Stockwell 'Lazarus' Day Steps Aside

The oft-resurrected Conservative is hanging up his wetsuit for good.

Following the announcement this week that cabinet members Stockwell Day and Chuck Strahl will soon follow fellow westerners Jim Prentice and Jay Hill by leaving the Conservative government, the Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin says the Tories are looking increasingly like the party of Ontario, and increasingly like a party made up of jerks. All four “were low key and reasonable,” he writes, “not inclined to engage in character assassination. They won admiration for their sense of decency, so it’s in this respect that their departures will hurt the government.”

On his Maclean’s blog, John Geddes recalls that Day’s loss of the Alliance leadership to Stephen Harper in 2002 was a watershed moment for Canadian conservatives, because in rejecting Day’s social-conservative religious leanings, they became immediately more electable. “Day was a riveting political figure not so much because his persona exposed rifts in the broader Canadian political world,” Geddes writes, “but because he compelled activists inside the conservative movement to think hard about what face they needed to put forward to succeed in national politics.”

The Ottawa Citizen editorial board sounds genuinely saddened by Strahl and Day’s departure, writing “cabinet is losing two men who respect their constituents and their political rivals and take public service seriously.” The Citizen also points out that losing the pair, who were originally elected on the Reform and Alliance tickets, respectively, is a sign that the Conservatives are shedding their “protest-party” roots and have become one of Canada’s two establishment parties.

The Edmonton Journal editorial board recalls Day’s “gaffe-a-day” time at the head of the Alliance party, which included memorable missteps like showing up for a press conference in a wetsuit, and proposing that any issue gaining 350,000 petition signatures should trigger a national referendum. For you young’uns out there, that latter gaffe prompted Rick Mercer to collect 1,000,000 votes demanding Day change his first name to “Doris.” Given he made such howlers, the Journal says “the resurrection of Stockwell Day from the ashes of his rocky early years in Ottawa has to be seen as one of the most impressive in Canadian political history.”