#29 Vanity and Learning - Me and Joe Clark (Part I)

I met Joe Clark before he became the Leader of the federal PC Party, but only in passing.

I was working as the (part-time) Social Policy Analyst in Opposition Research (more on this in Series #33), an office funded by the Library of Parliament, tasked with providing members of the Official Opposition with counter-bureaucratic policy analysis and advice so that they could better perform their duty of “holding the government to account”.

Because he had grown up in politics, serving as the President of the U of A Young PCs and later the National Young PCs and had also worked as a political staffer himself, Clark probably needed little help from the likes of me to analyze legislation or draft queries for Question Period. He was one of the youngest MPs in Parliament and had a reputation as a hard worker and solid thinker, although many of his older colleagues also thought he was overly ambitious and a little goofy. Virtually no one saw him as the next Leader of the PCs.

But when Robert L. Stanfield announced he was stepping down, Clark was quick to throw his hat in the ring.

Because of his long tenure and deep roots in the party, he was able to assemble a talented team who launched an effective ground game aimed at his Alberta base and youth delegates. Also, while few expected him to win, he was well liked and a popular “second choice” for many in the progressive wing of the party. His strength at the riding level produced a surprising third place finish on the first ballot and when Flora Macdonald dropped out after the second ballot, his momentum allowed him to eke out a 65 vote victory over front-runner Claude Wagner on the fourth ballot.

The next day the Toronto Star summed up his victory with the headline “Joe Who?”

It soon became clear to insiders that the results of the 1976 leadership race represented the continuation of a decade-long battle that had its roots in the “Dump Dief” campaign over whether progressives or conservatives were going to control the party. Progressives had been winning that fight since the mid-60s and Clark’s victory meant the “Red Tories” would continue to steer the party for the years to come. This fact caused the conservative wing of the party to become even more agitated and determined to wrest back control, as soon as they could.

Clark chose my boss. Bill Neville to be his Chief of staff and my partner in the in-house polling program, Ian Green as his Executive Assistant. Both told Clark that one of his top priorities was to be briefed on the nation-wide poll we had just conducted.

My first impression of Clark was that he wasn’t going to be my type of guy. He was nerdy, a bit awkward and seemed like he was trying too hard to be loose and casual, when in fact he was probably stiff and quite formal, by nature.

It also wasn’t clear if his familiarity with polling went much beyond the “horse-race” results published in the press. But as I started going over the data, it was evident that he was intrigued by the findings, very quick to grasp their meaning and immediately understood that our job was not just to passively take all this information in, but to figure out ways to improve the numbers.

While the results were quite encouraging – in no small measure because of a profound dislike of the Prime Minister and a strong “anyone but Trudeau” sentiment in English Canada – he also seemed to take them quite personally and was more interested in “why” voters felt the way they did than the simple views they were expressing. In particular, he wanted to know why the Tories were so far behind in Quebec and among urban dwellers and new Canadians. I told him that the poll hadn’t set out to answer these questions, but we certainly could explore them with qualitative research focused on these voter segments, going forward. His response was “let’s do it”.

He then told me that he was going to appoint Lowell Murray as his new Campaign Chair and asked me if I could give him the same briefing.

As I left the session, I felt pretty good about myself. Not even a year after starting on the Hill and here I was hanging around and shooting the shit with the new Leader and preparing to do the same with the rest of the big mucky mucks in the PC Party of Canada.

When I mentioned meeting with the new Leader to my mother on a phone call later that week, she asked … “Mr. Clark didn’t seem bothered by your hair or earrings or the fact that you never wear a jacket of a tie?” I said, “No, why would he?” Her response was … “Well, most people would.” Hhm, I thought to myself, maybe he isn’t as uptight as I first expected.

I briefed Lowell and he soon asked me to become the National Campaign Secretary of the national campaign (See series #2). I readily accepted but told him I could only do it part-time for the next couple months because I still had responsibilities to help my current boss Michael Meighen who would soon be stepping down as President of the Party.

