David Orchard - Anti-merger Activist

Anti-merger Activist

Orchard unsuccessfully attempted to prevent the merger. In a high-profile news conference in early November he suggested that the new Conservative Party of Canada was "an abomination, conceived in deception, born in betrayal." He urged PC Party members to vote "no" on any referendum and also encouraged "loyal members" to express their frustrations with Peter MacKay. Orchard argued that his efforts were not based on self-promotion but rather on preserving Canada's founding party and preventing a takeover of the moderate values and membership of the PCs by the neoconservative values of the Alliance membership.

Orchard opposed the right wing, and in his view slavishly pro-U.S. views of the Canadian Alliance. Orchard argued that before the merger was announced, the Canadian Alliance and its leader, Stephen Harper, were highly unpopular and a moment was fast approaching for the PCs to reemerge as the national alternative to the governing Liberals. Orchard suggested that MacKay's "traitorous" actions put the above scenario in jeopardy. Some other notable Tories such as Joe Clark, Flora MacDonald, Brian Peckford and Sinclair Stevens also opposed the merger.

In a last-ditch attempt to stop the merger, Orchard went to court, seeking an injunction against the merger vote. The case was thrown out of court on the grounds that a merger through a "national convention" did not violate the PC Party constitution. The merger was ratified with 96% support by members of the Canadian Alliance in a one-member-one-vote process on December 5. The PC Party opted for a "virtual convention" in which delegates were selected in ridings and then attended local provincial urban centres in which they voted for or against the merger.

Orchard described the process as fraudulent and undemocratic, as the convention delegates never actually voted together in any fixed location. The convention produced a result in which 90.5% of the Progressive Conservative Party delegates voted in favour of the merger. However, Orchard and other opponents claimed the result was not representative of the true PC membership, pointing out that new memberships in the party were sold almost up to the day of the vote, many of which were card holders of the larger Canadian Alliance and the PC members were being swamped.