by Paul Wells
On November 21, Gilles Duceppe, the Bloc leader, tabled the wording of his motion: “That this House recognize that Quebeckers form a nation.”
The following day Harper rose after Question Period, during the slot in the parliamentary day reserved for statements from ministers. “Mr. Speaker,” he said, “tomorrow the Bloc Québécois will present the House with an unusual request that we here at the federal Parliament define the Québécois nation. As a consequence, with the support of the government and with the support of our party, I will be putting on the notice paper later today the following motion: ‘That this House recognize that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada.’ ”
His “preference,” Harper said, was to leave it to Quebec’s National Assembly to decide how Quebecers should be described. It needn’t be Parliament’s business, he said. “But the Bloc Québécois has asked us to define this. And perhaps that’s a good thing, because it reminds us that all Canadians have a say in the future of this country.” Forced to take a position, Harper would take one. “Our position is clear. Do the Québécois form a nation within Canada? The answer is yes. Do the Québécois form an independent nation? The answer is no and it will always be no.”
When it came, the final vote would be overwhelmingly in favour. Every Bloc MP voted for Harper’s wording. And every Conservative, except Michael Chong and Inky Mark, who abstained. Every Liberal leadership candidate in the House except Ken Dryden. In all, fifteen Liberals voted against the motion. Plus Garth Turner, whose colleagues had evicted him from the Conservative caucus for being a blabbermouth and who would soon join the Liberals.
What the hell happened?
“We’d had internal discussions about, you know, what do we do if Ignatieff brings a motion or the Bloc brings a motion? Will we get cornered on this? And there was nothing conclusive,” a Conservative who worked with Harper on a response to the Bloc motion said. “This was discussions at the level of P&P”—the Priorities and Planning committee of cabinet—“or of a few key advisors.” These included Dimitri Soudas, the press secretary from Montreal who had been with Harper since 2002, and Paul Terrien, a former Mulroney speech writer who was Lawrence Cannon’s chief of staff. “And the tentative conclusion was that, you know, if this happens, we may bite this bullet. It wasn’t a definitive decision but there was a feeling that, yeah, we don’t want to get cornered on this.”
Between the moment the Bloc released the wording of the motion and the moment Harper released his reply, there was about a day. That evening and the next morning Harper consulted with staff, colleagues, outside advisors. He didn’t consult his intergovernmental affairs minister, Michael Chong, who spent the evening undisturbed at dinner in the Byward Market with some journalists from Maclean’s magazine. Chong’s job used to be a big deal. Stéphane Dion had it under Chrétien. Joe Clark held a comparable post under Brian Mulroney when that crew was trying to climb out from under the rubble of Meech. As a rookie minister in a rookie cabinet, Chong had gamely set about learning the intricacies of his government’s position on the fiscal imbalance. He rather expected to be in the loop on big questions of federal-provincial relations. He was surprised to learn otherwise.
Harper, meanwhile, was warming to the notion of recognizing Quebecers as a nation. Well, not Quebecers, precisely. The Bloc motion had referred to “les Québécoises et les Québécois” in French, and “Quebecers” in English. Harper’s version referred to “les Québécoises et les Québécois” in French and “the Québécois” in English.
Keen observers will note that “the Québécois” is not quite English. “Well, I think it means the francophone people historically rooted within the province of Quebec,” the Harper advisor said later. “What I think in previous generations you would have called ‘French Canadians.’
“What we didn’t want to do, and what is, I think, consistent with the PM’s history on federalism is, he didn’t want to set up a situation where Quebec—as a province, as a legal entity—had a special status compared to anyone else.”
The nuance between a “Quebec nation” that included everyone living on Quebec’s territory and a “Québécois nation” limited to historic francophones will go sailing over the heads of most readers outside Quebec. But the largest part of the province’s intellectual elite had learned, over many years, to insist that Quebec is a civic nation whose population is every person living in Quebec. A year after Parliament passed Harper’s resolution, the former Parti Québécois premier Bernard Landry published an op-ed in Le Devoir rehashing this argument. It reads today as a sort of museum piece.
