What if Joe Clark won the 1980 confidence vote?

what if the government of Joe Clark had got its budget approved by the Canadian house of commons?
what would a clark government have done in the longer term?
 
If Clark won the December 1979 confidence vote, which would require an easy adjustment in parliamentary tactics, then a whole flock of butterflies. Trudeau's successor as Liberal leader will be elected in March 1980, most likely former trade minister Donald Macdonald. Implications for the Quebec referendum but my guess is that the No side still wins. No 1982 Constitution, no National Energy Program, no Canada Health Act, etc. Clark will want an early election, most likely in early 1981. Whether he gets a majority is debatable... without Quebec he needs to basically sweep everywhere else. If Clark hangs on long enough to catch an economic recovery he wins, otherwise Macdonald, an Ontarian centrist, has a good shot. Liberals will return to power by the late '80s or early '90s. I think there's a good shot of the BQ being avoided but Reform is more likely than not to appear.
 
Would it still be Reform though? The Socreds would presumably have played a prominent role in any successful 1980 confidence vote, boosting their prestige, while they were of course working hard in this time to make inroads into Western Canada again, could the vacuum filled by the Confederation of Regions & Reform have been maintained by the Socreds?

They could certainly have been more national than Reform, or even the Canadian Alliance.
 
Would it still be Reform though? The Socreds would presumably have played a prominent role in any successful 1980 confidence vote, boosting their prestige, while they were of course working hard in this time to make inroads into Western Canada again, could the vacuum filled by the Confederation of Regions & Reform have been maintained by the Socreds?

They could certainly have been more national than Reform, or even the Canadian Alliance.

It might depend on how beholden the Socreds as a whole were to the Douglaite theories still popular among the Quebec branch. I don't imagine that the oil-industry players who backed Reform in OTL would be too keen on a party espousing militant anti-banking and, to some degree, anti-capitalist rhetoric and policies.
 
so if Clark went for an election in 1981, got a narrow majority, say 145-150 seats
what would a clark government do in the longer term? how would it differ from trudeau-mulroney?
 
so if Clark went for an election in 1981, got a narrow majority, say 145-150 seats
what would a clark government do in the longer term? how would it differ from trudeau-mulroney?

I won't try to predict with any detail, but given that Clark was the man who preached about a "community of communities", I'll speculate that he would try to reverse at least some of the centralizing trends that the Liberals had initiated in the 60s and 70s.

He probably wouldn't completely abandon official bilingualism, but might institute a policy stating essentially "Okay, if you live in a region where almost everyone can speak the same official language, you don't need to ensure that your local government office has workers who can speak the other. And there's no need for every city in western Canada to have its own French language TV station, the francophones in those places can make do with Radio St. Boniface being beamed in."

This would be popular with the western redneck crowd(for whom bilingualism was a pretty major issue at the time), and likely would not alientate Quebec nationalists too much, especially if Clark promised to more or less leave things like the sign-laws alone(and in this scenario, there is certainly no Charter Of Rights to challenge said laws). Western francophones and Quebec anglos would howl of course, but they were never big Tory voters anyway.

On foreign policy, Clark would be more openly pro-American than Trudeau. This might not amount to much difference in actual practice, but it would be enough to prevent the government from being denounced as Communist by Peter Worthington and Company.

Maybe Clark would increase our defense spending and NATO commitment somewhat, but at the end of the day would probably just say with a realpolitik shrug: "No one's gonna kick us out of NATO just for penny-pinching, and the Yanks aren't gonna stop defending their northern frontier; no need to dump zillions into our military budget."
 
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Just for reference, here is a list of candidates who probably would have run for the Liberal Party leadership in 1980 had Trudeau stayed retired:

-Pierre de Bane (MP for Matapedia-Matane)
-Bob Andras (MP for Thunder Bay)
-Lloyd Axworthy (MP for Winnipeg-Fort Garry)
-Jean Chretien (MP for Saint-Maurice)
-Herb Gray (MP for Windsor West)
-Donald Stovel MacDonald (former MP for Rosedale)

Does anyone have any more thoughts about this aspect of the WI?
 
Just for reference, here is a list of candidates who probably would have run for the Liberal Party leadership in 1980 had Trudeau stayed retired:

-Pierre de Bane (MP for Matapedia-Matane)
-Bob Andras (MP for Thunder Bay)
-Lloyd Axworthy (MP for Winnipeg-Fort Garry)
-Jean Chretien (MP for Saint-Maurice)
-Herb Gray (MP for Windsor West)
-Donald Stovel MacDonald (former MP for Rosedale)

Does anyone have any more thoughts about this aspect of the WI?

my knowledge of Canadian politics is not in vast detail ill admit, but I think 1980 would be too soon for chretien
 
I won't try to predict with any detail, but given that Clark was the man who preached about a "community of communities", I'll speculate that he would try to reverse at least some of the centralizing trends that the Liberals had initiated in the 60s and 70s.

He probably wouldn't completely abandon official bilingualism, but might institute a policy stating essentially "Okay, if you live in a region where almost everyone can speak the same official language, you don't need to ensure that your local government office has workers who can speak the other. And there's no need for every city in western Canada to have its own French language TV station, the francophones in those places can make do with Radio St. Boniface being beamed in."

This would be popular with the western redneck crowd(for whom bilingualism was a pretty major issue at the time), and likely would not alientate Quebec nationalists too much, especially if Clark promised to more or less leave things like the sign-laws alone(and in this scenario, there is certainly no Charter Of Rights to challenge said laws). Western francophones and Quebec anglos would howl of course, but they were never big Tory voters anyway.

On foreign policy, Clark would be more openly pro-American than Trudeau. This might not amount to much difference in actual practice, but it would be enough to prevent the government from being denounced as Communist by Peter Worthington and Company.

Maybe Clark would increase our defense spending and NATO commitment somewhat, but at the end of the day would probably just say with a realpolitik shrug: "No one's gonna kick us out of NATO just for penny-pinching, and the Yanks aren't gonna stop defending their northern frontier; no need to dump zillions into our military budget."

I could see Clark going pretty whole hog on peacekeeping, although given Cold War issues I'm not sure how far that would extend.
 
Macdonald was the heavy favourite. Chretien wouldn't run, partially due to the Liberal tradition of alternating between Anglophone and Francophone leaders and partially because winning the next election was far from guaranteed. Overoceans had a good overview of the policy stuff. Clark's foreign policy would be like OTL when he was PM and later Mulroney's external affairs minister. With the centrist Macdonald as leader the parties will become closer on both domestic and foreign policy.
 
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