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The 1983 Progressive Conservative leadership election was held on June 11, 1983 in Ottawa, Ontario to elect a leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. At the convention, Brian Mulroney was elected leader of the PC Party on the fourth ballot, defeating former Prime Minister Joe Clark. ==Background== Joe Clark had been leader of the PCs after winning the 1976 leadership convention. While credited with uniting the PCs after the difficult Stanfield years and leading the party to victory in the 1979 federal election, a divisive austerity budget resulted in the government falling. The Conservatives lost the subsequent 1980 federal election, and found themselves returned to opposition. After the 1980 defeat, Clark unexpectedly decided to stay on. At the 1981 convention, 33.5% of delegates supported a leadership review, which was generally seen as a high number. Clark's internal strategy, led by his Chief of Staff Lowell Murray, was to bring dissidents into the party structure. Clark's external strategy was to change the party's longstanding strategy of obtaining large wins in English Canada and then appealing to Québec voters with the advantage of holding government to obtain a majority. Believing that the party's base was now too narrow to initially win government, Clark began an attempt to broaden the party to include women, multicultural communities, and nationalist Québec voters. Though the approach began to pay some dividends, including favourable attention in Québec after the patriation of the constitution, opponents remained prominent in the party and the national media. They could generally be divided into two groups: The first were not convinced Clark, given his personality and the unpopularity of the 1979-80 government, had the ability to win another election. Others within the party maintained that Clark's outreach and moderate policy decisions were aloof from the party's grassroots, which had begun to embrace neoliberal and monetarist reforms that were currently being pursued in the United Kingdom and United States. At the party's national convention in Winnipeg in January 1983, the chief issue was again Clark's leadership. The issue mobilized supporters and detractors of Clark to a degree not usually seen at biennial conventions. At the convention 66.9% of the delegates voted against, and 33.1% voted for leadership review. Clark, seeing only a marginal gain in popularity among his party, decided with his advisers that he would resign as leader, but opt to run in the convention to succeed himself. This was seen within his inner circle the only way to drown out the opposition to his leadership, as the previous attempts to reach out to opponents had left the party leadership unable to push back. After a short rebound after the patriation of the Constitution, the Liberals lagged in opinion polls, with the PCs ahead at times by over 20 percentage points. While Clark would probably have thought this an advantage, it also made the leadership a much more lucrative prize than it would have been. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Progressive Conservative leadership election, 1983」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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