Peter MacKay shocked and appalled that the Alliance guys want to change the rules

Great Debates
1

Angry MacKay says Tories’ future ‘in jeopardy’.

Peter MacKay’s rightfully upset. He’s been deceived by those wicked Alliance types, who sucked him in with promises to allocate delegates to the conventions based on the PC model, not the Alliance model. It’s just unbelievable that those shifty Alliance types would try to change the rules of the game after they’ve swallowed up MacKay and the Tories, in spite of a clear agreement between the parties on the terms of the merger.

Why, the only thing that would be even worse would be a Tory leadership candidate giving a signed, written promise not to enter into merger talks with the Alliance as a condition of getting support from one of his opponents at a Tory leadership convention. Honourable men would never break such a promise.

What’s that? oh… never mind.

:wally

2

Alliance? Feh. I’m a Browncoat. :wink:

3

Snerk I’m sure someone conservative will be along to play three-card Monte on this and try to persuade you that (a) it didn’t really happen that way, (b) supposing it did, it was morally justified because…, and/or © they had the right to do it because…

Morally bankrupt people always act for their own benefit, and then invent supposed justifications for their actions. And the St. Lawrence and the 49th Parallel apparently make no difference as regards human behavior.

4

This may have the effect of making the Conservative party heavily regional, counteracting one of the main goals of the merger.

5

As long as Harper and MacKay can keep the Right fractured, they can continue to remain out of power where they do not have to take responsibility for anything that happens while still keeping the power and prestige associated with being “national leaders.”

As long as the Liberals don’t mess it up and find a way to lose the elections, they should be able to get away with it.

6

Seems to me that Reform/Alliance were never really interested in a merger at all. They wanted the nation-wide credibility of the Progressive Conservatives without having to modify their western populist social conservative policies. They still don’t seem to understand that their lack of credibility outside the west is due to their policies and not the mere fact that they originated as a western protest group.

7

Whoosh I assume this is anout certain partis in the Democratic Republic of Canuckistan?

This might eb a good time for someone to outline the basic parties and principles and political divisions in the Great North Hope. :slight_smile:

8

This has been done fifty times, anyway; you might want to do a search for “canada conservative party” or “canada political parties.”

9

Never mind a comprehensive listing of Canadian parties, just help us ignorant Yanks contextualize the article from the OP:

So – what’s all that mean? Apparently MacKay represents one faction in the Conservative Party and the westerners represent another faction – but what’s the difference? What, respectively, do they stand for?

Also – Reid’s proposal was overwhelmingly defeated, so why is MacKay being such a sore winner?

10

BG: In simplest terms:

New Democratic Party (NDP) – Strongly leftist, reminiscent of left-wing European parties. Matt_mcl was NDP candidate for Parliament from his riding twice. Always relatively small but consistently a player in the national scene.

Liberal Party – the majority party nationally. Analogous to U.S. Democratic Party.

Reform/Alliance Party – social conservatives concentrated in the Prairie West. Think of the right wing of the U.S. Republicans, without any tempering influences from the moderates.

Progressive Conservative Party – recently merged with Alliance, hence the story covered in the OP. Centrist, despite the name. It’s a mid-20th Century amalgamation of two parties, the Progressives and the Conservatives, the latter being Canada’s oldest party, the one founded by Sir John A. MacDonald. Formerly the party that traded government control with the Liberals (à la GOP/Dem in the US) but has fallen on hard times in the past decade or so. (At one time they were down to 2 MPs.)

Various minor parties including a strong Québec regional party.

Note also that unlike the US, national parties and provincial parties are separate entities.

That’s by no means either precisely accurate nor thorough, but it gives you a rough idea of who the major players are.

11

[QUOTE=PolycarpReform/Alliance Party – social conservatives concentrated in the Prairie West. Think of the right wing of the U.S. Republicans, without any tempering influences from the moderates.

