By: Murray Dobbin

  It could hardly be more appropriate. The party that has tried for 12 years to hoodwink the country into thinking it is a party of "ordinary Canadians" has ended up with the name CCRAP - the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance Party. At least that is what it will be called if Preston Manning can cajole, persuade and bully his loyal followers into abandoning the right wing western populism which attracted them in the first place. Everyone agrees it will be the toughest sell yet.
 

The placard says it all. Environmental concerns won out at Montreal. The Government of Canada lost. More in our story Montreal agreement puts brakes on "frankenfoods"

All of the machinations taking place at the dual conventions of the United Alternative and Reform are driven by a single political fact that no amount of manipulation by Mr. Manning could change: people in Ontario won't take Reform seriously. They refuse to vote for the party and are actually less inclined to do so now than when Reform first entered the province. They simply don't trust the man, are deeply suspicious about his western roots and are wary of his open hostility to Quebec.
  Considering how profoundly alien Preston Manning is to mainstream Canadian culture and its political and social values, that he has gotten this far is quite astonishing. Manning is the quintessential political technician, constantly in strategy and tactics mode, always testing the populist sentiment that allowed him to launch his project in 1987; fine-tuning policies according to the way the wind currently blows; carefully massaging his language in an exercise of calculated ambiguity. But the image we now have is of a man tinkering furiously with a machine that is simply no longer running. He's still a good mechanic. It's just that no matter what he does he can't convince it to keep going.
 

Lost in the media coverage is what the party actually stands for - privatizing medicare, free trade, outlawing strikes, more tax cuts for the wealthy, etc.

  And he knows it. He knows the game is up but he just can't walk away the way he planned to in 1988 if he reached this current impasse. The party was supposed to be dissolved in the year 2000 if it had not achieved power. This bizarre tenet of Reform's constitution is rooted in Manning's conception of his project. He had waited for many years to launch Reform after two false starts - in 1971 and 1979. He was waiting for a populist wave - a critical juncture in which Canadian frustration with mainstream politics and rapid social change reached a peak. It was on this wave of discontent that Manning planned to implement his vision - not populist policies but hard right, Christian-fundamentalist driven, neo-liberal policies. In short the project from the beginning was an enormous fraud. Populism was just the vehicle. A completely unregulated, free market society was the goal.
  Lost in the media coverage of the United Alternative - or CCRAP as it will hopefully be known - is what the party, with or without the new camouflage, actually stands for. Manning's intention is to privatize medicare, despite his more recent and hypocritical attacks on the Liberals. He is unabashedly pro-corporate and pro free trade, has stated that the strike is obsolete and that the market should determine the minimum wage, supports a flat tax as a way of putting even more wealth into the hands of the wealthy. Far from being a party of ordinary Canadians, Reform attacks those who would tax wealth as practising the "politics of envy." Manning's legacy to date has been to help the Liberals to implement the most regressive social and economic policies in half a century.
  The party referendum on CCRAP will be fascinating. Manning, true, in a way, to his original vision of disbanding Reform in 2000, is making a last desperate effort to stay in the picture. Reform is dead, its populist engine seized up. It can only remain if it reincarnates itself as a mainstream conservative party. For Manning, it's all or nothing. If he manages to force the "new" party on reluctant members, many of Reform's fractious, anti-social, immigrant-hating, anti-metric loyalists will leave while those who remain, unleashed from their loyalty to their father figure, will very likely tear apart what remains of Manning's project. If he fails, Manning won't stay and the results will be the same. No other leader will be able to control the Reform machine, carefully constructed at every level to be a reflection of its founder. Either way, the Reform project is doomed to a rapid and richly deserved decline.