It may have been obvious that the division of conservatives into Alliance and Progressive Conservative factions was a recipe for permanent Liberal governments, but it still took great courage on the parts of Stephen Harper and Peter MacKay to bring about the Conservative Party of Canada. This is particularly true of MacKay, who won his leadership by promising David Orchard, unnecessarily, as it turns out, that he would do no such thing.

The merger was the result of a strong push from the faithful in both predecessor parties to stop dividing right-of-centre electoral support. Some analysts maintain that a unified right does not necessarily claim all the votes of the the Liberals. Yet the chances of the combined entity winning the next federal election are exponentially greater than the sum of the parts, because voters tend to vote for a contender and shun an also-ran.

The timing of the merger has forced the party to rush its preparations for a late spring or early summer election. As the leader was being chosen in March, no one thought that the new party would be within touching distance of throwing out the long-in-the-tooth Liberal regime in an election in June. The contest for leader of the Conservatives might well have been different had the sponsorship scandal cap-former two parties, and that many Red Tories will migrate to Stanley H. Hartt tured the popular imagination a few months earlier than it did.

While the leadership candidates did not include stars like Mike Harris, Ralph Klein and Bernard Lord, the campaign did generate renewed interest in the Conservatives. Tony Clement gave a strong convention speech, although he received less support than his ideas warranted. Belinda Stronach was a welcome and attractive new face, strong on political platform and poised and effective in public appearances.

The main thing the leadership contest did was to provide a solid rebuttal to the allegation that the merger was an Alliance takeover. The race proved that the party represents a re-branded conservatism with plenty of appeal to Canadians.

The brand equity of the Conservative name is important as voters consider their choices, particularly if they are considering change.

Stephen Harper has the capacity to surprise in office and a talent for being underestimated. In successive stages, he has won the leadership of the former Alliance party, orchestrated its unification with the PCs, handily won the leadership of the new party on the first ballot, and held his caucus together going into an election. For someone supposedly averse to, and not adept at, the retail side of politics, he appears to be holding his own. On the policy side, he is thoroughly engrossed in issues, understands and loves them, and is adept at making leader-like choices among unattractive alternatives. The term ”policy wonk” is used to describe an ability to enjoy having to analyze the big files. Some may say that Harper lacks charisma, yet this could actually help as he combats the Liberal attempts to demonize him as an extremist wing-nut.

But, as the saying goes, ”governments aren’t defeated; they defeat themselves.” The timing of the emergence of the sponsorship scandal is felicitous for the Tories. Paul Martin’s invincibility is unraveling before the nation’s eyes as the revelations in the auditor general’s report on the machinations in the Department of Public Works have sapped the strength of the ruling Liberals and boosted the opposition parties.

Having been handed this unexpected electoral opportunity, the question is whether Harper’s Conservatives have exploited voter dissatisfaction in a timely manner while the issue was still top of mind and established themselves as a viable alternative on policy issues. The decision to hold the party’s policy platform document for release two weeks into the election was originally made to ensure maximum impact, impede Liberal poaching and cover up the fact that the book addresses only about 80 percent of the policy concerns of Conservatives, emphasizing those areas where there was broad agreement between predecessor platforms. When the Liberals test-marketed some over-the-top attack ads (on immigration, support for the US on Iraq and medicare), the Tories released a précis for candidates, which received generally good reviews from the media.

Here’s what Harper and his team need to establish in the public’s mind if they are to make the most, in electoral terms, of the sponsorship affair: The idea that if you spend hundreds of millions of dollars ”on” a program, your heart’s in the right place, is a Liberal concept. Spending money ”on” national unity does not ensure that the money gets to the end objective, any more than spending money on other programs, like the billion dollars wasted ”on” the gun control registry, actually assures Canadians that a single firearm has been removed from the hands of criminals. From a Conservative strategic perspective, public revulsion at the huge commissions paid to Liberal-friendly ad agencies should not be allowed to dissipate in the wake of the confusion generated by the Public Accounts Committee hearings, which have failed to identify the individuals who sanctioned the abuse of public money for partisan purposes.

The practice of setting up the deniable delivery system for patronage which could not be traced to ministers is particularly offensive in Quebec where it plays to the unfair stereotypical image of politics founded on graft, and is seen as an admission that the feds were buying hearts and minds instead of winning them. But this is clearly benefiting the Bloc, not the Conservatives, at least going into the campaign. Obviously, every one of Quebec’s 75 ridings won by the Bloc, over and above their 33 seats at dissolution, is one more seat Liberals need to win in Ontario and Atlantic Canada in order to obtain a new majority. This is the reverse of the assumption when Martin took office in December, that Liberal gains in Quebec would offset anticipated losses to a united right in Ontario, and does not look to be a sound basis for Grit strategic calculus.

Which brings us to election timing. Martin’s essential argument is that he is not Jean Chrétien and that, therefore, he must solicit a mandate of his own. Voters have not bought past attempts to distance a successor regime of the same political stripe from its own record. John Turner spent almost nine years in exile in a Toronto law firm so that, when Pierre Trudeau finally retired, Canadians would see Turner as a fresh face representing change. It didn’t work. Brian Mulroney’s knock out punch in the 1984 televised debate certainly helped, but Turner was punished as much by the West for the National Energy Program (NEP) and the Foreign Investment Review Agancy (FIRA), and by Quebec for the repatriation of the Constitution without its consent, as if he had personally thought these up.

