-by Paul W Conway
There is more to Preston Manning than meets the eye. He does so meet however from time to time, most recently in The Globe and Mail on Monday, January 18 — and these occasions are all we have unless we attend the proceedings of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy. There is one next month in Ottawa, if you are keen.
I met the man in person some thirty-plus years ago, when he and I were both young per-diem-rate peddlers in northern Alberta. He was working the oil industry side of the Cold Lake heavy oil deposits, I the community development side. I expect he got higher rates than I did and stayed in better hotels, but we met as equals
then, more or less.
I remember the part of our conversation in which we talked about the need, not only for skill-training, but for work-place orientation appropriate to the industry for the young aboriginal people of the area. I said that my clients in the communities needed something like that. He agreed, but said that his clients in the oil industry thought it was a problem for governments. I said I thought that meant that his clients didn't care, because since when, I asked, did the oil industry want to turn over to government something it cared about? He agreed. That was the Preston Manning of those days.
We had another, longer-standing connection too. In the 1960's, Preston had a large hand in a thing called the Manning White Paper on Human Resources Development, which among much else established in northern Alberta a community development project that was full-blooded Saul Alinsky. Quite a thing for an Alberta government of his father's stripe to do in those days. I came on board as the new Progressive Conservative government under Peter Lougheed was trying to figure out what to do with it. That's a long story, and not relevant here, but I mention in passing that that government was both progressive and conservative, beyond question.
What are relevant, particularly to us in our neck of the woods, are Preston's musings on the future of the "the Canadian Right" which for the time being translates down into the Conservative Party. I say particularly to us, because our riding and our neighbouring ridings are firmly locked into voting that way and appear likely to remain so as long as the voting system stays even remotely the same. Conservative supporters here never had a better reason to vote some other way than on October 19th, 2015 when a sterile, exhausted, no longer minimally competent governing party offered us a candidate who, however sterling his personal qualities, had not made any conspicuous mark on the national political scene. But only a few of them did.
In other words, we in Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound will have a Conservative Party representative in Parliament for the next four years, and quite possibly longer. Regardless of where we stand, we need to pay attention to the Conservative debate. Preston Manning will have a lot to say in it, both directly and indirectly through his followers.
We need not find such a reality discouraging however, because if we read his six recommendations carefully and think about what they are saying, we may find that some of them are not bad. Preston is a "progressive" conservative in the old prairie sense of the adjective, and that is not a political ideology to be sneezed at no matter how "progressive" one perceives one's self to be.
What is Preston suggesting? His first thought is for good character — "openness, honesty, transparency, integrity, compassion, humility" — in candidates, leaders and staff. Who can possibly object to that? One could perhaps add intelligence, knowledge, grit, good balance, and a willingness to work hard, but I do not think Preston would disagree.
In his fourth recommendation he urges a longer list of conservative values and principles to include concerns for "poverty, inequality, health care, education, environment, science and culture" where conservatives, he says, are "rightly or wrongly" (rightly, in fact) "seen to be weak or disinterested". Again, who could object? His ideas on specifics may perhaps have to be filtered through those values and principles he identified in his second rcommendation, those being "freedom, responsibility, equality of opportunity, stewardship, respect for life, democratic accountability". Even those ideas, however, in some form, are not by nature unprogressive. At the very least he appears to invite a wide-ranging and complex discussion, which is confirmed by his sixth thought, concerning consultation and involvement of "ordinary Canadians".
His fifth concerns internal party practice concerning training for "volunteers, constituency executives, campaign managers and candidates" which is good advice for any party.
So therefore, out of his six recommendations, the first, second (with a caution about coded language), fourth, fifth and sixth suggest nothing that should cause even the most committed progressive to run away from the conversation. A Conservative Party guided by those lights would indeed be worthy of serious consideration.
Unfortunately, however, he undoes it all in the third recommendation where he trumpets the virtues of "trade liberalization, public-spending constraints, balanced budgets, debt reduction and tax relief". Here we have the same old, tired, discredited, wrong-headed, money-market agenda —the anti-gospel of austerity — once again raising its loathsome head and completely negating everything he has said in the other five. Nothing good can be expected out of the Conservative Party as long as these wicked and comprehensively ill-founded ideas are strangling its ideology.
"Progressive" and "conservative" are not fundamentally incompatible- not in the past and not now. Many governments, both provincially and federally, have proved that. The gloating parsimony and mingy pusillanimity of the tax-cutting austerity lobby are compatible with neither, and the Conservative Party deserves to stay in the political wilderness until it has thoroughly cleansed itself of them.
Where did anyone get the idea that Canadians, even conservative ones, want "less" government, by some broad definition of the term? Do not all bands of the political spectrum scream for the government to do something whenever they see anything they don't like? And where did we get the idea that we could have good government, able to respond to things we don't like, if we keep all our governments starved for funds?
Good government costs money. Surely that is so obvious it should not need to be said. Good government is worth having. Governments serve many purposes, of which the most vital is to serve as an effective expression of our sense of community, of our concern for each other and for the people of the future. For that purpose we insist that our governments serve and regulate. It is vitally important that they do it well.
The people who invented the tax-cutting austerity lobby and who made it sound legitimate are the people who want us to give our money to them instead. By lining himself up with these scallywags, and urging the Conservative Party to continue in the same, Preston Manning diminishes himself, the ideology of conservatism, and the discussion he says he wants to promote. Fie upon him!
