Preston Manning Recruits Gordon Campbell to Boost Danielle Smith

Oh, for crying out loud!

Preston Manning, 84, the superannuated godfather of the Canadian right, has teamed up with another tiresome has-been from conservative western Canadian politics to try to polish up Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s tarnished October separation referendum with a two-day “virtual assembly” in late September.

Manning’s sidekick in this elaborate constitutional snake-oil pitch is Gordon Campbell, a comparatively youthful 78, who was the “Liberal” (but really conservative) premier of British Columbia for a decade in the 2000s. Nowadays, however, Campbell is mostly remembered for an unfortunate police mug shot taken during a brush with the law in Hawaii in 2003 and a troubling civil suit more recently.

By contrast, the teetotalling Manning, leader of the Reform Party Opposition in Ottawa for four short years in the late 1990s, has managed to become the bad penny of Alberta politics.

That is to say, he just keeps turning up on United Conservative Party government panels in Alberta, writing friendly “reports” for the same government, and organizing generously financed and well-publicized “citizens’ assemblies” and “inquiries” on such conservative preoccupations as COVID, convoys and provincial sovereignty, not to mention authoring partisan jeremiads on a variety of paleoconservative topics for the always accommodating National Post.

Indeed, just last year while his boat was still rocking in the wake of the federal election, Manning was musing about setting up a “Canada West Assembly” to talk about how to respond to the election of another Liberal government, this time led by Prime Minister Mark Carney. Options would include “various independent-oriented proposals,” he told a National Post reporter.

So here we go again with the “Alberta and the West Assembly” — which is said to be a project of Manning’s eponymous Manning Foundation for Democratic Education. According to the event’s website, the online dog-and-pony show next month is intended to publicly “examine and debate the major options affecting Alberta’s and Western Canada’s future within the Canadian federation.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, after plowing through about 3,300 words of turgid drivel under the heading “A Brief Introduction,” these begin to sound a lot like the long list of grievances Manning has regularly repeated since failing to grab the brass ring during his fleeting tenure as Opposition leader in Parliament.

‘Concerned and thoughtful persons’

Reading this twaddle, one comes away with the impression that the point of this performance will be to shine up the UCP separation referendum that almost no one in Alberta asked for and find a way to make the Conservative Party of Canada relevant again as it withers in the bright glow of an unexpectedly popular Liberal in the Prime Minister’s Office.

The list of “concerned and thoughtful persons” who will serve as delegates to the “virtual assembly” includes a number of familiar names associated with Manning’s hobby horses over the years. Some are known to be sympathetic with his dyspeptic view of federal politics. One suspects the less familiar ones will turn out to hold the same opinions.

Many of the words in the not-so-brief introduction grind Manning’s axe on the reasons for “western dissatisfaction with the status quo,” including the “ignorance, indifference, and even outright hostility on the part of the media, academic, and political elites of central and eastern Canada toward the legitimate concerns and aspirations of Canada West.” (Eye rolls all round, including some right here in Wild Rose Country.)

Premier Danielle Smith will put in an appearance at the two-day virtual bean fest, the site promises, to speak for the Remain side. Several separatist grandees will also be coming. Federal Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre, also labelled a Remain advocate, has been invited. No word on why we hear so little in defence of Canada from his large cohort of Alberta members of Parliament.

Invitations were also extended to pro-Canadian groups but, by the sound of it, most of them told Manning to pump sand.

“Preston Manning built his career on ‘western alienation,’” former Progressive Conservative Alberta deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk told me last week. “He harnessed West’s dislike of Ottawa to build his Reform Party, which is supposed to run candidates only in the West like the PQ runs candidates only in Quebec, but the lure of wanting to be a prime minister made him pretend to be a federalist.”

“Now, he wants to sell himself as an honest broker in the unity debate, even though right out of the gate he insists that everyone should vote yes on the nine divisive referendum questions,” said Lukaszuk, who was the proponent of the successful Forever Canadian petition drive.

“It appears that the Oct. 19 referendum is not only intended to preserve Danielle Smith’s UCP leadership, but it also serves as an opportunity for many separatists to sell themselves as federalists,” he concluded. Needless to say, he won’t be taking part in Manning’s “assembly.”

Carney’s otherwise occupied

It also sounds as if Prime Minister Mark Carney will likely find something more pressing in his calendar on Sept. 19 and 20.

Remember, Manning is nowadays the Conservative political éminence who can’t quite stay in the grise and who can still be found on the internet advising Smith in 2021 on how to blackmail Canada into doing Alberta’s bidding by threatening to become the 51st state.

Cheekily wearing his Order of Canada pin, Manning tells the soon-to-be premier that “fear of the United States can be a factor in federal provincial relations” in a video created by the Canada Strong and Free Network, as the Manning centre has been rebranded.

That’s because they want our oil, he explains. “Is there some way that fear of the United States can be used as a lever to get some of the things that the West needs to have addressed?” His answer, obviously, is yup.

Did this advice lead directly to the UCP government’s effort to create a constitutional crisis with the October referendum? It’s hard to believe otherwise.

According to the “Alberta and the West” website — which despite Campbell’s involvement is unlikely to generate much interest outside Alberta — “the Assembly is not intended to promote any one of the options under consideration, but rather to ensure that differing perspectives receive a fair and respectful hearing and to help participants and the broader public become better informed about the choices facing Alberta and the West.”

If you believe that, I can probably come up with a list of major infrastructure projects here in Canada West you may be interested in purchasing.