Circle of Willis
Well-known member
Not having Trudeau speak out against the Accord would help. However in the short term that actually galvanized support among the Premiers for the Accord, in the long term you'd also need Mulroney to stop shoving his foot in his mouth every time he tried to publicly drum up support or was even asked about Meech Lake in an interview. For sure he must avoid scandalously mentioning how he'd strategically scheduled the 'Last Supper' talks in the first week of June 1990 to pressure the premiers into accepting the final deal on the table, which pissed pretty much everyone off and convinced even people prepared to endorse the Accord (such as Chrétien) to reverse course.I wonder if Pierre Trudeau not intervening in the Accord would have actually resulted in it being passed though. His intervention was one of the reasons why it failed, but if it passes and Reform does end up reducing the Bloc Quebecois to political irrelevance, that could go a long way in marginalizing the extreme elements of Quebecois nationalism.
No need for a new party when the Alliance will be right there to channel Western anger, heh. Indeed they would be seen overall as a hard-right but still somewhat mainstream and 'respectable' party, dominated by aggrieved Westerners but also functioning as a vehicle for more generally socially conservative culture-warrior types and populists of a right-wing bent (note that the Alliance's 2000 platform included a direct democracy plank, greenlighting referenda on issues where at least 3% of the population had signed a petition) with little room for kooks like the 'semen retention warrior' who ran as the PPC candidate in the riding next to mine last election. Which is a good thing obviously, the latter category aren't just unelectable but would outright make the party they belong to look like a completely unserious joke to the public.I wonder if the collapse of the PCs would only be delayed before it eventually falls apart, though without the merger of the PCs and Canadian Alliance, at best, Canadian Alliance would be the only kind of conservative movement that will theoretically exist. Basically would the Canadian Alliance exist as the prototype version of the OTL People's Party of Canada, only without the potential infiltration by hard right figures?
This kind of sentiment is exactly how Western Alienation continues to persist, and I wouldn't be surprised if the West finds a way to become a surprise power broker if they continue to get pissed off. Heck, I could imagine a different version of the PPC or Maverick emerging as their kind of movement that could wield enough power to force the federal government to pay more attention to them. It's also a common sentiment among conservative voters in the West that Ontario and Quebec decide the elections, no matter how much Conservative votes are counted in the West.
Progress on Senate reform would go a long way to keeping Manitoba on board with the Accord. As to alternative leaders for the Alliance, other than the aforementioned Harper and Deborah Grey you could also just roll with Stockwell Day, who was the party's historical leader for the 2000 election and a banner-bearer for the evangelical social conservatives: he'll need to avoid making so many gaffes on the campaign trail and put in a better performance that year (perhaps driving the PCs out of the West altogether and winning a couple more seats in BC & rural Ontario), but if he can do that he should be able to stay on as leader - Harper lost his first election in '04 but managed to hang on after all. From there he must make steady inroads into rural Ontario and (even more difficult) Quebec & also cannibalize the PCs election after election until an opening to topple the Liberals finally presents itself. (I don't think Preston Manning had a shot - he had too much baggage to enjoy any significant appeal to Ontario, where the Alliance correctly identified a need to branch out, and got crushed in the 2000 leadership election by Day historically)I think that in order for Meech Lake to become a successful thing, though a successful poisoned chalice for Canadian politics would have been for one of the other significant issues that was raised (ie: Senate reform) to be successful. I could see someone from the Western Canadian region in addition to Harper being a potential figure as well. I also wonder if a stronger Reform/Alliance movement might also translate to provincial successes, especially in BC where we had a SoCred government for a while, until the constant scandals drove the BC SoCreds to collapse.
Having the BC Socreds elect a different leader than Bill Vander Zalm or Vander Zalm himself not stumbling into so many scandals, thereby keeping them competitive in the longer term, would strengthen a Day-run Alliance and indeed Day's position within his party, considering that Day's own seat was in BC. I don't know how tenable the BC Socreds' position would have remained in the decades to come but having them survive to become the de-facto provincial wing of the Alliance and keep BC an Alliance bastion or at least competitive for the Alliance can only help.