Clark was never fully embraced by the press, public or party in the early days of this leadership. The awkwardness I had noted in our first meeting was soon seized upon by the media. In addition to drawing attention to every convoluted sentence or gesture of nerdy body language, the likes of cartoonist Andy Donato would always draw Clark wearing a pair on mittens on strings, hanging off the arms of his jacket. Needless-to-say, this kind of image building did little to cause voters to express much enthusiasm for the new Leader.

And then there was the enduring progressive-conservative rift in the Party that Clark could not bridge no matter how hard he tried because of his own partisan history as a young acolyte of Dalton Camp and his efforts to rest control of the party from the conservative wing. Add to this the bitterness that many of his leadership rivals still harboured, and Clark’s leadership seemed like it was under siege and teetering on the precipice of collapse from the very start.

The first real test of whether Clark was going to be able hold the Tories together came at the 1977 Party Convention in Quebec City where – as part of the “Dump Dief” legacy – there would be a mandatory leadership review.

While Clark didn’t seem to be fussed up about the upcoming vote, everyone else around him was. One reason for the concern was that my boss, Michael Meighen was stepping down as Party President and no progressive candidate was coming forward to take his place. Instead, it looked like Bob Coates, a MP from Nova Scotia and one to the stalwart supporters of Diefenbaker and conservative wing of the party was going to be unchallenged and would be taking control of the party apparatus as the new National President.

To counter the ascendancy of right winger for the first time in over a decade, Neville, Murray, Meighen and I worked on a plan to try to elevate the theme of the Convention to a more aspirational place by drawing parallels to the 1864 Quebec City Convention that John A MacDonald presided over and led to Confederation three years later. In this way, we hoped to focus delegates more on lofty ideals than plots and cabals.

Again, it was left to me to brief Clark on all the efforts we would be putting in place to ensure that he would survive the leadership review. While I was going over the details of our plan, Joe seemed largely disinterested and impatient. About 3 minutes in, he interrupted me and asked what we were doing to make sure that new Canadians had a meaningful place and a presence at the Convention. I thought “What the f*ck?” “This guy potentially could be getting ousted after less than a year in office, and all he wants to talk about is making sure new Canadians are being welcomed and seen at the Convention!” “Where is his head at?”

He then reminded me of the polling briefing I had given him when we first met and how I had identified new arrivals to Canada as a key constituency the PCs had to attract if they were ever going to be able to take “the natural governing party” status away from the Liberals. Since then, we had done focus group research with recent immigrants and discovered that their voting choice was based not so much on affection for the Liberals or even animus towards the PCs but rather simple familiarity and comfort – almost all of their friends and neighbours were Liberal supporters and most felt that they would not “fit in” or feel welcome in Conservative ranks.

Now hold on here for a minute.

So instead of obsessing over his immediate political fortunes, Clark was focused on growing the party base and finding ways to attract new voters who historically had never supported the PCs by making them feel welcome at the Convention. He was putting the interests of the party first, and his own second. And I realized that this was part of pattern that I had been observing over the course of our various encounters.

For me, partisan politics had largely been an academic pursuit -something to learn, study and observe. For Clark it was something very different – a way of life and commitment to public service.

Thinking about this, I then harkened back to the lecture Thelma Oliver delivered the day in October 1970 when the War Measure Act was introduced – when she said that politics allowed for “the authoritative allocation of scarce resources” and that government has the only “monopoly on the legitimate use of violence”.

While he definitely did not attend the same lecture, it was becoming increasingly apparent that Joe Clark understood – and deeply believed – in the same things that Thelma was telling me. That politics was too important to be left to the opportunistic or the self-serving. That government was not “them” but “us” – and that for better or worse, this is how we chose to organize and run civil society to ensure that we all had equal opportunity to participate in that system. Indeed, that was why he was in politics and a politician. Not just to win elections but to pursue a greater good and to make Canada a better place.

After that briefing, I left the room and thought … “Maybe this is my type of guy”.

Learning: Listen before you jump to conclusions – you might just learn something.