“The use of the word ‘nous’ to designate members of the civic Quebec nation is unavoidable: it encompasses every person of Canadian citizenship … living on our territory,” Landry wrote. “Only 75,000 or so citizens have another belonging. These are the Amerindians and Inuit [who] have their own nations.… All other citizens of Quebec are part of our nation.”
Good luck with that. Harper’s wording flew in the face of the consensus Landry had spent most of his career trying to build. The Commons motion was a kind of play on words: in seeming to endorse the Bloc/PQ argument that “Quebec” is a nation (with one significant addition, the notion that this nation exists within a “united Canada”), Harper had actually endorsed a much older notion of nationhood. One which, handily, has no legal expression, as there is no “National Assembly of Francophone People Historically Rooted Within the Province of Quebec.”
It fell to poor Lawrence Cannon to try to explain all this for the TV cameras. It didn’t go well. A reporter asked him if the definition of Québécois could “include every resident of Quebec regardless of which boat their ancestors came over on.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Cannon said. “It doesn’t.”
So did he mean anglophone Montrealers weren’t Québécois? “I didn’t say that they’re not Québécois. What I’m saying here, and the reference that the Bloc Québécois has made is that they’ve made the francophone pure laine. That’s the intention. The intention is to be able to divide. We are taking the same words and we are saying no.”
It will do no good to attempt to find meaning in this. Cannon had begun by making sense while saying something deeply impolitic. He quickly changed course until he was safely making no sense at all. Meanwhile, once again we find we have let ourselves get sidetracked. While it’s interesting to wonder which Québécois Harper meant to recognize, it’s even more intriguing to ask how he could make any such gesture when he had railed against the possibility of such a thing in the not-distant past.
“He had obviously moved a considerable distance in accepting that there was a cultural specificity to Quebec that had to be recognized,” the Harper advisor said. “And this was how he felt able to do that.”
Were they worried about the flagrant contradiction? You bet. “I think we got away with that more easily than I would have expected. I thought there would have been more [questions like], ‘Are we catering to an ethnic nationalism as opposed to a civic nationalism?’ But I think just the shock and awe was so great that that debate never happened. People were just stunned that Stephen Harper would in some sense recognize Quebec as a nation. So it didn’t get parsed as much.”
But was there not a time, and a recent time at that, when Stephen Harper would have been among the people who would have been stunned at what Stephen Harper had done?
“I’m sure if Stephen Harper had [still] been in the National Citizens Coalition [in 2006] he would have been against it.”
So how does the Stephen Harper who is no longer president of the National Citizens Coalition sleep?
My interlocutor deemed my question too cynical. “Harper actually has a genuine capacity for growth and change. It’s one of his strongest qualities. It’s not simple opportunism that he flipped on a dime. He decided, and the party decided a couple of years before, that he was going to have to take a different position on that question than the party would have taken in the ’80s or �
�90s.”
Most of the party decided that, anyway. Michael Chong resigned as intergovernmental affairs minister within days. “Everyone was surprised at the stance he took because he was seen as a Red Tory, Joe Clark type, and [pulling the Québécois nation motion out of a hat] was very Joe Clarkish.” Harper worried for a while that Chong’s resignation would launch him on a new career as an incorrigible backbench critic of the government, but the worry was misplaced. Having made his statement and surrendered his privileges as a cabinet minister, Chong promptly ceased to be any kind of gadfly or pain in the government’s backside. And that was as bad as things got for the Conservatives over the Québécois nation resolution.
Coverage of Harper’s gesture in Quebec for several days after he introduced the motion was strongly positive. As might be expected of a symbolic act that was designed to have no real-world consequence, this one had no real-world consequence: soon enough, the motion was all but forgotten. Given that the Bloc had hoped to set a trap that would hurt Harper badly, perhaps a transient benefit should be counted as a relative triumph.