Progressive Conservative Party – recently merged with Alliance, hence the story covered in the OP. Centrist, despite the name. It’s a mid-20th Century amalgamation of two parties, the Progressives and the Conservatives, the latter being Canada’s oldest party, the one founded by Sir John A. MacDonald. Formerly the party that traded government control with the Liberals (à la GOP/Dem in the US) but has fallen on hard times in the past decade or so. (At one time they were down to 2 MPs.)[/QUOTE]

The “right wing” of the U.S. Republican Party includes several factions, notably the religious right – which, AFAIK, has no analogue in Canada. What, exactly, are the policies of the Reform/Alliance Party? And what puts them at odds with the Progressive Conservatives, to the point that their recent merger apparently is at risk?

12

It’s a long story. I’ll attempt to be brief.

In the late 80s the Reform Party was created by Preston Manning. It was a western populist party centred in Alberta. To oversimplify, western conservatives were ticked off at Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government, which they felt was undemocratically ignoring the west and unduly favouring Quebec (see: Meech Lake Accord). How legitimate those feelings were is questionable, given that Lucien Bouchard left the PCs a few years later to form the Bloc Quebecois for more or less the opposite reason.

In any event, Mulroney pissed off most of Canada during his second term, and in 1993 the Progressive Conservatives were reduced from a 169-seat majority to two (2) seats in the House of Commons, due in no small part to the fact that their constituency in the west and Quebec voted in large numbers for the new regional parties, the Bloc and Reform. Over the next years, the PCs struggled to regain national prominence but never really succeeded, though they did elect 20 MPs under Charest in 97. The Reform Party, on the other hand, wanted desperately to break out of their stronghold in Alberta to become a truly national party. They didn’t have much luck either. Much was made, however, of vote-splitting on the right during the 97 election, particularly in Ontario, and there was some desire amongst elements within each of the conservative parties to join forces.

In 2000, the Reform Party pretended to merge with the PCs and changed their name to the Canadian Alliance. To be fair, a substantial number of former rank and file Progressive Conservatives joined the Alliance, but the Tory leadership under Joe Clark refused to endorse the deal. As a result, the Alliance was generally viewed as simply Reform with a new name, and given the dominance of old Reform figures within the party, this wasn’t particularly inaccurate. Chretien called a snap election before the Alliance could try to consolidate, and the election results were nearly a rerun of the 97 vote. The Alliance failed to break through east of the Great Lakes, while the PC caucus shrank to 12 seats.

During the Liberal’s third term in government the Alliance distinguished itself primarily by infighting. Controversy over the leadership of Stockwell “Doris” Day led to Reform stalwarts Deb Grey and Chuck Strahl and a dozen others to leave the party and sit as independents, though they were popularly referred to as the Rebel Alliance. Eventually Day was forced to resign, and the party was reunited under the leadership of Stephen Harper.

Shortly afterwards, Joe Clark retired from politics, and the Progressive Conservatives held their own leadership convention, at which Peter MacKay was chosen after promising never to merge the PCs with the Alliance, as related in the OP. Unsurprisingly, when MacKay turned around and negotiated a merger with the Alliance to form the Conservative Party, many of the remaining PCs felt betrayed. A couple of Tory MPs went so far as to cross the floor to the Liberals. You see, by that time there were almost no social conservatives left in the PCs, with the exception of Elsie Wayne. (She was one of the 2 Tories who held onto a seat in the 93 debacle, and is now an apparently enthusiastic member of the new Conservative Party. She is reportedly unhappy that the current convention hasn’t adopted any anti-abortion policies.) Clark and most of his MPs had been social progressives/fiscal conservatives, and uncomfortable with the strong elements of social conservatism in Reform/Alliance. So when MacKay negotiated with the merger, the concern (well-founded, as it turns out) was that the progressive part of the Progressive Conservatives would be squelched by numerical dominance of the Alliance. MacKay believed that he had negotiated certain aspects of the new party’s constitution such that the PC branch of the party wouldn’t lose all influence, and that’s why he was so pissed that this resolution (which would have undone one part of that) was even up for a vote.

