Preston Manning Recruits Gordon Campbell to Boost Danielle Smith

Preston Manning, 84, the superannuated godfather of the Canadian right, has teamed up with another tiresome has-been from conservative western Canadian politics to try to polish up Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s tarnished October separation referendum with a two-day “virtual assembly” in late September.

Manning’s sidekick in this elaborate constitutional snake-oil pitch is Gordon Campbell , a comparatively youthful 78, who was the “Liberal” (but really conservative) premier of British Columbia for a decade in the 2000s. Nowadays, however, Campbell is mostly remembered for an unfortunate police mug shot taken during a brush with the law in Hawaii in 2003 and a troubling civil suit more recently.

By contrast, the teetotalling Manning, leader of the Reform Party Opposition in Ottawa for four short years in the late 1990s, has managed to become the bad penny of Alberta politics.

That is to say, he just keeps turning up on United Conservative Party government panels in Alberta, writing friendly “reports” for the same government, and organizing generously financed and well-publicized “citizens’ assemblies” and “inquiries” on such conservative preoccupations as COVID , convoys and provincial sovereignty , not to mention authoring partisan jeremiads on a variety of paleoconservative topics for the always accommodating National Post.

Indeed, just last year while his boat was still rocking in the wake of the federal election, Manning was musing about setting up a “Canada West Assembly” to talk about how to respond to the election of another Liberal government, this time led by Prime Minister Mark Carney. Options would include “various independent-oriented proposals,” he told a National Post reporter.

So here we go again with the “Alberta and the West Assembly” — which is said to be a project of Manning’s eponymous Manning Foundation for Democratic Education. According to the event’s website, the online dog-and-pony show next month is intended to publicly “examine and debate the major options affecting Alberta’s and Western Canada’s future within the Canadian federation.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, after plowing through about 3,300 words of turgid drivel under the heading “ A Brief Introduction ,” these begin to sound a lot like the long list of grievances Manning has regularly repeated since failing to grab the brass ring during his fleeting tenure as Opposition leader in Parliament.

Reading this twaddle, one comes away with the impression that the point of this performance will be to shine up the UCP separation referendum that almost no one in Alberta asked for and find a way to make the Conservative Party of Canada relevant again as it withers in the bright glow of an unexpectedly popular Liberal in the Prime Minister’s Office.

The list of “concerned and thoughtful persons” who will serve as delegates to the “virtual assembly” includes a number of familiar names associated with Manning’s hobby horses over the years. Some are known to be sympathetic with his dyspeptic view of federal politics.