A historic election defeat leaves the Conservatives crushed, Reform rampant and a left-wing government securely entrenched in power. The similarities between Canada in 1993 and the UK result of 2024 have been much remarked upon. But what is less discussed is the aftermath of that ‘93 result and the ten years it took to finally ‘unite the right’ under the merged Conservative party of Canada in 2003.
The man at the centre of those debates was Preston Manning. He founded and led the Reform party from 1987 to 2000, spending the final three years as Leader of the Opposition in parliament. Manning, now 82, is something of an intellectual godfather for Nigel Farage. As far back as 2013, Farage – the-then leader of Ukip – was talking publicly of taking inspiration from Canada. He spoke at the eponymous institute founded by Manning and later renamed the Brexit party in 2020 in honour of Reform.
‘I think he [Farage] was quite aware of what the Canadian experience was’, says Manning when we speak. ‘He had read up on that and even professed to get some guidance from it.’ Though he admits ‘I haven’t met or talked to him recently’, Manning takes a keen interest in events that are happening in the colonial motherland. He sees parallels between contemporary political discourse and the debates around enfranchisement in Victoria Britain. Political success, he says, relies on harnessing ‘bottom up’ energy – be that Disraeli in the 1860s or Trump in the 2020s.
‘Part of the challenge for the Conservative party’, he says, is ‘whether they disdain whatever Farage represents or whether they say “This is something that we should try to understand and try to represent and try to convince them that the Conservative party can become a vehicle for those expressions”, just like Disraeli did a long time ago.’
Manning rejects the left-right axis, arguing that ‘a more valid framework is bottom up populist movement versus parties that are controlled by economic or academic or intellectual elites.’ In the 1990s, his Reform party ‘was maybe a predecessor of that – and you can now see that happening across the world. The fact that Reform UK got the percentage of the vote they did, with hardly an organised campaign and a last minute leader, I think is another illustration of this phenomena.’
The big breakthrough for Manning came in 1989 when his party won a shock by-election in Alberta; Reform UK hope to now do the same in Runcorn this May. His advice to Farage is to champion bread-and-butter issues rather than elite concerns on ‘climate change’ and ‘trans issues’: ‘The more Nigel represents that effectively and consistently, that rank and file agenda, I think they’ll grow support and then the traditional parties have to decide: “Do we fight these guys and demean them? Or do we recognise that they are representing something legitimate?”’
His other advice from having lead Reform is ‘how to manage the eccentric fringes’ and ‘stay on message’. Manning argues that:
Populist movements have the potential of actually keeping their leaders on message and warning them if they get off it. One of the things that Trump is going to have to face is that he got elected on this “I’m going to make life more affordable for you rank and file people, I’m going to deal with this illegal immigration and trafficking of drugs across the US border”. He never said anything about a tariff war, or going after Greenland or the Panama Canal. He has to watch, if he gets too far off this populist agenda that elected him, he’s going to lose some of those voters… Populist leaders have to stick to that rank and file agenda and they can get into trouble if they don’t know how to manage the eccentric elements.
The success of the Canadian Reform party was born out of regional discontent. In the 1980s, Pierre Trudeau’s government created a national energy programme after the Opec price spikes that, in Manning’s words, ‘basically confiscated about 110 billion dollars of resource wealth from the West and transferred it to [the] central government.’ Independence movements began to spring up; Reform’s achievement was to harness that energy while rejecting Quebec-style secessionism.
Manning likes to use the analogy of ‘wildcat drilling’ – a form of high-risk oil extraction in unexplored areas. Sometimes, when oil is struck, a wildcat well gets out of control and catches fire: ‘One of the ways you deal with that is drill in a relief well from the side and take off some of the pressure. The Reform party was a relief valve for that western energy that could have been quite destructive and could have grown into a full-blown separatist movement.’ Manning’s movement benefited from having a concentrated base of geographical support in the West, something Farage’s parties have often previously lacked.
