With the electoral dogs of war increasing the volume of their yelping in the political party kennels, Parliament is about to lose one of its genuinely good guys.
Former agriculture minister and current transportation minister Chuck Strahl has announced he will not seek re-election.
Since there is a high probability during the week of March 21 that opposition parties will combine to defeat the government and force an election, these could be Strahl’s last days in Parliament after more than17 years.
He was one of the first wave of Reformers elected in 1993 on a platform of cleaning up government and “the West wants in.”
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He leaves as the Conservative government is mired in a series of opposition allegations about election fraud, patronage appointments and arrogance – the things that drove western conservatives and entrepreneurs like Strahl to head to Ottawa in a western populist uprising.
The NDP was quick off the mark with a news release March 14 noting that much of the Reform agenda that was a reaction to Brian Mulroney and his Progressive Conservative record – deficits, patronage, favouring Quebec, a lack of Senate reform – marks the current government.
“We have nothing to learn from the Conservatives when it comes to democratic reform,” Strahl said in Parliament in 1996. Indeed.
Ironically, his March 12 announcement, coupled with a similar retirement decision by treasury board minister Stockwell Day, means that prime minister Stephen Harper is losing two of his senior western ministers and workhorses.
Ontario and Quebec Conservatives increasingly hold key positions in the Harper government. It is time, it appears, for Eastern Canada to take the lead in the Conservative government.
But beyond the political implications of the retirements, Strahl’s departure will diminish civility, courage, humour and commonsense on Parliament Hill.
Despite bouts with lung cancer because he ingested asbestos working in the forestry industry, the 54-year-old has carried some of the heaviest workloads and politically sensitive portfolios in the five-year-old Conservative government – agriculture, Indian affairs and now transportation, communities and infrastructure.
He could be partisan and tough, a straight shooter. Yet he had a disarming sense of humour that endeared him to employees who worked for him, lobbyists and political opponents.
And in a government that often seems hostile to media and information release, Strahl was available, chatty and forthright.
But mainly funny.
Shortly after he became agriculture minister, the latest BSE case was found in an old dairy cow in his Fraser Valley riding. “She was old enough to have a driver’s license,” he lamented.
Almost any interview would turn into talk about the new tractor he bought for his Chilliwack-area property that he rarely got a chance to drive.
And in the days following his appointment as agriculture minister, he mixed up the letters of his difficult- to-spell last name on the wall outside his office, muttering that “someone is going to pay.” Staff who had endured years of bombastic management loved it, loved him.
That little tractor is going to be getting a workout.
