On Western alienation, Preston Manning is not backing down

Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, is banking on people’s fears about the desperate nature of our present situation. And he’s promising to save Canadians from the apocalypse heading our way, triggered, not by climate change, but by Donald Trump’s up-ending of world order. A 2025 report released by the federal government’s in-house think tank — Policy Horizons Canada — reinforces Carney’s dystopian warnings, with dire predictions of disillusioned youth living in a country with rising inequality, inaccessible housing and a broken promise of meritocracy. “The cheapest, quickest way to get public support for a public policy today is to scare the hell out of people,” says Preston Manning. That’s what these consultants to political parties will tell you, says the former leader of the Reform Party and a former leader of the Opposition. This use of fear as a motivator, Preston asserts, has been the “Liberals’ modus operandi now for over 10 years.” “There was fear in the pandemic,” he says, that motivated people to obey health guidance. “Fear of climate catastrophe is the fundamental motivator behind a lot of green initiatives,” he continues, “and now this fear of Trump.” Consider Carney’s concluding remarks during the leaders’ debate, Preston says, with a shake of his head. “When asked to give a one-minute statement, he actually said Trump wants to take over your country, which is complete nonsense and not possible.” (Preston has a full legal explanation, for those who are interested.) With less than one week to the federal election, I reach out to Preston at his Calgary home for a virtual tete-a-tete on the state of the nation. Sitting up tall with arms crossed, casually dressed in a green and blue plaid shirt, the April sunlight streaming through tall windows behind him, this is not a man beleaguered by his critics. In early April, Preston unleashed the hounds with an op-ed warning Canadians that the election of another four years of a Liberal government could precipitate a national unity problem in Canada. B.C. Premier David Eby discounts the risk, calling it a “tired trope.” And journalist Andrew Coyne discredits the idea there is a real problem with secession, accusing Preston of threatening Canadians with a rubber knife held to their throats. But Preston — the man who once told us “the West wants in” — isn’t backing down. If the Liberals are re-elected, he reiterates, the West may be motivated to find a way out of Confederation. What he’s recommending is a legitimate forum for disgruntled westerners to be able to express their anger. Five years ago, both Preston and I participated on then-premier Jason Kenney’s Fair Deal Panel, touring Alberta, listening to people’s grievances as a way to defuse frustration and identify strategies to strengthen Alberta’s voice in Confederation. To be clear, Preston’s present concerns about western disgruntlement aren’t confined to Alberta, or even to Alberta and Saskatchewan. “It goes into most of rural Manitoba and all of eastern and interior and northern B.C,” he says, “The only part of B.C. that’s not in sync with this is Vancouver and Victoria.” In his early 80s, Preston has a legacy to consider. And not just his own. In 1935, his father, Ernest Manning, entered the realm of provincial politics as William Aberhart’s right-hand man, launching the Social Credit party to alleviate the suffering of Albertans during the Great Depression, truly desperate times. “They didn’t have to convince people that things were bad,” Preston chortles, referring to his father and Aberhart. During the Depression, Alberta’s GDP dropped by 50 per cent, he explains; for reference, during the COVID pandemic, there was an eight per cent GDP contraction. “Can you imagine a 50 per cent contraction of your economy?” Preston posits (and Saskatchewan was even worse, he notes). “Partly because the only major industry was agriculture and agriculture was hit, not just by financial collapse but by a drought at the same time. “The only thing you could do was try to give (people) hope,” Preston reflects. “We can get out of this. We can fix it.” Peddling hope is a tricky thing; something we talked about during our tenure on Alberta’s Fair Deal Panel. Until recently, Carney’s reputation has been staked to faith in humanity’s ability to fight climate change by going green. Now, those carbon tax policies have been set aside and Carney’s costed election platform promises Canadians catastrophe can be averted with public-sector investment to build out Canada at a scale commensurate with that of former U.S. president Joe Biden. Preston visibly bristles: “The Liberals are deceptive in their use of language,” he asserts. “Carney’s not calling that ‘public spending,’ he’s calling it ‘public investment,’” Preston snickers, saying the Liberal leader is failing to take into account that some day those debts that are accumulated have to be paid, and the only way they can be paid is through increased taxation. “He’s severing the link between spending and deficits and debt by calling it ‘public investment,’” he adds, obviously agitated. “You mentioned my father,” Preston reflects. One of the last times he went into the cabinet room in Edmonton with his father, Preston recalls, his dad said: “I think we should carve into the ceiling … a question, that is, ‘Is there somebody else out there who could do what we’re talking about in here?’ Not a bad question to ask,” Preston grins. Preston has had a lifetime to observe politics — from a western Canadian vantage point — and he’s of the view “there is no region in North America that has had more experience with populism … than western Canada.” He no longer views the political spectrum as a left-to-right continuum; for him the axis is vertical, between “bottom-up democratic populists with their wild and woolly side, and parties dominated by aristocratic elites. “When you carve up the West’s history this way, the CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan) and the Social Credit (in Alberta) are in the same quadrant,” he says. “They were both populist movements — one embraced democratic socialism, the other embraced something else — but what they had in common, and people that knew the politics of both parties at that time said, the people supporting Tommy Douglas (and the CCF) in Saskatchewan were exactly the same guys that were supporting Social Credit in Alberta.” Noticing how talk of his father’s political era grounds Preston, I dare to probe a question few Canadian politicians risk talking about, at least in public, and that is the connection between populism and faith. “All of these western populist movements had a spiritual dimension to them,” Preston acknowledges. “Riel might have been crazy at the end, but his rebellion was as much influenced by his Catholic upbringing as it was anything else.” And, he continues, “the movement to create the United Church, which was a bottom-up attempt to integrate things, occurred at exactly the same time as the farmers’ movement. Then in the Depression, you had Tommy Douglas, who was a Baptist minister,” and in Alberta, “Bible Bill” Aberhart. In the U.S., it’s different — we agree — few would deny the spiritual dimension to Trump’s appeal. Whether or not something similar will happen in Canada, Preston doesn’t know, but he actually hopes it does. Ignoring the spiritual dimension, or putting it in some category where you can’t talk about it in relation to politics, he says, is a mistake. Preston may be guilty of trying to scare the hell out of Canadians, with his talk of western alienation. But credit where credit is due: He also understands his responsibility, to create space for hope.

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