by Paul Wells
“I don’t know if that’s fair,” Buckler said. “I don’t think that’s a fair statement.” She added that “some people have told us that they enjoy the fact that they get to get on a list.” This would very much have been a minority opinion among Ottawa political reporters at the time, if in fact it existed.
Latraverse was not putting up with Harper’s chief protector giving her rebuttals from phantom reporters. “I mean, we can debate this forever,” she said. “You hear from the people who like the way you run things and we get to hear from the people who aren’t happy.”
“Right on,” Buckler said. “Yeah.”
Latraverse: “That’s the nature of the debate.”
Buckler: “Yes.”
Right then. Onward. Previous governments, going back to Brian Mulroney’s anyway, had held regular meetings of the full cabinet, after which milling reporters would catch ministers as they left the meetings and ask them questions. Now just about all of that system had fallen apart. Reporters suspected Harper had held cabinet meetings he hadn’t announced. Hill security officers now patrolled the third-floor corridor in the Centre Block where reporters had spent much of their careers lying in wait, most weeks, for cabinet ministers. Nobody, including reporters and camera crews, was now permitted to loiter at any time in that corridor. What was up?
“Downstairs, in the foyer, is a wonderful opportunity to show Canadians their Parliament, you know, reconnecting them with the government,” Buckler said. Except ministers hadn’t been talking to reporters in the foyer either. They hadn’t been talking much at all. “Then there’s the safety element,” Buckler said. “I mean it’s crowded up on the third floor. There’s a lot more media than there were, say, thirty years ago. There’s a lot more media now than there was, say, ten years ago.”
This was asinine. No reporter had ever plummeted to death, or even to a sprained ankle, from the scrum area outside the cabinet room. The meeting was fast becoming a dialogue of the deaf.
“I think for you guys to get access on all issues you report on, you have numerous opportunities,” Buckler said.
Latraverse replied, “So you’re actually arguing that all your cabinet ministers are available on a range of issues?”
“I didn’t say that,” Buckler said.
Word of the meeting spread quickly. A Winnipeg Free Press reporter called Buckler for comment. “I would argue that if they just gave us a chance,” Buckler said of her gallery visitors, “they will see that we are going to continue to provide more access, more space and more depth of responsiveness than they have had for the last twelve years.”
That would almost never be true. A summer of jostling between reporters and handlers ensued. The press gallery published a transcript of the Buckler meeting. Harper began popping up in the oddest places, in rooms some reporters had never seen before, as he sought to ensure that he kept reporters off balance, instead of vice versa. At one news event in May, briefly legendary, soon forgotten, Soudas came to reporters gathered in the Commons lobby to seek names to put on his list of approved questioners. Reporters from various news organizations told him they would not put their names on a list. Soudas left, then returned, saying Harper would make a statement but he would not take any questions. The reporters, now reduced to stenographers, left en masse. Harper made his statement to a near-empty room.
Two days later, on a campaign-style swing through southern Ontario, Harper dropped in at the A-Channel station in London. The press gallery “has taken the view that they are going to be the opposition to the government,” he told his interviewer. “They don’t ask questions at my press conferences now. We’ll just take the message out on the road. There’s lots of media who do want to ask questions and hear what the government is doing.”
By June he’d found one of those reporters in Kevin Libin, the editor of the Western Standard magazine, whose proprietor was the deeply conservative and combative lawyer and former Canadian Alliance staffer Ezra Levant. Harper told Libin that “left-wing ideologues” were “apparently running the show” among Ottawa reporters. Who were these ringleaders? “The key journalists causing the problem are from the CBC,” Harper said. This was creative. Latraverse had been accompanied by a Sun reporter and one from the Canadian Press’s French-language service during her meeting with Buckler, and when her term as gallery president ended soon afterward, her successor was from Quebec’s private TVA network.
But this sort of quibbling was uninteresting to Canadians from coast to coast. Reporters were amazed to learn that when they told their readers and viewers about their treatment at Harper’s hands, audiences were not more sympathetic to the gallery than to the PM. By autumn, most of the press gallery had stopped resisting Harper’s rules for media relations.
Meanwhile, he told Libin: “I’m free to pick my interviews when and where I want to have them. The great irony is, the result is precisely the opposite of what those doing it claim to be seeking.” The gallery executive was accusing Harper of seeking to increase control over his press appearances. But his feud with the scribes did nothing to keep Harper from getting his message out whenever he wanted. “I’ve got more control now,” he marvelled.
TWO
REMEDIAL READING I
I wrote a whole book once about how Stephen Harper became prime minister. There is no need to repeat most of that story now. Short version: there was a guy named Paul Martin, who wanted to be the head of a Liberal dynasty, and it didn’t work out. But let us step back from the heady days of 2006 for just one chapter, to sift through Harper’s past and the recent history of Canadian conservatism. Perhaps we can find a few items that now look like foreshadowing.
