Peter Lougheed was more than just a provincial man

By Colby Cosh - Friday, September 21, 2012 at 3:56 PM - 0 Comments

Dave Buston/CP

The leadership of the federal Progressive Conservatives was Peter Lougheed’s for the asking from about 1973 onwards. Bob Stanfield approached him almost immediately after his 1974 election defeat, and Joe Clark, who had started political life as a gopher for Lougheed’s election team, made sure to get his all-clear before launching his own campaign. Later, after Clark’s vote-counting powers failed him at a 1983 leadership review, Lougheed was drafted again. That time, he thought about it a little longer.

He concluded—and notice how little self-delusion the man exhibited, compared to many who came after him—that his lack of French was a deal-breaker. Even a man who had once been well-organized enough to combine professional football with law school was unlikely to remedy that in his ’50s.

In truth, he could sincerely see no more satisfying use of his abilities than to be premier of Alberta. That probably still sounds ridiculous to some. It sounded half-crazy to everybody, when Lougheed was a young man. But his political comrades remember him talking about it when he was still nothing but a bundle of ambition—before he had even decided what the particular vehicle for his political ascendancy was going to be.

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Knockin’ on doors with Peter Lougheed

By Dale Smith - Tuesday, September 18, 2012 at 6:39 PM - 0 Comments

Left: CP Images; Right: Chris Bolin/Flickr/Wikimedia Commons.

Progressive Conservative senator Elaine McCoy remains a Progressive Conservative to this day, in large part because of former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed.

“There was an honesty and a decency to Peter Lougheed, and certainly in the way he conducted himself,” McCoy says from her home in Calgary. “Before he was elected–and in fact I have that document–they had made up rules for themselves on how to behave, and the one that strikes me so powerfully these days is ‘never attack the person; only attack an idea.’ That’s a message or a policy or a practice that is just not being honoured these days. I think people need to be reminded of it.”

McCoy first met Lougheed when she moved into his riding, around 1980, and volunteered with his constituency association.

“That was my first memory of him being my MLA, and watching him looking after his constituency,” McCoy says. “I didn’t realise it then quite so much, but he was an example of all of his MLAs. He never forgot his responsibility as an elected representative. He would do things like hold town hall meetings at least twice a year; he’d go door knocking twice a year. Of course he had an annual meeting, he regularly met with his constituency board. He was on top of it all the time.”

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Peter Lougheed: A photo gallery

By admin - Friday, September 14, 2012 at 10:46 AM - 0 Comments

of Photos

Peter Lougheed, R.I.P.

By Colby Cosh - Friday, September 14, 2012 at 7:57 AM - 0 Comments

Former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed in October 2002. (Adrian Wyld, CP photo)

Click here to view “Peter Lougheed: a photo gallery.”

The leadership of the federal Progressive Conservatives was Peter Lougheed’s for the asking from about 1973 onwards. Bob Stanfield approached him almost immediately after his 1974 election defeat, and Joe Clark, who had started political life as a gopher for Lougheed’s election team, made sure to get his all-clear before launching his own campaign. Later, after Clark’s vote-counting powers failed him at a 1983 leadership review, Lougheed was drafted again. That time, he thought about it a little longer.

He concluded—and notice how little self-delusion the man exhibited, compared to many who came after him—that his lack of French was a dealbreaker. Even a man who had once been well-organized enough to combine professional football with law school was unlikely to be able to remedy that in his fifties.

In truth, he could sincerely see no more satisfying use of his abilities than to be Premier of Alberta. That probably still sounds ridiculous to some. It sounded half-crazy to everybody, when Lougheed was a young man. But his political comrades remember him talking about it when he was still nothing but a bundle of ambition—before he had even decided what the particular vehicle for his political ascendancy was going to be.

Look at our constitution, he would tell them. Continue…

‘Today Canada lost a truly great man’

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 13, 2012 at 10:28 PM - 0 Comments

The Prime Minister’s statement on the death of former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed.

“On behalf of all Canadians, Laureen and I offer our deepest sympathies to the family and friends of Peter Lougheed.

“Today Canada lost a truly great man. Peter Lougheed was quite simply one of the most remarkable Canadians of his generation.

“A master politician, gifted lawyer, professional-calibre athlete and philanthropist, the former premier was instrumental in laying the foundation for the robust economic success that his cherished province of Alberta enjoys today.

“He was a driving force behind the province’s economic diversification, of it having more control of its natural resources and their development, of Alberta playing a greater role in federation and of improving the province’s health, research and recreational facilities. He was also instrumental in the creation of the Canadian Encyclopedia.

“Mr. Lougheed did all of these things for his province while also working tirelessly towards a strong and united Canada.

“It is fitting that Mr. Lougheed’s dedication, integrity and ability to generate results for this country have been so widely recognized – from being appointed as a member of the Privy Council of Canada to being inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, from being appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada to being made an Honorary Chief of both the Cree First Nations and the Blood Tribe to name but a few. In June he was named Canada’s greatest premier of the past 40 years based on a survey by the Institute for Research and Public Policy – a title he richly deserves.

