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Conservatives gathered in Toronto this past weekend to choose their new leader, Saskatchewan MP Andrew Scheer. But at a very different convention in Vancouver exactly 30 years ago, the conservative movement opened a new chapter of its history with the birth of the Reform Party under leader Preston Manning. It was an event that shaped the future of Canada’s political right, and its legacy can still be felt three decades on.

Thanks to the Reform Party, no Conservative leader today can afford to ignore any branch of the political right, said Rick Anderson, Manning’s former campaign director.

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“If you draw a straight line from where Reform was (in 1987) to 30 years later, its successor political movement … it’s quite astonishing and I think quite encouraging about the health of Canadian democracy,” Anderson said.

The Reform Party grew out of a sense of alienation in western Canada, fed in part by Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s much-maligned National Energy Program in the 1980s. Amid rumblings of western secessionism, Manning’s party instead demanded a seat at the federal political table — his famous slogan was “the West wants in.”