The 1983 Progressive Conservative leadership election was held on June 11, 1983, in Ottawa, Ontario to elect a leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (PC Party). At the convention, Montreal businessman and lawyer Brian Mulroney was elected leader on the fourth ballot, defeating former prime minister and party leader Joe Clark.
Joe Clark became party leader in 1976 and led the PCs to a minority government in the 1979 federal election, though lost power only nine months later. In 1981, about a third of delegates were dissatisfied with Clark's leadership and were in favour of holding a new leadership convention. Clark refused to resign as leader and stayed on, though in January 1983 still about a third of delegates were unhappy with Clark's leadership. Clark resigned as leader, triggering a leadership election. If he won, he would have been able to demonstrate a 'clear mandate' to the opponents of his leadership.
A big tent party, a politically diverse set of eight candidates ran for the leadership. President of the Iron Ore Company of Canada Brian Mulroney, along with former Bay Street investment executive Michael Wilson and sports owner Peter Pocklington, gained support among the pro-business faction of the party. Clark and former Mayor of Toronto David Crombie were popular among Red Tories while Member of Parliament John Crosbie was popular among the social liberal wing of the PC Party. John A. Gamble and Neil Fraser were lesser-known minor candidates who only had a few followers. Quebec played a major role in the leadership election, as Crosbie and Wilson's chances of victory were hampered by their inability to speak French. Mulroney, on the other hand, was a fluently bilingual native Quebecer who was popular among PC members from Quebec.
After the results of the first round were released, the set of eight candidates was halved to four; Wilson and Pocklington endorsed Mulroney while Gamble and Fraser endorsed Crosbie. In the second round, Crombie was eliminated and endorsed Crosbie. Crosbie, Mulroney and Clark were the three candidates left standing in the third round, and Clark was the only one in the trio who never received an endorsement. After Crosbie placed third, he released his delegates to vote as they chose. In the fourth round, Mulroney was elected leader with 54.4% of the votes cast compared to Clark's 45.6%.
Mulroney later went on to carry the Progressive Conservatives to a massive landslide victory in the 1984 federal election, and a second majority government in 1988. Clark, Crosbie, Crombie and Wilson would all gain prominent positions in Mulroney's cabinet.
Background Joe Clark had been leader of the PCs after winning the 1976 leadership convention. While Clark was credited with uniting the PCs after the difficult years under the leadership of Robert Stanfield and with leading the party to victory in the 1979 federal election, the opposition defeated his government over a divisive austerity budget. The Progressive Conservatives lost the subsequent 1980 federal election, and found themselves returned to opposition.
After the 1980 defeat, Clark decided to stay on. At the party's 1981 convention, 33.5% of delegates voted in favour of holding a leadership convention to choose a new leader. This was generally interpreted as being a high level of discontent with Clark's leadership. Clark's internal strategy, led by his Chief of Staff Lowell Murray, was to bring dissidents into the party structure.
Clark's external strategy was to change the party's longstanding strategy of obtaining large wins in English Canada and then appealing to Québec voters with the advantage of holding government to obtain a majority. Believing that the party's base was now too narrow to win government, Clark began an attempt to broaden the party to include women, multicultural communities, and nationalist Quebec voters.
Though the approach began to pay some dividends, including favourable attention in Quebec after the patriation of the Canadian constitution, opponents remained prominent in the party and the national media. They could generally be divided into two groups: the first were not convinced Clark had the ability to win another election, given his personality and the unpopularity of the 1979-80 government. Others within the party maintained that Clark's outreach and moderate policy decisions were aloof from the party's grassroots, which had begun to embrace neoliberal and monetarist reforms that were being pursued in the United Kingdom and United States.
At the party's national convention in Winnipeg in January 1983, the chief issue was again Clark's leadership. The issue mobilized supporters and detractors of Clark to a degree not usually seen at biennial conventions. At the convention 66.9% of the delegates voted against, and 33.1% voted for leadership review. Clark, seeing only a marginal gain in popularity among his party, decided with his advisers that he would resign as leader, and run in the convention to succeed himself. This was seen within his inner circle the only way to drown out the opposition to his leadership, as the previous attempts to reach out to opponents had left the party leadership unable to push back.
After a short rebound after the patriation of the constitution, the Liberals lagged in opinion polls, with the PCs ahead at times by over 20 percentage points. While Clark would probably have thought this an advantage, it also made the leadership a much more lucrative prize than it would have been.
Candidates
Joe Clark, 44, Member of Parliament (MP) for Yellowhead, Alberta, had been the party leader since 1976 and served as prime minister from 1979 to 1980. He was supported by the more centrist elements of the party, Quebec nationalists, some Red Tories, and most of the party's Toronto-based establishment. Clark at this point was fluently bilingual and making inroads into Quebec, where support for the Tories was traditionally the weakest. Clark's efforts to broaden the party's ideological reach were generally seen as making him weaker in traditional conservative bedrocks such as Western Canada and rural Ontario.