“Today we mourn the loss of an exceptional leader, a true Canadian and a trail blazing Albertan. And yet his legacy will live on in the institutions that he pioneered which continue to generate benefits for the people of Alberta and the people of Canada.”

Long-time Alberta premier hospitalised

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 11, 2012 at 10:26 AM - 0 Comments

Former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed is seriously ill and in the Peter Lougheed Centre hospital in Calgary, the National Post reports. The hospital was named for the premier and leader of the Alberta Progressive Conservatives, who served from 1971 to 1985.

Lougheed’s family has declined to comment on his condition, but the 84-year old has been suffering from an undisclosed illness for some time.

Lougheed is one of Alberta’s best loved politicians, and was named Canada’s greatest premier of the past 40 years this June.

Thomas Mulcair goes to the Calgary Stampede

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, July 13, 2012 at 11:23 AM - 0 Comments

The leader of the opposition wore a white, or maybe pearl, cowboy hat. And talked about oil. And sounded like Peter Lougheed. While Jason Kenney fumed.

Wanted in Alberta: one premier

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 3 Comments

Larry Wong/Edmonton Journal

Alberta’s Progressive Conservative government turned 40 on Aug. 30. That first win back in 1971 was regarded as an upset, but one man saw it coming—Peter Lougheed’s rural boss, House leader, and political Merlin, Dr. Hugh Horner. In the days before the election, the tall, soft-spoken Horner circulated amongst legislature reporters, promising skeptical scribes that the upstart PCs would capture about 50 seats (the final figure was 49). Today Horner’s son Doug is part of a six-person field from which PC members will select a chief for an election fight anticipated next spring.

It’s the latest chapter in the tale of eternal Alberta PC renewal. This time last year there were many who didn’t think the Tories would make it to age 41. Premier Ed Stelmach, the compromise candidate who had succeeded Ralph Klein, had turned out to be a tongue-tied bungler. And the Wildrose Alliance, a right-wing alternative party led by young and eloquent Danielle Smith, was at the government’s heels in the polls. A January caucus coup led by Ted Morton forced Stelmach into a slow-motion retirement.

Morton is one of the candidates for the leadership, and whether or not he triumphs, his move seems to have been the best thing for the party. With a gang of possible leaders capturing media attention and shoplifting Wildrose policies, Alberta’s natural governing party has surged back into a commanding lead. A late July Environics survey gave the PCs a towering 54 per cent share of voters, with the Wildrose (renamed simply the Wildrose Party this summer) at 16 per cent and the NDP and Liberals even further back.

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Software for your Alberta politics B.S. detector

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 7:35 PM - 103 Comments

Some of you will be reading my column on the resignation of Ed Stelmach as Alberta premier as early as today; some of you will have to wait until next week. In the meantime, I’ll give you some principles you can use to filter the hypotheses of other observers.

First of all, don’t believe anyone who tells you that Alberta politics is governed by some mystical tidal pattern of stagnation punctuated by revolution. Anybody who’s been here for the past 20 or 30 years should have learned to tune out the “massive change is just around the corner!” refrain by now, if only because advancing age has made him half-deaf. Preston Manning alone has been guilty of a dozen or so end-times prophecies of this sort (though, in fairness, prophecy is sort of a family tradition with him). News flash: pretty much everybody who voted here in 1935 is underground, and not because a basement suite was all they could afford. The Alberta electorate of 2011 in no way resembles that even of 1981; not ethnically, not culturally, not spiritually, not ideologically.

And the political spectrum itself has changed. As much as there might be a casual longing for a revival of “Peter Lougheed Conservatism”, Lougheed’s style of state corporatism, which led to budget disaster in the 1980s after his suspiciously timely exit, would probably now put any candidate who embraced it on the left wing of the federal NDP. Don’t believe anyone who tells you there is some unexploited, powerful hidden welter of Red Toryism in Alberta, waiting to spew forth into an appropriate channel. Even the reds aren’t that Red anymore.

There is no particular reason for Alberta politics to seek the same equilibrium in which our federal government is trapped, so don’t believe anyone who argues for realignment as some kind of cosmic axiom. Yes, I’m looking at Jeffrey Simpson here. Simpson is described endearingly by his employer as “a regular visitor to Alberta”, which seems like a deliberate invitation to scorn, but the man obviously is well-informed about the place. His characterization of the Alberta Liberal Party can only have come from someone familiar with it.