As we ponder what led Harper to make a gesture Brian Mulroney might have made, we should consider that one of the strongest influences on him in his first two years in power was Brian Mulroney.
The charm that oozed in industrial quantities from the wily old man was the catalyst for the wary, tentative Harper–Charest friendship. “Mulroney was managing both sides of the relationship, for a whole bunch of reasons,” another Harper advisor says, “because he likes Charest and feels an obligation to keep Charest whole for a long-standing loyalty going back to Lucien Bouchard’s departure from the PC Party. There’s a whole crew of Mulroney-Charest guys with crossover between the two. And Mulroney wanted to rehabilitate what he knows is his otherwise poor reputation in the federal party.”
Harper had wanted to feature Mulroney as a keynote speaker at the first Conservative Party policy convention in Montreal in 2005. Mulroney couldn’t come but he sent a video. “Stephen was very eager to have Preston and Brian on equal footing,” this advisor said, “despite the fact that that was going to piss off some people on the Reform side.” Here was an example of Harper’s eagerness to ensure that the new party would not seem to be a mere extension of the Canadian Alliance. The same instinct helps explain, for instance, why so few Albertans made it into Harper’s cabinet. Mulroney’s career had ended poorly. Harper had never liked him in the days before the new party was born in 2004. But for thousands of members of Harper’s Conservative Party, Mulroney was practically family, and Harper would treat him as such. Manning, whose supporters needed less flattering and reassuring, could wait.
In April of 2006, when Corporate Knights magazine decided to designate Mulroney as Canada’s greenest prime minister, Harper ventured across the street from the Langevin Block to the Château Laurier to attend the event. It must have been excruciating. Harper could not have been less interested in having environmental activism recognized as any prime minister’s standard of success. But it seemed that if it made Mulroney feel good he would fake it. Manning was holding an event for his Manning Centre for Building Democracy on the same night, in a different ballroom in the same hotel. Harper ignored it.
A few months later, in the summer, Harper invited Mulroney and his family to the prime minister’s country residence at Harrington Lake. “This was like the final acceptance,” the Harper advisor said. “And Mulroney and Mila and the kids were so effusively grateful to be asked back.” It dawned on Harper’s crowd, who had not been in power long and weren’t sure they’d be in power much longer, what a refuge from the daily stress Harrington Lake was for long-timers. “The Mulroney kids had the fondest memories of Harrington. And they would have liked to have gone back [for a visit] in the Chrétien years, but there was no way Chrétien was going to have them. The family made a huge effort to get there for the weekend they were invited, and enjoyed it hugely. And Mulroney was very thankful to everybody.”
Later, Mulroney told Marjory LeBreton, a senator he’d appointed who had gone on to serve in Harper’s cabinet, what a wonderful gesture it all was. He told David Angus, another of his Senate appointees. He told Peter MacKay’s dad, Elmer, who’d served in his cabinet. He told everybody who would listen how grateful he was to be invited back to his home-away-from-home by the current tenant.
Not all of it was social. Mulroney was far more sure-footed in Quebec than Harper would ever be. He still knew everyone. He persuaded Jean-Pierre Blackburn to run for Harper after a long period out of politics. He was in constant contact with Lawrence Cannon. The seat for Quebec on UNESCO was, as far as anyone could recall, Mulroney’s idea. “Harper’s Quebec lieutenant for quite a while,” the former Harper advisor said, “was effectively Mulroney.”
The old charmer’s understanding of how people operate in positions of power was exquisite. He would know when Harper’s people were having a lousy day. He would call to buck them up. LeBreton, of course, sometimes more than once a day, but Angus, and Rob Nicholson, the justice minister. Ian Brodie’s phone rang once and it was Mulroney. “This must be a difficult day to be chief of staff.”
Brodie was baffled.
“I just want you to know you did a superb job and Stephen’s very lucky to have you.” And with that, and a few more pleasantries, the chat was over, the legendary Mulroney hand had reached out, and Brodie was left to contemplate the life he might have led if he had worked for such an extravagantly empathetic boss.
