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

by Paul Wells

  The next day Dion was in Montreal to address the Board of Trade along with a similar group representing young people in business. He was obviously on a bit of a high, full of obscure asides and literary allusions. “I’m always wary when I hear about ‘la relève,’ ” he told the young entrepreneurs in French, using the term that means a rising generation. Its literal translation would be “the next shift” or “the ones who take over.” “I’m always reminded of what Gilles Vigneault said whenever he heard it: ‘What, did somebody fall?’ ”

  This was the day the U.S. House of Representatives would pass a reworked version of the US$700-billion bank bailout package it had rejected, in a particularly nasty afternoon of infighting and finger-pointing, four days earlier. “We need a plan,” Dion said. “A plan made in Canada, not in Australia.” Applause, none too raucous, from the business crowd. “One thing that is certain: Stephen Harper is an economic risk Canadians can no longer afford,” Dion said.

  It was not a bad speech, but neither was this business lunch the kind of foot-stomping rally Dion needed to fan the weak flame of hope he had finally lit for his campaign. By Saturday in Dieppe, New Brunswick, Dion was finally sounding like a bit of a populist. He said he wanted a Canada “where not only the rich go to university,” a potent distillation of the indigestible seminar on student aid he had delivered early on at Western. He wanted a Canada “where nobody has to sell their house to pay for their medication.”

  “He’s beginning to feed off the crowds that he sees,” Munson said later, after a brief stop on Prince Edward Island. The Conservatives had been saturating the tiny province with its four Liberal seats for a year—radio ads, mailers to every household, visits by half the cabinet. Dion needed to shore up Liberal support. Still playing defence. “He’s beginning to pay attention to the simpler messaging that he could be using.”

  Wasn’t it perilously late?

  “Well, it is. Absolutely. But it’s happening. That’s the good thing. It’s happening,” Munson said.

  But it was happening in the middle of nowhere. After New Brunswick, incredibly, Dion went to Nunavut, then to the almost equally isolated town of Churchill, Manitoba. Harper was actually taking the day off. But the election was ever closer, the surprising debate performance another day further into the past. Dion was doing nothing useful to push his advantage. Yet almost despite him, support for the Conservatives was starting to fall in the daily tracking polls. Nanos, which had put the gap between the two largest parties at fifteen points only nine days before, now had it down to four.

  On Tuesday the Conservatives finally released their platform. The election was a week away. The plan had always been to drop a platform near the end of the campaign. It would not announce a glorious future because Harper was supposed to be the candidate of stability pointing out the nonsense in everyone else’s plan for a glorious future. Policy for the Conservatives had been very much an afterthought this time around.

  Harper’s problem now was that the economy and his shaky debate performance had made at least some voters wonder whether he was still up to the job. His platform, designed as a show of confidence from a party whose old ideas worked fine, now looked like confirmation that it was out of new ideas. As Dion’s chartered Air Inuit plane flew from Victoria over the Prairies, Dion’s advisors pored over the Conservative campaign document.

  At a rally for candidate Anthony Rota, the Liberal leader shared the fruits of his staff’s research. Harper’s forty-four-page document made no reference to poverty, climate change or fiscal discipline, Dion said. But it mentioned Harper a hundred times. “We have a platform of sixty-six pages,” he said. “We mention the leader six times.” The Liberal platform had one picture of Dion. “It’s a very nice picture.” Harper’s platform had twenty-two pictures of Harper. “Beyond the words, it’s all about him. It’s me, myself and I,” said Dion. “It’s his navel. It’s about his job. Our plan is about your jobs.” The crowd of four hundred roared. It was the kind of rally Dion could have used four days earlier, to capitalize on the momentum coming out of his performance in the debate.

  While the Liberal leader was at pains to depict Harper as out of touch with ordinary Canadians, Harper seemed eager to help him. Speaking to reporters after his platform launch, Harper was relaxed and expansive, delivering long, thoughtful replies to the questions from the press gallery. This turned out to be a problem. “I think there’s probably some great buying opportunities emerging in the stock market as a consequence of all this panic,” Harper said. Certainly there was panic: the S&P/TSX Composite Index was down for the fifth straight day.

