Leaders on the Frontier with Preston Manning

No region of North America has had more experience – much of it positive – with populist movements, populist parties, and populist governments than western Canada. It was the populist Progressive and Farmers parties that elected the first woman to Parliament, the first women to provincial legislatures, and which secured recognition of women as “persons” in Canadian law. It was populist legislators in the prairie provinces and in the House of Commons that secured the Natural Resources Transfer Agreement which granted ownership and control of natural resources to the people of those provinces. And the first healthcare system offering universal coverage regardless of the patients ability to pay was established by a populist government in Saskatchewan.

Preston Manning, former Leader of the populist Reform Party and the Official Opposition in parliament, is a long time student and practitioner of populist politics. He was also his party’s science critic and is a long time student of the application of science to public policy. Mr. Manning believes that the bottom up political energy exhibited by the recent Freedom Convoy and those supporting it has the potential:

• To force the creation of an independent, non-governmental investigation of governmental mismanagement of the COVID pandemic, including its misuse of science to support its positions.
• To facilitate a change in government at the federal level depending on the extent to which Canadians demand a better balance between health protection and the protection of their rights, freedoms, and economic wellbeing, and whether the Official Opposition in parliament under a new Leader can respond positively and vigorously to that demand.

Mr. Manning thoroughly explores both these possibilities in a futuristic fictional work entitled The COVID COMMISSION which the Frontier Centre will be publishing, posting on its website, and exploring as part of its Leaders on the Frontier series.