Also-rans of the Trudeau era

John

Diefenbaker was replaced as leader of the Tories in 1967 by Robert Stanfield (pictured below, left), who had been premier of Nova Scotia. It was the beginning of another long period in opposition for the party, as Stanfield went on to lose three consecutive elections to Pierre Trudeau.

Stanfield came to power with the backing of Dalton Camp, the party’s national president, who’d led the charge to dump Diefenbaker. Though decent and intelligent — Stanfield was a cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School — he came across as boring and uninspiring next to Trudeau. Given that his family shared its name with the underwear brand it created, and he was prone to media mishaps, Stanfield was easy to caricature. He was also unilingual, so he had little appeal in Quebec, even though his party had gone to great lengths to woo support in A H I S T O R Y O F C O N S E R VA T I S M that province with the introduction of its deux nations

(“two founding nations”) policy.

As leader, Stanfield kept the Tories ideologically vague. He campaigned in the 1968 election on a guaranteed annual income — an idea even the Liberals rejected. In 1972 he

proposed wage and

price controls, a

scheme later implemented by

Trudeau’s government.

Although he

succeeded in bringing Trudeau down to

a minority, Stanfield

was never able to beat

him; dispirited, he

stepped down in 1976.

He was replaced by

Joe Clark ( pictured I N C A N A D A below, right), who came out of nowhere to win the leadership against Stanfield’s Quebec lieutenant, Claude Wagner.

Clark, then a first-term MP, was another Dalton Camp disciple. He was a lifelong political operative, having served two terms as president of the PC National Student Federation. While a bornandAlbertan, Clark exhibited few of the characteristics usually associated with Western conservatism. His political ideas — or lack thereof — were close to Stanfield’s: non- ideological and wishy-washy. His wife, Maureen McTeer, was an outspoken feminist.

In the 1979 election against Trudeau, Clark won a minority, and at 39 years old became the youngest prime minister in Canadian history. He announced he would govern as if he had a majority; nine months later, he was out of office.

Clark had campaigned on cutting taxes but in government did a U-Turn, proposing a budget with an 18¢-per-gallon gas tax. He failed to line up

enough votes to get his budget

passed and the government

was defeated. Clark called

an election for Feb. 18,

1980. A reborn Trudeau

was back with another

majority.