1From Professor to Politician (1981–1997)

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people things they don’t want to hear.

—The George Orwell Foundation¹

Introduction

How does a professor become a politician? I suppose there are as many ways as there are examples. Some of my friends joke that I was like the anthropologist who went into the jungle to study the natives, but then stayed too long and “went native.” Some of my critics would say that I was always that way. There may be some truth in both.

My involvement in Alberta politics was incremental. As I explain in this chapter, initially it was an extension of what I was teaching in the classroom. And I was self-consciously cautious about going into the political waters too fast, too deep. Some of the best advice I was ever given came from one of my undergraduate professors at Colorado College, Dr. Fred Sondermann: “Don’t get involved in elected politics until you are financially secure. You don’t ever want to be in a position where you have to choose between what you know is right and what you need financially.” I never was.

As for going native, it’s true that I’ve always been interested in and attracted to politics. It may be genetic. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a “New Deal” Democrat in the US Congress from 1937 to 1940. My father was elected as a Republican to the Wyoming House of Representatives from 1966 to 1980; served as speaker of the house in his last term; and then ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1982. My first-year bio at Colorado College states that I was “interested in politics, creative writing, skiing, golf and becoming a college professor.” That was when I was eighteen, so I’ve been conflicted from the start.

In this chapter I describe my journey from prof to pol, starting with how I became a conservative; my graduate studies at the University of Toronto in the 1970s; and my early involvement with Preston Manning and the Reform Party in the 1980s and 1990s. In chapter 2, I explain my decision to be a Reform Party candidate in Alberta’s 1998 Senate election; my involvement with the Alberta Agenda, aka “Firewall Letter,” in 2001; and finally, my decision to seek election as the new MLA for Foothills-Rocky View as the candidate of the provincial Progressive Conservative Party in 2004.

How I Became a Conservative (1967–1980)

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

—Winston Churchill

Sometime during the 1990s, my mother remarked to me (in a disapproving tone) that I had gone from being a left-winger to a right-winger without ever passing through the middle. As usual, she was pretty accurate in her assessment.

It might surprise many of my friends and former supporters in Alberta that my initial involvement in politics was all on the Left. As a senior in high school in the winter of 1967, I read Arthur M. Schlesinger’s then recently published book Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy, 1941–1966.² This inspired me to organize the first (and maybe the last) Vietnam War “teach-in” in Casper, Wyoming. My political engagement continued when I went off to college that fall. I participated in anti-war marches outside of Fort Carson, home base of the US Army’s Fifth Infantry Division, a major staging area for soldiers going to Vietnam. In February 1968, after a good friend from high school, Vernon Nix, was killed only twelve days after he arrived in Vietnam, I went to work for anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign. (Note: Before his political career McCarthy was an economics professor.)

In the fall of 1968, I was a co-founder of Colorado College’s first student chapter of the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a civil rights organization). I helped to organize voter registration in minority neighbourhoods leading up to the November federal elections. Later that year I was an organizer and speaker at a “free speech” rally defending the onstage nudity of actors in a recent campus theatre performance, which had ignited a firestorm of protest in the local Colorado Springs media. In the Colorado College 1968 yearbook, there is even a picture of me protesting in support of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, holding a sign, “NO MORE SOUR GRAPES.” The occasion was a speaking event for the then anti-union California governor Ronald Reagan. Yes, the same Ronald Reagan whom a decade later I supported for president of the United States! (As did Eugene McCarthy!) And it should come as no surprise during this time that I tried—and liked—smoking marijuana. Soon after, I also experimented with both mescaline and LSD. In short, I was a stereotypical Sixties campus “hippie radical.”

