Manning’s advice for Tory candidates
OTTAWA • Veteran politician Preston Manning says the next Conservative leader must strike a balance between emphasizing party unity and addressing populism bubbling up to the surface of Canadian politics.
In an interview before this week’s high-profile conservative conference organized by his Manning Centre, Manning told the National Post whoever becomes l eader must remember the Con- servative party was stitched together not so long ago.
“It’s got fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, constitutional conservatives in Quebec, democratic conservatives on the prairie. It’s a coalition, and I think whoever leads it has to recognize this is a coalition. … Hopefully the stitching is solid stitching, but it’s not like it’s been around for a hundred years,” Manning said.
The party formed in 2003 to bridge Progressive Conservatives with members of the Canadian Alliance, which was the successor to Manning’s Western-based Reform Party.
“You can’t take the unity of coalitions for granted. You have to work on it,” Manning said. “If you can’t make democracy work internally to handle your differences, how are you going to go to the public and say you can make it work in the broader differences of society?”
The agenda for this week’s conference in Ottawa includes a debate between Conservative l eadership candidates who are divided on several major questions, including whether Canada’s immigration policy should be changed.
In the context of Liberal government positions and a Trump administration in the United States, Manning said populist questions around di- versity, extremism and inclusiveness must be addressed.
“One of my worries is, and it fits into the Trump phenomenon, that a lot of the political establishment in Canada is denying that those concerns exist here, or just decrying anybody that brings them up,” he said. “I just think that’s a mistake. I think there are concerns on all of those issues and they’re down below and people resent it when they can’t be aired.”
Manning recalled how populism in the ’ 80s and ’ 90s spurred his Reform Party, which harnessed a “populist element” of Western alienation during those decades rather than allowing it to tear up the federation.