Chantal's Assessment Of Turner's Walk

Turner now Liberal red but he's no Red Tory
February 09, 2007
Chantal Hébert

No one would accuse Liberal leader Stéphane Dion's research team of lacking the journalistic instincts to dig into a story. After all, some members of the group that lays the groundwork for the official opposition's onslaught on the Conservative government these days once starred in the Parliamentary press gallery.

But they might have done more homework before letting Dion herald the Liberal conversion of maverick MP Garth Turner as a progressive second coming.

In two statements that should have Joe Clark spinning in his political grave, Dion framed Turner's decision as proof that the Liberal party had become the new home of the Red Tories, the progressive wing of the defunct Progressive Conservative Party.

Well, Turner has certainly been many things over the course of his political life. But a Red Tory he most certainly was not.

On the contrary, when he ran to succeed Brian Mulroney in 1993, it was as the candidate of the ultra-right wing of his party.

At the time, Turner promoted the most radically conservative policies of all five contenders, including deep cuts to social programs, reduced old-age security pensions, maternity leave and employment insurance payments, and the introduction of hospital user fees. He also called for the privatization of Canada Post and the CBC and the elimination of the multiculturalism ministry.

Over the course of that campaign, Turner was often described as a soulmate to Reform party founder Preston Manning, a comparison he did not reject.

"There are a lot of Conservatives who think the party today is too centrist," Turner told The Globe and Mail in June 1993. "Those people are looking for a return to conservative values within the Conservative party. And quite frankly, I'm out to appeal to a number of those people, because I share that belief. It's basically a conservative message. It's just one that they haven't heard from the Conservatives for a while."

If he had been more fully briefed on his recruit's well-documented background, Dion might have been more selective in his choice of words. But he would likely have been as effusive in his welcome. It seems the Liberal party felt it needed Turner as much as the banished Conservative MP needed a new home.

Few political manoeuvres reveal as much about the fears of a party as the successful seduction of MPs previously elected under a different banner.

Notwithstanding Dion's fighting words, such manoeuvres are all about papering over glaring weaknesses.

After the last Quebec referendum, Jean Chrétien went out of his way to get a handful of Quebec Tory MPs to cross over to the Liberals to drive home the message that his party was the only viable federalist alternative to the Bloc Québécois.

By bringing Bloc co-founder Jean Lapierre back into the Liberal fold, Paul Martin wanted to attract nationalist voters. And he hoped that winning over Progressive Conservative Scott Brison would help the Liberals fend off a reunited right.

David Emerson and Michael Fortier would not be in the Conservative cabinet if the party had done well in Montreal and Vancouver in the last election. And ex-Liberal MP Wajid Khan might have been excluded from Harper's caucus if he had not held a seat in Toronto's crucial 905 belt.

In Turner's case, the Liberal hype over the recruitment of a right-wing MP addresses three unpalatable realities for the party.

The first is that it has yet to find its ideological compass. Dion is right on at least one score. Compared to the significant rump of social conservatives in his caucus, Turner does qualify as a progressive.

The second is that the Liberals have yet to find a way to make up for what is likely to be a permanent loss, i.e. the return of a significant number of traditional Conservative constituencies to their natural ideological home.

Turner's Halton seat is one riding that the Liberals won handily when the right campaigned under two conflicting banners.

It is no accident that the Liberals first lost their majority, and then power, after the two conservative factions reconciled.

Finally, the warm welcome extended to Turner reveals just how anguished Liberal strategists are over how Dion will play against Harper in the suburban belt of Southern Ontario, in places where his dream team of Gerard Kennedy, Bob Rae, Michael Ignatieff and Martha Hall-Finlay, with their trendy downtown Toronto undertones, will not be able to do the job for him.


Chantal Hébert's national affairs column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. chebert@thestar.ca.