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Rick Anderson is a Canadian political strategist, public affairs commentator and public affairs consultant.
Anderson, a native of Montreal and Valleyfield, Quebec, was initially drawn to the Liberal Party of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. His first campaign experience was in the 1974 federal election, working in Ottawa West for Lloyd Francis, the Liberal candidate and past MP who won re-election that year. As a young Liberal, Anderson subsequently worked at the national headquarters of the Liberal Party of Canada from 1974–1976, during the tenure of Senator Gil Molgat as party president and Blair Williams as National Director. In 1976 Anderson moved to Parliament Hill as a special assistant to cabinet minister Judd Buchanan of London West, and then worked on Prime Minister Trudeau's election tour in the 1979 election. Anderson remained actively involved in the Liberal Party on a volunteer basis throughout the 1980s, assisting in several campaigns including those of Ontario Liberal leader Stuart Smith and Ontario Premier David Peterson.
Anderson served as campaign manager for the 1984 Liberal leadership campaign of Don Johnston, assisted with Prime Minister John Turner's 1984 campaign, and supported Paul Martin in the Liberal Party's 1990 leadership election.
With the Liberals' 1990 selection of Jean Chrétien as leader, Anderson moved away from the Liberal Party, and within a couple of years became heavily involved with the newly emerging Reform Party of Canada.
Although by then a Reform supporter, Anderson did not share the party's deep opposition to the constitutional reforms known as the Charlottetown Accord. Instead, during the 1992 referendum he campaigned on behalf of the unusuccesful Yes side, working with Tom d'Acquino and business leaders in what was then known as the BCNI.
Under Reform leader Preston Manning, Anderson directed Reform's national campaigns in the 1993 election and in the 1997 election, as the party grew from a single seat in Parliament to Official Opposition. In the 1993 campaign, he worked very closely with party chairman and later campaign chairman Cliff Fryers, with key early MPs such as Diane Ablonczy, Deb Grey, Chuck Strahl, Monte Solberg, Jay Hill, Elwin Hermanson and with key party executives such as Gordon Shaw, Neil Weir, Virgil Anderson and Glenn McMurray. Despite early differences in approach with key players such as Tom Flanagan (who left the party headquarters staff) and Stephen Harper (who left Parliament in early 1997), by the 1997 campaign the core campaign team had expanded to include veteran MP John Reynolds, pollster Andre Turcotte, advertising executive Bryan Thomas, Jim Armour, Phil von Finckenstein, Kory Teneycke, Stephen Greene, Darrel Reid, Morten Paulsen, Lisa Samson, Ian Todd, Ellen Todd, Paul Wilson, Nathalie Stirling, Nancy Brancombe, and a number of other young staff and candidates who continued on to become key players in subsequent campaigns and in the future Conservative government.
Between the 1993 and 1997 campaigns, Anderson acted as a Reform ambassador to provincial governments and to the business community, working to thaw historically-chilly relations with the new party. Early relationships forged with Ontario Conservative leader Mike Harris and key lieutenants Tony Clement and Tom Long assisted Harris's election as Ontario Premier and laid the groundwork for future collaboration. Improved relations were also established with key figures in the campaign teams of Alberta Premier Ralph Klein and future BC Premier Gordon Campbell.
Following the 1997 election, from 1998 to 2000 Anderson was a leader in the Reform Party's United Alternative campaign to "unite the right". Other key Reformers who were involved in that campaign included Cliff Fryers, Deb Grey, John Reynolds, Jason Kenney, Nancy Branscombe and Ken Kalopsis. Key Conservatives included Peter White, Tony Clement, Tom Long, Thompson MacDonald, Rod Love, Michael Fortier, Don Morgan, Bob Dechert, John Capobianco and Sandra Buckler. Alberta Premier Ralph Klein and Ontario Premier Mike Harris were quiet but key backers of the reconciliation initiative.
After the morphing of Reform into its new incarnation as the Canadian Alliance in 2000, and following the new party's disappointing 2000 election results, Anderson and newly elected leader Stockwell Day were publicly critical of one another, with Anderson leaving the new party's executive, the party fracturing, and Day eventually resigning. Stephen Harper succeeded Day, reunited the Alliance and the Progressive Conservative Party into today's Conservative Party, and went on to become Prime Minister in the 2006 federal election.
Anderson has been a member of the board of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy. [1] He is a supporter of democratic reform, including Senate reform and more proportional representation. Since 2003, he has served on the board of directors and advisory board of Fair Vote Canada. In 2007, he was campaign chair of the YES side in Ontario's provincial referendum on MMP, which had been recommended by the Ontario Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform.
Professionally, Anderson served as an executive with Hill & Knowlton and predecessor companies from 1980 to 1995, in Ottawa and Toronto, Canada; London, England; and Washington, DC. He left H&K in 1995 to launch his own consulting practice, ASCI Anderson Strategic Consulting Inc. From 2004 to 2008, Anderson served as president and CEO of Zip.ca, a Canadian online DVD rental company. Anderson is currently EVP of Interborder Holdings Ltd, parent of Walton International in Calgary, Alberta.
