As the 36th Parliament prepared to assemble this week, much of the spotlight was on the Liberals, their plans for the session and how they will manage to govern with a slim majority.
Would there be visible jockeying among contenders to replace prime minister Jean ChrŽtien as Liberal leader? Would disgruntled backbenchers use their enhanced power in a narrow-margin government to throw their weight around in caucus?
Added to the speculation was the sudden possibility of an early byelection.
On the eve of Parliament, a Liberal MP from the Ottawa area was charged with criminally harassing an Ottawa woman.
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If convicted, would he resign? Would the Liberals hold the seat? An eight-seat advantage in the Commons could become a six-seat advantage.
Questions like these were at the core of the buzz as a new political season began in Ottawa. But there was another, much more interesting sideshow happening, with the debut of the Reform party as official opposition and government-in-waiting.
Reform leader Preston Manning chose the pre-Parliament period to announce that he was launching an all-out attempt in Ontario to “unite the right” by encouraging co-operation among local Conservatives and Reformers who split the anti-Liberal vote in the last election.
Manning would not say it outright but it is clear he imagines a united right wing under his leadership. It would be difficult to imagine Reform agreeing to pull a candidate out of an Ontario riding to allow the Conservative to win.
In the last election, Reform drew over 900,000 Ontario votes and failed to elect a single MP. The Progressive Conservatives drew 44,000 fewer votes and elected one MP. Combined, that right-wing vote would have defeated at least 26 of the 101 Liberals who were elected.
Manning’s decision last week to call a news conference to announce his “united alternative” drive was a clever tactic by a skillful politician, keeping the attention on his new status as opposition leader and letting Ontario voters know he is serious about earning their support.
The fact that it earned vigorous denunciations from Tory leader Jean Charest was a clear sign he is feeling vulnerable, having won just a third as many seats as Reform. He led the once-grand Conservative Party to fifth place.
But it also is a gamble for Manning, one of the most important of his career.
If his hard-core supporters in Western Canada hear, or imagine, any softening of Reform’s traditional policies in order to attract the more liberal, urban audiences of Ontario, there could be Reform hell to pay back home.
Manning last week said he would not alienate western supporters because he would carry the same messages to Ontario that made Reform the dominant Western Canadian political vehicle of the 1990s.
Yet as a student and longtime practitioner of politics, he also knows that perception, unease, rumor and unfocused distrust can be as poisonous to a political career as real mistakes.
As Manning stands on the Manitoba-Ontario border this winter looking covetously east at Ontario’s voting masses, he had best watch his back as well.
