If all goes according to plan, the Reform Party will disappear within a few months. It will immediately be replaced with a new party that will have a different name, slightly altered policies, an influx of organizational talent from Tory Ontario, and possibly a new leader.
The gamble is that the Canadian Alliance can achieve the breakthrough in Ontario that has so far eluded the Reform Party.
The political logic behind the Canadian Alliance is undeniable. The Reform Party swept the West in the past two federal elections. Mike Harris's Tories won majorities in the past two provincial elections in Ontario. If the strength of those two small-c conservative movements could be harnessed, it would threaten many of the 101 Ontario seats Jean Chrétien's Liberals won in the last federal election -- and that could be the start of a political revolution in Canada.
Yesterday afternoon, Reform Party Leader Preston Manning declared: "I believe what's happened in these last couple of days now makes it perfectly possible to get the 150 seats you need in that Parliament to do the things that the Liberals won't do, and that's the best news coming out of this weekend for Canadians and Canadian taxpayers."
Perhaps. But the path to power will not be an easy one for the Canadian Alliance.
True, their rivals on the right -- Joe Clark's federal Tories -- are deeply divided over national unity at the moment, and thus politically vulnerable.
But the Liberals currently have the support of well over 50 per cent of the voters in Ontario, and Reform is at just 16 per cent, according to the party's own pollster. That aside, the Canadian Alliance is still several steps away from becoming a viable political party. When Reform MP Deborah Grey was asked whether a new party had been born, she replied, more correctly, that it was "birthing."
At a personal level, of course, it takes more than strategic logic to create a political party. Partisan loyalties die hard. For the most part, the Reformers and provincial Tories who gathered in Ottawa's Congress Centre over the past few days didn't know each other. They eyed one another warily; weather-beaten western farmers in cowboy hats and string ties rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ontario Tory organizer Tom Long, who looked like he had just walked out of a Harry Rosen ad.
What unites the two groups, however -- beyond simply the desire to win -- is ideology. Despite their social and cultural differences, it turns out there really isn't that much difference politically between a Mike Harris Tory and a western Reformer. Delegates to the united-alternative convention easily agreed on a tax-cutting, free-market program with a strong dose of social conservatism.
Reformers had to put water in their wine on just two points, in an attempt to assuage the concerns of Ontario voters. First, the Canadian Alliance will not insist on equal representation in the Senate from every province. Second, delegates voted to accept a limited form of bilingualism, including a federal role in protecting minority-language rights -- positions that Reform always rejected.
Even those concessions are too much for some Reformers, and they have been running a guerrilla campaign against the idea of a new party ever since Mr. Manning first broached it. They had hoped they could stop it cold this coming March. That's when all 65,000 members of the Reform Party get to vote in a referendum on whether to join the new party. Under the Reform Party's rules, it requires a two-thirds majority to pass.
A failure to get the necessary majority would leave Canada's political right in disarray. However, that seems less likely to happen after this past weekend. Mr. Manning won a solid 75-per-cent endorsement for his leadership from the Reform Party convention.
Even before the results of that ballot were released, the opponents of the new party were sounding discouraged. One Reform delegate lamented: "I think this party is already dead. . . . History should record what happened to this great Reform Party of ours."
The more daunting challenge for the new party may be the race to become its first leader. Organizers are counting on a leadership contest to attract public attention and sell memberships, especially in Ontario.
In particular, they would like to see a strong candidate from Ontario -- or at the least, one who can draw substantial support from the province. Even Mr. Manning, who has already declared his own candidacy for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance, acknowledges that a "wide-open leadership contest" would be "healthy" for the new party.
The problem is that at the moment, Mr. Manning doesn't have any challenger of stature. Moreover, the rules adopted for the Canadian Alliance leadership race lend themselves to a regionally based campaign that could aggravate the divisions between the West and Central Canada in the new party.
The leader will be chosen by a one-member, one-vote system, likely in late June of this year.
According to one prominent Ontario Tory organizer, John Mykytyshyn, the easiest way for an Ontario-based rival to Mr. Manning to campaign might be to focus all his efforts in a small geographical region. He suggests the city of Mississaugua, just west of Toronto, where the Harris Tories enjoy some of their greatest strength.
This is the way he described the advantages of such a campaign. "Local [phone]calling, easy to mail to, easy to walk to, easy to put rallies together, more favourable to the conservative cause. You could focus [a leadership campaign]in there and recruit 100,000 people and blow the doors off of the rest of the country."
That may be just bravado, but if the leadership race unfolds as Mr. Mykytyshyn suggests, it seems likely that it would leave many former Reformers in Western Canada bruised and resentful.