Poisoned Chalice: The Last Campaign of the Progressive Conservative Party

D.M.L. Farr is professor emeritus of history at Carleton University in
Ottawa and the editor of Life and Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

Kim Campbell, Canada’s 19th prime minister, occupied that office for
only 133 days. Much of that period was taken up with the campaign for
the general election of October 25, 1993, a campaign in which Campbell
appeared as both part-author and victim. This book, written from the
close vantage point of a senior aide to both Brian Mulroney and Kim
Campbell, is the record of that disastrous Progressive Conservative
campaign.

Campbell’s chief asset, according to Conservative strategists, was
that her image was radically different from Brian Mulroney’s. This was
true, but it was not enough to keep the Conservatives in office.
Campbell was simply out of her depth in leading a political party in an
election campaign. Canadians wanted substance from their prospective
political leaders; what they received from Campbell was merely image and
style. The outcome of this mismatch was the greatest disaster in
Canadian electoral history.

McLaughlin, although a sympathetic critic of Campbell, does not pull
his punches in listing the shortcomings of the party leader and those
who organized her campaign. His book describes the party’s fumbling
under the failure of the Meech and Charlottetown accords; the search for
a successor to Mulroney; the euphoria when Campbell, the “dream
candidate,” was chosen; the run-up to the election call; and the
day-by-day unfolding of the campaign. There are many insights, drawn
from the author’s experience, on how political campaigns should be
managed, and many more on what made the 1993 Conservative campaign such
a debacle. The chair of the campaign team, John Tory, and the
pollster/strategist, Allan Gregg, must shoulder most of the blame, but
Campbell must take her share. She did not prepare herself adequately for
the encounters she faced; she did not show political judgment; she was
not at home in the party she led. The comment of the old political pro
Lowell Murray was devastating: “She didn’t know what she didn’t
know.”

On the whole, McLaughlin’s account is clear and persuasive. As a
political “staffer” accustomed to dealing with the media, he slips
easily into the jargon of his trade: “little interaction meant little
spinning”; did a story have “legs”?; could the leader be kept from
going “off message”? He ends his book with a plan for a Conservative
revival, emphasizing the main lesson of the botched 1993 campaign: that
“standing for something does matter.” Poisoned Chalice will be sad
reading for Progressive Conservatives but a valuable primer for students
of Canadian politics.