The Longer I'm Prime Minister: Stephen Harper and Canada, 2006-

by Paul Wells

  Dion arrived in Vancouver and promised to spend $250 million against the mountain pine beetle. Marzolini, vexed, sent a memo to the Liberal campaign office. It landed at five o’clock the next morning. “Canadians do not care about the size of funding announcements,” he wrote. “Each should be announced because Stéphane Dion cares about the average Canadian and shares their values.” With their leader touring the country with lists of problems and dollar figures in his hand, the Liberals looked like “cold-hearted accountants.”

  But suddenly the Conservatives could not take much pleasure from the Liberals’ discomfiture. They had serious trouble of their own. It came from Quebec.

  Early in August, Canwest News had reported that the Harper government was cutting a $4.7-million program designed to send artists abroad to promote Canadian culture. When Canwest’s reporter David Akin called the PMO for comment, he was told the money had been going “to groups that would raise the eyebrows of any typical Canadian.” Those included the “general radical” and former CBC broadcaster Avi Lewis, and a Toronto band named Fucked Up. “I think there’s a reasonable expectation by taxpayers that they won’t fund the world travel of wealthy rock stars, ideological activists or fringe and alternative groups,” Akin’s source said.

  Within a week various news organizations were pegging the total cuts to assorted arts programs at $45 million. The culture-war overtones of the PMO’s political defence went down particularly badly in Quebec. By late August hundreds of artists were staging protests in Montreal and Toronto. “They don’t want to recognize the existence of art in our society, and that’s appalling,” actress Marie Tifo said in Montreal. “I’m here with all my peers to say ‘no,’ we exist, and [culture] is an essential good.” A satirical video appeared on YouTube, showing pop singer Michel Rivard facing a thuggish panel of Ottawa arts bureaucrats who get his French lyrics all wrong and won’t give him a grant. The ad, which was funnier than I’ve made it sound, went viral, logging hundreds of thousands of views. Layton and Duceppe organized their campaign tours so they could attend a Montreal concert protesting the cuts. The Conservatives want to “turn off the floodlights on our stories, on our hearts, on our souls,” Layton told the crowd. “We say that creative industries are an enormous part of our country’s future.”

  In Saskatoon Harper’s political radar let him down. Perhaps playing to the Western crowd he saw before him, he called the cuts “a niche issue for some.”

  Then he elaborated. “You know, I think when ordinary, working people come home, turn on the TV and see … a bunch of people at a rich gala all subsidized by the taxpayers, claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough when they know the subsidies have actually gone up, I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people.”

  Francophone reporters asked Harper to repeat the comment for French-language TV and radio, a routine request. Perhaps he hadn’t liked the sound of his remark as it escaped his lips. For whatever reason, he declined. But the Conservatives’ Quebec problems were only beginning. The Bloc soared up toward 40 percent in Quebec polls. The Conservatives, who had been flirting with 30 percent support or higher, collapsed to 20 percent or lower. At those levels, Harper could forget about picking up seats in Quebec. The challenge now would be to salvage the ones he already had.

  Dion, meanwhile, was finally learning how to deliver a campaign speech. His belated journey up the learning curve could not have come any later. On Friday, September 26, the midday tracking poll from Nanos Research showed the worst result of the campaign for the Liberals. The Conservatives led nationwide with 40 percent to 25 percent for the Liberals and 19 percent for the NDP. Those numbers made a Harper majority possible. The Liberal number was three points lower than John Turner had won in 1984, up to now the party’s lowest share of the popular vote since Confederation.

  As Dion prepared for an event at a farm in Belmont, Ontario, word of Harper’s morning event started to arrive. With banks failing in the U.S. and a global liquidity crisis fast advancing, the Liberals had been hitting Harper hard on his handling of the economy. Now Harper had accused Dion of “trying to drive down confidence in the Canadian economy without foundation—and quite frankly sitting on the sidelines virtually cheering for there to be a recession.”