Since 1993, Anderson has been a frequent commentator on national affairs, including with CTV's Canada AM, CBC Radio's As It Happens, CBC TV's Newsworld, the Toronto Star, Edmonton Journal, Ottawa Citizen and CBC's The National . During the 2006 Canadian federal election campaign, CBC's The National had a recurring feature throughout the campaign entitled "Campaign Confidential", in which an unidentified "former campaigner", who was actually Anderson, provided detailed written analyses of the campaign which were then read by an actor on television. The identity of Anderson as the analyst was revealed on-air by Peter Mansbridge on January 24, 2006, the day after the election.
For the 2008 election campaign, Anderson was on CBC's The National along with David Herle, as one of "The Insiders" commenting on-air and on the CBC's website regarding the unfolding campaign.
Anderson subsequently provided political commentary on CBC Newsworld's Politics broadcast, hosted by Don Newman, and authored a blog for The Globe and Mail .
Rick currently focuses on advising clients involved in the global energy transition, as Principal of e4 Strategies Inc.
Charles Joseph Clark is a Canadian businessman, writer, and politician who served as the 16th prime minister of Canada from 1979 to 1980.
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. Harper is the first and 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 2000 Canadian federal election was held on November 27, 2000, to elect members to the House of Commons of Canada of the 37th Parliament of Canada. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's Liberal Party won a third majority government.
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, 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 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".
The 2004 Conservative Party of Canada leadership election took place on March 20, 2004, in Toronto, Ontario, and resulted in the election of Stephen Harper as the first leader of the new Conservative Party of Canada. The Conservative Party was formed by the merger of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, in December 2003.
Canada holds elections for legislatures or governments in several jurisdictions: for the federal (national) government, provincial and territorial governments, and municipal governments. Elections are also held for self-governing First Nations and for many other public and private organizations including corporations and trade unions. Municipal elections can also be held for both upper-tier and lower-tier governments.
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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.
The Young Liberals of Canada (YLC) is the national youth wing of the Liberal Party of Canada. All members of the Liberal Party aged 25 and under are automatically members of the YLC. The Young Liberals of Canada are an official commission of the Liberal Party and the largest youth political organization in Canada.
Alberta separatism comprises a series of 20th- and 21st-century movements advocating the secession of the province of Alberta from Canada, either by joining the United States, forming an independent nation or by creating a new union with one or more of Canada's western provinces. The main issues driving separatist sentiment have been the perceived power disparity relative to Ottawa and other provinces, historical grievances with the federal government dating back to the unrealized Province of Buffalo, a sense of distinctiveness with regards to Alberta's unique cultural and political identity, and Canadian fiscal policy, particularly as it pertains to the energy industry.
Western alienation, in the context of Canadian politics, refers to the notion that the Western provinces—British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba—have been marginalized within Confederation, particularly compared to Ontario and Quebec, Canada's two largest provinces. Expressions of western alienation frequently allege that those provinces are politically over-represented and receive out-sized economic benefits at the expense of western Canadians.
This article covers the history of the New Democratic Party of Canada.
The 2019 Canadian federal election was held on October 21, 2019. Members of the House of Commons were elected to the 43rd Canadian Parliament. In keeping with the maximum four-year term under a 2007 amendment to the Canada Elections Act, the writs of election for the 2019 election were issued by Governor General Julie Payette on September 11, 2019.
The House of Commons Special Committee on Electoral Reform (ERRE) (French: Comité spécial sur la réforme électorale) was a special committee of the House of Commons of Canada established in 2016 during the 42nd Canadian Parliament to investigate reforms to the Canadian electoral system. The formation of "an all-party Parliamentary committee to review... [electoral] reforms" was an election promise by Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau in the 2015 federal election. After the Liberals won a majority in the election, and Trudeau became Prime Minister of Canada, he indicated the formation of a special committee was a priority in his mandate letter for Minister of Democratic Institutions Maryam Monsef. Shortly after the committee submitted its report to Parliament on December 1, 2016, Monsef was transferred to the position of the Minister of Status of Women and Karina Gould took over the electoral reform file. Shortly after taking her position, Gould announced that the government would no longer be pursuing reform of the electoral system, stating "It has become evident that the broad support needed among Canadians for a change of this magnitude does not exist."
The 2021 Canadian federal election was held on September 20, 2021, to elect members of the House of Commons to the 44th Canadian Parliament. The writs of election were issued by Governor General Mary Simon on August 15, 2021, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau requested the dissolution of parliament for a snap election.
Melissa LantsmanMP is a Canadian politician and public relations executive who serves as the Member of Parliament for Thornhill in the House of Commons of Canada. A member of the Conservative Party of Canada, she was elected in the 2021 Canadian federal election. Lanstman is the first openly gay and first Jewish woman ever elected as a Conservative MP. Upon Pierre Poilievre's election as Conservative Leader, he named Lantsman one of two deputy leaders along with Edmonton MP Tim Uppal.