Another Alliance MP has left the caucus. Joe Peschisolido, member for Richmond, has left Stockwell Day’s sinking ship not to sit with Joe Clark’s Conservatives but tp make a deal with Satan
himself.
That’s right, he’s crossed the floor to the Liberals and Jean Chrétien. Peschisolido included his increasing disillusionment with the Alliance leadership situation and Saskatchewan Alliance MP Roy Bailey’s remarks that Ray Pagtakhan should not be Minister for Veterans Affairs because Mr. Pagtakhan was born in the Philippines among his reasons for crossing the floor.
The Alliance has had leadership troubles from the outset. The campaign to oust Stockwell Day from the leadership is no different from the one headed by Day’s supporters two years ago when the newly created party replaced its founder, Preston Manning, with Stockwell Day. Only this time the battle has been fought in public and this public battle is costing the party its support, members, and credibility.
But who should Alliance supporters blame? Stockwell Day is no more than a patsy.
He reminds me of Robert Redford in The Candidate. Redford gets elected to Senate or Congress, and then looks at his organizers and asks "now what?" Day is just as clueless. He got in over his head and there is a part of me that actually feels sorry for him. He was just incapable of leading a federal party. All forehead and wetsuit, he was never a leader.
No, Stockwell is not to blame. Those who forced him on the Canadian population, on the other hand, should be held accountable. His election was organized by the likes of Jason Kenney and other
former Reform backbenchers un-happy at not playing a larger role in Preston Manning’s party. Said backbenchers found a suitable face and hoodwinked the members of the Alliance into voting for Day. These same members blame Manning for many of Day’s troubles, as he, Preston, did not give Day the support a leader needs. Yet Kenney and Ezra Levant, the lawyer running for Manning’s vacant seat, went against Manning in the Alliance leadership race. The new party was fractured before the election ever began.
Maybe Manning did not give Day the support necessary to run the caucus. But Manning was not the leader. His new job was solely to represent his riding; he was not in charge of running the party. No one asked Khruschev to come to the aid of Brezhnev when Nikita Sergaivich was ousted as leader of the Soviet Communist Party. No, Brezhnev took control and no one heard from Khruschev ever again.
While I am not suggesting that Manning should have gone away or retired from politics upon losing the leadership race, I am suggesting it was up to Day, as the leader, to lead. He did not do that, hence the Alliance is in the state it is in today.
To all you myopic Albertans who think that one day you will have an Alliance Prime Minister who really understands the problems of the west, go to your history books and look up the Progressive Party. They were elected as the federal official opposition in 1921. Most of their seats were from the Prairie provinces and they were very popular in rural areas. But within a decade they were no more than a fringe party that would eventually merge with the Conservatives, hence the Progressive Conservatives.
This is where I see the Alliance going. Maybe not today or next year, but in the foreseeable future the bickering, infighting, and lack of leadership will send it, like the Progressives before, into the arms of the Tories and into the pages of the history books.
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