American President Jimmy Carter’s briefings about Joe Clark’s new government continued on this date in 1979. For the previous two years, of course, the Carter Administration had dealt with Pierre Trudeau’s government. Now it would be Joe Clark and his Progressive Conservatives that Carter and his team would be facing.
“Joe Clark is described as intelligent, pragmatic; cautious; someone who seeks and takes advice, but makes his own decisions,” Carter’s National Security Advisor reported to his President in a briefing note that has recently been declassified. “Clark excels in organizational ability. When he became leader of the Tories three years ago, he took over a fractious, divided party that regularly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory through its public feuding and internal backbiting.
Clark has successfully unified the party and demonstrates impressive…control over the Tory caucus in Parliament. The rise in party fortunes has attracted better people into its ranks, and some of these are part of the Tory front bench in Parliament.”
The American Embassy in Ottawa also sent the President a memo about the incoming Clark government.
“His principal preoccupations, as he assumes the new prime ministership, are: to organize the Conservatives as the governing party after 16 years out of power; to deal with the problem of Quebec; and to get the economy moving,” officials reported.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.