Alluding to a vote of confidence taken by party members several months before, which led Mr. Clark to resign his leadership and run again to succeed himself, the Prince leaned over to Mr. Clark and asked: "What I don't understand is: Why was 67 per cent [support] not enough?"
His Royal Highness obviously had trouble comprehending the inner workings of Canada's oldest political party. He is not alone.
Ever since the days in the 1950s and 1960s when John Diefenbaker ruled the Tory roost, the party of Sir John A. Macdonald has been peppered by cockfights. Arguments over what the party stood for, and attacks on successive leaders for their failure to win elections, or hold on to power when they did, became so intense they led political scientist George Perlin to coin the term "the Tory syndrome."
Simply put, the PC Party lost election after election because voters couldn't trust a group whose own house was riven by infighting, and the Tories were fighting among themselves because of successive electoral defeats.
Patrick Martin
For Joe Clark, it was no different. Having lost power after only eight months in office, party members -- especially the Tories' parliamentary caucus -- began to turn on their leader. With a third of the members and a majority of MPs opposed to him, Mr. Clark could no more successfully govern his party than he could hope to be acclaimed as prime minister.
The opposition that emerged in the early 1980s, however, was qualitatively different from earlier party rebellions. Surveys of delegates to the party conventions in 1983 revealed a large majority of Conservatives who thought the party was ruled by a small elite that excluded them, the grassroots. Members demanded a more democratic process -- free votes, referendums, greater accountability -- both in the party and in government.
It was a clear case of the "outs" wanting in, and, in those days, the outs were mostly western social conservatives. The people on the inside were the party's moderate Red Tories, who championed social welfare and special recognition for Quebec. Today, with the prospect of a reunified Conservative Party on the horizon, those who have been on the inside wonder if now they'll be out.
If the seeds of the populist uprising that would splinter the Tory party were planted during Joe Clark's leadership, they blossomed under Brian Mulroney.
Initially quieted by the large parliamentary victory of 1984 and Mr. Mulroney's glad-handing style, the populists soon felt betrayed again. This new prime minister also ruled with a small, mostly Central Canadian, clique. He muzzled his ministers and MPs and put a trusted Toronto businessman, Peter White, in charge of all the government's political personnel. Not even electoral power was enough to compensate for the feeling of exclusion many Tories in the West felt.
Two issues in particular triggered the schism that followed.
On Oct. 31, 1986, the Mulroney government announced that the maintenance contract for the armed force's CF-18 fighter jets would be awarded to a Montreal company instead of a firm in Winnipeg. This seemingly innocuous decision summed up all that was wrong with the Tories' decision-making process. To the grassroots, it smacked of favouritism for Quebec at the expense of Western Canadians.
So indelible was the mark this decision left that the founders of the Reform Party elected to stage their inaugural convention on the first anniversary of the CF-18 decision and held it in Winnipeg.
Aware of some of the backlash his policy had created, Mr. Mulroney followed with an initiative he hoped would appease dissenters: a debate and free parliamentary vote on capital punishment. Support for executions had always been strong among western Conservatives and, with the grisly case of serial killer Clifford Olson fresh in their minds, many clamoured for their reinstatement.
The acrimonious debate backfired. Mr. Mulroney himself spoke powerfully against capital punishment and, in doing so, revealed his personal disgust with those who supported it.
"Mulroney just didn't get it," one of his senior staff said. "I remember how proud he was when he came back to the office after his speech in the House: He had really thumbed his nose at the western attitude. He wanted to make the point that he was cut from a different cloth than those who favoured the noose."
It was no coincidence that the Reform Party was created four months later.
Preston Manning, its first leader, would describe the initiative this way. "Reform is founded on the belief of many Canadians that our political process needs fundamental reform, that our Parliament is too partisan, too undemocratic and too unaccountable. To remedy this, we have proposed serious changes including freer votes, Senate elections, recall of MPs and greater use of referendums and initiatives to bring Canadians directly into decision-making on the most critical issues in society, issues such as abortion, capital punishment and constitutional reform."
Reformers saw Brian Mulroney as a symbol of Quebec values, (something for which Joe Clark had been criticized too). Those values included opposition to capital punishment, as well as support for government largesse, special status for Quebec and elite-driven political decision-making.
Never imagining that this small movement led by a whiny-voiced preacher's son would amount to much, Mr. Mulroney continued full steam ahead with his agenda. While his free-trade proposal was popular out west, his Meech Lake initiative was not. It stood for everything the populists rejected: Quebec favouritism and clubby decision-making.