If there is a dominant school of journalistic thought about Harper in power, at least among journalists who live between Montreal and Toronto, it is that Harper is a loner with the instincts of a vandal. He came to power by accident and brings no project more ambitious than an inexplicable urge to wreck the Liberal Party. In his book Harperland, Lawrence Martin recalls the old adage about winners making their own luck. This is “twaddle” when it comes to Harper, he writes. Harper came to power mostly by accident, and he came to wreak vengeance. His effect on the country is incidental to the damage he seeks to inflict on the Liberals. “The Liberal order and the Canadian order were almost one and the same,” Martin writes. “To take down one was to take down the other.”
In an influential article in The Walrus in October 2004, Marci McDonald wrote about Harper’s Calgary associates, especially the political scientist Tom Flanagan. The new Conservative Party’s course “may have already been set by Flanagan and a handful of like-minded ideologues from the University of Calgary’s political-science department,” McDonald warned.
McDonald depicted Harper’s entourage as a compact, cohesive team, shadowy in motive, inspired by the U.S. neo-conservative theorist Leo Strauss, and alienated from the mainstream of Canadian political thought. Her article concentrated on Flanagan, who had already left his position as Harper’s chief of staff when McDonald researched her article. “Little is known about the shadowy, sixty-year-old professor,” she wrote. “In Ottawa, where he has refused interviews for the last three years, some journalists regard him as a modern-day Rasputin manipulating a leader sixteen years his junior.”
In fact, Flanagan’s influence with Harper was fading even as McDonald wrote those lines. He had left Ottawa and been replaced as chief of staff. His replacement would not last either. Nor would that guy’s replacement. Flanagan went on to write a book about Harper, published in 2007; Harper viewed the act as a betrayal and the two men have not spoken since. And while other members of the so-called Calgary School have played walk-on roles since Harper won power, it has become clearer with time that they do not own him and that he does not depend on them.
This book seeks to explain Harper’s success as something more than an accident and his appeal as something more than a trick. My argument is that Harper wins elections because millions of people want som
ebody like him to be prime minister. They have a broad sense of who he is and what he wants to do, and they prefer it to the alternatives. Indeed, there is tremendous affection toward this prime minister. This explains why voters who supported the Harper Conservatives a first time tend to do so again in subsequent elections.
Of course millions of other Canadians prefer one of the other parties to Harper’s Conservatives. Harper has sought to change the distribution of money and power in this country in ways that put him at odds with the legacy of generations of Liberal governments. But in controversies that have pitted Harper against a very broad cross-section of the people who are used to winning political arguments in this country—big fights like the ones over the long-form census, the coalition crisis of 2008, and the budget cuts after 2011—Harper stuck to his guns because he knew at least a workable plurality of voters had his back.
As I have sought to explain Harper to often skeptical audiences in recent years, I find I keep returning to a few of his writings and the observations of people who were, at one time or another, close to him. These texts help put Harper in a broader cultural context. They help explain how he wins and why he wants to win.
Our first reading comes from a book that was an unlikely bestseller when it was published in 1986. When you mention Peter Brimelow’s The Patriot Game: National Dreams and Political Realities to most people in Ottawa, you get a blank stare. But to Conservatives close to Harper it has enormous significance. “That book was actually influential in Harper’s circle the way the Straussians were supposed to be,” a long-time Harper aide said to me.
Harper biographer William Johnson notes that when The Patriot Game was published, Harper and his friend John Weissenberger approached a Calgary bookseller for a group discount and then bought ten copies for their friends. “No other book seems to have grabbed the future Prime Minister quite the same way,” my colleague John Geddes wrote in Maclean’s. And not only Harper: you can draw a straight, short line from the sentiment of revulsion against politics-as-usual in the governments of Trudeau and Mulroney encapsulated in The Patriot Game to the founding of the Reform Party barely a year after its publication.
Peter Brimelow is a British-American journalist who has worked in London, Washington and Toronto at various points in his career. In The Patriot Game he presented himself as a “wandering WASP” who came to Canada to tell difficult truths. “There are important human reasons why outsiders can see, and even more to the point say, things that insiders cannot,” he wrote. What had he come to reveal? “I argue that contemporary Canadian Nationalism is a fraud,” Brimelow began, “designed primarily to benefit particular interest groups in Canada.” The rest of The Patriot Game lays out the nature of the fraud and the identity of the beneficiaries.
Brimelow is a big fan of nationalism in general. His problem with Canadian Nationalism is that Canada “is not a nation.” He argued that there was a large and growing division between English and French Canada. But neither was English Canada internally coherent, divided as it was into Ontario, the West, the Maritimes, the North and so on. No obvious resemblance united these English Canadas more closely than that all of them were bound up in a “greater English-speaking North American nation.” The country’s national borders, in other words, were essentially arbitrary.
So far, so unsurprising. At least in pessimistic moments, every Canadian sometimes wonders whether this country is an expression of anything real. But Brimelow made it more interesting when he argued that attempts to keep Quebec and the rest together were creating various pathologies, including an imbalance in the political system that benefited “elements in Central Canada” and inspired the weed-like growth of “an unusually large and powerful public class.” This looming public class, he wrote, “has developed what Marxists call a ‘dominant ideology’ rationalizing and justifying its power, and has been quite successful in imposing it as the Canadian conventional wisdom.” This ideology, devoted to denying what Brimelow saw as fundamental characteristics of the country, “can for practical purposes be identified with the federal Liberal Party, but it extends far beyond.”
