MacKay himself refuses to confirm those leaks from angry former Tories. But according to associates, he was never included in strategy sessions or dispatched to help out other former Tory candidates, many of whom later lost. More than once when he agreed to answer a call for help, Harper’s headquarters vetoed the trip. When MacKay did come to the rescue of friends in ridings across the country it was at his own initiative. Otherwise, Harper’s official Number Two was left to sit out the race in Nova Scotia. “There were weeks at a time when Peter didn’t talk to Harper,” says an associate, “or hear from anybody in headquarters.”
Nor was MacKay the only former Progressive Conservative who found himself snubbed. Key players in the old Tory election apparatus — including the Ontario team that propelled Mike Harris to power — never received the expected calls for their services.
Some try to explain away those lapses as the pitfalls of a rough-and-tumble national race for which Harper’s team had little time to prepare. But off the record, they pin the rap on Flanagan, the supreme cog in his campaign machine. From a war room that ironically once housed Groupe Action, the ad firm behind the Liberals’ sponsorship scandal, he directed an election effort that stunned even veteran Parliament Hill reporters with its fortress mentality. “Everything was very tightly held,” says one Tory. “It was circle the wagons completely.”
At the centre, the lanky, taciturn wagon master remained a phantom presence, whose aides scrupulously referred to him as “Dr. Flanagan” but whom only a few ever glimpsed. Says a miffed Tory MP: “He was just this overlord nobody ever saw.”
Now, both former Alliance and Tory loyalists blame Flanagan for a parliamentary showing that, however strong, fell far short of the campaign’s overhyped eleventh-hour expectations. “He caused us to lose,” says an irate MacKay loyalist. “I don’t think he really understands this country.” Even some in Harper’s own ranks are equally blunt: “You can’t build an organization by excluding people,” says a former Alliance MP. “There’s a lot of bitterness out there.”
Veterans of the Reform Party see that snub of the Tories as a rerun of Harper’s treatment of party stalwarts, including his former boss Deborah Grey, who bolted the Alliance caucus under Stockwell Day. Even after Harper took over, they found themselves treated as not quite trustworthy and relegated to the back benches. As official co-chair of the Conservative campaign, Grey refuses to badmouth Flanagan — at least not in so many words. “He’s bright and he’s capable — a university guy — and I wish him well with his classes,” she says. “Some guys fit and some guys don’t.”
Critics blamed the Conservatives’ near miss on their mushy platform, but there seems no doubt the party’s policies were left purposely vague. They were released on a Saturday, under the media radar, and couched in language that the University of Lethbridge’s Geoffrey Hale calls “a masterful exercise in ambiguity.”
Now Harper and Flanagan seem in no rush to convert that cotton wool to concrete. They have postponed the party’s policy convention, originally scheduled for October, until at least March — delaying a high-risk day of reckoning that many predict could be bloody. “There will be tremendous pressure to move to the centre,” says David Taras of U of C’s Faculty of Communications and Culture. “When there’s actually a policy convention, you’ll see real struggle. It’ll be a contest for power.”
On one side are MacKay and other former Tories pressing for progressive policies — an adjective that gives neo-conservatives palpitations. “It has to happen,” MacKay insists. “This party has to portray a modern, moderate vision with compassion for people who represent all facets of this country.” For him, it’s not a matter of choice. “We’re right at the precipice of electing a new government if we play our cards right,” he says. “But we have to lead people to a new comfort zone. We don’t want to remain in opposition forever.”
Lined up against him are those true believers who have long made up the Reform and Alliance faithful — not to mention Flanagan himself. He has never blanched at owning up to his most contentious beliefs: scrapping medicare in favour of personal medical savings accounts — a policy adopted by some U.S. corporations — and whittling aboriginal claims on land and self-determination down to individual property rights and municipal self-government. Flanagan may, in fact, not be unlike Louis Riel: a man with a mission, albeit secular. In his last literary outing with Harper, a June, 2001, column in the National Post, they warned fellow conservatives to stick to their policy guns and offer a genuine right-wing alternative — not some pale vote-getting pap. “If all we want is the exercise of power,” they wrote, “we might as well join the Liberals.”
The looming power struggle is not only for the soul of the new party. It is also over Stephen Harper’s political future: how much is he willing to water down the ecumenical wine required to win the pmo? Rick Anderson calls it “the defining question of his leadership — whether he’ll fudge the party’s policies or not.”
But back in Alberta, Ted Byfield, the unabashed voice of the West since the Calgary School’s professors were pups, sees it another way — in terms Leo Strauss might have approved. “All these positions which Harper cherishes are there because of a group of people in Calgary — Flanagan most prominent among them,” Byfield says. “I don’t think he knows how to compromise. It’s not in his genes. The issue now is: how do we fool the world into thinking we’re moving to the left when we’re not?”
To those who are unnerved by that prospect, Byfield offers no cheer. “Those people who said they’re dangerous — they’re right!” he says. “People with ideas are dangerous. If Harper gets elected, he’ll make a helluva change in this country.”