All this was fuel for Reform's fire.
In the 1988 election, the new party ran candidates in 72 ridings west of Ontario, garnering 275,000 votes. In 1989, Reformer Deborah Grey was elected in an Alberta by-election, the party's first MP.
Late in the Meech process, Mr. Mulroney tried to compromise to attract western support. At one cabinet committee meeting, a senior insider said, the prime minister suggested perhaps they should link the Meech Lake accord with a move to elect senators. "[Quebec Conservative cabinet minister] Lucien Bouchard just exploded," the insider said. "He didn't see why Quebec had to agree to such a thing."
In the end, of course, Meech failed, and Mr. Bouchard left the Progressive Conservative Party to form the Bloc Québécois, taking with him thousands of Tory supporters and shattering what was left of the Tories' grand coalition.
Mr. Mulroney left office in 1993, and the carcass of his party, picked apart by Reform in the West and the Bloc in Quebec, was reduced to two seats in the Commons.
What followed was an exercise in political futility, as the Reform-Canadian Alliance peaked at 66 MPs in 2000, wringing every seat it could out of its western support base. Meanwhile the PCs, through three successive leaders, could barely regain official party status.
This week's effort at political reunification was born of the realization that no end was in sight to that political futility. It was also no accident that pro-Mulroney people led the Tories' side in the negotiations. Party Leader Peter MacKay, who embraced the agreement to merge, was endorsed by Mr. Mulroney in this year's leadership contest; his father, Elmer MacKay, was a minister in the Mulroney government. Donald Mazankowski, who led the talks with Alliance representatives, was Mr. Mulroney's deputy prime minister.
For Mr. Mulroney, the stain of the party schism that happened on his watch is something he would like to remove.
For Mr. Mazankowski, the decision to support the process didn't come easily. "I was bitter," the Alberta politician admitted, "because Reform had engaged in an all-out effort to undermine and destroy us and had pretty well succeeded. But I'm a realist. You can't stay mad forever."
Not everyone, however, is so willing to forgive; not if it means their view of conservatism is going to be lost.
Ross Reid, a Newfoundland MP from 1988 to 1993, was fisheries minister in the short-lived Conservative government of Kim Campbell. "The Alliance comes to the party with a lot of baggage," Mr. Reid said.
"I came from the left wing of the party," he said, "and though the debates on things like including sexual orientation in the Charter got pretty wild and woolly, I always felt welcome in the party. Now I'm waiting to see if this new party makes me feel welcome too."
The Red Tory values that Mr. Reid speaks of were epitomized by former Toronto mayor David Crombie, who sat as a Tory MP from 1977 to 1988 and served in Brian Mulroney's cabinet. In a memorable speech at the 1983 Tory leadership convention, Mr. Crombie spoke of his fears that the party was turning away from its moderate inclusive policies.
"If my work with the people of my city and setting my priorities on looking after them as individuals and caring for the community makes me a Red Tory, well then, I'm proud to wear the label," he said. "The day the Conservative party thinks it's only concerned with economic growth and not social justice is the day Canadians will forget about the party."
Does Mr. Crombie welcome this new party?
"It all depends on the leadership," he said. "I became a Tory when John Diefenbaker was leader because he had a broader view of what the party was about. Dief brought the West into the party; Preston took them out. My party would have room for everyone."
The last word in this political saga belongs, rightly, to Joe Clark, who has been at the centre of splits in his party over much of the past four decades. On Thursday, he issued a brief statement saying he, personally, could not support what many see as a reunification of the Tory family.
Mr. Clark also said one should not underestimate the significance of the change in the party's name to simply the Conservative Party of Canada. The PC party had added "Progressive" in 1942 when it absorbed the Manitoba-based Progressive Party.
"The name had as much to do with policies as it did with political merger," Mr. Clark said. "The party needed to reassure westerners, in particular, that it supported a social-welfare system.
"I am very worried that if we throw out the name, we will throw out our policies too. If we do that, we risk losing support not just in Quebec, but in Atlantic Canada and in urban centres across the country.
"Will we Red Tories have a place in this new party? That's the major question," Mr. Clark said. "It's also a good reason why people shouldn't rush to support this merger until they get an answer."
Patrick Martin, The Globe and Mail's Comment editor, is co-author of Contenders; The Tory Quest for Power (1983).