This began to change in 1969 when I went off to Aix-en-Provence, France, for my third year of university. Simply being outside of North America for eleven months gave me a new and different perspective. Like so many young people then (and now), I believed that somehow my generation was “better” than previous generations; that our demands for “Peace Now” and racial and sexual equality represented “progress” and would somehow change the world for the better. My eleven months in Europe began to change this. Walking through the streets of medieval towns like Aix and Avignon made history come to life; made me think about how previous empires had come and gone. I began to understand that we are just a very recent part of a much older and richer human tapestry.

I was particularly influenced by my art teacher, Billy Weyman, a young expatriate American who had moved to the south of France to pursue a career as an artist in the tradition of Paul Cézanne and Leo Marchutz. In addition to introducing me to the joys of drinking French cognac, Billy was the first teacher to make me question whether the subjectivity and moral relativism of twentieth-century art and culture represented progress over the past. Maybe the two were related?

In March, a two-week trip through Morocco also impressed on me for the first time how different—and how much better—life was in Western Europe and North America. It began to dawn on me—what today I now know to be true—that so much of what we take for granted is not found in most of the rest of the world. By this I don’t just mean our material comforts, but the institutions that make this possible. Democracy, responsible government, the rule of law, property rights, free and fair elections—all are in short supply or even non-existent in most of the rest of the world. That was in 1970. And it’s still just as true today.

Being in Europe that spring also meant that I was out of the US in May 1970, when Ohio National Guard soldiers shot and killed four students during an anti-war protest at Kent State University. This tragedy sparked the largest student protests and campus unrest in American history. Had I been in the US, I would have been in the middle of it. But I was not. And so, when I came back from my year in Europe, I had moved in a more reflective, academic direction, while campus politics had become more radical. During my fourth and final year of university, I was not involved in any public protests or political organizations.

What I did do was to immerse myself in philosophy courses with Dr. J. Glenn Gray and political theory courses with Dr. Tim Fuller. Full-semester courses on Plato and Aristotle; Augustine and Aquinas; Hobbes and Locke; Hegel and Marx. I loved it. And as a result, I did surprisingly well, compared to the lacklustre grades of my first two years. So well in fact that by spring graduation, I was nominated and inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest academic honour society in the United States.

The Phi Beta Kappa award cemented my decision to go to graduate school to pursue my goal of becoming a university professor. But in conversations with professors Gray and Fuller I decided that I would first do a “wanderjahr”—to return to Europe to explore and to better understand the roots of Western civilization. Upon graduation my student deferment expired, but I had drawn a high number—223—in the US military draft that year. So off I went, with Bambi Lathrop, my then girlfriend and now wife of fifty years. We explored Roman and Greek ruins in Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Israel. To pay for these travels, I worked in restaurants in Spain and France; as a chauffeur/handyman for a wealthy Italian family in Switzerland; picked grapes and peaches in France; and then spent seven months in the winter of 1971–72 working on Kibbutz Yifat in Israel.

I had chosen the kibbutz because I had been attracted by the agrarian utopianism in the writings of Leo Tolstoy. I was also attracted by the “back to the land” movement that was part of the Sixties hippie culture. The kibbutz cured me of both. I was in the “ulpan” program—which meant half-time work, and the other half learning Hebrew. This allowed me to get to know some of the Israeli kibbutzniks my age. The more I learned, the more disenchanted I became. Most were planning to leave the kibbutz, and I soon understood why. About 20 percent of the kibbutzniks were doing 80 percent of the work. That cured me of socialism. And my romantic dream of doing honest labour by day and then reading Tolstoy and Plato by night soon evaporated. After eight hours of picking grapefruit or cleaning chicken coops, all I wanted to do was to eat dinner and go to sleep.

Israel also cured me of the pacifism I had embraced during my involvement in the anti–Vietnam war movement. The more I travelled around Israel, the more I realized how perilous Israel’s existence was. My time there was after the Six-Day War of 1967 but just before the disastrous Yom Kippur War of 1973. The entire country was an armed camp—soldiers with automatic weapons on every street corner. It had to be. Israel was (and still is) surrounded on all sides by hostile Arab nations and the displaced Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza. The only reason Israel had survived was because of its superior air force and the US Sixth Fleet cruising off its coast in the Mediterranean Sea. I came to realize the truth of what Professor Sondermann had taught me in his international relations course: Every country is occupied by an army. The question is: Is it yours or someone else’s? Irving Kristol once described a conservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” I went to Israel and got mugged.

