by Paul Tuns
On Sept. 15, alumni of the now-defunct magazine Alberta Report hosted a reunion to mark the 25th anniversary of an Edmonton meeting between Ted Byfield and Preston Manning that helped lay the tracks for the creation of the Reform Party of Canada and, eventually, Stephen Harper’s majority.
The feting of Byfield and Manning was billed as a “celebration of the success of our 25-year journey from the birth of Reform to the election of a national Conservative majority government.”
Manning’s role in the formation of Reform and the ascendancy of a brand of a populist conservatism is well known, but without Byfield, Reform might not have ever existed.
American journalist George Will has said that before there was Ronald Reagan there was Barry Goldwater, before Goldwater there was National Review, and before National Review there was William Buckley.
There is a Canadian equivalent. Before Stephen Harper there was Preston Manning, before Manning there was Alberta Report, and before Alberta Report there was Ted Byfield.
Byfield, like Buckley, understood the need for a magazine to challenge the conventional wisdom. After spending 27 years in journalism and education, Byfield founded Saint John’s Edmonton Report in 1973 and four years later Saint John’s Calgary Report, general interest news magazines that were unabashedly conservative.
In 1979 he merged the two into Alberta Report and later created B.C. Report and Western Report magazines. In them, Byfield and the writers and editors he assembled, including Kenneth Whyte and Lorne Gunter – to name just two – would question what the country had become under Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. They trumpeted traditional values and economic freedom, opposed feminism and socialism, and fulminated against official bilingualism and multiculturalism. Circulation flourished, peaking at a weekly average of 53,277 in Albertain early 1985, and later the combined readership for the three magazines would reach 400,000.
Byfield’s magazines railed against the political and cultural elite of Central Canada, provided a conservative critique of Pierre Trudeau (especially his National Energy Program), and later gave voice to the slights conservatives in the West felt with the Brian Mulroney Tories’ pandering to Quebec with constitutional tinkering in the Meech Lake
Accord and the awarding of the CF-18 contract to a Montreal firm over a Winnipeg company.
To promote western interests in Ottawa, Byfield saw a need for Senate reform to increase western representation with a Senate that was elected, effective, and equal. Byfield is credited with coining the term Triple-E Senate and his magazine popularized the idea.
The Triple-E Senate was a key Reform platform, and even today many conservatives, including Harper, support senate reform, even if not quite in the format Byfield and the early Manning espoused.
“The West wants in!” motto of Reform was also coined by Byfield (or Alberta Report columnist Ralph Hedlin – various sources dispute authorship) and was, according to former Reform Party researcher and Harper confidante Tom Flanagan, “regional without being separatist.”
In August 1986, Byfield penned a column in which he argued that the West needed its own political party. The timing was fortuitous because Manning was beginning to meet regularly with Calgary lawyers and business executives, as he describes in his 1992 book, The New Canada, “to discuss ways and means, including political action, to secure greater constitutional equality” for the West.
In September, Manning wrote a memorandum entitled “A Western Reform Movement: The Responsible Alternative to Western Separatism.” On Sept. 15, 1986, Byfield and Manning met in Edmonton and discussed the former’s support for the latter’s efforts to create a regional party. Byfield promised his editorial support and journalistic expertise to help Manning get his not-yet-formed Reform Party off the ground. Alberta Report promoted early Reform initiatives through advertising and stories, most notably the 1987 founding convention in Winnipeg, at which Byfield was the keynote speaker.
Paul Bunner, a former editor of Report magazine who later became a Harper speech writer, said the reunion was mostly “about getting Ted the recognition he deserves for keeping the conservative flame alive during the Liberal dark ages.”
Indeed, without Ted Byfield there may have been no Reform, and certainly not a Reform Party that fought for economic, constitutional, and social conservatism. More through his journalism, which kept a remnant conservatism alive, than his political involvement,
Byfield made Reform and, eventually, Stephen Harper’s majority possible.
(Paul Tuns is a political analyst and public affairs commentator. This article originally appeared in the Ottawa Citizen.)