Canada, in Brimelow’s depiction, did not so much resemble an accident as a conspiracy. In our out-of-the-way corner of the globe, a protection racket had sprung up to safeguard Canada’s ungainly integrity at the expense of its prosperity and of a fair distribution of local wealth. Like any durable scam, this one devoted much of its energy to perpetuating its own success. “Systematic government intervention in the Canadian economy in the name of Nationalism and other edifying political ideals has been accompanied by equally continuous complaints about the economy’s poor performance,” he wrote, citing Goldwin Smith, a nineteenth-century British chronicler of the Canadian soul, to the effect that Canada was “rich by nature, poor by policy.”
Indeed, nature and policy were increasingly at odds. The effort required to prop up the “public class” was growing. The population was moving west, away from the traditional Montreal–Toronto corridor of power. Between 1901 and the 1980s, the four Western provinces’ combined share of Canada’s population had risen from 10 percent to 27 percent, finally surpassing Quebec’s. So the economic strategy of the central elites made less and less sense.
What was their strategy? “To concentrate rents from a resource-based economy in Central Canadian hands.” The influx of money from the hinterland was used to prop up the manufacturing industry, “always regarded as a Good Thing in Canada.” An assortment of policy tools were deployed to that end, including the maintenance of a weak dollar, even if the combined effect of those policies was to keep the West down. To Brimelow each of those tools was a “two-by-four” administered by Ottawa to Western Canada’s face. One such assault was the government’s 1977 decision “to allow a coalition of nationalists, environmentalists and ‘native people’ activists” to block the Mackenzie Valley natural gas pipeline to the United States. Brimelow could not imagine such a ragtag opposition stopping something Ottawa actually wanted, but Mackenzie Valley was another matter because its beneficiaries would have been mere Westerners. “This window of opportunity for the West has been slammed for a generation.”
So Canada made sense as a country only as long as you lived at the bottom of a policy-induced money slope that kept cash and influence rolling toward Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal even as populations and opportunity were heading in the opposite direction. Perverse as it was, the system might have been made to last indefinitely if the restlessness of the Quebec partner in the Central Canadian protection racket had not presented a new internal challenge. Liberal victory had always been ensured by leaders who managed to unite French Canada and divide English Canada. If they lost Quebec they would lose everything.
The Liberals responded to the Quebec nationalist threat, wrote Brimelow, by turning, slowly at first and then with real gusto under Trudeau, against any element of Canadian cultural expression that might be deemed upsetting in Quebec. Official references to Canada’s British imperial history were expunged from the decoration of government buildings, from mailboxes, from official stationery and more. A “stealthy campaign of attrition against the emblems of monarchy” was pursued. Trudeau eliminated “the technical convention that Canadian diplomats were accredited in the name of the Queen.” He tried to have the word “Royal” removed from the name of the national constabulary. Brimelow was hardly unaware that Trudeau’s ideas about federalism often antagonized Quebec nationalists. This was the tragedy of Trudeau, he wrote: the old man was selling Canada’s history down the river to appease Quebec and it wasn’t even working.
How could a country spend decades handing power to a political party devoted to denying its history and confounding its economics? Why would the population consent? Here Brimelow called on the theories of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist writer and political theorist. Not a likely authority, to be sure, but a handy one. To the obvious riddle of working-class consent in bourgeois rule, Gramsci replied by greatly expanding the Marxist notion
of “hegemony.” Hegemony didn’t necessarily mean coerced rule by force, and indeed usually it didn’t. Rather, in the words of his biographer James Joll, it meant that a political class “had succeeded in persuading the other classes of society to accept its cultural values.” The ruling classes didn’t literally have to keep their jackboots on the necks of the masses. Most of the time they could simply persuade the population that the way things were was the way things had to be.
I find this notion of hegemony perfectly fascinating, and essential to a proper understanding of Stephen Harper as prime minister. Gramscian hegemony describes winning as a process, not an event. The consent of the governed is not won once but every day; not through occasional confrontations but through countless acts of suasion.
Surely a mere political party, even the Liberals, can’t hoodwink an entire society into acting against its interests for generations at a time? Indeed, Brimelow argued that the Liberals had not managed this feat alone. They had “developed a crucial political asset,” he wrote, “in the shape of the emerging alliance of civil servants, educators and assorted media and political hangers-on” that had risen to prominence across the Western world with the rise of the welfare state.
Brimelow mentioned Irving Kristol, the intellectual father of neo-conservatism in the United States, who wrote in the 1970s about what he called the New Class. “As a group, you find them mainly in the very large and growing public sector and in the media,” Kristol wrote. “They share a disinterest in personal wealth, a dislike for the free-market economy, and a conviction that society may best be improved through greater governmental participation in the country’s economic life.” Kristol’s New Class was tentacular, reaching into the media, the educational system, science, law, social work and other professions. These were not only people who cashed a government paycheque. They were also the much larger class of people who prospered in the kind of society only an activist state could build and sustain.