This was my frame of mind when I arrived in Toronto in September 1973 to begin my graduate studies. I had chosen the University of Toronto because I wanted to study with Emil Fackenheim in the Department of Philosophy. I had already decided I wanted to do my doctoral dissertation on the German philosopher Hegel, and Fackenheim was the most accomplished Hegel scholar in North America. He was also a Jewish refugee who had fled Hitler’s Nazi Germany in 1938; had lost his brother in the Holocaust; and had become a Zionist supporter of Israel. He too had been “mugged by reality” to a degree that I could only imagine. I had read his books before I arrived and thoroughly enjoyed the courses I took with him that first year. Unfortunately, this did not last. After being warned that there were virtually no job prospects for new PhDs in philosophy, I chose to transfer to the Department of Political Science, where I thought I could still do my dissertation on Hegel but with better employment prospects after I finished.

It was there that I first met Walter Berns, and then Allan Bloom. Both had done their PhDs with Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. Both had been tenured full professors at Cornell University. Both had resigned in protest after the Cornell administration refused to sanction the armed Black students who took control of the Cornell campus during student protests in the spring of 1969. Shortly afterward, both were offered and accepted tenured, full-professor positions at the University of Toronto.

I was unaware of any of this history when I first took courses with them. Berns co-taught a course on comparative Canada-US constitutional law with Professor Peter Russell. I liked the course and both professors. I ended up writing my PhD dissertation on the constitutional law of sexual equality, with both as supervisors. With Bloom, I first audited his undergraduate course on Plato’s Republic and then was a student in his graduate course on Rousseau’s Emile.

In retrospect, my continuing evolution to the conservative side of the political spectrum was not that surprising. Leo Strauss was one of the most influential American political theorists of the twentieth century. Also a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Strauss had distinguished himself first as a scholar of ancient and medieval philosophy and then as a skeptic of the widely held belief in progress and the view that twentieth-century liberal democracy is “the end of history.”³ In two decades of teaching at the University of Chicago, Strauss attracted dozens of students who went on to their own academic careers. Loosely described as “Straussians,” many of these professors influenced the development of the “neo-conservative” movement in American politics. Berns and Bloom were among these.⁴

With Berns and Russell I came to understand the genius of British, American, and Canadian constitutionalism—democracy, responsible government, checks and balances, separation of powers, federalism, the rule of law, and property rights. I learned that constitutional supremacy does not mean judicial supremacy, and that judges—even Supreme Court judges—are not infallible. The US Supreme Court had once ruled that Negro slaves were not humans but just “property.”⁵ Several decades later, the same court held that the segregation laws of southern states did not violate the rights of now free Black Americans to the equal protection of the laws as long as the separate facilities were “equal.”⁶ The Supreme Court of Canada had once declared that as far as the British North America Act was concerned, women were not “persons” and so could not be appointed to the Senate.⁷ Studying cases like these taught me early on that final courts of appeal tend to reflect the same values and prejudices as the political parties that appoint them.

