Peter MacKay should be having a good week. After all, he’s just secured the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, a position that he’s coveted for years. And, the party’s fortunes, while not great, are certainly better than that other rightwing federal party.

Instead, MacKay is being forced to defend the deal he made to ensure his leadership victory. Longtime party loyalists are using words like “traitor” to describe him. One unidentified delegate told the Globe and Mail, “It was supposed to be about the leadership, and all I know is that the deal is all people are talking about. They’re not talking about Peter MacKay.”

The deal with David Orchard, who outgoing leader Joe Clark once described as “a tourist in the party” (others are even less charitable), exacted a price that was almost unthinkable heading into last weekend’s convention. In return for Orchard’s support, MacKay promised not to merge with the Canadian Alliance and, more importantly, to create “a blue-ribbon panel” (whatever that is) to review free trade. Orchard will be allowed to name the panel’s chairperson. The deal is apparently a written one, although no one gets to see it (not even the Tory caucus). “We don’t need a copy of it. We have to trust each other in this racket. I trust my new leader,” said Newfoundland MP Loyola Hearn, a MacKay supporter.

As Graham Fraser noted in The Toronto Star, until the convention, “MacKay had been the safe choice, the Canada Savings Bond candidate: low risk, but low interest.” He was always pegged as the front runner in a leadership race marked more for its high attrition rates of candidates than for any real excitement.

MacKay was frequently attacked by his opponents. Fellow Nova Scotia MP Scott Brison (who ended up supporting Jim Prentice in an unsuccessful attempt to stop MacKay) argued in one debate that, “your problem, Peter, is that no one knows what you stand for.” Last weekend’s events hardly do anything to dispel that criticism.

MacKay’s subsequent waffling on what his deal with Orchard meant (was it backpedaling on a key policy plank as Orchard contended, or just an agreement to try to make free trade work better?) greatly magnified that image.

Writing in The National Post, political author and Liberal strategist John Duffy contends that:

“Their pact is either a betrayal of everything the modern Tory party stands for or a two-faced sucker job perpetrated on a hapless amateur. Either way, this loathsome backroom chicanery fundamentally compromises MacKay’s reputation. Can anyone trust this guy? Is there anything he won’t sell out to get ahead? More than compromising his own integrity, the rookie leader has seriously damaged the already-weak Tory brand. MacKay’s wheeling and dealing evoked the worst of Mulroney’s political style; he is now shredding the best of Mulroney’s substantive achievements.”

The day of the leadership selection was preceded by a day of speeches. One was from Mulroney himself, who in typical Mulroney fashion, boasted about the effect of free trade on the Canadian economy. “I think Canadians are saying, ‘Thank God we have a free-trade agreement with the United States of America.’ ” Support for free trade is even entrenched in the party’s constitution, and MacKay himself referred to it in his remarks as “the crown jewel” among Tory achievements.

In 1998, when David Orchard first contested the Progressive Conservative leadership, I argued that only someone with a massive ego and a poor sense of political strategy would fight policies of globalization by trying to take over the party that authored them (presumably so that he can get the party to apologize).

I still think that, but it now appears that Peter MacKay has an even worse sense of political strategy. If David Orchard offers a deal, the correct response of Peter MacKay would have been: “You don’t belong in this party. I don’t need your support, and I’m not going to sell out the party’s principles to get it.”

After a similar snub by the Prentice team — Orchard had reportedly tried and failed to reach the same agreement — the Orchard delegates would surely have walked out or spoiled their ballots. MacKay was going to win the leadership anyway. His deal with Orchard was just plain stupid.

Defending the deal, MacKay said, “I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done — never.” Noting that some had described the deal between him and Orchard as “a deal with the devil”, MacKay argued that, “describing [Orchard] as a devil is very inflammatory and negative and unhelpful and I don’t see it that way.” Perhaps MacKay should pause to reconsider who people are referring to as “the devil” in this deal.

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Scott Piatkowski

Scott Piatkowski is a former columnist for rabble.ca. He wrote a weekly column for 13 years that appeared in the Waterloo Chronicle, the Woolwich Observer and ECHO Weekly. He has also written for Straight...