Darrel R. Reid (born June 3, 1957 in Grande Prairie, Alberta) is a Canadian policy advisor, political manager and federal candidate in two Canadian federal political elections. He is particularly notable as having occupied positions as the Chief of Staff or Deputy Chief of Staff of two Canadian federal political leaders, Preston Manning and Stephen Harper.
Reid obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Regina in 1981. This was followed by a Master of Arts degree in 1984 and a Master of Library Sciences degree in 1985, both from the University of Toronto. In 1994, he completed a doctorate in history at the Queen's University. The topic of his dissertation was the life of Albert Benjamin Simpson.
Between 1988 and 1994, during the course of his doctoral studies, Reid served as Information Officer and Manager, Publishing and Information Systems, of the Institute of Intergovernmental Relations, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University.
Following the completion of his doctorate, Reid served as Director of Policy and Research for the Reform Party of Canada. In May 1996 he became Chief of Staff to Preston Manning, Leader of Canada’s Official Opposition. In 1997, he ran unsuccessfully as a Reform Party candidate for the riding of Lanark-Carleton.
From 1998 to 2004, Reid was the president of the evangelical Christian organization Focus on the Family Canada. He promoted conservative Christian family values, while actively campaigning against issues such as divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage.
In 2004, Reid left Focus on the Family Canada to become Vice-President of Current Corporation, a high-tech firm specializing in night vision systems for the marine industry.
In May 2005, Reid won the Conservative nomination for Richmond and ran unsuccessfully in the subsequent federal election. Following his January, 2006 election loss, Reid became Vice President of Project Development for the Work Research Foundation, an organization with the stated mission to "influence people to a Christian view of work and public life."
In September, 2006, Reid announced that he had accepted an offer to become the Chief of Staff for Environment Minister Rona Ambrose. This was an appointment requiring the approval of the Office of the Prime Minister, in accordance with the practice established by the Prime Minister's office, following the Conservative Party minority election win earlier that year. Reid thereafter withdrew his candidacy for nomination to run again as the Conservative candidate in Richmond.
In April 2007, Reid was appointed Deputy Director of Policy and Research to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. [1] On July 7, 2008, one week after Guy Giorno assumed the position as the Prime Minister's new Chief of Staff, Reid was appointed Director of Policy in the Prime Minister's office, replacing Director of Policy and Research Mark Cameron. [2] Reid's first parliamentary position, commencing in 1994 and as noted earlier herein, had been as Director of Policy and Research for the Reform Party of Canada. Reid later was promoted to the position of Deputy Chief of Staff. In August 2009, Reid assumed additional responsibilities to those of Deputy Chief of Staff, becoming also the Prime Minister's Director of Regional Affairs. [3]
In August 2010, Reid became the Executive Director of The Manning Centre, a policy and research forum founded by Preston Manning. [4]
The Canadian Alliance, formally the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance, was a centre-right to right-wing federal political party in Canada that existed under that name from 2000 to 2003. The Canadian Alliance was the new name of the Reform Party of Canada and inherited many of its populist policies, as well as its position as the Official Opposition in the House of Commons of Canada. The party supported policies that were both fiscally and socially conservative, seeking reduced government spending on social programs and reductions in taxation.
The Reform Party of Canada was a right-wing populist and conservative federal political party in Canada that existed from 1987 to 2000. Reform was founded as a Western Canada-based protest movement that eventually became a populist conservative party, with strong social conservative and fiscal conservative elements. It was initially motivated by profound Western Canadian discontent with the Progressive Conservative Party government of Brian Mulroney.
Ernest Preston Manning is a retired Canadian politician. He was the founder and the only leader of the Reform Party of Canada, a Canadian federal political party that evolved into the Canadian Alliance in 2000 which in turn merged with the Progressive Conservative Party to form today's Conservative Party of Canada in 2003. Manning represented the federal constituency of Calgary Southwest in the Canadian House of Commons from 1993 until his retirement in 2002. He served as leader of the Official Opposition from 1997 to 2000.
Stephen Joseph Harper is a Canadian politician who served as the 22nd prime minister of Canada from 2006 to 2015. He was the first, and to date, only prime minister to come from the modern-day Conservative Party of Canada, serving as the party's first leader from 2004 to 2015.
The 1993 Canadian federal election was held on October 25, 1993, to elect members to the House of Commons of the 35th Parliament of Canada. Considered to be a major political realignment, it was one of the most eventful elections in Canada's history. Two new regionalist parties emerged, finishing second and third in seat count. Most notably, the election marked the worst defeat for a governing party at the federal level and among the worst ever suffered by a governing party in the Western democratic world. In a landslide, the Liberal Party, led by Jean Chrétien, won a majority government.
The Conservative Party of Canada, colloquially known as the Tories or simply the Conservatives, is a federal political party in Canada. It was formed in 2003 by the merger of the two main right-leaning parties, the Progressive Conservative Party and the Canadian Alliance, the latter being the successor of the Western Canadian–based Reform Party. The party sits at the centre-right to the right of the Canadian political spectrum, with their federal rival, the centre-left Liberal Party of Canada, positioned to their left. The Conservatives are defined as a "big tent" party, practising "brokerage politics" and welcoming a broad variety of members, including "Red Tories" and "Blue Tories".
