Both images courtesy of Tom FlanaganJournalist Lorne Gunter (left) and Tom Flanagan (right) showed a united front in catching the same fish. This explanation is courtesy of Mr. Flanagan: “The picture comes from a fishing trip about three years ago, to Gordon Lake in the NWT. On the trip were David Bercusson, Barry Cooper, Lorne Gunter, and me. David, Barry, and I had been going on these trips for years, but it was Lorne’s first time (he is now a regular). Lorne had done almost no fishing in his life. I took him with me the first morning and showed him how to set up the tackle, bait the hook, etc. He was trolling while I drove the boat. We’d been fishing less than an hour when he got a strike and finally landed the 36-pound lake trout you see in the picture. I netted the fish, took the hook out, and with Lorne’s camera snapped a picture of him holding the fish. I’ve been fishing all my life and had never even seen a fish like that. Lorne goes fishing and catches a monster the first time, in less than an hour. You may well ask, Where is the Just Society? Anyway, I consider it partly ‘my’ fish because of the contributions described above. After Lorne sent me the picture, I had a friend take a shot of me with her digital camera and scan my head onto Lorne’s body. That’s why I look so relaxed, because I wasn’t actually holding a slippery 36-pound fish! I’d love to simply publish the picture and thus complete my campaign of historical revisionism. But in fairness to Lorne, we have to ask his permission and promise to put in some kind of explanation.”
Flanagan has gone on to reprise that role in a half-dozen other federal aboriginal disputes, including Victor Buffalo, et al. vs. The Queen — a landmark claim for more than $1 billion in damages by the Samson Cree Nation at Hobbema, near Edmonton, over Ottawa’s handling of its oil and gas royalties. The Manitoba and Alberta governments have also hired him for their own battles over treaty rights. “What he’s become is a very convenient tool for the government,” says David Chartrand, president of the Manitoba Métis Federation.
Flanagan’s expert-witness stints have not proved unrewarding, but friends insist he is driven not by money but ideology. “He’s concerned the state should not adopt people as wards,” says Allan Kornberg. “It eventually has a corrosive effect on the entire society.” That libertarian loathing of special rights for any group is the philosophical underpinning of Flanagan’s most provocative work, First Nations? Second Thoughts, which unleashed outrage not only in aboriginal circles, but in the usually restrained corridors of academe. “These aren’t second thoughts,” says Joyce Green, an associate professor at the University of Regina and a Metis herself. “They’re the same old first thoughts that the colonizers came with from Europe. It’s a celebration of the original arguments that supported the subordination of indigenous peoples.”
What ignited the most fury was Flanagan’s contention that aboriginals were simply conquered peoples who’d been bested by Europeans with a higher degree of “civilization,” as he termed it. That argument, peppered with references to “savagery,” hadn’t been heard in polite company for decades. “There’s a fundamental racism that underpins his view,” says Radha Jhappan. “It’s an amazingly selective reading of history and it’s driven by a particular right-wing agenda that wants to undermine the claims of collectivity.”
But Flanagan’s fans cheered the book as a brash intellectual ice breaker on a subject that has bedevilled Ottawa policy-makers for years. “What Tom was trying to do was demythologize a lot of stuff that needed demythologizing,” says David Bercuson. “Political correctness had settled over the issue like a wet blanket.”
When First Nations? Second Thoughts won the $25,000 Donner Prize in 2001, Flanagan’s foes weren’t surprised. The award is funded by the Donner Canadian Foundation, which set out to promote a Reaganite agenda in this country. The foundation, in fact, funded Flanagan’s basic research with a $25,000 grant.
But when the Canadian Political Science Association cpsa awarded Flanagan’s book its prestigious Donald Smiley Prize, all hell broke loose. Gurston Dacks, an expert in aboriginal rights who chaired the three-member jury, quit after finding himself outvoted. In a tense, closed-door session, the cpsa’s board decided to keep Dacks’s walkout under wraps and even today no one will talk about it. But in political-science circles the decision left lasting bruises. “It fractured the community,” says Joyce Green, “because it implicated us all in rewarding something that many of us felt was deeply wrong.”
