The Canadian Alliance? The Reform-Conservative Party? The United Reform Party?
Canada, it would appear, might soon have a new political party. A new name hasn't been settled on, but its policies are going to look extremely close to those of the Reform Party.
People working for a new party -- the Reform leadership and other conservative voices -- have formed something called the United Alternative. They hope that, at a convention later this month, UA delegates will vote to form something new and that the required two-thirds of Reform members across Canada will agree to dissolve their party and come aboard.
That two-thirds majority represents a hurdle over which those wanting something new must jump, including Reform Leader Preston Manning, who has said he will resign if his party won't follow his wishes.
If Mr. Manning gets his way and Reform becomes something else, no one should be under any illusions that the new entity will be startlingly different from the old Reform Party. A few policy shadings will change, but the new party will walk and talk very much like the old Reform Party.
At least that's the impression gleaned from reading the policy declaration to be presented to the UA convention. Despite recent headlines heralding major departures from established Reform policy, this new policy declaration won't cause heartburn for most Reformers.
True, the UA drafters see a role for Ottawa in protecting minority language rights instead of leaving linguistic matters to the provinces. There's been a little watering down of the old Reform war cry for a Triple E Senate -- equal, effective and elected. And a bit of a nod is offered to Canada's farmers within supply management that Reform will not abandon them to the market.
But that's about it. The rest of the document is traditional meat-and-potatoes Reform stuff as adjusted over the years since the late 1980s.
Which invites the question: What is this UA movement about? It cannot be about dramatically widening the political appeal of the existing Reform Party on policy grounds. If that were the objective, then this policy document would have moved further from traditional Reform dogma.
The UA, therefore, is more about what political pros and advertising executives call "positioning." Creating a new party, it would seem, is mostly about optics, perceptions, legacies and defeats.
Reform hit a wall at the Manitoba-Ontario border in the last election. Reform had tried in two elections to impress Ontarians -- to say nothing of Quebeckers and Atlantic Canadians -- and largely failed both times.
The idea of a merger or fusion or co-operation with the federal Conservative Party, always more a dream than a sensible option, died with the Conservative leadership race in which most of the candidates, including winner Joe Clark, rejected co-operation.
Faced with that rebuff, Reform's leadership opted for repackaging. If it had tried something more drastic, then the meat-and-potatoes Reform crowd might have rebelled.
That potential for rebellion still lurks among the rank and file, since, if 34 per cent of them turn thumbs down to dissolving Reform, the new party cannot fly. That partly may explain why the policy declaration to be presented to the UA convention -- then, in turn, sent to Reformers -- looks and reads so much like traditional Reform Party stuff.
Whatever happens at the end of the month, a leadership race will begin. If Reform dissolves itself, then Mr. Manning will run for the leadership of the new entity. If Reformers reject their party's dissolution, Mr. Manning will quit and someone else will emerge as leader.
Mr. Manning has most of Reform's worthies on side for the new party. But if he were to win the leadership of the new party, Canadians would be confronted with the old leader, most of the old policies wrapped in a new name and perhaps fresh packaging, an unlikely combination for important political progress.