In his introduction to The Discipline of Power, the 1981 winner of the Governor-General's Award for non-fiction, Jeffrey Simpson describes what happened on 4 June 1979. Pierre Trudeau handed in his resignation, jumped into his sportscar, and sped down the driveway with the parting words 'I'm free.' It was hard, reports Simpson, not to be touched by 'the infectious enthusiasm and beaming countenances' of Joe Clark and his new ministers as they took their oaths of office. Nine months later, the Conservative interlude was over, and the Liberals were restored to power.
Simpson analyses the erroneous assumptions of the members of the Progressive Conservative party, who, conditioned by an extended spell in opposition, could not wield effectively the political power they had won. The Conservatives' misfortunes represented a classic case of an Opposition party failing to appreciate the demands of governing, that is, the discipline of power. Twice within eleven months voters witnessed election campaigns. What voters did not see were the machinations and private calculations of those who shaped the parties' campaigns. In Simpson's account of the elections of 1979 and 1980, he reveals these manoeuvres and describes how an election campaign is structured around them.
A new introduction traces the Conservative party's manipulations and misfortunes, ending with their humiliating defeat in the 1993 election, and questions their future role.