BLUE
THUNDER
THE TRUTH ABOUT CONSERVATIVES FROM MACDONALD TO HARPER
BOB PLAMONDON
great river media inc.
Copyright © 2013 by Bob Plamondon
Originally published by Key Porter – 2009
Re-published by Great River Media Inc. - 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems—without the prior written permission of the publisher, or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, One Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, M6B 3A9.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2052-3
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Plamondon, Robert E.
Blue thunder / Bob Plamondon.
1.Conservatism—Canada.
2.Canada—Politics and government—18672008.
3.Canada—Politics and government—18672008.
4.Canada—Politics and government—2008. I. Title.
JC573.2.C3P528 2008
320.520971
C20089022122
INTRODUCTION
BY CONAD BLACK
This is an invaluable analysis of the leaders and fluctuations of for tune of the Canadian federal Conservative Party (under different names) over 141 years, of what it needs to succeed, and why it has often failed.
The genius of Sir John A. Macdonald is generally conceded, but rarely laid out as clearly, and with such economy of words, as here. He won an astonishing six majority victories in general elections (after two in the pre-confederation, so called United Province of Canada), and was only defeated once.
The largely forgotten Sir Robert L. Borden was tortoise to Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s hare, and the two split four elections evenly.
In the eighty-five years from the retirement of Borden to the rise of Stephen Harper, Mr. Plamondon explains how two rather random events, and the generally high cunning of successive Liberal leaders, caused the Conservatives to lose eighteen of twenty-five general elections to the Liberals.
Borden, who was not at all anti-French, produced the first event when he imposed conscription for overseas service in 1917, out of his passionate loyalty to the Canadian army in France that was making such heroic sacrifices. This added only a few thousand reluctant warriors to the front lines, while the United States, which had just entered the war, was pouring over 100,000 soldiers a month into the Western Front, and steadily tilting the balance of forces in favour of the Allies. This enabled the supreme Allied commander, Marshal Foch, to launch his great offensive of August 8, 1918, which carried through to the German request for peace terms concluded on November 11.
For this gesture to the volunteer army, Borden, as he foresaw, destroyed the Conservative Party in Québec for two whole generations, as Liberal orators pilloried Tories as British colonialists happy to send French Canadians overseas to fight and die for Britain. In the twenty-five elections mentioned, the Conservatives won more MPs in Québec than the Liberals only three times, twice under Brian Mulroney, when the Conservatives finally elevated a Québec leader and ceased effectively to forfeit the significantly French-speaking third of the country’s constituencies before the election campaigns started.
The other successful election for the Conservatives in Québec had almost nothing to do with the Conservatives themselves. In 1958, Maurice Duplessis, the five-term premier and almost omnipotent “chef” of Québec, delivered fifty MPs to John Diefenbaker, to settle scores with the federal Liberals from when they had intervened against him in the Québec election of 1939. Apart from this windfall for the Conservatives, Brian Mulroney remains the only Conservative leader to defeat the Liberals in Québec in a federal election since Macdonald in 1891.
The second random event that squandered Mulroney’s party-building achievement and laid the federal Conservatives lower than they have ever been since Confederation, was the election of Kim Campbell as leader over Jean Charest, to succeed Mulroney. An attractive and capable woman, she had no idea how to lead a national party in an election and the Conservative caucus shrunk, in 1993, from 169 to two (not including the outgoing prime minister, whose next official position was consul general in Los Angeles).
The Reform Party took almost all Conservative support west of Ontario; the Bloc Québécois took all of what Mulroney had painstakingly built up in Québec; and the Liberals destroyed the Conservatives in Ontario and the Atlantic provinces. The Progressive Conservative Party was atomized and endured a futile decade of four more crushing electoral defeats while Jean Chrétien frolicked in the vacuum, until Stephen Harper and Peter MacKay reassembled the pieces yet again.
In this book, several obscure Conservative leaders, including John J. C. Abbott, J.S.D. Thompson, and the generally disparaged R. B. Bennett, emerge as having more merit and significance than is generally believed. And more familiar Conservative leaders, including Borden, Diefenbaker (whose strengths are indisputable but often hard to identify precisely), and Mulroney, are plausibly presented as more accomplished prime ministers than conventional opinion has generally held.
Robert Plamondon has performed an important service. He has shown that Canadian federal Conservatives are not just, as they have often appeared, a hodgepodge of disparate elements and political losers who don’t happen to be Liberals, and who receive a chance, which they squander, one election in four. And he has shown how the Conservatives can win federally and can regain the status, lost for nearly a century, of a natural party of government.
PREFACE
Although the tory party has produced some of this country’s most colourful leaders and prime ministers, their contributions to Canada are rarely recognized, let alone understood. It’s time Canadians learned the truth about its Conservative political history.
Blue Thunder explores 141 years of Canadian Conservative leadership revealing what has worked for Tories and what has not. Along the way it gets to the truth by correcting the distortions perpetuated by a cunning opponent, a willing media, and an academic community that is loath to embrace anything Conservative.
Of course, it’s been tough being a Conservative in Canada. For every three years Liberals have been in power, Conservatives have held office for two. Not counting the Macdonald years, Liberals hold a two-to-one margin. If Conservatives have an inferiority complex, the same cannot be said for Liberals, the nation’s so-called “natural governing party.” Liberals tell us that Tory times are hard times and that Conservative leaders do not represent Canadian values. To the same end, historians have consistently underplayed the Tory contribution to the development of Canada. Books about Conservative political history, if you can find them, come with such catchy subtitles as “syndrome ... renegade ... rogue ... blues ... interlude ... decline.” Except for Macdonald, there is little praise for Tory leaders. Even then, the national poll for the CBC program The Greatest Canadians absurdly ranked both Pierre Trudeau and Lester B. Pearson ahead of Sir John A. Macdonald.
True, the Conservative electoral record is appalling. But more important than raw statistics, Conservatives have made fundamental and far-reaching contributions to Canada while in and out of office. Tories led the country through some of its more tumultuous times and initiated many of the transformative changes that define the nation today. Conservatives did much