After its 1989 by-election triumph, Reform went on to win 52 seats in 1993 and then 60 in 1997. By the late 1990s they had eclipsed the Progressive Conservatives (PC) as the main centre-right force in Canada. But momentum had stalled: the centre-left Liberals had won comfortable majorities and logic suggested a deal on the right would have to be done. Manning had insisted that Reform had a sunset clause in its constitution to ensure that, after ten years, the party had to decide on whether ‘to keep doing what it was doing.’ The ten-year deadline happened in 1997, coinciding with the election that year. ‘I could tell it was time to broaden out,’ says Manning.
Following three years of talks, the Canadian Alliance was formed to fight the 2000 election. But in pushing the realignment agenda, Manning burned up much of his political capital with his base. Not all backed his efforts; some Reform MPs formed the ‘Guard’ protest movement – ‘Grassroots United Against Reform’s demise.’ ‘I had been at it nine to ten years’, says Manning. ‘People thought that I had gone as far as I could. They were a bit tired of me, suggesting that I shouldn’t do it, so I lost the leadership.’ In the June 2000 leadership contest, he won just 36 per cent of the vote. Stockwell Day, the former Alberta PC Treasurer, won with 44 per cent. As Manning ruefully told reporters at the time: ‘The operation was a success but the doctor died.’
To allow his party to grow, Manning resigned his seat in parliament in January 2002. Two months later, Day was replaced by Stephen Harper, Reform’s former chief policy officer. After three successive defeats for the right – in 1993, 1997 and then 2000 – it was Harper who concluded negotiations with the Progressive Conservatives to allow a formal merger in 2003. The newly-born Conservative party of Canada fought the 2004 election: the first time the centre-right was not split in 15 years. The Canadian Tories won 99 seats; two years later Harper became Prime Minister. Less than twenty years after Manning started his party, the country had its first ex-Reform leader.
Manning is philosophical two decades on. He confesses to ‘disappointment’ at losing the leadership but accepts he had his limits. ‘I tend to be an ideas persons – I get these ideas that I think would benefit the country and I like communicating that… Some people were looking for a flashier, more charismatic leader. One of my advisors said I had ‘reverse charisma’ which we never quite figured out what that was!’ But he says that ‘the idea itself managed to survive and other people picked it up and at the end of the day, a graduate in economics from the University of Calgary joined us and we made him our policy chief… and lo and behold he ended up being Prime Minister of Canada so I take a lot of pride in that accomplishment.’
For Manning, office was always the goal: ‘The aim right from the beginning was to get a government so we could actually do something.’ His leadership inspired a generation of conservatives who now lead the party today. Pierre Poilievre, the current Conservative leader, joined Reform as a teenager and witnessed the merger battles firsthand. Ex-Reformers dominate his inner circle including aide Jenni Byrne and Andrew Scheer MP. Just as western Canada’s influence has grown at the expense of the east, so too have Reformers eclipsed the old PCs.
Having sat through countless hours of debate, he has thoughts on how any potential merger on the right in the UK might come about. ‘I wouldn’t focus on the institutional merger of the parties as being the number one thing’, he says. ‘That’s an inside-the-tent discussion that the rank and file of people couldn’t care less about. What I would focus on is how the interests and issues, the energy that is in the UK movement, how are they to be best expressed in the democratic arena.’ Manning’s advice is that any emphasis on “institutional changes” or “changes of name” should only occur after the fundamental question of interests has been ‘properly resolved.’
He asks: ‘Are the Conservatives prepared to acknowledge that there’s an agenda that is somewhat different from theirs, that it is deserving of respect and deserving of representation?’ He notes how what is happening in Britain is reflective of a global trend: ‘Bottom-up movements [are] replacing parties that have become more dominated by elites, this is occurring all over the world. This is happening in Argentina, in half a dozen European countries. Britain is the mother of parliaments, it could show how to manage this upsurge in energy from the rank and file… It would be instructive to many other countries in the world.’
Both Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage have shown a willingness to learn lessons from Canadian politics. They know that in a Westminster system, two parties of the centre-right will struggle to survive together. As they look to 2029, heeding Manning’s advice on harnessing ‘bottom up energy’ may prove crucial in deciding whether the establishment party can see off its insurgent rival. Otherwise, the Reform party could eclipse its Conservative rival for the second time in 30 years.
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