But even a world-class schmoozer like Mulroney could work only limited miracles. Charest is often a loner. Harper usually is. Even a good catalyst can’t encourage a reaction between inert elements. When Harper believed he had finally delivered everything Charest wanted, he learned he had not understood much about Charest at all. He didn’t like the surprise.
The Harper government’s second budget was designed to deliver on the promise of the first. Its title was “Restoring Fiscal Balance.” Just as Harper had signalled in his Montreal Board of Trade speech, the budget defined fiscal imbalance broadly, so every move Harper and Jim Flaherty made could be interpreted as a solution to some aspect of the problem. If more money went from Ottawa to the provinces, Flaherty said it settled the imbalance. If money went zooming past the provincial capitals and straight into Canadians’ pockets, that settled the imbalance too. If Flaherty announced no new plans in areas of provincial jurisdiction, that was good too.
The main element in the budget package was the recalculation of equalization payments to poor provinces. This had to happen anyway, as equalization payments are calculated for five years at a time and the old five-year plan was running out. So any prime minister would have had substantial news to announce in this budget. Harper had chosen to rejig the formula in ways that disproportionately benefited Quebec, something he could afford to do because British Columbia’s improving finances were about to permit it to leave the ranks of equalization-receiving provinces. Harper added increases to the Canada Health and Social Transfer, in line with promises Paul Martin had made at the ramshackle 2005 federal-provincial health-transfer conference. The government threw in some new money for infrastructure programs.
In the end Quebec, with 24 percent of Canada’s population, got 46 percent of all the new money Flaherty’s budget transferred to the provinces. Ontario, with more than a third of the population, received 24 percent of new money. British Columbia wound up losing $1 million. Of course the reviews in Quebec were ecstatic. La Presse columnist Alain Dubuc wrote that the budget “settles the dossier of the fiscal imbalance.” It sets out “stable, clear, predictable and equitable” funding and represents “an enormous change of course in Canadian political life.” Indeed it did represent a change. Stephen Harper used to complain when governments distributed wildly disproportionate benefits to Quebec. Now he was running a government that was distributing wildly disproportionate benefits to Quebec, and he had no complaints.
At least, not until two days after the budget. That’s the
day Charest gave his own speech to the Montreal Board of Trade. There was an election campaign on in Quebec, and the Liberal premier was in deep trouble. For once it wasn’t the Parti Québécois that was threatening him. It was Mario Dumont’s party, the upstart Action Démocratique du Québec. This was Charest’s first challenge from the right. He responded by announcing that, if he was re-elected, he would use the fiscal imbalance money from Harper to cut income taxes by $700 million.
“That,” one of Harper’s staff would say later, “was the end of open federalism.”
The whole provincial pitch on the fiscal imbalance, led by Quebec, was that “the money” was in Ottawa, while “the needs” were in the provinces. So Harper sent hundreds of millions to Quebec, which in Charest’s best estimation turned out not to have any needs except to cut taxes. The vision of tax relief, offered with the full knowledge that the gesture would be a slap to the Harper government, was not enough to secure Charest a clear win. His Liberals were reduced to a minority in the National Assembly and the ADQ formed the opposition. “From a political perspective, it looks like it didn’t help Mr. Charest,” Flaherty told Policy Options magazine. “It may have in fact harmed his party, and it was not helpful in the rest of the country, certainly from comments that were made across Canada.”
The relatively close working relationship between Charest and Harper was shattered. The damage to their relationship was permanent: in the Quebec provincial campaign of 2008, the federal campaigns of 2008 and 2011, and the provincial campaign of 2012, neither would lift a finger to help the other. Harper had worked hard to present a province-friendly face, sharply decentralizing the federation. He had bent his principles into pretzels to appear specifically Quebec-friendly. He had cultivated a close working relationship with the man he often called “the most federalist Quebec premier of my lifetime.” And it had led to a nasty surprise from a politically weakened premier.