  That night Harper appeared on the CBC to be quizzed by Peter Mansbridge. The CBC had labelled their leaders feature “Your Turn,” and its conceit was that this was supposed to be a chance for ordinary Canadians to ask leaders the questions. Only one leader had refused that format. Guess which one. Harper would take questions from Mansbridge alone, the CBC had been told, or he would not show up.

  As it happened, it did not much matter who asked the questions that night. Harper was determined to dig himself deeper. “We always know that when stock markets go up, people end up buying a lot of things that are overpriced and when stock markets go down people end up passing on a lot of things that are underpriced,” he said. “I think there are probably some gains to be made in the stock market.”

  Mansbridge was incredulous. “Do you really want to be heard saying that?”

  Publicly, Harper’s team insisted the leader’s comments were innocuous. Privately, the remarks hit the Conservatives like a lightning bolt. Ever since the Lehman Brothers collapse on September 15, barely eight days into this campaign, a few Conservatives, including Muttart and Teneycke, had been nervous. They had designed a campaign suitable for sitting on a comfortable lead, one that depended on a calm electorate. But Harper’s reassuring tone had, for some time, been an increasingly lousy fit for the voters’ mood. Before the debates, the campaign’s road team and headquarters staff had convened in the dining room at 24 Sussex Drive to discuss the progress of the campaign. Doug Finley, Jenni Byrne, Teneycke and Muttart were among the participants. They all told Harper that the Conservatives’ slide in the polls was real. The participants agreed to show more empathy on economic concerns and make sure the focus stayed on Dion.

  But in the days after the debate it became clear that the Conservative campaign wasn’t swift or agile enough to adjust to changing circumstances. And the leader himself seemed, simply, not to get that he was much of the problem. Later, many Conservatives would point out that early October 2008 was, in fact, a period of excellent buying opportunity in the stock market. None of them thought Harper should have said so. “This was Harper being Harper the pundit,” one said. “Harper the pundit is a fantastic pundit. He’s a very interesting pundit. But you don’t get to be a pundit when you’re the prime minister.”

  Now, finally, Harper tried to hammer home the idea that the alternative to him wasn’t bliss, it was Dion and Layton and Duceppe. In Victoria on October 8, for the first time, he raised the possibility that a coalition of opposition parties might wind up in power. “If you get Prime Minister Dion, either directly or by the opposition parties helping him take power, interest rates are going to go up.”

  Events in the real world were accelerating as the campaign sped toward its conclusion. On Wednesday, October 8, the Bank of Canada joined the European Central Bank and central banks in the United States, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K. in announcing a simultaneous half-point cut in their base rates. China followed suit hours later. It was a nearly worldwide expression of concern about the flagging global economy, conjured by the fates as if to underscore Harper’s contention that voters must not view this as an ordinary election.

  But this late in the game, a change in tone might not be enough to improve Harper’s trajectory. “We weren’t running on our ballot question,” one of his advisors said later, “and we weren’t fighting a campaign against a real person.” How
bad was it? “I think it was possible to lose.”

  Somebody needed to make the choice real again, and turn the comparison to Harper’s advantage. That task fell to Stéphane Dion.

  In Halifax, Dion made what is nearly an obligatory call for campaigning leaders who want to reach a wide Atlantic audience: the studio of veteran ATV supper-hour news anchor Steve Murphy. The interview was pre-taped, as most of these things are. Anchor and party leader sat facing each other.

  “If you were prime minister now,” Murphy asked, “what would you have done about the economy and this crisis that Mr. Harper has not done?”

  Who among us is rock-solid on questions phrased in the conditional perfect tense in our second language? “If I would have been the prime minister two and a half years ago?” Dion responded, uncertainly.

  “If you were the prime minister now,” Murphy said, “and had been for the past two years.”

  The look of bewilderment on Dion’s face was plain. Perhaps by now he understood the question but was seeking to reframe it to his advantage. “If I’m elected next Tuesday,” he said. “This Tuesday.” He was trying to explain what he would do, starting the morning after an election. The whole point of his thirty-day plan was that it was about the future.

