He has been out of the limelight since ceding the leadership last summer to Stockwell Day. There had been speculation he might retire after last fall's election. Still, Preston Manning's statement yesterday that he will leave politics by the end of this year is no less the showstopper for that. It reminds us how significantly he has reshaped the political face of Canada.
The Reform Party did not exist before 1987, when Mr. Manning was acclaimed its leader. It registered only a slight impact in the 1988 election, which gave Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney his second majority government. But Mr. Manning had a clear vision of where his party was going.
"We are not talking about another splinter party or single-issue party or another party of the strange and extreme," he said in 1987. "The West has produced too many of these in the past years and there is no need for another."
Preston Manning is easily one of Canada's most thoughtful and intelligent leaders, whatever your views on his politics. His policies may have been rooted in core beliefs, but every time he opened his mouth it was evident he had thought those policies through.
His chief problem as leader, particularly in the early years, was the image his party had as a haven for racists and rednecks who hated Quebeckers and pined for the return of the noose. He made it clear that the intolerant weren't wanted on board, and set about selling Reform as the grassroots party that opposed the Ottawa of patronage and closed-door meetings.
The timing was right. Mr. Mulroney, by the end of his second mandate, was about as despised as it's possible for a prime minister to be. The Progressive Conservative Party was collapsing. Not only had Reform attracted legions of disaffected Westerners but, after the failure of the Meech Lake accord, the Bloc Québécois had siphoned off the nationalist supporters Mr. Mulroney relied on to win Quebec.
The 1993 election reduced the Tories to two seats. The Bloc and Reform, by splitting the majority of opposition seats, ensured there was no longer a government-in-waiting -- a single party capable of ousting the government.
By 1997, when Reform formed the Official Opposition, Mr. Manning had learned to play the Ottawa power game. He had taken voice lessons, acquired a new hairstyle and gone back on his earlier vow to turn the official residence of Her Majesty's Official Opposition into a bingo hall. He even accepted an official car.
Of most lasting impact, the success Reform enjoyed with its platform of bringing sanity to the federal finances put pressure on the governing Liberals to eliminate the deficit and control the accumulated debt. For that alone, Mr. Manning and his party deserve the thanks of every Canadian.
But it wasn't enough. Reform kept hitting an invisible wall at the Manitoba-Ontario boundary, not least because its western boosterism and intolerance of Quebec's distinct identity left Ontarians feeling uneasy.
To his credit, Mr. Manning did what politicians with less integrity would never have dreamed of doing: He preached the importance of creating a new party that could appeal to all Canadians, even if it meant he would be turfed out as leader. The idea was to unite the right through a united alternative, but, since the Conservatives didn't join up except through defections, the new party was a merger in name only.
The Canadian Alliance was born last summer, Mr. Manning was relegated to leader emeritus, and Stockwell Day proved that being more glib and more photogenic than his predecessor was no passport to success east of Manitoba. If the Alliance hoped to be seen as new, it didn't help that a conservative Albertan fundamentalist Christian had been replaced by a conservative Albertan fundamentalist Christian, and that most of its policies hadn't changed a whit from Reform's. The new populist, pan-Canadian party Mr. Manning envisioned is not even close to being born. The Alliance and the Tories circle each other warily, whispering of merger and then making a great show of backing away.
Now Mr. Manning is signalling his intention to bow out of politics at a relatively young age (he turns 59 in June). As he told the CBC's Don Newman yesterday, "I'm in an awkward position" in the Alliance caucus as a former leader, because if he proposes any new ideas he risks being seen as competing with Mr. Day. And he may have received a bit of a wake-up call from his recent surgery for prostate cancer, which happily left him with a clean bill of health.
He says he hopes to do some writing, is in contact with university think-tanks, is open to business consulting opportunities and will "be doing everything I can to fan" Alliance principles from outside Parliament -- which doesn't sound like the schedule of someone intending to wind down. Heck, he can't even tear himself away from the Commons without a nine-month withdrawal program.
So it's not so much adieu as I'll be seeing you, often. It will be good to hear from him.