Quote:
Originally Posted by KAI
You have to be kidding. Iknow this is Alberta and we love our hard core conservatives. But Presten Manning and the reform push didn't have much of an impact at all outside of Alberta.
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I think you misunderstand me--I'm a dyed-in-the-wool liberal--I own a copy of the MacLean's tribute to Trudeau AND a copy of the "Red Book." I'm not trumpeting Preston Manning's name from the rooftops as a visionary, I'm reluctantly giving him props for how he managed to change the political conversation in Canada.
Put it this way: offer me three choices for PM--Stephen Harper, Paul Martin and Preston Manning--and I'll tell you which of these things is not like the others. Manning was an ideologue, and a good rhetorician--it just so happens that I think he was wrong about almost everything, and didn't like his tendency to fall back on meaningless bread-and-butter-rhetoric like painting Reform as a "grassroots" movement, and pretending he wasn't a career politician. But you can't say that he didn't believe in something.
By the way--do you consider the death of the Progressive Conservative party to be "not much of an impact" outside Alberta? I think a few people in the maritimes would disagree.