  Dion was furious, and huddled with Jim Munson, a former CTV news reporter turned Chrétien-appointed Liberal senator, and Herb Metcalfe, another veteran Liberal organizer. The two men thought Dion’s anger might be an asset. They told him to let it show when he addressed the crowd.

  So Dion let loose. At the Belmont farm and again in a rally in London that night, he ditched the teleprompter he had been using for his speeches and simply vented. “He lied today in order to make cheap shots,” he said of Harper. “This is unacceptable. And it says a lot about him and nothing about me.” He said he would debate the economy any time with Harper “if he wants to discuss it as an adult.”

  The crowds at both events loved it. Dion led local newscasts in London, Hamilton and Kitchener. “You did what you were supposed to,” Munson told him. For weeks Munson had been trying to get Dion to understand that the emotive line wasn’t necessarily a betrayal of the intellectual line.

  “Well, sir,” Munson would ask Dion, in Socratic fashion, “what does enhanced productivity mean?”

  Dion would ponder the question at some length. “… Jobs?”

  Here was progress. “Well, why don’t we say that?” Munson would reply. “And what do jobs mean?”

  “… Hope?”

  “Well, we could say that too.”

  The night after the Belmont speech, Dion took time off from campaigning to spend an evening at home at Stornoway. Metcalfe came for dinner, armed with new numbers from Marzolini’s overnight polls. He told Dion: “Your numbers are starting to move because people are starting to see passion and conviction.” Dion would need both: the leaders’ debates were now only days away.

  There had already been considerable preliminary debate over the format of the debates—and the attendance list. Dion and Elizabeth May, the Green Party leader, had a non-aggression pact. He had announced in April 2007 that he would run no candidate against her in Central Nova, the Nova Scotia riding where she had chosen to run against Peter MacKay. Their alliance was not purely tactical; they clearly got along well. She often said she would greatly prefer Dion as prime minister over Harper. Dion called her “courageous” for saying so.

  That was all the evidence Harper needed to conclude that May and Dion were objective allies. Only one of them should be allowed in the debates. They were free, he said magnanimously, to decide which one of them it should be. Conservatives also persuaded Layton’s campaign staff that it was to the NDP leader’s benefit to keep May out of the debates. In a crowd Layton could not hope to stand out, they argued. With only Dion and Layton representing alternatives to the Conservatives outside Quebec, Layton might hope to marginalize Dion. The Conservatives were sure they had persuaded Brian Topp, Layton’s campaign director, of the logic of this argument. But when May began to complain that she was being frozen out, Layton heard an earful from NDP supporters from coast to coast. Ordinary New Democrats were not inclined to think strategically. They figured the more people onstage who didn’t think like Harper, the better. E-mails to the party ran overwhelmingly against keeping May out. Layton couldn’t get his daily campaign message out because reporters only wanted to know about why he thought May shouldn’t be in the debates. So Layton caved. May would be welcome, he said.

  Four hours later, Harper abandoned his opposition to May’s participation. Privately he viewed Layton’s capitulation as further proof that the New Democrat leader was more interested in being a nice guy than in winning. In Harper’s eyes it was an unforgivable flaw.

  The debate was turning into a swamp for Harper. He would now have four people attacking him, not three. He was vulnerable on May’s defining issue, the environment. Worst of all, she was a woman and he had a temper.

  “It c
ircles back to the women-vote thing and the need for women to be reassured, that they want someone calm,” a Conservative close to Harper said. “A lot of time was spent in debate prep on getting Stephen ready about how to look at and treat and react to Elizabeth May.”

  So Michael Coates, the CEO of Hill+Knowlton Canada, had one preoccupation as he started preparing Harper for the debates. No matter how much the other leaders tried to kick sand in Harper’s face, the Conservative leader must be calm and reassuring. The debate prep team told Harper to keep staring at Elizabeth May with what one advisor called “the icy blue eyes of love.”

