Equal as Citizens by Richard Starr

Author:Richard Starr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Formac
Published: 2014-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

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There’s a certain sad irony to the fact that Bob Rae’s NDP government, which vainly tried to buck the neo-con currents, ended up siding with those forces in its criticism of the transfer system. Although Rae’s government gave qualified support to equalization per se, its embrace of equal treatment for all other fiscal transfers (regardless of need) fitted well with the prevailing zeitgeist. Political breezes that had been building throughout the 1980s and early 1990s reached gale force in 1993 with the shattering of the Progressive Conservative Party and the rise of the western-based Reform party and a Quebec-based separatist party. (Those same winds would blow Bob Rae and the NDP out of office in 1995, to be replaced by the tax-cutting, poor-bashing Mike Harris.) And although the Liberals handily won the federal election, the government headed by Jean Chretien and his finance minister, Paul Martin, bore only slight resemblance to Liberal governments of the previous thirty years.

The electoral success of the Reform Party owed something to the so-called Calgary School, an informal academic think-tank that began to emerge in the 1970s.7 What is striking about the Calgary School (aside from the fact none of its members were born in Alberta) is the way in which its members were inspired by scholars, all born around 1900, who became exiles from Nazi Germany in the 1930s: Friedrich Hayek, Leo Strauss, and the political philosopher Erich Voegelin. Calgary School members Tom Flanagan and Barry Cooper both studied Voegelin while getting doctorates in political science at Duke University. Flanagan, born in Illinois, was the first of the group to arrive at the University of Calgary, landing there in 1968. The only one in the group who was not a political scientist, Montreal-born military historian David Bercuson, arrived in the early 1970s. Rainer Knopff, who took his undergrad degree at McMaster University, arrived in 1978 to be followed in 1981 by California-born Ted Morton. Both Knopff and Morton did graduate work at University of Toronto, where they studied under Straussians Walter Berns and Allan Bloom (later author of the million-selling The Closing of the American Mind). Vancouver-born Cooper arrived in the early eighties after a decade at York University. He quickly made up for lost time, becoming one of the group’s more prolific propagandists. Morton taught for twenty-three years before being elected to the Alberta legislature in 2004 and running unsuccessfully for party leader in 2006. He and Knopff specialized in attacking the Canadian legal system, especially the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Calgary School became the idea factory for the Reform Party, founded in 1987 by Ernest Manning’s son, Preston. Tom Flanagan signed on as Preston Manning’s chief of staff in 1990 but departed before the 1993 election. Among the Reform MPs elected in 1993 was Stephen Harper. Toronto-born and raised, Harper arrived at the University of Calgary in the early 1980s to study economics and was introduced to Hayek’s work, which became the foundation of his graduate studies.8 He studied under Robert

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