History repeats itself in the federal election campaign
National Post, 1 April 2025
A Tory leader at odds with the Conservative premiers of Alberta and Ontario. Liberals bringing in a new face and vying for a fourth mandate. It's all happened before
The most intriguing bit of recent political news was that Mark Carney had been asked by then-prime minister Stephen Harper to be his finance minister in 2012. He was asked to be in Harper’s cabinet before Pierre Poilievre was.
I wrote in December that Carney would make an excellent finance minister in a Conservative government, just as Harper had put Liberal David Emerson in his cabinet in 2006, first as trade minister, before promoting him to foreign affairs. I had no idea then that Harper had already proposed that very thing.
Even apparently fanciful future things can be a return to the past. There was a touch of that when Ontario Premier Doug Ford said that his recent telephone call with Poilievre was the “first time I ever spoke to him.”
What those words mean is puzzling, as Ford has been premier since 2018 and Poilievre has been Conservative leader since 2022, and they have been photographed at events together. Ford’s meaning though is clear enough: Poilievre is not my guy.
That, too, is a return to the past. It is unlikely in the extreme that Poilievre consults Canada’s 16th prime minister, Joe Clark, in his attempt to become the 25th. Clark may not be able to offer constructive suggestions, but he can certainly commiserate over shared unhappy experiences.
Clark’s party leadership (1976-1983) coincided with two prominent Conservative premiers, Bill Davis in Ontario and Peter Lougheed in Alberta. They were titans, as Ford and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith manifestly are not, but a similar dynamic has returned.
Davis, a centrist who tilted left, sided with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau on the great national issues the day, energy policy and constitutional affairs. He was cool to Clark and kept his distance from the federal Tories. Only as he was headed for the exits did Davis put his campaign infrastructure, the formidable “Big Blue Machine,” at Brian Mulroney’s service, a not inconsequential contribution to the latter’s massive 1984 victory.
Ford has refused to help Poilievre’s campaign. He has also adopted the Davis approach to governance. If an ostensible conservative governs from the centre-left, there is no room left for the actual leftists. Davis won four straight elections, two majorities and two minorities, on that model. Ford has won three consecutive majorities and wants to be premier forever.
He has a better shot at that if the Liberals retain power in Ottawa. The last time the Ontario PCs won an election when the federal Liberals were not in power was 1959. So electorally, Ford prefers the federal Liberals, and likely on principle too, being rather liberal himself.
Clark’s other headache was Lougheed in Alberta. A centrist who tilted right, Lougheed was happy to be in Clark’s camp, but his robust defence of Alberta’s energy interests made it awkward for Clark in Ontario and Quebec. What was good for oil-producing Alberta was not aligned with the interests of the oil-consuming east.
Hence Clark, in taking on Trudeau père, was squeezed between his provincial cousins. Sound familiar?
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