Simpson, however, believes Alberta politics is reverting to a “normal” shape (one it has never had) because the province no longer has any reason for hostility and suspicion toward a federal government led by a Calgarian. (With the bonus, one presumes, of a chief justice from Pincher Creek.) I think our visitor underestimates the ease of Ottawa-bashing in a world where Alberta farmers can still be jailed for defying the Wheat Board; where Alberta still pays toll upon toll for its presence in Confederation, layering pension and employment-insurance outflows on top of explicit fiscal equalization; where, as finance minister Ted Morton recently pointed out, Albertans are being billed specifically for the provincial sales tax liabilities of Ontarians and British Columbians. Morton’s a smart guy! He can find reasons to be upset with Ottawa almost as fast as Ottawa can come up with ways to screw Alberta!

I would tell you not to believe anyone who sees no difference between Ted Morton and Danielle Smith, but then, you barely have any choice aside from me. My column anticipating a personal tilt between Morton and Smith in the Calgary exurbs has been superseded with embarrassing speed by events, but at least it was written by somebody who can distinguish between various species of “right-winger” if given a pair of field glasses and sent out into the bush. The Morton-Smith personal combat, which already started when Smith announced a candidacy smack-dab in the middle of Morton Country, is more than superficial. Morton, by trifling with property rights as resource minister, has attacked the very principles Smith built her career around. She is physically moving to the rural south because Morton painted a target on himself; his core organizers and financial backers are gone, many directly to her, and they are not coming back. The Globe‘s Josh Wingrove is all over this, and understands it better than most writers for Alberta organs do; he, at least, is no mere visitor.

But, really, is there any realistic doubt that Morton and Smith could stage a pretty interesting political battle? Forget even the intriguing stylistic contrast: one of them has been a rights advocate for her entire career and the other is the country’s leading intellectual opponent of liberal “rights” rhetoric. One of them is pro-choice and pro-gay marriage; the other made his reputation blowing raspberries at the Morgentaler and Vriend decisions. It’s literally not possible that any reasonable person could be equally comfortable with either of the two as premier.

Other myths to be wary of? Don’t believe anybody who talks up the Alberta Party, at least until it has a leader, some policies, and a history of contesting elections. The idea that an Alberta political movement can go from zero to government in 6.8 seconds, just because Social Credit did it 76 years ago, is just a variant of the “every X years Y happens” myth. (Hasn’t anybody in this province read The Poverty of Historicism?) Don’t believe anything you are told about low Alberta voter turnout unless the province’s young-skewing demographics are factored in; young people don’t vote anywhere in the Western world, and we have more of them than you do.

And don’t put too much stock in the election of Naheed Nenshi as mayor of Calgary. What he accomplished was remarkable, but it also required less than 40% of the vote in a race where the establishment favourite, Barb Higgins, turned out to have a bad case of China Syndrome. The people who got giddy over big bad Calgary electing a relatively liberal mayor apparently haven’t heard that the last time Calgary elected a non-Liberal was 1977.

And then there were two

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 12:48 PM - 14 Comments

A symbol of defiance or history, the Progressive Conservative flag flies, or hangs at least, from an upright pole, down a quiet corridor of the Centre Block, just outside the office of Sen. Elaine McCoy.

From 1942—when John Bracken, Progressive premier of Manitoba, assumed leadership of the federal Conservative party, creating a party that would come to stand for moderate centrism—through 2003, some 675 individuals sat in the House of Commons under the PC banner. More than 100 PCs have, at one time or another, served in the Senate. But seven years after the Canadian Alliance and PC party merged, only two people formally identify as Progressive Conservatives on Parliament Hill: senators McCoy and Lowell Murray. When Murray retires next year, the party of John Diefenbaker and Brian Mulroney will be down to an Internet-savvy, sixtysomething policy wonk, who was appointed by Paul Martin and has little time for the agenda of Stephen Harper.

A protege of former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed, McCoy won Lougheed’s seat in the legislature when he stepped down in 1986. As a minister in Don Getty’s government, she spoke openly about gay rights and favoured a 50-cent hike in the minimum wage. But when she ran unsuccessfully for the provincial PC leadership in 1992, she pledged to cut spending and debt. (When a report circulated that half of cabinet might resign if a woman won the race, McCoy suggested that was a good opportunity to shrink government.) “When I was a cabinet minister, I was approached to cross the floor to the Liberals,” she recalls. “It was when Getty was really down in the polls and things weren’t getting done quite as well as they might. It was very tempting, but I just couldn’t. In the end, my stomach clenched and I just couldn’t do it. There’s something about sticking with who you say you are.”

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Unbelievable

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, June 4, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 78 Comments

He destroyed himself. Nobody did it to him. He was simply asked, respectfully, to explain himself. And he could not. If the former prime minister of Canada is now widely suspected of corruption, it’s all his own work.

Brian Mulroney was not on trial before the Oliphant inquiry, nor was the commission counsel, Richard Wolson, his prosecutor. Wolson’s job was simply to test the witness’s story, to see how well it stood up: whether there was any evidence to support it; whether it conflicted with others’; whether there were any internal inconsistencies. But mostly it was to let the witness tell his story. And the more Mulroney talked, the less believable he became.

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