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?
what would a clark government have done in the longer term?
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.
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?
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?
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."