  But Murphy was asking about the past. Murphy wanted to refight the past. Murphy wanted to know what Dion would have done if he’d been in Harper’s shoes when the crisis hit. Dion ignored this, or perhaps he still did not understand it. He pressed ahead. “I would start the 30-50 plan that we want to start the moment we have a Liberal government.”

  Okay, that wasn’t great. It wasn’t even what Dion had meant to say. He had meant to put in a plug for his thirty-day economic plan. The 30-50 plan was his anti-poverty agenda, which he didn’t want to talk about right now. Dion tried to correct himself, then thought better of it. “Can we start again?”

  This sort of thing happens in television, which after all most often seeks to present an idealized simulation of reality. Mistakes happen. When the broadcast isn’t live, as this wasn’t, there are all kinds of chances to fix mistakes. Often an anchor screws up the intro or the question and asks his production crew and his guest for their indulgence while he restarts. It’s less common for the guest to request a Mulligan, but it’s not unheard of. So Dion and Murphy restarted. Murphy asked the question again. But even then, Dion still didn’t know where to situate himself, the question, and the fate of the nation in time and space. Dion’s press secretary, Sarah Bain, off camera, tried to explain the question to him. Dion asked for yet another restart. It all went downhill from there.

  In what follows, it’s worth remembering that Murphy had agreed to a do-over. He had not said, “No, Mr. Dion, your answer must stand!” So it was highly unusual for him and the CTV management to decide, later, to air the false starts. Just as it was odd that the whole tape found its way onto coast-to-coast cable via Mike Duffy’s CTV Newsnet show. Both choices—to air Dion’s false starts and to take them national (well, national-ish; the supper-hour Ottawa cable news shows hardly have huge audiences)—would be criticized by other journalists for a long time to come.

  The decision was made during a lengthy phone call between Halifax and Toronto whose participants included Robert Hurst, CTV News president. The journalists decided one do-over was permissible (and had been permitted by Murphy), but a chain of fumbles was a story. “My personal sense is if we had to restart the interview once, you and I wouldn’t be talking about this today,” CTV Atlantic news director Jay Witherbee told Susan Newhook, an assistant professor of journalism at King’s College School of Journalism, two weeks after the election. “Somewhere between that and an aide jumping in to explain the question, and a few other do-overs, we got ourselves to the situation that we’re in.”

  The following May, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council would rule against both CTV and Duffy for their behaviour on this campaign Friday. But of course, by May, it would be altogether too late.

  The upshot was that Dion was seen on TV looking like a goof on the very issue he had hammered Harper on for a week. “Isn’t this great?” a Conservative war room staffer told me at the moment the news broke. “It’s so great on so many levels.”

  The Conservatives’ only worry was that the Dion interview would remain stuck in the viewership ghetto of CTV’s Atlantic affiliate and its cable news show. Travelling with Harper in Winnipeg, Teneycke made a quick decision: get the leader back out in front of the TV cameras. Everybody would have to carry the prime minister’s comments. And they would also have to carry the interview footage to put the comments in context.

  “When you’re managing a trillion-and-a-half-dollar economy, you don’t get a chance to do do-overs, over and over again,” Harper said. “I don’t think this is a question of language at all. The question was very clear. It was asked repeatedly. But what’s important in the end, after all the times the question was put, the answer was, from Mr. Dion, that he does not have a plan, that if he is elected he would spend thirty days trying to create one.”

  To call this entire display disingenuous would be like calling the Pacific Ocean moist. Harper had been the only party leader to show up at the televised debates without a platform. The platform, when it did land, was mostly a photographic celebration of Harper’s physiognomy. He would never implement large parts of the plan he did put before the voters. And he would wind up swiping much of the plan from Dion that he claimed Dion didn’t have—the meeting with premiers and leading economists, an early economic update … but again we are getting ahead of ourselves. For now it is worth pointing out that Harper’s attack on Dion’s credibility presumed a good deal more credibility on Harper’s own part than he had earned in this campaign. But it mattered little. For more than a year the Conservatives had warned voters that Dion was “Not a Leader.” Now Dion had acted in a way that tended to confirm those suspicions. The resulting television footage would be the last image of him millions of voters would see before they voted.