Today, Flanagan’s work remains an explosive topic, but few of his colleagues are willing to criticize him — at least on the record. After an introductory political-science textbook he co-authored was dropped from Ontario’s approved list of high-school texts because of its “racial, religious, and sex bias” against women and Jews, he became active in the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, an aggressive lobby of professors fighting political correctness, on whose board he now sits.
Certainly, by last June there was no lack of opinion that Flanagan’s own writings were controversial, if not right off the mainstream map. As the Conservatives’ campaign director, he seemed perfect fodder for the sort of Liberal attack ads already depicting Stephen Harper as a scary extremist with a hidden agenda. The mystery is why Paul Martin’s admen didn’t jump on that tailor-made target.
One reason for their reluctance may well have been case #C181-01-01010. After twenty years, the Manitoba Metis’ land claims are still in federal court and the stakes for Martin’s government are high — vast tracts of prime Manitoba real estate, including slices of Winnipeg, and cash reparations that could run to billions of dollars. In that battle, as in at least two others, the Department of Justice is still pinning much of its defence on Flanagan’s expert testimony.
The Liberals’ silence not only left him untouchable, but it may have allowed Harper to sidestep the question posed by aboriginal leaders: does he share Flanagan’s views? Rick Anderson, who has worked with both Harper and Flanagan in the Reform Party, has no doubts. “I’d be astounded if it were otherwise,” he says. “They’re intellectual soulmates, philosophical soulmates.”
In a cramped, windowless office at Calgary’s Canada West Foundation, Preston Manning tries to keep his eye on the big picture. Down the hall in a glass-walled corner suite, the foundation’s president, Roger Gibbins, had just vented his post-election spleen in a Globe opinion piece, blasting Paul Martin’s campaign rhetoric for stoking Western alienation. That tirade hardly seems unexpected from a think-tank long regarded as an arm of Manning’s defunct Reform Party, but in his own commentaries, Manning, the foundation’s star fellow, strikes a more conciliatory note. He is careful never to betray bitterness toward the two protegés who helped orchestrate his ouster from the movement he founded — Stephen Harper and Tom Flanagan — both once his closest aides. “These politicians who keep score,” Manning says, “it’s just a waste of energy. Now if you talk to my wife you might get a different story.”
For nearly two decades, Manning had dreamed of launching a Western-based populist movement that took up where his father’s Bible-thumping Social Credit Party had left off. In 1987, with Westerners furious at Brian Mulroney’s gst and mollycoddling of Quebec, he sensed the time was ripe. A policy wonk who’d worked on systems theory for a U.S. defence contractor during the Vietnam War, Manning asked Gibbins — then head of U of C’s political science department — to pull together some intellectual wattage to help hammer out a platform.
During those brainstorming sessions in the departmental conference room, Flanagan and his colleagues not only met Manning, but the grave young grad student who was already his policy chief. Harper was just finishing his Master’s degree with Robert Mansell, a neo-conservative economics professor who joined the group, but Gibbins can’t remember Harper uttering a word. “He had a quiet, very serious, imposing presence,” recalls Radha Jhappan. “I got the feeling he was one of the people pulling Manning’s strings — definitely playing an influential role.”
For Manning, the relationship with Harper was “very much an intellectual one. Stephen was one of the few people who could write speeches for me with very few changes,” he says. Not that Harper had any knack for Manning’s trademark folksy phraseology. “Stephen’s preferred method of communication is policy-writer language,” he says. The down-home parables that Manning added came from cocking a careful ear to the small talk after political meetings — part of the process he calls “democratic discourse.” Harper had no time for it, then or later. “Stephen worried about the dark side of populism,” Manning says. “He’d feel I went overboard on all this grassroots stuff.”
In October, 1987, when Manning launched the party in Winnipeg with the rallying cry, “The West Wants In,” its policy manifesto may have been Harper’s handiwork, but the Calgary School could see its own fingerprints on the pages of that Blue Book. Still, once Reform got rolling, Manning’s ideafests at the university petered out. “We’d filled a vacuum,” Gibbins explains.