My studies with Bloom deepened my skepticism of the moral relativism and utopian egalitarianism that was (and still is) fuelling modern progressive thought and politics. Indeed, what we now know as “identity politics” and “critical race theory” was unpacked and dissected by Bloom thirty years earlier in his bestselling book The Closing of the American Mind.⁸

More broadly, my years in Toronto cured me of the liberal understanding of Western history as inevitable progress—that as each new generation corrects the faults and prejudices of those who came before, our societies become more just, more democratic, better places to live. Yes, this understanding of history may have been persuasive one hundred years ago. The twentieth century was supposed to be the culmination of the Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions of the nineteenth century. But it did not work out that way. Instead, it became the century of the Nazi Holocaust in Germany and the Communist genocides in Russia, China, and Cambodia. In 1900, Germany was arguably more advanced than any other European nation. But by mid-century, Germany had methodically exterminated six million Jews and started a world war that killed over fifteen million soldiers and twice as many civilians.⁹

The Communist genocides were even worse. The Nazi Holocaust was an industrialized version of old-fashioned ethnic and racial prejudice—a source of conflict on all continents since recorded history began. What Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot did was new. They executed millions of their own countrymen—over sixty million¹⁰—because of their politics; because they were “enemies of the people.” These new totalitarian regimes persecuted and killed people not for what they did but for what they believed. In this sense, it was a throwback to the religious wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But now heresy was defined not as belonging to the wrong religion but as not belonging to the correct political party. So much for the “inevitable” progress of democracy and human rights in the twentieth century. And the outlook for the twenty-first century does not look much better. Freedom House, which has monitored the progress/decline of democracy globally for the past fifty years, reported that as of 2023, support for political rights and civil liberties has declined for the past seventeen consecutive years.¹¹

Suffice it to say that by the time that I left University of Toronto, I too was a neo-conservative. I subscribed to both Commentary and Public Policy and read almost everything Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz wrote. I now enthusiastically supported as US president the same Ronald Reagan I had protested against when he was governor of California only a decade earlier. I had become an ardent admirer of Winston Churchill, and of his latter-day successor, Margaret Thatcher. My evolution from the left-wing, counterculture politics of the 1960s to the neo-conservative movement of the 1980s was not unique. It turned out to be a path well travelled.¹²

Nor is this ideological evolution surprising. As Churchill is said to have observed, “Show me a young Conservative and I’ll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I’ll show you someone with no brains.” The quote may be apocryphal, but it conveys that liberalism is romantic and aspirational: our society is broken, and we are going to fix it. As Michael Novak observed, “Socialism is the residue of Judeo-Christian faith, without religion. It is a belief in community, the goodness of the human race and paradise on earth.”¹³ Who can be against that? The problem, Novak, continues, is that “the saintliness of socialism will not feed the poor.”

Conservatism is anti-utopian and practical: Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Since Conservatism is not aspirational, it does not appeal to young people. But as Kristol observed, getting “mugged by reality” leads many of us back to a more conservative perspective.

A sense of history also helps. Liberals tend to take the achievements of today’s liberal democracies for granted and are preoccupied with what’s wrong with Canada and other Western democracies. Conservatives recognize that the political freedom and economic prosperity enjoyed by Canada and the other Western democracies are a unique historical achievement. We must attend to their preservation—the principles, traditions, and institutions that have sustained our collective well-being. It remains a simple historical fact: Today in Canada, we enjoy more freedom; more security; more prosperity; more toleration and diversity; and more opportunities for women than 99 percent of the humans who have come before us.

Alberta: The Early Years (1981–1997)

We moved to Calgary in August 1981 when I accepted an assistant professor position in the political science department at the University of Calgary. We moved ourselves and all our belongings in a large U-Haul van. We had three children under the age of seven, a large dog, and soon an even larger mortgage with an 18 percent interest rate. We knew only two people in Calgary—Rainer and Robin Knopff, friends from graduate school at the University of Toronto. Neither Bambi nor I had even been to Alberta until I had flown out in March for an interview. In other words, we were much like the tens of thousands of other Canadians and non-Canadians who had flocked to the booming city in the preceding decades for opportunity and jobs.

In my first decade in Alberta, I had no intention of joining a political party or running for public office. How could I? I wasn’t even a Canadian citizen. Plus, I was much too busy with teaching, writing, and publishing; working to achieve tenure at the University of Calgary; raising three kids; junior hockey; and coaching Little League baseball.

