and lonely, he returned to the University of Calgary to pursue post-graduate studies. He was not entrepreneurial or particularly motivated by money; he was a man of ideas, an intellectual who could easily have pursued a comfortable life as a university professor. As Jim Hawkes said: “Everyone thought his future lay in proceeding to a doctorate in economics and to a career in university, something that would also give him the opportunity to advance policy ideas.”
But Harper was still very much a partisan and wondered how he could help persuade Mulroney and the PC party to shift to the right and follow a purer form of conservatism, like that being pursued by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Harper felt there was not much cause for optimism in this mission; in his view, the Red Tories, those in the middle and perhaps the left of the political spectrum, were in charge of the PC party. In his view, the leadership of the party lacked political will. Nonetheless, his first instinct was to work within the PC party to try to move it to the right of centre by building a “Blue Tory” network.
“The Blue Tory network was basically two guys: Stephen and me,” recalled John Weissenberger, a colleague of Harper’s at the University of Calgary and the man considered to be Harper’s best friend.18 Like Harper, Weissenberger was an easterner who went west in the early 1980s to pursue studies and a career. Harper and Weissenberger met while they were volunteers for the Calgary West PC Association in 1988.
“The idea behind the Blue Tory network,” said Weissenberger, “was to find a home for philosophical conservatives, who did not exist at the time within the PC party. There was not, to our minds,
strong philosophical base to the party, especially compared with what was happening to conservative parties around the world. The PC party, in our estimation, was a very broad brokerage party that was trying to copy the Liberal party in terms of its positioning within the political spectrum.”
Weissenberger and Harper developed terms of reference for their Blue Tory network and identified caucus members they thought might support it. “These were the caucus members that to average PC members would have been referred to as the dinosaurs,” said Weissenberger. “But what we really wanted to attract was younger people to the cause.” In the 1980s, there was no Internet or blogging; communication and outreach were more painstaking.
The dinosaurs had another name for themselves: the 1922 Club. According to Gerry St. Germain, the club was patterned after a rump of the Tory caucus, formed in 1922 in Great Britain out of a huge majority government, not unlike the one Mulroney had earned in 1984.The Canadian version of the 1922 Club consisted mostly of western members with strong right-wing social conservative views on issues like capital punishment. Mulroney acknowledges that he had “Reformers” in his caucus. However, once inside caucus expo- sure to the legitimate interests and concerns of members from other parts of the country persuaded most of them to accept a more moderate and inclusive national vision.
It is clear that Harper and Weissenberger wanted to remain politically active, and their first choice was to work within the structure of the existing system, that is, the PC Party of Canada. It is equally clear that Harper did not underestimate the challenge of remaking the PC party from within. Within the party, he and Wiessenberger would have been but a couple of faint voices. While they may have been accused of being dogmatic and youthfully uncompromising, they understood they were in a “big tent” political party that was sup- posed to represent a broad spectrum of political views. The problem, as they saw it, was that small-c conservatives were essentially ignored or, worse, derisively labelled as right-wing Neanderthals. “There is a difference between being a conservative and making honourable compromises, and being a centrist,” said Weissenberger. “ A lack of conservative philosophical grounding caused the PC party to be not much different from the old Liberal party.”
Weissenberger added, “But the whole Blue Tory network thing got short circuited.” That’s because Robert Mansell, head of the economics department at the University of Calgary, introduced Stephen Harper and John Weissenberger to Preston Manning. This was no chance introduction: Manning had asked Mansell for his best and brightest student, and Mansell thought of Harper. He was, recalled Mansell, “A reluctant politician—an ideal politician in my sense.”
To both Harper and Weissenberger, Manning sounded like a principled conservative; he had credibility in the West, was articulate, and was prepared to give two young and inexperienced conservative idealists a chance to spread their wings. Manning could provide an easier route for the University of Calgary students to hatch their network. “Had we carried on with the Blue Tory network [within the PC party], we would have been going against the party establishment. We would have been going against the flow. We were willing to work inside the party to try and change things, but it seemed to us the path of least resistance was to leave and try and effect change from the outside,” said Weissenberger.
Harper and Manning both felt that something was wrong in Ottawa. Harper was intrigued with Manning and travelled to Vancouver to attend an assembly Manning helped organize. Prime Minister Mulroney had directed the PC party to avoid the assembly. But Harper and Weissenberger felt no disloyalty in attending and contributing. “I get annoyed when... Stephen and I are called turn- coats and traitors for leaving the PCs,” said Weissenberger. “We did not leave for any personal advantage and had no expectations of personal gain. We went into the wilderness and filled a void. We just thought it was the right thing to do and we did it.” The meeting would lead to the creation of a new political party that would change the course of Canadian history.
The Western Assembly on Canada’s Economic and Political Future was held in Vancouver May 29–31, 1987. Under the banner “The West Wants In,” about three hundred delegates and observers discussed issues such as regional fairness, balanced budgets, Senate reform, and free trade. Progressive Conservatives thought the West was already “in.” After decades of underrepresentation during the Trudeau years, western conservatives filled the government benches and cabinet seats like never before. Yet it was not western people Manning wanted in, it was popular western ideas. The assembly was no meeting of flaming radicals. The creation of the Reform party was careful, deliberate, thoughtful, and professional.
To establish an organized response to western alienation, four options were debated: (i) work with a traditional party; (ii) create a focused pressure group; (iii) create a new federal political party; and (iv) the non-offensive category “other.” While there were four options on the table, however, the outcome was never in doubt. “Preston had the objective right away of forming a political party that he would lead,” said Weissenberger. “It is a fair comment to say that this was his objective back in 1967.”
Preston Manning and others tried to argue that the new political party would be different and would not be ideologically focused. Trevor Harrison, in his book on the rise of the Reform party, paints a different picture. “Despite Manning’s call for balance, the ideological mix of the new party had already begun to congeal around certain right-wing principles.” Harrison cited comments from delegates and reporters to support his conclusion that assembly participants “were almost uniformly social and economic conservatives” who were “dominated by old-time Socreds dying for another kick at the political cat.”
The young Stephen Harper went to the assembly with a manifesto called “A Taxpayers Reform Agenda,” which he concocted with Weissenberger. Their agenda included eleven one-sentence proposals that were true to conservative principles. But Harper’s right-wing perspective was at odds with the message Manning delivered to the assembly. Manning advocated a populist movement that would, in theory, appeal to the left, middle, and right of the political spectrum. He may have sounded like a conservative when he complained about the Mulroney government being out of touch with western Canada, but he was not trying to form a party of the right. Manning, an evangelical Christian, also spoke of social conservative issues, which were nowhere to be found in Harper’s manifesto.
Despite Manning’s populist urgings, Harper felt he was among true conservatives, and he was comfortable enough to abandon his Blue Tory project to explore what could be done within this new western-based political movement.
The convention that established the Reform Party of Canada took place in Winnipeg from October 30 to November 1, 1987.The 306 delegates were largely