Diane Ablonczy is a former Canadian Member of Parliament who served in the House of Commons of Canada. Ablonczy represented Calgary ridings from 1993 to 2015, sitting first with the Reform Party of Canada, then with the Canadian Alliance, and finally with the Conservative Party of Canada. She served as the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs from January 4, 2011 to July 15, 2013. She was previously appointed Minister of State (Seniors) on January 19, 2010. She held the position of Minister of State from October 30, 2008, Secretary of State from August 14, 2007, and served as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance from February 2006. Previously, Ablonczy served as Chief Opposition Critic for Citizenship and Immigration, Health, and Human Resources Development.
Deborah Cleland Grey, is a retired Canadian member of Parliament from Alberta for the Reform Party of Canada, the Canadian Alliance, and the Conservative Party of Canada. She was the first female federal leader of the Opposition in Canadian history. She currently serves on the advisory board of the Leaders' Debates Commission.
The Unite the Right movement was a Canadian political movement which existed from around the mid-1990s to 2003. The movement came into being when it became clear that neither of Canada's two main right-of-centre political parties, the Reform Party of Canada/Canadian Alliance (CA) and the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (PC), was independently capable of defeating the governing Liberal Party. The objective of the movement, therefore, was to merge the two parties into a single party. The goal of uniting the right was accomplished in December 2003 with the formation of the Conservative Party of Canada.
Barry Devolin, is a former Member of Parliament in the House of Commons of Canada and an academic.
Scott Jeffrey Reid is a Canadian politician. He has served in the House of Commons of Canada since 2000, and currently represents the Ontario riding of Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston as a member of the Conservative Party.
Ian Angus "Ross" Reid is a former Canadian politician who most recently served as the Chief of Staff to Newfoundland and Labrador Premiers Kathy Dunderdale and Tom Marshall. Reid is a former Progressive Conservative member of Parliament who served as the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans and Minister for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency under Prime Minister Kim Campbell.
The Calgary School is a term coined by Ralph Hedlin in an article in the now defunct Alberta Report in reference to four political science professors – Tom Flanagan, Rainer Knopff, Ted Morton, and Barry F. Cooper – who became colleagues at Alberta's University of Calgary in the early 1980s. They shared and promoted similar ideas about how political scientists could shape the rise of a particular kind of conservatism in Canada – informed by theories based on Friedrich Hayek and Leo Strauss. Cooper and Flanagan had met in the 1960s at Duke University while pursuing doctoral studies, while Knopff and Morton were both mentored by Walter Berns, a prominent Straussian, at the University of Toronto. They were economic, foreign policy, and social conservatives who were anti-abortion and were not in favour of legalizing gay marriage. They supported Stephen Harper in his 1993 election campaign, and former Alberta premiers Ralph Klein and Jason Kenney. A fifth University of Calgary professor, David Bercuson, co-authored publications with Cooper but was more loosely associated with the group and, at times, disagreed with the others on these public policies and candidates.
Conservatism in Canada is generally considered a movement which is primarily represented by the modern-day Conservative Party of Canada in federal party politics, as well as various centre-right and right-wing parties at the provincial level. Far-right politics have never been a prominent force in Canadian society. The first party which called itself "Conservative" in what would become Canada was elected in the Province of Canada election of 1854.
Rick Anderson is a Canadian political strategist, public affairs commentator and public affairs consultant.
Kory Teneycke is the former vice-president of Sun News Network. He was also the former Director of Communications to the Prime Minister's Office under Stephen Harper. He was the campaign manager for the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party during the 2018 Ontario election.
Michael Douglas Finley was a Canadian Senator and was Campaign Director for the Conservative Party of Canada during the 2006 and 2008 federal elections and the party's director of Political Operations.
Stephen Greene is a Canadian politician and an independent member of the Senate of Canada. He was appointed on the advice of Stephen Harper to the Senate on January 2, 2009, and sat as a Conservative Senator until May 2017, when Senate Leader Larry Smith removed him for his support for Senate reform proposals put forth by the governing Liberal Party. Greene then decided to sit as an "Independent Reform" Senator.
Brian Gerard Loughnane is an Australian business and political strategic adviser. He was the federal director of the Liberal Party of Australia from February 2003 until January 2016 and campaign director for the centre-right Liberal-National Coalition in the 2004, 2007, 2010 and 2013 federal elections in Australia. Loughnane is Deputy Chairman of the International Democracy Union since April 2019.
The Canada Strong and Free Network based in Calgary, Alberta, is a not-for-profit political advocacy group that was established in 2005 by Preston Manning to promote conservative principles. It was known for the annual "high-profile" Manning Networking Conference (MNC). The Manning Centre operates the for-profit think tank the Manning Foundation, which undertakes some research and analysis, while the Manning Centre self-describes as a "do-tank", that focuses on advocacy, training and networking events for conservatives.