When the surging party led by Stephen Harper is called “Tory” voters are being misled. The Canadian Conservative Party should be known in the press as the Conservative Reform Alliance Party, or CRAP for short. This would be a fair, balanced, objective way of announcing what awaits us.

Harper has been putting together an Alberta-Ontario alliance. In the West, CRAP appeals to those hard done by living in small towns, and rural areas. As a pollster would say, this is a growing demographic in Ontario.

The upper middle class in the Ontario 905 area code around Toronto is preparing to vote for CRAP, as they did for Mike Harris, the Reform Alliance surrogate in Ontario. His Conservatives never won a seat in the urban core of any city bigger than Peterborough. The hinterland, and the suburbs sent him to Queen’s Park.

It was very smart of Harper to get his Reform Alliance followers to agree to take the old Conservative name for themselves. Words have magic properties.

It did not take long for the Ontario papers to start calling them Tories, when in fact Reform was created by Preston Manning to replace the Conservatives in the West. As a Reformer, Stephen Harper defeated one-time Joe Clark Conservative cabinet minister, James Hawke in his own riding. Earlier, Harper had worked as a parliamentary aide to Hawke.

As Stephen Harper takes centre stage in election 2004, his best hope is that nobody in the media looks too closely, not just at his supporting cast, the CRAP candidates, and what they stand for, but at who is behind him —American oil money.

Alberta politicians deliver for big oil. Premier Ralph Klein is tied to American oil money, as was Preston Manning, and even more so his father, former premier Ernest C. Manning, as Murray Dobbin pointed out in his book on Preston Manning and the Reform Party.

Alberta’s Parkland Institute has shown how Alberta undertaxes — compared not just to Norway but to Alaska for crying out loud — the exploitation of non-renewable oil and gas reserves, which increasingly flow to the U.S. Publisher and occasional politician, Mel Hurtig has regaled many an audience with his account of the Alberta oil and gas royalty tax regime, or “how the Americans put the oil and gas into the ground in Alberta.”

The American oil companies, which will not be far away from Harper, take their politics seriously, as those who have studied the history of Alberta, or Texas, or Saudi Arabia or Iraq will have noted.

A minority Harper government will need support from the Bloc. Leader Gilles Duceppe told Graham Fraser of the Toronto Star last week that Bloc support is non-negotiable for the Kyoto accord, gay marriage rights, minority language programs, and reproductive choice for women. This hardly looks likes a promising start to a long relationship with CRAP.

Should Harper find himself with a majority, the morning of June 29 all attention would turn to the Senate of Canada. They could play “kitty bar the door” on legislation, though cabinet could act in all kinds of ways that do not require support from both chambers of parliament.

In either a minority, or majority situation, expect CRAP, allies of American oil, to proceed with further continental integration, as if the sell-out to the U.S. had not gone far enough already. Look for a “Star Wars” deal on missile “defence” to be signed, and borders to be opened for American ownership of anything that is still Canadian, from broadcasting to banking.

Any deal signed by a Canadian prime minister with a U.S. president, no matter how bad for Canada, is difficult for another prime minister to overturn. That is what makes electing Stephen Harper and his bunch risky, sort of like a crap shoot, with lots on the line.

Duncan Cameron

Duncan Cameron

Born in Victoria B.C. in 1944, Duncan now lives in Vancouver. Following graduation from the University of Alberta he joined the Department of Finance (Ottawa) in 1966 and was financial advisor to the...