  It was a profoundly defensive strategy. “He knew,” the advisor said, “that how he reacted and dealt with her could potentially, in one wrong move, one wrong look, one wrong word, one wrong reaction, be captured and just drive away that vote that they worked so hard to get.”

  Immediately before a leaders’ debate, campaigns often release some juicy bit of news to rattle and demoralize their opponent. These “destabilizers” are usually uncovered months ahead of time by party research offices. There comes a day when you find something embarrassing about the other party. Instead of pushing it out immediately, when nobody is paying attention and your opponent will have all the time in the world to recover, you sock it away for debate day. Sometimes it’s not even something secret. Days after Dion became Liberal leader he appeared on Don Newman’s CBC Politics show, where he told his host he would win the English-language leaders’ debate when it came. The Conservatives’ eyebrows raised and somebody put the clip aside for the right moment. On the day before the first debate of the 2008 campaign the party sent the clip to the television networks so the pre-debate shows would be full of footage of Dion looking arrogant.

  Here at least, in the search for campaign destabilizers, the Liberals had the Conservatives soundly beat. On the morning of the first debate, Bob Rae had a foreign affairs speech scheduled in Toronto, complete with a surprise. While Rae watched from his podium, onstage TV monitors showed a speech Harper had delivered on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Next to Harper were images of John Howard, then Australia’s prime minister, giving a speech of his own thirty hours before Harper’s.

  They were the same speech.

  Sentence after sentence, somebody had lifted Howard’s arguments and given them to Harper to parrot. The effect of the side-by-side videos was extraordinary. On a major foreign-policy issue, here was Harper speaking another man’s words. It reinforced the notion that Harper got all his foreign-policy ideas from conservatives in other countries. It undercut a cherished element of the Harper mythology, that he was his party’s leading thinker and his own best speech writer. And it just made him look silly.

  Hours after Rae spoke, a long-time Harper speech writer, Owen Lippert, confessed to the plagiarism and resigned from the campaign. The Howard tape didn’t really affect the campaign, except to launch teams of researchers from every party into an orgy of Google searching to try to catch other parties in similar patterns of plagiarism. One Conservative in the Harper war room started running every Harper speech through plagiarism-detection software in case the Liberals had another such salvo ready to fire. The rest of Harper’s speeches came up clean. But the lifted speech did transfer a little good morale from Harper’s camp to Dion’s. And that’s where things stood as the French debate began on Wednesday night.

  Harper smiled doggedly. Alone among the leaders, he referred to his opponents by their first names. Duceppe accused him, three times in the first five minutes of the debate, of “enriching the rich oilmen.” Layton said his environmental policy would be great for Exxon. Dion reminded Harper of every insult he had ever sent Dion’s way, such as the time he’d called Dion a fan of the Taliban for asking about prisoner abuse. Duceppe told Harper that by letting Michael Fortier, an unelected senator, parade around Quebec telling voters it was a waste of money to vote for the Bloc, Harper was showing “contempt for democracy.”

  The prime minister looked trapped. Trapped and weirdly happy. There was no getting that smile off his face. Still, he looked besieged. By agreeing to a seated format, he had consented to a format that made everyone look the same. Since it eliminated his height advantage, he wound up looking small and docile. He had not ever wanted to look small and docile in his life.

  Something else happened too. Dion kept turning toward the camera, an unnatural behaviour that, thanks to the tight angle of the TV camera shots, gave him an intimate contact with the camera that the others lacked. He spoke in quiet, conversational tones. The others, with their tunnel-vision attacks on Harper, let him talk. And Dion, alone among the leaders, brought something new: a “thirty-day plan” for dealing with the economic turbulence. It was nothing fancy, basically just a plan for meetings. As prime minister, Dion would meet the premiers, some private-sector economists, and the heads of the Bank of Canada and other federal agencies, as soon as he could. He’d put out an economic update. He’d speed up some infrastructure spending.

