Upstart parties should worry Conservatives

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This article was published 08/06/2021 (1682 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The united front of Canada’s political right appears to be fraying at the edges as political upstarts like the Maverick Party in the west and the libertarian People’s Party of Canada try to siphon members from the Conservative Party of Canada.

Last month, Manitoba’s first Maverick Party electoral district association was established in the Dauphin-Swan River-Neepawa federal riding, with the intent of taking on the Conservative Party candidate, MP Dan Mazier, in what would normally be a safe Tory riding.

Don Armitage, who hails from Miniota and was established as president of the association, told the Sun he was a longtime Conservative Party of Canada member before shifting to Maverick.

“Things were going well when Stephen Harper was the leader, but things started going downhill when Andrew Scheer took over, and they’ve gone well downhill when Erin O’Toole took over,” he said.

He’d had enough of the CPC after O’Toole went back on his word and introduced a carbon tax to the Tory platform, which Armitage said the Maverick Party will not do.

Armitage’s thoughts on climate change — that apparently only a small amount is human-caused — drive his believe that such a minor detail should not be allowed to destroy the economy. And he says he believes that Western Canada would be better off as its own country, without the overbearing influence of Eastern Canada — a key policy plank of the Mavericks, and its earlier establishment as the Wexit Party before a name change last September.

In a press released dated June 4, the Maverick Party boasted that as of last week, there are 33 established Electoral District Association executive boards in place, including the first here in Manitoba. While most are in Alberta (22), there are a further six in Saskatchewan and four in B.C.

It’s impossible not to see similarities between the Mavericks and the Reform Party of the late 1980s that became the standard bearer of small-c conservative thinking as a result of the 1993 federal election. The deeply unpopular Progressive Conservatives, led by then-prime minister Kim Campbell following the disastrous Brian Mulroney years, fell to a pair of holdout seats, while the Reform Party — largely hailed as a western protest party — took 52 seats.

Also notable that year was the fact that the Liberals won a majority 177 seats, and the Bloc Québécois became the official Opposition with 54.

That splintering of the right-wing vote in this country left conservatives out of power for more than a decade, until the unite-the-right movement prompted the formation of the Canadian Alliance led by Stockwell Day and eventually Stephen Harper, a party that eventually merged with the PCs to form the Conservative Party of Canada.

But that shaky alliance between the hard-right conservatives of this country and what would have been called red Tories under the former federal PC banner has begun to unravel, and the apparent growing interest in the Maverick Party should cause no small amount of alarm for present-day Conservatives.

This undermining of federal Conservative support can be seen in a recent Angus Reid poll that showed the federal Tories holding a shrinking lead in Alberta among decided voters.

That poll had the Tories leading in Alberta at 45 per cent of voter intention, down from the 69 per cent received in the last election, with the Liberals at 25 per cent and the NDP at 20 per cent, according to the Western Standard, a conservative news site.

Interestingly, the Maverick Party and the PPC scored seven per cent and four per cent, respectively. While this seems quite low, the Maverick Party had only polled at two per cent in previous surveys. This does not make for a government in waiting by any means, but such a split could easily serve the interests of other parties such as the federal Liberals. It has happened in Westman before — think back to the 1993 election, when Liberal Glen McKinnon became the Brandon-Souris MP after the PC and Reform Party candidates split the vote.

And there are some similarities between the Mavericks and the Reform to ponder. You only need to look at the current — “interim” — leader of the Maverick Party, Jay Hill, to see the connection.

Mr. Hill was first elected to the House of Commons as a Reform MP for Prince George-Peace River in British Columbia in 1993, and eventually served as Government House Leader in the Stephen Harper administration under the Conservative Party of Canada banner.

Both were grassroots protest parties originating from Western Canada’s exasperation and discontent with Ontario and Quebec. But while the Reformers of old used to say that the “West wants in,” under the Mavericks, it’s the “West wants out.”

With the O’Toole Conservatives slipping in the national polls following his unpopular decision to embrace a carbon tax, there is a risk of further erosion in party support if he cannot find his footing in time for the next federal election — one that could come sooner rather than later in this kind of minority governance.