  The last image of Harper was one the Conservatives had chosen. After the debates, at the campaign meeting where it became clear Harper had pretty much screwed up in framing the election as a choice between economic stability and Liberal chaos, his staff had decided to shoot some new ads and make sure they landed in front of swing voters’ eyeballs. Now on TVs across the country, whether they were tuned to HGTV or the Food Network or maybe some other channels, the last-ditch ads began to appear. They showed a young mother in a pantsuit in what was, frankly, her gorgeous, sprawling new kitchen. She looked worried. She picked up the paper. “Markets Unnerved,” the headline said. The mother put a protective hand on her daughter’s shoulder. There were no live males in this house, only televised images from the TV hanging in the corner of the immense kitchen. In fact, there was Stéphane Dion now. The mother listened and frowned. “He worries me,” she said in voice-over. “He promises money like it grows on trees. Keeps promising this carbon tax. We can’t afford more debt. I can’t afford more taxes.”

  Mother and daughter cast a glance at each other over the sprawling marble-topped island in front of the immense spice racks. “Dion’s just not worth the risk,” she said to herself as the Conservative party logo appeared at the bottom of the screen.

  The Conservatives did a bigger buy with that ad in targeted swing ridings than with any other of the campaign. “Our lead with women had slipped away a bit, but it’s coming back,” Marjory LeBreton said. “I always say women are the most worried about things, they’re worried about stability.”

  When the final returns were in, the Conservatives had won again. The party’s share of the popular vote inched upward 1.38 percentage points, to 37.65 percent. Given the lower voter turnout, it meant fewer Canadians had voted for Harper’s party in 2008 than in 2006, although the same was true of all the major parties. What mattered, it seemed, was that Harper would return to the Commons on a more stable footing. He had 124 seats, up 16 from the 2006 elections. Layton’s NDP, with vo
ter support a shade higher than in 2006, picked up 7 more seats, for 37 in all.

  Dion’s Liberals lost 18 seats and not quite 4 percentage points in the popular vote. It was a smaller decline than the Liberals had suffered in 2006 and, it would turn out, smaller than they were in for in 2011. It was still plenty bad: the lowest share of the popular vote for the Liberals since Confederation.

  Dion’s leadership was destroyed. He would, astonishingly, spend six days alone with his family at Stornoway before finally emerging to admit as much. He would, he told reporters, resign the leadership as soon as his party could find a replacement.

  Harper’s election-night speech to supporters at Calgary’s TELUS Convention Centre was becoming a tradition. This was his third such speech since he had become Conservative leader in 2004. “Tonight, Canadians have voted to move our country forward and they have done so with confidence in the future,” he said. Even accounting for rhetorical flourishes it was a lousy choice of words. Canadians had almost never felt less confidence in the future. “These are challenging times in the world economy,” Harper said. “Canadians are worried right now and I understand those worries. But I want to assure Canadians that working together we will weather this storm.”

  He announced three priorities. “First, we will continue to govern on behalf of all Canadians.” And because, despite its electoral gains, the government’s “scope is not as wide as it should be,” Harper promised “an inclusive and responsive government.”

  Second, he vowed to “continue to respect the principle that government is accountable to the people’s representatives in Parliament.” To that end he asked the opposition parties to work with him on the problems facing the country.

  And third, he promised to “keep our promises. We will do what we said we would do.”

  So much still lay ahead, but there was time for Harper to run one victory lap. Four weeks after the election, the Conservatives held a national policy convention in Winnipeg, the first they had permitted themselves since 2005. Holding a convention on the heels of an election campaign was a formidable and entirely optional logistical feat. They could have delayed the thing. But Harper wanted to underscore his victory. From its tenuous beginnings, Harper’s tenure as prime minister had now outlasted those of nine others, including Paul Martin. By early 2011, if he could keep fending off the opposition parties, he would have outlasted Alexander Mackenzie, and then Lester Pearson, and then R.B. Bennett. His residency at 24 Sussex Drive was changing from something that had happened to something that would matter.