Stockwell Day
Categories: 1950 births | Members of the Canadian House of Commons from British Columbia | Alberta MLAs | Conservative Party of Canada MPs | LGBT rights opposition
Stockwell Burt Day, MP (born August 16, 1950), is a Canadian politician. He served as leader of the Canadian Alliance party, before being ousted from that position. He remains a prominent member of the Conservative Party of Canada.
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Early life and career
Day was born in Barrie, Ontario, and lived in a number of places in Canada during his youth, including Toronto and Montreal. He attended the University of Victoria.
Day had a number of careers before being elected to the Legislative Assembly of Alberta for the riding of Red Deer North in 1986. He continued to hold that seat for many years and in 1997 he was appointed Provincial Treasurer (Minister of Finance).
Leadership of the Canadian Alliance
In 2000, Day chose to run for leader of the newly-formed Canadian Alliance party. After a heavily-publicized campaign, Day came first in the Canadian Alliance leadership election on July 8, 2000, defeating former Reform Party leader Preston Manning and prominent Ontario Tory strategist Tom Long.
Day was subsequently elected as MP for the riding of Okanagan—Coquihalla in British Columbia. During his initial days as leader, Day gained much popularity, and appeared poised to mount a formidable challenge to the incumbent Liberal Party. In the period before the September 2000 general election, however, Day attracted the most attention when he showed up at a news conference on a Jet Ski wearing a wetsuit, advocating that Members of Parliament spend less time in session in Ottawa and more at home in their constituencies.
Day's reliance on photo ops would later work against him: After taking reporters to a technology firm, he remarked about "brain drain" to the USA, only finding out that the owner had moved to Canada from the United States eight years earlier. The next day, in a speech at Niagara Falls, he remarked that Canadian jobs were flowing south just like the Niagara River, when in fact the river flows north. Later, Day was doused with chocolate milk by communist Julian Ichim as he made a grand entrance for a speech at Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario. While changing, he joked that he "should have been wearing the wet suit."
One of his policies was famously satirized during the 2000 federal election campaign by Rick Mercer onThis Hour Has 22 Minutes. Day's platform had a point that the federal government should be required to hold a referendum on any subject if three percent of the electorate signed a petition requesting this. The comedy show riposted by putting a petition on their website calling for a referendum to require Day to change his first name to Doris. Although not a legal petition, the troupe considered their point made when, in the end, the website's counter claimed more than a million signatures - substantially more than the three percent that Day had proposed.
The leader's debate also included another Day photo op: Responding to a Globe and Mail headline earlier in the campaign, Day held up a sign saying "NO 2-TIER HEALTHCARE" in large letters during the televised leadership debate. As props were against the rules, he claimed it was his lecture notes.
The election resulted in an increase of seats for the Alliance, but the hoped-for breakthrough in Ontario did not occur. The night of the election, prior to Day speaking to party faithful, a producer for the CBC which was covering the speech got into trouble when a live microphone in the control room caught him making a sexually related comment about Day's daughter-in-law, Julianna Thiessen Day, who had once represented Canada at the Miss Universe pageant. The CBC later apologized.
Although Leaders of the Opposition are occasionally sworn into the Queen's Privy Council for Canada, Day was not.
After the election, Day ran into problems over the funding by Alberta taxpayers of his defence in a defamation of character lawsuit. It was discovered that the Alberta government had secretly paid $792,000 to settle a defamation lawsuit filed against him. The lawsuit, filed by lawyer Lorne Goddard, arose as the result of a letter Day wrote criticizing Goddard's legal representation of a man accused of possessing child pornography.
Questions also arose over whether Day knew about a private investigator who had been hired by the Alliance to dig up dirt to smear the Liberals.
During the summer of 2001, a split occurred within the party ranks in which Chuck Strahl and Deborah Grey led a group of dissident MPs who split with the Canadian Alliance and sat as the Democratic Representative Caucus in the House of Commons, entering a short-lived coalition agreement with the Tories.
Political career after leadership
In the fall of 2001, Day agreed to step aside and recontest the leadership, and in the March 2002 Alliance leadership election, Day was defeated by Stephen Harper. Day remained an MP and a prominent member of the Canadian Alliance shadow cabinet, serving as critic for Foreign Affairs. In March of 2003, Day and Harper co-wrote a letter to The Wall Street Journal in which they condemned the Canadian government's unwillingness to participate in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Day later appeared as a speaker at a "Canadians for Bush" rally in the Niagara region, organized by controversial right-wing minister Tristan Emmanuel.
In December of 2003 the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada merged to become the Conservative Party of Canada. Day did not run for the leadership of the new party and he continues to serve as both a Member of Parliament and as the Foreign Affairs critic for the Conservative Party of Canada.
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| Preceded by: {{{before}}}}|before=Jim Hart}} | {{{title}}} {{{years}}}}|title=Member of the Canadian House of Commons from Okanagan—Coquihalla|years=2000–}} | Succeeded by: {{{after}}} |