Before Stephen Harper, Brian Mulroney was the most hated politician in Canadian history. Fourteen years out of office, Mulroney was caught up in a scandal that revealed he accepted several hundred thousand dollars in cash from Karlheinz Schreiber. Yet, Mulroney still fills a room, as he demonstrated recently when he gave a speech at Toronto’s Albany Club. And Mulroney loyalists don’t criticize him in public the way some from Harper’s circle are doing to the recently ousted prime minister now by placing almost all of the blame for the party’s recent loss on him.

Mulroney today is our triumphantly flawed statesman, proving anyone – or any party – can reinvent themselves politically if they have the skill and willpower. As the great John Huston said in the 1974 film noir Chinatown: whores, politicians and ugly buildings all get respectable if they last long enough.

Still, you have to wonder if Harper will be able to fill a giant hotel ballroom of veteran political hacks 22 years from now.

What you don’t have to wonder about are two major points in Mulroney’s Albany Club speech. The Conservatives would do well to hand out a text of that speech at their next caucus meeting, if they haven’t done so already.

Back in 2003, members of the former Progressive Conservative and Alliance parties finally learned a hard lesson. They had to put their differences aside and form a united Conservative party if they ever wanted to form government: the enemy they could not beat was vote splitting.

“We do not need to learn this lesson again,” Mulroney told the faithful gathered at the Albany Club. Yet, Conservatives are in danger of having to learn that lesson a second time. Red Tories, as most former Progressive Conservatives are known, had been frozen out of Harper’s government for years. Harper seemed to dislike the Red Tories even more than he dislikes Liberals. Political views that are somewhere to the right of the position traditionally occupied by the Red Tories was and still remains very much in charge of the Conservative party.

The Conservatives’ biggest mistake may have been to allow their party to become a personality cult around one man. The party will probably need at least two years to choose a new leader. The winner will have a tough unification mission. That process could take some time, so it’s likely the Liberals really will have to screw up to lose the next election in 2019.

Another lesson that Mulroney spoke about in his recent speech and that the Conservatives need to learn involves the wise use of political capital: “You accumulate political capital to spend it on noble causes for Canada. If you’re afraid to spend your capital, you shouldn’t be there.” In other words, voters want to see what George H.W. Bush called “the vision thing.”

The Conservative party that has existed since 2003 practised small-ball politics. That is, Harper liked to dole out small initiatives that looked like favours to targeted voter groups, such as endless grants to snowmobile clubs. So did the New Democratic Party, with promises such as capping ATM fees.

The Conservative thinking was that with the so-called “progressive vote” split between the Liberals and the NDP, all the Conservatives had to do was hold onto their base – which they succeeded in doing – and let the other parties split the vote. That had worked in all the elections that Harper’s Conservatives won; surely it would work again. That view only seemed more secure this time around, given that the NDP went into the election campaign in first place, with the Liberals a distant third.

Given the outcome of the election, it appears that the Conservatives have some tough conversations ahead.

Then there is the NDP, back in the Great Canadian Parking Lot of left-wing politics. Watch for talk of a merger with the Liberals. That is, if the Liberals are interested.

Eventually, the Liberals will revert to talking left but governing right. And unfavourable events will start to take a toll, as they do with any government.

But there won’t be a dent of any size in the Liberal’s political capital until midway through their second term. The new Trudeau era has begun.

The Tories’ mistake may have been to allow their party to be built around one man

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