Kim Campbell suffered from Mulroney’s low standing in the polls as much as her own inept campaigning in the 1993 election. The fix was in to back her as leader because the prospect of years in opposition motivated the Tories to seek someone as different from her predecessor as they could find. So they chose a Westerner, a woman, not quite bilingual enough to be seen as a Québécoise. Again, it didn’t work. On the very first day of the 1993 campaign, minutes after obtaining the writ at Rideau Hall, she suggested there would be little employment growth to the year 2000. It was all downhill from there.

Ernie Eves thought, unwisely, that he could shift his party to the centre after two mandates of the Common Sense Revolution had worn out Mike Harris’ welcome with Ontario voters. All he succeeded in doing was to underline that even he, the right-hand alter-ego and counselor of the premier, and his powerful finance minister, disagreed with some of the most fundamental policies of his mentor, like privatization of electrical utilities and tough-love bargaining with public sector unions. That turned out to be a reason to vote against Eves and the Harris record, not, as hoped, a successful case made that he represented change.

Paul Martin has the same dilemma. His handlers tried to spin the line that only one cabinet minister had retained his post in the new Martin government, when in fact there are fourteen holdovers from Jean Chrétien’s tired regimes. To distance himself from scandal, Martin has brought the sponsorship affair into the open with parliamentary committee hearings, but this only serves to keep the pot boiling. He has fired heads of Crown corporations who are now fighting to clear their names and this keeps the news of the events leading to their dismissals in the forefront of the voters’ minds. If Martin succeeds in persuading Canadians that there is no Liberal continuum beginning in 1993, he will be the first to have pulled off such sleight of hand.

The bottom line is that, if Martin’s story is that his is a new government, and he sticks to it, an election deferred to the fall of 2004, or perhaps until 2005, would not work. After a while, the government becomes yours, if only because you have done nothing to cure the abuses you attribute to your predecessor. A June election is forced upon Martin in these circumstances, even in the face of polling numbers hammered by scandal.

Enter Stephen Harper with new momentum and an impressive list of local candidates, particularly in Ontario. Lifelong party activists and advisors of quality, who always harboured a dream of one day running for Parliament, have picked this election to make their move. Well-known former provincial cabinet ministers and MPPs are presenting themselves.

It remains to be seen whether the scare tactics of the Liberals, painting Harper as a redneck westerner, will survive people actually meeting this native of Leaside (a quiet, middle-class suburb of Toronto) whose family were all accountants. Harper’s personality is calm and re-assuring, not at all threatening. His platform concentrates on the issues that unite all segments of the predecessor parties and is heavily influenced by the contributions of Peter MacKay.

In Toronto in the second week of May, he moved to the centre on health care, illustrating his position with a family history. While his father once underwent an operation that his grandfather had to pay for before health care, Stephen Harper had himself benefited as an asthma patient from universal, publicly funded health care. This speech was delivered just days after the revelation that Martin visits his family physcian at the offices of Medisys Health Group, one of the nation’s largest private providers of group and executive health care. Any advantage the Liberals might have claimed as the champions of public health care appeared to have been largely neutralized by the appearance of queue-jumping.

Yet, one has to wonder at the timing of Joe Clark’s most recent attempt to marginalize the new party and its leader just as they seem to be gaining momentum. While it is not the first time he has attributed unwholesome content to the new party’s electoral offering (he did so immediately upon the massive ratification of the combination by the members of both predecessor parties), this latest outburst came on the heels of a very successful show of unity in New Brunswick, where former prime minister Mulroney joined Premier Lord and Harper on the same platform to advance the merits, the unity and the electability of the new entity.

Why would a former prime minister pick this time to undermine his former colleagues by decrying a policy platform he had not read, and which the moderates in the party were succeeding in tailoring for the more centrist stance required for victory? The best that can be said is that Clark has always had a bent for quixotic political strategies, beginning when he miscalculated his voting strength on the 1979 budget, resulting in an election in which he was defeated by Pierre Trudeau, or when he called and lost a leadership convention in 1983, after winning 66.9 percent approval in a leadership review. Clark certainly didn’t feel he couldn’t work with former Alliance partisans when he organized a cooperative parliamentary effort with the seven members of the Democratic Representative Caucus, led by Chuck Strahl, who had fled the leadership of Stockwell Day in 2001.

Clark, as well as John Herron, Scott Brison, Keith Martin and Andre Bachand were all guilty of premature extrication when they didn’t give the party a chance to revitalize the Conservative movement. They bought into the theory of an Alliance takeover, when there is persuasive evidence that it was anything but.

A group of other former ”œRed Tories” led by Sinclair Stevens, with assists from Heward Graftey, Flora MacDonald and former premier Brian Peckford of Newfoundland and Labrador, are asking the Federal Court to quash the merger on various technical legal grounds. None of this impressive list of once and former Tories seems to grasp that the merger represents a victory for the moderate views they espouse and that they would do much better to come aboard and help the party in the next election instead of mourning the ”œdeath of the family.”

Harper and MacKay deserve a great deal of credit in bringing the two parties together and offering a united Conservative alternative to the governing Liberals. The least that can said, heading into the election, is that Canadian politics is competitive again. In that sense, Canadian democracy is the better for it.

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