  The flimsiness of Dion’s plan would end up sharply limiting its useful shelf life. But for now at least he had a set of ideas about what was turning into some truly nasty global economic turbulence. Harper didn’t, as far as anyone could tell. He had identified economic turmoil as a major campaign issue as early as his trip to Rideau Hall on Day One. He had asked the broadcast consortium that was broadcasting the debates to lengthen the economic component of this debate from twelve minutes to thirty. He’d been reminding every crowd he’d spoken to that he was an economist. But he’d brought nothing to this debate but icy blue eyes of love.

  “At a moment when heads of government around the world are acting to address this crisis, Mr. Harper seemed passive,” Radio-Canada commentator Michel C. Auger told the network’s viewers later. Over at TVA, Jean Lapierre had even more surprising news. Among viewers who had called and written to the network with an opinion, Dion was the clear winner.

  On Thursday came the rematch in English. Outside the National Arts Centre, young Conservatives waved blue candidates’ signs, pursued by mobs of young Liberals chanting “Ozzie Ozzie Ozzie, Oi Oi Oi!” Because Harper had delivered a John Howard speech. Get it?

  Inside, this time, Harper brought an offensive game. His staff had spent the morning scripting and rehearsing an opening charge against Dion. “What leaders have to do is have a plan and not panic. Last night, Stéphane, you panicked.” Canada’s economy wasn’t the same as the one south of the border, he said, and ours wasn’t doing too badly.

  It was the sort of thing that sounds clever until you say it. The debate wasn’t five minutes old and Harper had already managed to sound more blasé in English than he had sounded all night in French. “The economy is not fine,” Layton shot back. “Now, either you don’t care or you’re incompetent. Which is it?” Layton wouldn’t stop needling Harper. Every other party had released a platform, Layton pointed out, except the Conservatives. “Where is it?” he asked. “Under the sweater?”

  Mostly the debate was a mess. And Harper had not managed to dispel the impression he was a bit out of it. Later, during the post-mortem exercise Harper had bragged about during the fake breakfast with reporters in Toronto, the campaign team would decide they had made a serious mistake in preparing for this debate. In handing debate prep to Mike Coates and a bunch of other people who had no daily involvement in the rest of the campaign—competent as they were—they had ensured that Debate Harper would be subtly different from Rest-of-Campaign Harper. Different body language, different catchphrases, different tone. Which was great if they wanted to convey, to the largest audience they were going to get in the campaign, that the Conservative leader had been captured by body snatchers. And if not, not. Next time, Harper’s regular campaign staff would coach him for the debates.

  When Frank Graves of the polling firm EKOS Research Associates did a quick survey after the 2008 debates to check viewer perceptions, he found something curious. When he asked who had won the English debate, 26 percen
t said nobody had. Harper came in second with 23 percent; May followed with 18 percent; Layton with 15 percent. At 10 percent, Dion came dead last, except for Duceppe. When asked who had lost the debate, respondents were as likely to name Harper as Dion, at 25 percent each. This meant only that Harper was a polarizing figure, with fans as well as detractors. With a tie for top loser and a fourth-place berth out of five in the winners’ circle, Dion could not claim to have had a stellar night.

  But then EKOS asked respondents whether anything they had seen would make them reconsider their vote. Eighteen percent said yes, a pretty high number. And who were they thinking of voting for? Among the vote-changers, the highest number—22 percent—said they were thinking of voting Liberal. Harper’s Conservatives had attracted only 7 percent of vote-switchers.

  This helps explain why coverage of debates is such a lousy predictor of their political effect. Journalists covering debates are trying to declare a winner. Everyone else is looking for a prime minister. A lot of people watching the debate had decided Dion didn’t win it. But a significant fraction among them had decided he might make a good prime minister anyway.

  The Liberals were back in the game. At first Dion even seemed to have some vague awareness that this was the case. But he had a much better plan for the thirty days after the election than he did for the twelve days left before it.