By Lloyd Mackey

PRESS GALLERY colleague Brian Lilley, who provides Parliament Hill news and analysis to the influential CFRB group of radio stations across Canada, has a most interesting blog post, this week. In it, he reveals that Toronto-area Liberal MP John McKay has been designated by his leader, Michael Ignatieff, to help the party reach out to evangelical Christians.

Here is the link to the post in question. I would suggest that OttawaWatch readers take a close look at it, but in any case, will summarize some aspects for purposes of historical context.

Lilley suggests that McKay, first elected in 1997, is the right person for the evangelical-recruiting job.

McKay is a member and past moderator of Spring Garden Church, a strong inner-suburb Baptist congregation with vigorous evangelical leanings. Further, he was a co-founder of the Canadian division of the Christian Legal Fellowship, a North-America-wide organization of Christian lawyers.

And, even further, his voting record on same-sex marriage (against) and his pro-life stance will help him, as Lilley puts it, "in speaking to a community he knows well but that the Liberals have avoided like a plague."

I read Lilley's post with interest and generally agree that his thrust is accurate. Ignatieff has indeed recognized the need for the Liberals to "recapture" evangelicals, if it is to have any future crack at power in Canada.

Having said that, I would like to provide some context to the discussion, both with respect to McKay's own approach to the faith/political interface, and to some of the other players involved in the mix.

* * *

McKay has been both articulate in the advancement of moderate social and fiscal conservative concepts, and outreaching toward the moderate sectors on the conservative side of the fence.

When he was first elected, and the Reform party was the official opposition, it often seemed that when it came to articulating Reform-style conservatism, McKay was without a peer on either side of the house. And there seemed to be fair evidence that Preston Manning and other Reformers relied on McKay to communicate their particular perspective inside the Liberal caucus.

Moreover, since being on the opposition benches, McKay has successfully brought forward a couple of private member's bills that specifically addressed the freeing up of the development and relief process. Those bills were an outcome, in part at least, of his involvement, before entering politics, in evangelically-oriented Christian development projects.

Continue article >>

And, in order to see that his legislation made it through the Senate, once they passed the House of Commons, he worked with Conservative Senator Hugh Segal. (Segal's introductory words in his 2006 autobiography should not be forgotten, in recognizing the significance of that McKay-Segal linkage. In The Long Road Back: The Conservative Journey, 1993-2006 (Harper-Collins, 2006), Segal supplies a poignant commentary on the effect of his youthful orthodox Jewish background, on his discovery of both community and conservatism.)

* * *

Besides Segal, the "other player" I would like to mention is Liberal Senator David Smith. Readers of OttawaWatch will recall my periodic references to Smith and his close family ties to the Canadian evangelical community.

Smith, in his younger years, was a Trudeau cabinet minister and apparently helped persuade his boss to include a reference to God in the preamble to the constitution. Later, during Jean Chretien's tenure, he played a key role in building Liberal strength, federally, particularly in Ontario. Keep in mind that, during those years, the Liberals were electing over 100 MPs from Ontario. That figure has dropped to just over one-third of that total, during the Conservative resurgence.

Smith, a Baptist himself, has retained close contact with the Pentecostal community from which he was sprung. (Both his late father, C.B. Smith and his brothers, Robert and George, were/are outstanding Pentecostal leaders.)

That religio-political astuteness stood him in good stead in helping evangelicals to feel comfortable with the liberal political culture, particularly in Ontario. The lack of success of the Liberals in the west likely had something to do with the fact that the party could not penetrate the evangelical culture west of the Ontario-Manitoba border.

* * *

McKay, it would appear, if Brian Lilley has things well-pegged, could be Smith's de facto successor in the effort to attract evangelical votes to the Liberals, particularly in Ontario.

But his success in that area is not a "done deal". Rather, there are some other interesting options, one of which is being test-driven at the moment. It involves the concept of political realignment and involves the way in which the Liberals are relating to the Conservatives, in getting the budget passed.

That means that McKay's success could come in a different area and could involve "redefining victory", to adapt and paraphrase some of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's recent comments about Canada, Afghanistan and the Taliban.

* * *

Lloyd Mackey is a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa and author of Stephen Harper: The Case for Collaborative Governance (ECW Press, 2006), More Faithful Than We Think: Stories and Insights on Canadian Leaders Doing Politics Christianly (BayRidge Books, 2005) and Like Father, Like Son: Ernest Manning and Preston Manning (ECW Press, 1997). Lloyd can be reached at lmackey@canadianchristianity.com.

March 12/2009