On the surface, a Western regional party looks like a straightforward and common sense solution to an obvious problem: the intractability of Laurentian Canada regarding Western interests, needs and self-understanding. But to succeed a Bloc West would have to surmount two major problems and one unexplored implication.

The first problem is historical. We’ve already had a clearly regional party: the Reform Party. But it wouldn’t stick to its original mission, and very soon decided to “go national”. But its efforts to become the single national voice of the centre-right failed. What followed were years of infighting, including various splits, reformations and at last the merger of the Reform/Alliance Party with the Progressive Conservatives to form the Conservative Party of Canada.

But this new party, as Kurl points out, “seemed to tilt to Ontario and Quebec in terms of the place that needed to be the centre of gravity for Conservative votes.” Since the split between the two non-Liberal/non-left parties was a guarantee of endless rule by the now utterly corrupt Liberal machine (remember the Sponsorship scandal? Remember the Gomery Commission?), a merger in effect saved the country from complete degeneration. Western needs, interests and goals were once again subordinated to national demands. At the time, that might have seemed to Western Conservatives a price worth paying. No longer.

A second problem with the Western Canada Party, as Kurl said, is that it’s hypothetical rather than real. When the Reform Party began in 1987 the remnants of the Mulroney PC coalition were already falling apart in the West, largely because of policies that favoured (to use no stronger a term) Quebec. In addition, Reform had solid intellectual and financial backers. The modern-day analogs are nowhere in sight today, although it’s possible they might emerge. As Norm Atkins, a long-serving Conservative strategist from Ontario, once said: “Politics is about friends, loyalties, and ideas. In that order.”

For the present, a Western Canada Party is simply an idea. Its best and most obvious prospects to become an actual party and movement would seem to lie in a major reorientation of the current Conservative Party. That is a lot to ask, to put it mildly.

Despite these two obvious limitations, let’s explore the implications of a Bloc West analogous to the BQ. The BQ was created around the time that the Reform Party rose to national prominence, but for opposite reasons. Formed in 1987, Reform opposed the Progressive Conservatives, in part, because they introduced the Meech Lake Accord, which would have made the Province of Quebec as special in law as many Quebeckers already thought it was in practice. Conversely, the BQ was created because the Meech Lake Accord ultimately failed.

It claimed to promote the sovereignty of Quebec in the federal legislature much as the Parti Québécois did provincially. It could have been considered a temporary operation fated to disband following secession. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out in their favour, though they came close in 1995.

The early 1990s were also the times of the Liberal Government of Quebec under Robert Bourassa and his policy of fédéralisme rentable – which is as crass as it sounds. It means “profitable federalism”. Considered in that context, the Bloc was simply an integral part of the “national extortion racket”, as Andrew Coyne has termed it. That is, neither the BQ nor the PQ were ever serious about independence. Consider it another piece of evidence for just how “sophisticated” the political geniuses of Laurentian Canada really are in falling for this racket for decades on end. Of course the high point for the BQ federally came in 2004 when it ran under the slogan “Un parti proper au Québéc.” This means both a party belonging to Quebec or specific to Quebec, and a clean party in Quebec – in other words, one that’s in stark contrast to the corrupt Liberals.

Some would say the BQ backstory advances the cause for a Western-based party solely dedicated to advancing its own regional electorate’s interests. But does it really? Right out of the gate, a Bloc West would be hobbled by the fact that most or all of its members would be wounded federalists rather than Western separatists or “nationalists” (as some not-quite-separatist Quebeckers are called). With no underlying threat of separation, the Bloc West’s demands for a better deal might appear more like a whine than a tooth-baring snarl. Our “racket” would be seen either as inconsequential or as a transparent fraud rather than a carefully disguised one.