Manitoba Alliance MP Brian Pallister gave Joe Clark a run for his money in the 1998 Tory leadership race. Pallister’s name is on the lips of many unite-the-Righters. Other Right fusionists tossed Manitoba Mulroney minister Jake Epp into the leadership pot. Epp declined.

But the biggest Manitoba dark horse of all is the recently defeated Tory premier of Manitoba. Gary Filmon is being wooed for the Alliance leadership by none other than his former justice minister and Alliance MP, Vic Toews.

Toews sees the shortish and uncharismatic Filmon as a veritable lion tamer. According to Toews, Filmon, in his 11 years as Manitoba premier, “kept control of a diverse caucus that included MLAs who supported both the Reform party and the Tories federally.” Toews is convinced that uniting the raucous Alliance with the cautious Clark Tories would be a piece of cake for the lion-taming ex-Manitoba Tory premier.

Filmon is but the latest of a string of Manitoba politicians and premiers to be called from their molehill mountain retreats to save the nation. Arthur Meighen, who was briefly an MP from Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, was in the 1920s the first Western prime minister. By 1942, Meighen, a Tory leader once again, had been crushed in the 1940 election on the conscription issue. In ’42, Meighen lost a byelection on that same issue.

Still, Meighen had a plan. He wanted to create either a new party of the Right or give his Tories a new name and a new leader that would hint of modernity and goodness. Meighen headed for the molehills of Manitoba. There Meighen preached convergence and renewal to Manitoba Liberal Progressive Premier John Bracken.

Bracken was known as the Western farmers’ best friend. After the leaderless United Farmers of Manitoba were elected in 1922, they begged Bracken to become their leader and premier. From 1922 to the early ’40s under the label of Progressive and Liberal Progressive, John Bracken was master of the molehill agrarian politics of Manitoba.

Meighen and Bracken got along. Bracken just loved to be handed political parties on a platter and agreed to be the new Tory messiah. Bracken had only one stipulation. If chosen Tory leader, the party’s name was to be changed to Progressive Conservative.

These days the Clark Tories are offering Alliance dissidents and regulars the removal of the name Progressive from Progressive Conservative, as proof they are no longer Red Tory do-gooders hell bent to pass progressive legislation. But Bracken’s Progressives were anything but radical do-gooders.

Bracken’s Progressive Manitoba boasted more one-room schools than any place in Canada and one of the country’s most rundown highway systems. Bracken’s Sunday blue laws made Calgary and Edmonton look like sin cities by comparison.

Politically, Bracken was both a fiscal and a social conservative. Bracken easily embodied Meighen’s dreams of the 1940s of a united fiscally and socially conservative Right that would topple the Mackenzie King Liberals.

For Mackenzie King, Manitoba’s John Bracken was as big a godsend as Alberta’s Stockwell Day is for Jean Chrétien today. King knew that Tory Bay Street fiscal conservatism wedded to Progressive social conservatism was going nowhere in a rapidly urbanizing wartime Canada.

Returning soldiers wanted meaningful reform. So did the women who had replaced them in Canadian shops and factories during the war. Bracken was easily beaten in the election of 1945.

In 1967, after Dalton Camp had bested Diefenbaker on leadership review, Manitoba Tory Premier Duff Roblin, winner of four straight Manitoba elections, was the odds-on favorite to win the Tory leadership convention and go on to national victory. In 1967, Roblin’s reforms in Manitoba were the most extensive and far-reaching in Manitoba’s history.

Roblin the reformer had the Winnipeg business community reluctantly acceding to his reforms as the best way to outflank the CCF-NDP. But like Gary Filmon, Roblin was shortish and uncharismatic. His rhetoric was muted and stilted.

When I worked for Camp in Roblin’s last provincial campaign in 1966, Camp asked me what I thought of the Manitoba Tory premier. “He looks like the groom on a wedding cake,” said I. So does Gary Filmon.

Roblin’s political instincts were not that sharp, either. Expecting Diefenbaker to get a big convention vote which Roblin could then inherit, Roblin spurned the Dief-dumping Camp, pushing him into Robert Stanfield’s arms. Stanfield won.

There has never been Ottawa gold in the molehills of Manitoba. Not for Arthur Meighen, John Bracken, Duff Roblin or Gary Filmon.

Like Roblin before him, Gary Filmon will find being the groom on a wedding cake much more nourishing – and much safer than a run for the leadership of any so-called united Right.