13

Here’s how I see it, BrainGlutton

The current Conservative party is a marriage under somewhat odd circumstances of two former parties, the Canadian Alliance (think Christian social-coinservative Republicans minus most of the lunatic element), plus the Progressive Conservatives (think big-business Republicans). Together with a few very fringe parties who never got a seat federally, these parties shared the right wing of the vote.

The Progressive Conservatives had power and a majority government back in the eighties, the Reagan/Thatcher era, and were very chummy with those leaders. They helped push through the NAFTA “free trade” treaties, they support the WTO, etc. However, in a reaction to corruption, they spectacularly imploded at the ballot box during one election (1992?) and went to just two seats in federal Parliament.

The Canadian Alliance grew out of the Reform Party, which arose during the eighties from Western dissatisfaction. It was always based in Alberta, canada’s most socially-conservative province.

For generations, the Progressive Conservatives had alternated with the Liberals in power. The Liberals are a sort-of catch-all welfare-state centrist party, like the Democrats.

Back during their era in power in the sixties and seventies, the Liberals were vary nationalist and dirigiste under the leadership of the charismatic Pierre Trudeau, though later during the eighties, and out of power, they went rightwards. During the nineties they returned to power and their finance minister Paul Martin tamed the deficit monster. For the past seven years, the Liberals have brought in surpluses in the federal budget, and are slowly paying off the national debt.

The Liberals are pretty much the “default” party these days, not least I suspect because they’ve handled fiscal conservatism well*.

In the recent provincial by-election in Ontatio, in a mostly-rural and conservative riding, the provincial Conservatives came out on top, with 50-something percent of the vote, but the Liberals, NDP, and Greens were all fairly close in vote shate, getting something like 19, 14, and 10 % of the vote, respectively.

To me, this means that with the surrent crop of scandals, the Liberals are vulnerable. The more socialist and ecologically-oriented voters are likely to decamp to the NDP and the Greens. It would seem to be an ideal time for the Conservatives to swoop in and gain seats.

However…

If it wasn’t for the Christian social-conservative element, I suspect that the current merged Conservatives would be massively-more popular in Ontario. Remember, Ontario elected the radical Mike Harris neo-conservatives when they controlled the provincial Conservative party.

Not enough Ontarians want a Christian social-conservative party in power to give the merged Conservatives that chance.

I found it interesting that the provincial conservative party in Ontario did NOT change its name from the “Progressive Conservative Party pf Ontario” to simply “Conservative Party of Ontario” to mirror the name of the merged federal Conservative party.

And the Christian social conservatives have even less of a chance in Quebec, which, very roughly speaking, went through its own Quiet Revolution in the sixties to throw off social conservatism and the [Roman Catholic] Church. It now elects a large number of members of the Bloc Quebecios, who in affairs apart from Quebec nationalism tend to vote centre-left, somewhere between the Liberals and the NDP. But matt_mcl could clarify that better than I could.

Together, Quebec and Ontario have over half of the population of Canada, which tends to frustrate Westerners (or Easterners, for that matter), when their views differ from those of the centre.

If the Conservatives could even recast themselves as non-religious social consevatives, they would have a better chance.

When the former leader of the Alliance Party admitted publically that to his Fundamentalist Christan belief that the earth was only 6000 years old, etc, he was mercilessly mocked by political cartoonists and the papers and wasn’t taken seriously after that.

In addition, there are a lot of social conservatives in the big cities who are not traditional Western (i.e.Albertan) Protestant Christian. The Conservatives seem to be making efforts to appeal to the conservative Muslims, Catholics, Sikhs, etc, but then they always seem to shoot themselves in the foot when some party member admits to promoting a specifically Christian agenda.

Unless the social and cultural makeup of Ontario and Quebec shift dramatically toward the Christan conservative, the Conservatives will not win power.

This, IMHO, is the heart of the dispute: the Christan social conservatives outnumber the rest of the members of the merged Conservative party, and want to promote their polices. But the former PC members know that they will never win Ontario and Quebec if they champion Christian social conservatism.

The Conservatives must decide: as a politial party, do they want to follow their principles or do they want to gain power?

