Harper names his shadow cabinet

Canadian Press via Sun Media ^ | 2004-07-23 | Jim Brown

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OTTAWA (CP) - Conservative Leader Stephen Harper named a 40-member shadow cabinet Thursday, mixing old and new faces from every region of the country and billing the resulting team as a real government-in-waiting.

"We have the strongest, the most powerful official Opposition around this place in 25 years," Harper declared. "I think, frankly, we have a true alternative government for a country that needs a new government."

There were many parliamentary veterans on the list, including Peter MacKay as deputy leader, Stockwell Day as foreign affairs critic, Monte Solberg as finance critic and John Reynolds as House leader.

But there were notable newcomers as well.

Belinda Stronach, heiress to the Magna auto-parts fortune and former Harper opponent for the party leadership, will be trade critic.

Onetime Tory leadership hopeful Jim Prentice will be Indian affairs critic, former Progressive Conservative president Peter Van Loan will be social resources critic, and Steven Fletcher, the first quadriplegic elected to Parliament, will be health critic.

Conspicuous by their absence were MPs Randy White, Cheryl Gallant and Rob Merrifield, whose campaign comments on abortion and gay rights handed the Liberals a stick with which to beat Harper.

Relegated to the fringes was Scott Reid, who also sparked controversy with remarks questioning official bilingualism. He will be critic for northern Ontario economic development.

There are nine women on Harper's team, including Stronach and veteran Diane Ablonczy, the immigration critic.

Newcomer Rona Ambrose, a former Alberta government bureaucrat, will be intergovernmental affairs critic, and former broadcast executive and CRTC commissioner Beverley Oda will be heritage critic.

Twenty-six members of the shadow cabinet are from Western Canada - 11 from Alberta - reflecting the party's electoral success in that region.

There are nine from Ontario, where the Conservatives did far better than expected and hope to make further gains next time.

Three members, including deputy leader MacKay, are from the Atlantic

Two are from Quebec: Senate Leader John Lynch-Staunton, and Josee Verner, who failed to win a seat in the Commons but nevertheless was named critic for Quebec regional development.

Verner, a onetime organizer for the provincial Action democratique, will work with Harper's office to build Conservative strength in a province where the party did not elect a single MP.

Conservative strategists heralded the team as proof of the party's credentials as a moderate, centrist force.

They said that, with the Liberals reduced to minority status in the June 28 election, it was incumbent on them to show they have a team ready to take over running the country.

That meant, in part, dispelling the image of extremism associated with MPs like White, Gallant and Merrifield.

"There's certainly a sentiment within the party that would like to see MPs who step offside being punished," said one backroomer.

Harper, however, was reluctant to put it in those terms.

"I wouldn't make anything of absences of people," he said. "I've tried to put forward a representative team. . . . What you should take from it is that I have a lot of talent to draw from."

He left the door open for MPs who didn't make the shadow cabinet to play a role elsewhere, perhaps as caucus officers to be chosen later.

Harper also signalled - without going into detail - that he will be naming new staff to his office, in part to ensure "a much fuller francophone presence."

He has been under pressure to widen his circle of advisers beyond the current group of close allies, many of whom go back to his early years in politics.

The 99 seats the Conservatives took on June 28 exceeded the previous combined forces of the Canadian Alliance and old Progressive Conservatives, who merged to form the new party.

But Harper was dogged by Liberal efforts to paint the new group as just the Alliance in disguise.

In the closing days of the election campaign, Prime Minister Paul Martin seized on comments by White, who argued for overriding the Charter of Rights to ban gay marriage.

Harper had earlier been forced to fight off charges of social intolerance after Merrifield suggested women should be forced to seek counselling before having an abortion and Gallant compared abortion to the beheading of captives by Iraqi terrorists.

Reid, a longtime Harper confidant and financial backer, raised a storm when he mused about a drastic overhaul of official bilingualism policy that might see Ottawa no longer offer coast-to-coast services in both French and English.

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[youngtory]

These are great picks. A quadrapledgic MP gets a shadow cabinet post(health). If Martin did that then there would have been a lot of publicity in the media.

[Clive]

Stronach is new to elected office but I am still pleased that she has a shadow cabinet job. This will be excellent training for the day that the Tories take office and he needs Ministers from the Greater Toronto area.

Randy White, Cheryl Gallant and Rob Merrifield are going to have to serve some time in the wilderness, if only to teach them the meaning of party discipline in a parliamentary system, but they and their views cannot be ignorec. Each of them won his or her seat by margins in excess of 10,000 ballots.