“Example is the school of mankind; they will learn at no other.”
Edmund Burke
The one book everyone should read before forming government? Discipline of Power. First published in 1980 by the Globe reporter Jeffrey Simpson, it gives us the definitive account of Joe Clark’s short-lived 1979 government. It not only documents the missteps and failures of Mr. Clark’s eight months in power, but it’s also a textbook that conservatives have used to draw lessons about government ever since.
We sometimes forget the excitement around Joe Clark’s victory. His career was otherwise marked by disappointment so it’s easy to forget his rise to prominence. But for a brief moment in 1979 he was in the right place when Canadians went looking for political change. Pierre Trudeau’s government was past its prime. Inflation had trended back up since the start of 1977 and oil shocks around the Iranian revolution pushed it higher. Unemployment had spiked up and remained high. News media reported a “misery index” that summed inflation and unemployment to track how miserable economic conditions had become. Public finances were grim: the Trudeau government had run the federal deficit to 5% of GDP and higher interest rates were making things worse. Wage and price controls had failed. Mr. Clark, the young Albertan, promised a break from tired Laurentian thinking. He was bilingual, socially liberal, and a tough, aggressive partisan. When TV cameras were allowed to cover the House of Commons, the resulting media revolution turned Mr. Clark’s sharp Question Period performances into nightly must-see dram. He hammered at Trudeau government corruption, patronage, and disarray. Mr. Trudeau delayed the election as long as he could but finally, on May 22, 1979, Canadians went to the polls. The Tories won, although they were held to a minority. Mr. Trudeau resigned as Liberal leader, and it looked like the Clark government would get time to prove itself capable. Wasn’t history repeating itself? Hadn’t Dief’s 1957 minority led to a whomping majority the next year?
(OECD Statistics and Fiscal Reference Tables)
But history did not repeat itself. A few months later the Clark government came apart.
Mr. Simpson’s book – read the original focused edition – is devastating. Its meticulous reporting shows how Mr. Clark’s team was not ready to govern. Years in opposition meant that neither Mr. Clark nor his cabinet appreciated the demands of government, the “discipline of power.” Mr. Clark moved to 24 Sussex without a agenda for governing, and his team, focused on winning the election, didn’t have one either. The Tories put off meeting Parliament until they came up with an agenda, by which point the time for initiative had passed. Since they weren’t polling, they misjudged the strength of their mandate. After promising tax cuts during the election, the Tories announced new taxes to reduce the deficit, slow the economy, and tame inflation. They stumbled into a confidence vote without a way to win it and with a plan for a snap election in the event of defeat. Mr. Clark lost the vote and, a few weeks later, Mr. Trudeau cruised back to power in the 1980 election rematch. The cost of those mistakes was high. The next four years crippled Canada: record borrowing, the National Energy Program, and constitutional reform that rekindled Quebec separatism. Mr. Trudeau even broke ranks with NATO allies when he equivocated. Brian Mulroney eventually stepped up to clean up the mess.
Every Conservative government since Clark’s defeat has read and absorbed the lessons of Discipline of Power. It’s a definitive account of political failure. And as Burke reminds us, failure is the way we learn.
A few weeks before Christmas, on a trip back east, a former Harper cabinet minister welcomed me to his office for coffee. After we had settled in, he went right to the question every Conservative in Canada should be asking themselves these days: what happened to Jason Kenney?
We don’t have a Discipline of Power about the Kenney government. We urgently need one.