Western Producer staff
The magazine lies in an office file labelled “Progressive Conservative,” like one of those gaudy 1970s shirts that you save in the closet for the memory but can’t wear anymore in polite company.
On the cover of the Maclean’s magazine is a photo of a smiling Kim Campbell, fresh from winning her party’s leadership and the prime minister’s office and on her way, the gushing article suggested, to winning the country.
That was summer 1993.
In October 1993, Campbell suffered the worst defeat of any prime minister in Canada’s 126-year history.
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The PCs emerged with two seats and effectively ceased to be a political factor.
Almost two years later, Campbell has a summer job as a Vancouver radio host.
In her place, Liberal Jean ChrŽtien runs the most conservative government since Louis St. Laurent in the 1950s and easily leads the polls.
Then, there is Jean Charest, the young Quebec lawyer and one-time deputy prime minister who dreams of returning the Conservatives to relevance.
As last week showed, he has a long way to go.
Charest is on a rebuilding campaign and in Ottawa, he unveiled the first Conservative policy document since the debacle.
Actually, it was less a policy document than a series of questions which conservative Canadians are supposed to ponder and then offer Conservative answers for the 1990s.
But like any good politician, Charest asks the questions because he thinks he already knows the answers.
He appears to believe that the only way to rebuild the Progressive Conservative party is to adopt Liberal policy toward Quebec (please stay and eventually, you will get more power) and Reform party policy on just about everything else.
He wonders about a flat tax, smaller government, harsher penalties for law breakers, referenda on public policy issues, a return to capital punishment and devolution of power to the provinces.
Interestingly, the 54-page document makes no mention of agriculture, as if that policy field and that constituency is too small to worry about, not a sector of the future or effectively lost to other political tides. Perhaps those questions will come later.
Charest talks about emulating the conservative populism of Alberta’s Ralph Klein and Ontario’s Mike Harris.
If successful, he would be the leader who took the ‘progressive’ out of Progressive Conservative.
It is, however, a big ‘if’.
True, after two years much of the public’s anti-Tory anger has dissipated. And there is no doubt this Liberal government needs some effective political opposition.
But Charest seems to be trying to claim ideological ground already well occupied.
Does a country already awash in right wing governments of various labels really need another contender from that corner of the spectrum?
Even if the answer to that is “yes”, does Charest have the credibility to redesign the party, given his baggage as a nine-year veteran of the Big Government Mulroney Tories?
The odds, surely, are not great.
