Belinda Stronach could become Canada’s version of Arnold
Schwarzenegger if she wins enough votes of paid-up party members to
become head of the country’s new Conservative Party in a March
election. Only 37, she’s rich, glamorous, photogenic, designer
clad, and the daughter of an Austrian immigrant who is worth $600
million. If she becomes party leader, she will be its candidate for
prime minister in elections later this year.
For the last two years Stronach has served as CEO of Magna
International, the $13 billion auto parts manufacturer her father
founded. She’s the only woman CEO of a Fortune Global 500 company
based outside the U.S. Completely untested in politics, she shares
with Arnold both celebrity status and a famous Democratic political
connection in the U.S.: the Washington Post reports that
she has a close personal and business relationship with Bill
Clinton, with whom she has been constantly linked in gossip
columns. She has told friends that Clinton inspired her to enter
politics.
“She could become Canada’s Arnold or a morph of Bill and Hillary
Clinton,” says a Conservative Party activist. “But it’s the Clinton
connection that really worries Canadian conservatives.” Ms.
Stronach was asked about her friendship with Clinton at her
campaign launch in January. The National Post reported the
exchange: “Had she consulted with pal Bill Clinton on her campaign?
Next question please, she fumed.”
Four days later she did appear on the record, “I think he is a
great communicator,” she told the Toronto Star about
Clinton. “The American people have a lot of respect for that. He
tried very much to deal with women’s issues, with minority issues.
They call him the first, you know, black president of America, so
you know I respect that.” Sounds like Belinda has been taken in by
the Clinton blarney.
STRONACH’S TOUCHINESS IS understandable. She recently divorced her
second husband, a Norwegian four-time Olympic gold medal-winning
speedskater. She is thus the most eligible woman in Canada whether
or not she ever becomes prime minister.
Her friends have gone out of their way to downplay salacious
thinking about her friendship with Clinton. “They are good
friends,” a close friend of Stronach’s told the CanWest News
Service last year, “but there is not a romantic linkage. It’s just
not that way.… You shouldn’t jump to conclusions that they
are having a serious fling,” though the friend added Stronach is
attracted to Clinton. Another friend told the wire service that
Stronach is “intrigued” by Clinton’s “charisma and brainpower,
particularly his knowledge of world events.” Stronach, according to
that friend, said of Clinton: “‘The guy is really smart and he
really knows a lot of stuff.’”
A Magna spokesman says the two met when Mr. Clinton spoke at a
company event at its private golf course three years ago and
characterized their friendship as a “business relationship.”
Clinton spokesman Jim Kennedy said last year that the former
president “has met with Ms. Stronach and her father several times
over the past year to discuss the Clinton Library and
Foundation.”
Last year, the two were also spotted dining together at a
Toronto restaurant and sharing the Stronach family’s box at the
Preakness horse race. Frank Stronach, Belinda’s father, owns
Pimlico Race Course, where the Preakness is run. Last November, Ms.
Stronach was being honored with a humanitarian award at a Toronto
dinner when a cellphone rang. The caller was instantly connected to
a speaker phone. It was Bill Clinton calling from 12 time zones
away in China to congratulate Stronach and express regret for not
being able to be there in person.
NONE OF THIS IS REASSURING to Canadian conservatives. Ms. Stronach
wants to lower taxes but avoids talk of any budget cuts. She is
running on a vague quasi-Clintonian platform of fiscal conservatism
and social moderation, which includes support for gay marriage.
That mixture is likely to appeal to many in the new party, which is
a merger of the Canadian Alliance, a populist party based in the
western provinces, and the Progressive Conservatives, a party that
is strong in eastern Canada and governed the country under former
Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from 1984 to 1993.
Conservative skeptics point out that Ms. Stronach’s two most
high-profile supporters on the right, Mr. Mulroney and former
Ontario premier Mike Harris, sit respectively on Magna’s corporate
board and its international advisory committee. Other political
figures are more skeptical. Joe Clark, a former Progressive
Conservative prime minister and no right-winger, has attacked her
inexperience and refusal to participate in more than two debates.
Others are even harsher. “Her father sought to lead the Liberal
party in 1988,” says one Canadian Alliance member of parliament.
“Clinton adviser James Carville was a key speaker at last year’s
Liberal convention and has consulted with them. The last thing we
need is Clinton influence in both of our major political
parties.”
Her two major opponents for the party leadership are Stephen
Harper, the head of the Canadian Alliance, and Tony Clement, a
former health minister in Ontario. Both are serious policy wonks
and are frustrated at Stronach’s ability to avoid most debates and
pour vast amounts of money into her campaign for the votes of the
party members who will decide the leadership contest in March.
Supporters of both men are quietly trying to undermine the
Wonderwoman image the Stronach campaign is projecting. One points
to a profile in the National Post that hints that Magna is
still effectively being run by her father and that her “exposure to
the financial community has been limited to conference calls in
which she often relies on others to field queries.” Indeed, her
campaign office routinely deflects requests for interviews,
including one from me. Another critic hands over a Canadian
newspaper that characterizes her campaign as “Paris Hilton starring
in The Simple Political Life.”
BUT THERE IS NO DENYING that she generates excitement on the
campaign trail. In Calgary, a record 1,350 people bought tickets
last month to her speech at the Chamber of Commerce. A poll of a
sample of all Canadians in late January by Northstar Research
Partners found that 41 percent would prefer Stronach to lead the
Conservative Party, 28 percent would back Harper and only 9 percent
plumped for Clement.
The poll generated a lot of buzz until Charles Adler, a
columnist for the Winnipeg Sun, poured ice water all over
it. He noted that Northstar is partly owned by John Laschinger, a
Progressive Conservative campaign manager who nonetheless
moonlighted last year in a successful effort to elect union-backed
left-winger David Miller mayor of Toronto. Laschinger is now
Stronach’s campaign manager. In his book, Leaders and Lesser
Mortals, Laschinger wrote that in a campaign “one recourse is
to leak to the press internal polls, if they are more favorable
than the public polls. If they are not, another recourse is to fib
(or quote selectively) from the findings of internal polls.” I
don’t believe most of the salacious stories about Belinda and Bill,
but it’s clear her spin-driven campaign is Clintonian to the
core.