[sub]*At least on the surface. Many are arguing that the problems have been transferred downwards, to provincial and municipal governments. But that’s a debate for another thread.[/sub]

14

Actually, Gorsnak, you explained a lot of things better than I did… :slight_smile:

A “Tory” is a member of the Progressive Conservative party. Sometimes you will hear the expression “Red Tory”; it refered to this combination of social progressive and fiscal conservative. The term Tory seems to have carried over to the merged Conservative party.

15

Seems to me that things would be greatly simplified for Canadian conservatives if you had proportional representation. That would probably foreclose the possibility of any party, even the Liberals, getting a parliamentary majority ever again, all governments would have to be coalitions, and the PC and Alliance/Reform parties could row their own separate boats while voting together on (most) issues in Parliament. I know there’s a movement for PR in Canada (http://www.fairvotecanada.org/), but how far has it gotten? Do most Canadians at least know what PR means? (Most Americans don’t.)

16

I think some form of PR is likely to happen provincially before it happens federally.

There has been a Citizens’ Assembly in BC that recommended such a thing. The Liberal government in Ontario has set up a Secretariat for Democratic Renewal that is supposed to look at such issues. I have heard rumours of other moves elsewhere.

Interestingly, one of the last things that Chrétien lushed through before he quit as leader of the federal Liberals (and therefore Prime Minister) was a reform of political-party funding along proportional lines.

Contributions to federal political parties from individuals and organizations are now capped at levels in the single-digit thousands of dollars. The parties now receive a quarterly cheque from Elections Canada based on the number of votes: the more votes (above a certain threshhold), the more money they get. The parties do not have to have any members in power as MPs.

This has meant, among other things, steady funding for the federal Greens. Things will be interesting in the next election.

17

!!! I’m glad this helps the Greens, but there seems something fundamentally unfair about giving parties increased financial resources in proportion to their electoral success. Tends to keep the strong strong, you know?

18

Most do, and there’s a degree of support for it, but PR has its own drawbacks.

Constitutional change in Canada is about as easy as dividing by zero. Recent attempts at substantive Constitutional change have all ended in a geyser of blood and broken careers. It pretty much destroyed the Progressive Conservative Party; the issue that killed them was constitutional change. You never hear anyone bitching about free trade anymore; even some of its opponents have admitted they were wrong and that the $65 BILLION trade surplus is a pretty good thing, and those who won’t admit it just won’t talk about it now. What led to the creation of the Reform Party and Bloc Quebecois, at the expense of the PCs, was Mulroney’s catastrophic effort to “resolve” a Constitutional issue that didn’t really need resolving, and his ability, in failing at this, to look about as statesmanlike and graceful as Sideshow Bob losing another round with Bart Simpson.

Canada is a nation that is, regrettably, divided into regional factions. Quebec largely does not give a crap about the rest of the country and would rather leave if it wasn’t for the fact they’d be out zillions of dollars in free federal money; the Eastern provinces hate Ontario, the West hate Ontario and Quebec, and Ontario doesn’t give a crap about any of them.

Quebec will not, period, end of story, agree to any Constitutional amendment that does not involve giving Quebec boatloads of money and new power in return for nothing. The other provinces, albeit to lesser degrees, are all the same; the West will never agree to such a thing unless you fix the Senate and change Parliament to give the less populous provinces more power.

It is simply not possible to change the way Parliament is elected without getting the provinces to agree to distinct society for Quebec, new provincial powers, a fixed Senate, and so on and so forth. The First Nations would be screaming for more power (more money, really); now big cities, especially Toronto, are screaming for Constitutional power (read: the right to create gigantic tax hikes and infringe on people’s right to control their property. Or, if that won’t do, lots and lots of free money.) And since those things can’t be agreed on, PR will never happen at the federal level, not in our lifetimes.

Even if you could agree on those other things, any attempt to implement PR will be perceived, truthfully or not, as being an attack on provincial influence. And trust me, the provinces ain’t going for that.