Brian Mulroney, 44, was a Quebec lawyer and businessman who had finished third (behind Clark and Claude Wagner) at the 1976 leadership convention. He was the early front-runner to replace Clark. As former head of the Iron Ore Company of Canada, Mulroney attracted much of the party's pro-business faction in Toronto and Montreal. Mulroney was generally seen as personable and capable, though his previous attempt at the leadership had cast him as superficial. Mulroney's main pitch was that as a fluently bilingual native Quebecer, he would enable the party to break the Liberal Party's stranglehold on Quebec's seats in the House of Commons.
John Crosbie, 52, MP for St. John's West, Newfoundland, had been Clark's Minister of Finance in 1979, and known as an accomplished debater with a sense of humour. He was generally seen as the most personable candidate. He attempted to distinguish himself by adopting what he called a "continentalist" platform, with the centrepiece being free trade with the United States. His campaign was chiefly hobbled by his inability to speak French, and by a political base that was concentrated in the small province of Newfoundland. Before entering federal politics, Crosbie had been a senior provincial cabinet minister in Newfoundland.
Michael Wilson, 46, MP for Etobicoke Centre, Ontario, was a well-respected Bay Street banker and had been Minister of State for International Trade in Clark's government. He attracted modest support within his home province of Ontario, inherited the bulk of the support in Quebec for Peter Blaikie's abortive campaign, and gained only a smattering of support from other provinces. While Tories respected his financial acumen, he was an uninspiring speaker who struggled in French.
David Crombie, 47, MP for Rosedale since 1978, had been a popular Mayor of Toronto prior to entering federal politics and served as Minister of Health and Welfare in Clark's cabinet. Crombie attracted moderates who opposed Clark's leadership. Crombie was the only candidate to openly identify himself as a "Red Tory".
Peter Pocklington, 41, was an Alberta entrepreneur best known for owning the Edmonton Oilers hockey team. He ran a campaign based on strict adherence to the principles of free enterprise, with most of his focus on a flat tax. He gained some support through the Amway retail system.
John Gamble, 49, was the MP for York North, Ontario. He attracted a small band of supporters with a hard-line right-wing anti-Communist platform. Gamble had been an outspoken critic of Clark, and had hoped to parlay his role in Clark's downfall into a strong showing at the convention and a role in a future Progressive Conservative cabinet.
Neil Fraser, 49, was a civil servant who had been fired for publicly opposing the conversion to the Metric system in Canada. He mounted a campaign that had few followers.
The campaign
As with prior conventions, the leadership would be chosen by a delegated convention. Each of the party's constituency associations was permitted to elect six delegates to the convention: two "youth" delegates and four regular delegates, one of which had to be female. Student associations were able to send three youth delegates each to the convention. PC members of federal and provincial parliaments were ex officio delegates, and provincial party associations were able to elect "at-large" delegates. Associations controlled their own nomination procedures, so delegate selection meetings were held sporadically throughout the country, concluding by the end of April. To win, a candidate would have to win 50% + 1 of valid delegate votes; In the event a majority was not reached, the candidate finishing last would be automatically eliminated and new ballots would be held until a majority resulted.
While campaigns focused on electing slates of sympathetic delegates, delegates were not bound to vote for any particular candidate once elected, and around 60% were "undecided" in the race after the elections had taken place. This meant that the primary focus of campaigning after April was to appeal to delegates and influence their preferences in later rounds.
Clark already had a sizable campaign team up and running by the time he called the leadership convention, as he had mobilized support to help gain delegates for the biennial convention. Mulroney and Crosbie had been laying the groundwork for a campaign for some time, with Crosbie expecting Clark to lose or resign soon, and Mulroney supportive of the anti-Clark movement.
Quebec Quebec riding associations, which had tended to be inactive between elections, were overrun with Clark and Mulroney organizers in short order and many held votes within the first week of the campaign with set delegate slates. Clark's supporters tended to be former Union Nationale, Créditiste, and nationalist voters, while Mulroney's support came primarily from disaffected Liberals. These contests were especially fierce: voters only had to be PC members for five days before the vote was held, leading to many "five day wonders" that simply paid the $3 membership fee, with party operators receiving $10 commissions per voter. The lack of an age limit meant that children as young as 9 were recruited by the Clark and Mulroney camps to vote, with one 15-year-old recruiting 20 of her classmates. Most infamously, a CBC TV report showed a bus full of obviously intoxicated men from a homeless shelter travelling to vote for Mulroney in Montreal.
The Clark and Mulroney camps roughly split the province's delegates, which was seen as a strategic victory for the Clark side after Mulroney's boast that Clark "won't have enough support in Quebec to get a bridge game."
Davis and Lougheed