Western Producer staff
Senator Len Gustafson stood last week as living, breathing proof of how irrelevant the once-mighty Progressive Conservative Party has become to the Canadian political debate.
Gustafson was one of six politicians invited to perform at the closing session of the Canada Grains Council semi-annual meeting.
Inclusion of the Tories on a political panel about grain issues was a curious decision by Council president Doug Campbell, presumably based more on nostalgia than practical considerations.
Gustafson, a southern Saskatchewan grain farmer who served 14 years as an MP, most of those as a fiercely loyal disciple of Brian Mulroney before getting his job-for-life Senate reward, quickly showed that he was out of place on a panel meant to expose the political lay of the land.
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He represented no one but himself.
Since the Tories were “somewhat removed from power,” he said, “we don’t have definitive policies on a lot of these issues.”
The date, ironically, was Oct. 26, the first anniversary of one of the most remarkable days in Canadian political history.
Voters across the country that day quietly went about their job of throwing the PC party out of office after nine tiring, unhappy, nation-rending, debt-soaked, scandal-ridden years of power.
In the process, they all but destroyed the grand old party of Confederation, reducing it from majority power to a lonely two seats in the House of Commons.
Last week, the echoes and aftershocks of the election debacle still were everywhere in evidence in Ottawa.
On the same day Gustafson was reminding us that the Conservatives don’t stand for anything just now, Canadians were snapping up copies of a new book detailing the corruption and ethical decline of the Mulroney years.
On the Take, by Stevie Cameron, serves as a reminder of why the voters were so angry a year ago.
Meanwhile, the tenured holdovers from that regime who found refuge in the Senate continued, on that same day, to arrogantly hold up legislation approved in the elected House of Commons.
The bill would cancel a sweetheart deal put together by the Tories in office to sell off Toronto’s money-making Pearson Airport to some business buddies.
In the election, the Liberals promised to kill the deal.
So far, the Tories in the Senate won’t let them.
For these old political warriors, delusions of legitimacy apparently die hard.
In the year since Oct. 26, 1993, a favorite political guessing game in Ottawa has been to speculate on whether interim leader Jean Charest can rebuild the party base enough to drag the Tories from irrelevancy to at least the political fringe when the next election day dawns.
The party is holding renewal meetings across the country.
Former leader and prime minister Joe Clark has said Charest could form a majority government in 1997.
Such rhetorical absurdity aside, last week illustrated why the odds remain long.