The benefit of the first-past-the-post system is that at least everyone in the country is guaranteed someone from their area, chosen by them, is going to go to Parliament, and that their province will more or less send a proportional number of people to Parliament (Alberta and Ontario get a little screwed, but not by very much.) ANY PR system will dilute this one way or another; there’s no way around that.

PR at the provincial level is far likelier to happen because the regional anger doesn’t exist to the same extent. Oh, you do get some of it - Northern Ontario has always felt hard done by as opposed to southern Ontario, for instance - but it’s 1/100th of the nationwide problem.

19

Others have done an excellent job outlining the parties’ position, so I’ll just comment on why this was an issue.

The federal electoral map is based on constituencies, nicknamed “ridings.” The political parties organise themselves locally based on the constituencies. For each federal constituency, each party will have an association, dedicated to getting a member elected in the next election.

In addition, the riding associations send delegates to the party conventions, which debate policy, elect the executive of the party, and elect the leader (if a convention is used; the parties have also been experimenting with leadership selection by the entire party membership at “virtual conventions”.)

The Reform and the Alliance parties both allocated delegates to conventions, including leadership conventions, according to the strength of the party in each federal riding. The more members the party had in a riding, the more delegates that riding association had.

The PCs instead allocated a set number of delegates for each riding association, regardless of the strength of the party in a particular riding.

The Reform/Alliance approach was based on their populism - the membership drive the party, so you allocate delegates (and indirectly, a lot of control over the party) in a way that is roughly proportionate to the party membership in each riding.

The PC approach was based on the idea that to be a national party, you had to have representation from across the party, and even if the party was not strong in a particular region of the country at any given time, you still needed input from that region in the party’s internal politics to help ensure that the party overall had policies and candidates that appealed to as many parts of the country as possible.

Since neither party has been doing well recently, you might say that it’s kind of irrelevant, but the dismal fortunes of the PCs were a recent phenomenon, just over the past dozen years or so. Prior to that, they were generally in contention in federal elections. So if you take the long view, the PCs had considerable electoral success with their approach.

By contrast, Reform/Alliance was consistently shut out east of Manitoba. They had a reputation for having hard social conservative positions that did not resonate in central or eastern Canada. Since the Reform/Alliance groups were not strong in those reasons, that doesn’t strike me as surprising - their party organization meant that they were dominated by one particular region, the west, and adopted policies that were popular with some western circles. They didn’t have have internal regional diversity, given their delegate structure.

Since MacKay is from Nova Scotia, where the PCs were strong but Reform/Alliance were shut out, he’s particularly sensitive to this issue. Overall, more of the members of the new party are out west and come from the Alliance/Reform stream, so he fears that if the delegate rules are changed, the new party would lose its chance to have national breadth and become just another western protest party.

CTV is frugal with their links and edited the story as it developed, rather than setting up a new link. When I posted it, it was before the vote, and was a story about MacKay storming out of a meeting and implicitly threatening to walk out of the convention. A bit of theatre, perhaps, but he evidently thought he needed to make a stink to emphasise to the delegates that this was not a minor house-keeping amendment to the party constitution.

20

Rick, I think it depends on how a PR approach is structured. I agree that if we were to go to an Israel model, where you have each party run with a list of candidates, without any regional allocations, you would need a constitutional amendment, since that would eliminate the guarantee that each province is entitled to a certain number of seats in the Commons.

However, you don’t have to go that far. Parliament could provide that within each province, the seats will be allocated by a PR system. So if a party wins 50% of the vote in Saskatchewan, it gets 50% of the Saskatchewan seats. In the bigger provinces, like Ontario, you could go further, and subdivide it into 4 or 5 super-ridings : Toronto, Northern Ontario, Golden Horseshoe, and so on, and then have the seats in those super-ridings allocated by PR. That would help ensure that Toronto doesn’t dominate.

Or you could go to a mixture, like Germany has, where half the seats in a province are allocated on a regional riding system, and the other half is elected according to the overall popular vote in that province.

As long as you don’t touch the number of seats per province, and just tinker with how those seats will be filled within each province, I would think Parliament has considerable freedom of movement.