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REDISCOVERING: THE RIGHT AGENDA The Alliance must commit to ideals and ideas, not vague decision-making processes. After years of strategic drift, Harper positions the Alliance as an equal partnership of social and economic conservatism. This article is based on his remarks at the Civitas meeting in Toronto on April 25, 2003.

Article Excerpt
By: Stephen Harper

The Canadian Alliance wrapped up its leadership race a little over one year ago. At the time, the chattering classes told us the race was about the so-called "unity" issue--the question of whether we should have one "conservative" party or two. But I asked the 100,000-plus members of our party a different question: do we actually stand for something, or don't we?

I posed this question because what Alliance members feared most was seeing our agenda slipping away. Simply put, our members worried less about having two so-called "conservative parties" than about having no conservative party at all.

I believe the majority of members supported my leadership bid for approaching the debate in these terms. My mandate as leader is therefore to ensure that the Alliance remains a strong and principled voice for conservatism in national politics.

Our history and

the options today

There are two ways conservatives can respond to the challenges faced at the national level. Our party has explored both over the years, in two important phases. These two phases were not "Reform" and "Alliance"; they were not about name or organizational changes.

Rather, our party underwent one period in which it was policy-driven, and another period in which it was process-driven. In the policy-driven phase, the party emphasized what it stood for. It took stands on a litany of issues, from its fight against the Meech Lake/Charlottetown constitutional agenda, to the battle for deficit reduction, lower taxes and fiscal responsibility. This was the period in which the party grew from nothing to become an important electoral and parliamentary force.

However, for the past half-decade or so, the party moved into a phase in which it emphasized process. Specifically, the party focused its energies on a process by which it could garner greater electoral success. This was called "coalition building." In practice, it involved disassembling the party's institutional structures in order to bring in new supporters from other entities. In terms of policy, conferences were held to create and sell a new "vision." In practice, this amounted largely to making existing policy stands vague or simply invisible. Whatever the electoral potential of this approach promised by the polls, the results were clearly going in the opposite direction.

Those two options still confront us today. One option is to work within an existing political party to create a conservative "coalition." In my judgment this option is the way to go, and the best vehicle to do it is the Canadian Alliance.

I also believe that a combination of existing political parties, such as the Alliance and the PCs, could potentially be an even better vehicle. But that is not Joe Clark's opinion. It appears not to be Peter MacKay's. In fact, there is no guarantee or likelihood it will ever be the opinion of a federal PC leader. They seem to prefer to use the PC Party to build their own coalition.

While I may disagree with the Tories' choice, it certainly makes more sense...