My initial teaching assignments included teaching the department’s course in American Politics. To better engage my students, I regularly drew comparisons with parallel Canadian issues and events. I emphasized the role that the US Senate plays in protecting the interests of the smaller Western states, many of which are oil producers. Alberta was (and is) in a similar situation—small/poor in population relative to Central Canada but rich in oil and gas. Having grown up in Casper, Wyoming—which at that time described itself as the “Energy Capital of the Rockies”—I appreciated how the US Senate balanced the interest of the less-populated states (two senators for each state) with the practice of “rep by pop” in the House of Representatives.

In 1981, Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had implemented a “National Energy Program” (NEP) that kept domestic oil and gas prices well below the higher global price. This policy was popular with consumers/voters in Ontario and Quebec (who together constituted a majority of seats in the House of Commons) but had a strong negative effect on the energy sector in Alberta. Many oil and gas companies closed or sold their operations in Alberta. Jobs were lost and unemployment soared. My lectures used a comparative case study that explained how in the US, representatives from the energy-poor but voter-rich East Coast states had tried to enact similar legislation but were blocked by the Senators from the oil-producing Western states.¹⁴

Shortly thereafter, a new national political party—the Reform Party—was being formed by Preston Manning and Western Canadians. Their mantra was “THE WEST WANTS IN.” And it caught on. Many Westerners were angry about the NEP and its negative impact on their communities. One of Reform’s principal policy planks was a demand for “Triple E Senate Reform”—elected, equal, and effective—basically the American model. As I was already lecturing on this issue, I began writing some op-eds for the local newspapers in Calgary that explained how the US Senate had allowed less-populated, oil-producing Western states to avoid an American version of an NEP.

The “northern peso” experience was another one of the factors that led to my early involvement with the new Reform Party. By the time I decided to enter provincial politics, fiscal responsibility was not just an abstract concept. It had become personal. Over the preceding decade, I had lived through two successive government debt crises—one provincial, one federal.

In the 1990s at the federal level, there was a reckoning with bondholders for the runaway spending and deficits of both the Trudeau and Mulroney federal governments. The Government of Canada’s accumulated net debt had exploded from $300 billion in 1970 to $1 trillion by the time Liberal Leader Jean Chrétien became prime minister in 1993.¹⁵ These numbers had consequences. The value of the Canadian dollar had plummeted to 63 cents US. In 1995, the Wall Street Journal referred to the Canadian dollar as the “northern peso” and described Canada as “an honorary member of the third world.”¹⁶

Again, this had a personal connection for me. When I arrived in Canada in 1973 as a graduate student at the University of Toronto, I had to pay US$1.05 to purchase a Canadian dollar. I was impressed. Having travelled and worked in Europe the preceding two years, I equated a strong national currency with a strong, well-governed country. Canada clearly qualified!

Twenty years later, it was the opposite. In 1993, the year the Canadian dollar bottomed out at 63 cents US, we had just sent our two older children off to universities in the US. Notwithstanding the substantial scholarships they both received, there was still travel and room and board, and this had to be paid in US dollars, which now cost us $1.40 Canadian. We calculated that in that decade (1993–2002), helping to pay the education costs for our three children in US dollars swallowed two-thirds of my wife’s after-tax income.

At the provincial level, there was a similar reckoning with Alberta’s spiralling debt. In 1993, when Ralph Klein took over the leadership of the PC Party, he inherited a structural deficit of almost $3 billion per year and a net debt of over $22 billion. Interest on the debt was consuming 24 cents of every tax dollar collected in Alberta. The ensuing “Klein Revolution” saw drastic cuts in government spending and services, starting with a 5 percent across-the-board reduction in all public sector salaries. I supported the Klein cuts as the “tough medicine” needed to get Alberta back on track fiscally even though they hit us directly. Both my wife and I were subject to the public sector salary cuts (me at University of Calgary; her as a teacher in the Calgary public system). The “northern peso” experience was one of the factors that led to my early involvement with the new Reform Party.

