Why Unite The Right?

By: Alan Clark

    The old saying "hind-sight is 20/20" is all too true. In hind-sight, it’s obvious that western Canadians boarded the wrong bus when they chose to back the Reform Party of Canada in 1988 over the Western Independence Party.

    For several years now, Unite the Right has been the refrain from the Preston Manning fan club. Most ardent political analysts and anyone who has an I.Q. in excess of 125 knows that the right has in fact, been united at least since the Progressives and the Conservatives married several decades ago. The Canadian Alliance is absolutely the undisputed party of the unified right.

    The rest of the Canadian vote is split amongst the now centre-left Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals. There is not a single person who voted for the P.C’s or the Liberals in the past two elections who would ever consider voting for the CA. If the P.C. Party ceased to exist tomorrow, all their existing support would go to the liberals with the exception of leadership hopeful David Orchard who would go back to his neo-fascist, NDP roots.

    If there has been a split in the right since the almost total decimation of the Tories it has been between the Reform and the almost inconsequential Christian Heritage Party. With the election of former preacher Stockwell Day as the Reform leader however, the CHP collapsed in much the same way as the Western Independence Party did in the late 1980’s when the newborn Reform Party of Canada offered the WIP membership a more palatable alternative to separation.

    Western Canadians sent the first wave of Reformers to Ottawa with the cheery message "The West Wants In". The Reform had drawn extensively from Confederation of Regions leader Elmer Knutsen’s platform and were promising to work for citizens initiative, referenda, recall and the triple-e senate. All wonderful aspirations. All totally unattainable. The reason being that the Canadian Constitution cannot be changed and to achieve any of these western desires would require a constitutional amendment. Or several. Perhaps Preston really didn’t understand this when he first started his crusade but it didn’t take long before someone in Ottawa clued him in.

For those of you who don’t understand, it’s like this:

    A successful amendment to the Canadian Constitution must first be accepted and approved by the Prime Minister. Simple enough if Preston or Stockwell or Steve Harper were the PM. With a parliamentary majority it would be a simple matter to get a Bill enacting a triple-E senate through the House of Commons. This however, is where the wheels fall off the cart because a majority of the members of the Senate must also approve. That is; the Liberal Party of Canada’s Senate.

    When Pierre Trudeau changed (repatriated in liberal-speak) the Constitution in 1981, he accomplished two things (if you don’t include instituting official bilingualism, multiculturalism, stripping Canadians of their Property Rights and legalizing abortion and prostitution). Firstly, he re-entrenched Ontario and Quebec’s domination of the political system and secondly, he made it impossible to ever change the Constitution again to undo what he had done.

    Pierre Trudeau’s Constitutional accomplishments, to liberals everywhere, are sacred. Inviolable. For anyone to consider that a liberal dominated Senate would ever commit the heresy of voting with a bunch of hairy hicks from the hinterlands in ravaging the Great Genius’s crowning achievement is pure fantasy. The Senate would doubtless save the country for all liberal-kind.

    Even if the liberal Senate was to waiver, the balance of the amending formula requires that at least seven provinces representing fifty percent of the population ratify any amendment. Ontario and Quebec are not interested in sharing power equally with anyone let alone the uneducated, inbred, gun-toting red-necks that inhabit the colonies west of Kenora.

    You could almost see the change in Preston’s demeanor when he finally learned this fact of Canadian political life. He became visibly more subdued. He realized this was going to take a lot longer than he had originally planned. It likely wouldn’t happen during his tenure, hell even his lifetime. It would require at least a twenty year Reform/CA dynasty. Enough time to completely replace all the liberals, one by one, in the Senate. And even then, without Quebec and Ontario the odds were slim at best. Seeing the futility, Preston went back to Alberta, retired and began drawing his M.P.’s pension like so many good-hearted western politicians before him.

    Not surprisingly, the CA no longer wants to talk about initiative, referenda, recall or the triple-E Senate and this brings me to the whole point of this piece. The western Canadian desires that initiated the Reform Party in the first place are unattainable and most every Alliance politician knows it. Link Byfield knew it over ten years ago when he told me that at very least, Preston will go to Ottawa, prove to every westerner that fundamental change is impossible and thereby "drop 2 million hard-core separatists" right in my lap.

    Unfortunately, the Reform politicians have followed in lock step with every other reform-minded politician western Canada ever sent to Ottawa. They soon realize that they can’t do what they were sent to do, so they settle for what they can do. All they can really do is scream like school girls every time the ruling party decides to put the boots to westerners. Have the Reform/CA managed to keep one of our farmers out of jail for the crime of selling his own property? Have they managed to get taxes reduced? Have they gotten the federal government to butt-out of provincial affairs? Have they achieved anything that a western liberal, P.C. or N.D.P. couldn’t have also achieved?

    The Reformers are now in full damage-control mode, trying to steer Albertans away from considering what it was that we elected them for in the first place. What was our goal in sending a full slate of reformers to Ottawa? To impress them with our snappy message "The West Wants In"? Was it to achieve a measure of fairness from the federal government? Was it to see some of our western desires, values and principles injected into our federal political system? By any of these standards, the experiment with the Reform/Canadian Alliance has been a complete waste of fourteen years. A complete failure.

    Why "Unite the Right"? Because it’s the only thing the Canadian Alliance can do to give the appearance of some semblance of forward motion. "What the hell are you guys doing down there?" they’re asked repeatedly. "Why we’re trying to unite the right you know. If it wasn’t for those darn P.Cees we’d have elected two more people!". Bullshit I say.

    The Reform movement has blown it’s load just as Link Byfield, Fred Marshall and myself said it would. It was a colossal waste of time just as we said it would be. Albertans have paid dearly in taxes while these neophytes played politician. And meanwhile we are back to square one. Looking for a political alternative which will deliver the curled-lip, clenched-fist, "mind your own fucking  business or else" message that central Canada so richly deserves to hear.