Stand up for... Canada?
Scape @ Sun Jan 22, 2006 12:49 am
The beginning of the end
David Orchard
Mr. Harper and his colleagues, although campaigning as friends of the farmer, revealed their true colours when they blocked an all-party investigation into the exorbitant profits made by the giant U.S. meat packers at the expense of Canadian farmers during the BSE crisis.
The new Conservative party has run a campaign focused on ethics. For months Mr. Harper and Mr. MacKay have been talking loudly and sanctimoniously about honesty, integrity and trustworthiness in our public figures and promising to "clean up" Ottawa. Well, the ethics of Mr. Harper and Mr. MacKay are, unfortunately, something I happen to know about.
In the last leadership race of the Progressive Conservative party, in 2003, Mr. MacKay and I went into the convention with the two largest blocks of delegates. At the end of the day, Mr. MacKay sought my support. We negotiated an agreement, put it in writing and signed it. Point number one of our agreement was no merger or joint candidates with the Canadian Alliance. I and the majority of my delegates then delivered our part of the bargain -- we voted for Mr. MacKay and made him leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.
Afterwards, what did Peter MacKay do? Mr. Harper urged him to abandon his commitments to the membership of the PC Party and his agreement with me, and to merge the party into the Canadian Alliance. This the two men did -- in a blatantly fraudulent manner. They arranged to stack the ratification vote of the PC party, whose members had steadfastly opposed merging with the Alliance -- by allowing tens of thousands of Alliance members to join the PC party to overwhelm our existing membership and the voting process itself.
They then trumpeted a so-called 90-per-cent majority for the merger and destroyed the founding party of Canada, but not before stealing the party's colours, its reputation as a moderate centrist party, its history of achievement and half its name. These are the two men who would now lecture the rest of the political spectrum in Canada about ethics.
For all of these these reasons, I urge Canadians to look long and hard before buying the dangerous brew Mr. Harper is attempting to sell us on Jan. 23.
David Orchard ran for the leadership of the federal Progressive Conservative Party in 1998 and 2003. He is the author of The Fight for Canada -- Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism. E-mail: [email protected]