I also began writing op-eds on the new political role of the Supreme Court of Canada. In 1982, Canada adopted a constitutionally entrenched Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The new Charter applied to both federal and provincial governments, and it explicitly gave the courts the power to enforce it. In the Charter’s first decade, the Supreme Court actively exercised this new power to strike down numerous federal and provincial laws—almost all resulting in more liberal policy changes. By 1992, I had published two books on this topic: Morgentaler v. Borowski: Abortion, the Charter and the Courts and Charter Politics (co-authored with Rainer Knopff).¹⁷ The former won the Alberta Writers’ Guild award for Best Non-Fiction Book of the year. Both books explained and critiqued the court’s new judicial activism and attracted considerable attention within the academy. I think it was in recognition of this work that in 1995 I was awarded the Bora Laskin National Fellowship in Human Rights.¹⁸

I was also an outspoken critic¹⁹ of both the 1987 Meech Lake Accord and its successor, the 1992 Charlottetown Accord.²⁰ Both had strong support among political, economic, and media elites across Canada, but both would have had negative policy consequences for Alberta and Western Canada. Specifically, they would have made reform of the Senate either impossible (Meech) or meaningless (Charlottetown). The then-nascent Reform Party ended up opposing both as well. In the end, both were defeated in part because of strong opposition from Western Canada.

By the mid-Nineties, I was writing op-eds on Senate reform and the courts for both the Calgary Herald and the Calgary Sun. These caught the attention of Ted Byfield—a staunch Western conservative, a strong supporter of the Reform Party, and publisher of the weekly magazine Alberta Report. Soon I was being frequently interviewed and quoted. Byfield loved the Reform Party, and the Reformers all loved and read Alberta Report. So it was not surprising that I was soon introduced to the founder and first leader of the Reform Party, Preston Manning.

The introduction was made by Stephen Harper—then just a graduate student in our Economics Department, but already working with Manning. Harper began to bring Manning to campus to meet with a few professors and graduate students who were interested in the Reform Party’s policies. These monthly meetings usually included me and also Tom Flanagan, Barry Cooper, and Rainer Knopff from the political science department, plus some economists such as Robert Mansell. My contributions to these meetings were focused on Senate reform, federalism, and court decisions involving the Charter of Rights.

Manning and his mission impressed me. So having now acquired my Canadian citizenship (1991) and my promotion to full professor (1993), I joined the Reform Party. I began to attend Reform Party events and got to know some of their Alberta candidates. In the 1993 federal election, my wife and I held a “meet and greet” coffee for Stephen Harper, who was now the Reform candidate in Calgary West, our federal riding. Harper easily won, and for the next four years, I routinely had dinner with Stephen whenever I came to Ottawa.

The connections between my writing and the growing strength of the Reform Party did not go unnoticed. In 1992, Jeffrey Simpson, the Globe and Mail’s national political columnist, coined the phrase “the Calgary mafia” to describe a group of conservative professors at the University of Calgary. These included Tom Flanagan, Barry Cooper, Rainer Knopff, and myself, all in the political science department; David Bercuson, a historian; and Robert Mansell, an economist. Simpson described us as “controversial, outspoken and conservative,” and asserted that we were now “public figures … [whose] work has influenced those who are active in the Reform Party.”²¹ A few years later we were described more politely as “the Calgary School” by an American political scientist who wrote, “The works of these scholars are being read across Canada (even in translation in Quebec), and are playing a defining role in the Canadian political debate of the mid-1990s.”²²

Notwithstanding any of these developments, I was still a full-time prof at the university. But while I had never consciously aspired to it, I guess I had become what is now called a “public intellectual,” which is a form of political leadership.²³ When I spoke in public, I spoke as an engaged academic, not as an elected politician. This all changed in 1998.