CLARESHOLM, Alta. – For a rookie political candidate, the endorsement of a former prime minister should be a blessing.
Instead, when former Progressive Conservative prime minister Joe Clark said on national television he thought Macleod Conservative candidate Ted Menzies was someone he could support and campaign for, Menzies rebuffed the offer.
“I basically said thanks but no thanks,” Menzies recounted last week. ” Given the negative things he has said about my leader whom I support, I did not think it was appropriate to be associated with Mr. Clark.”
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In part, it was a reflection on Clark’s unhappy political end.
Briefly prime minister a quarter century ago as only the second Albertan to hold that job and twice leader of the Progressive Conservative party for a total of 12 years, Clark opposed the 2003 PC merger with the Canadian Alliance to form the Conservative party. Clark also labelled Conservative leader Stephen Harper a dangerous right winger.
In this election, Clark has campaigned for some Liberal candidates and suggested he would prefer a Liberal victory, while offering to support Conservative candidates he likes, including Menzies.
The fact that Menzies rejected the endorsement reflects his rejection of Clark’s red Tory credentials and anti-Harper comments.
It also reflects Menzies’ confidence about winning June 28 in a rural riding south and west of Calgary that has voted 70 percent in the past for conservative candidates.
Among the number of farm leaders who are running, or tried to run, in election 2004, Menzies clearly is the most likely to succeed. When he won the hotly contested nomination meeting March 27 over five other candidates, many in the Conservative party figured he had won the election.
“It’s true, I think, that my biggest competition was in the nomination process,” Menzies said last week. His biggest concern is convincing voters that they need to vote.
“I would hate to see our turnout falling,” he said.
Menzies, 52, is a grain, oilseeds and special crops producer who decided this year, after three decades in farming, to rent out the land and sell his equipment. “I guess I’ve entered a new phase.”
He has been involved in the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association as president, is a fervent anti-Canadian Wheat Board activist and as past-president of the Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance, a devout believer that increased and unfettered world trade is key to farm success.
Now, he expects to be the next MP from Macleod.
The political battle in his riding is low-key at best. Except in the two constituencies now held by Liberals, it is like that throughout Alberta.
Public opinion polls show the Conservative Party at 50 percent support and at more than 70 percent among farmers.
It allows key Conservative MPs like Monte Solberg from Medicine Hat to spend parts of the crucial last week of the election campaigning for candidates in Saskatchewan and the Maritimes, because the party thinks his riding is safe.
“It is frustrating and contemptuous of the voters that the Conservatives think they own the riding,” Wild Rose Liberal candidate Judy Stewart said last week. She is trying to unseat three-term MP Myron Thompson.
“I don’t think voters appreciate that.”
In the Crowfoot riding held by Conservative Kevin Sorenson and a series of conservative MPs stretching back decades, farm voter Arlene Filkohazy from Hussar, Alta., said last week she barely had been informed about who is running in the riding.
“I think this the quietest election I have ever seen, almost as if there isn’t an election,” she said June 15.
