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

by Paul Wells

  If the Liberals had won nearly as many seats as the Conservatives, Dion could have made a better case of it. Or if the Liberals and New Democrats had together outnumbered the Conservatives, which was the preferred scenario of Topp’s secret committee. Or again if the Liberals and New Democrats had needed only a few Bloc MPs to complete their hand. But to pull a coalition off, Dion would have needed essentially the entire Bloc caucus to prop his government up, so Liberal MPs would be a minority, not just in the Commons, but in their own government’s caucus support.

  It was a mess, and the opposition parties would not even have attempted it if they had not been interested, first of all, in saving their own hides. But even then Canadians might have backed the coalition in numbers sufficient to give heart to the plotters, if they had been angry enough at Harper, if they judged his misstep on the economic update sufficiently damning.

  Pollsters already in the field were starting to hear otherwise. But the main players in this drama still had a chance to make their case directly to Canadians. On Wednesday morning, December 3, Harper announced that he had asked for network broadcast time that evening. The networks offered reply time to the opposition leaders.

  Dion waited until late that afternoon to record his statement. He had it done by a Liberal staffer who did not have professional equipment and whose video camera, as luck would have it, had a busted autofocus. There was no time to fix the lousy footage. The Liberals had to rush the recording to the parliamentary press gallery for broadcast. Unfortunately, they neglected to check where it was supposed to go, and the delivery crew took it to the wrong address first. So, a half-hour late and comically out of focus, Dion delivered his pitch. On the substance of their messages, nobody had anything new to say. Harper said the people’s will was being thwarted; the others said Parliament’s will must be expressed and respected.

  The first decision would be made by Michaëlle Jean. On Thursday morning just before 9:30 a.m., Harper’s motorcade drove the short distance from 24 Sussex Drive to Rideau Hall, taking care to sweep right past the nest of reporters in front of the main entrance so that Harper could use a smaller entrance where no cameras waited.

  Two hours later, Harper came out. The governor general had granted his request to prorogue, he announced. Parliament would meet again on January 26. Parliament had always been scheduled to meet on January 26; all that was changing was that it would stop sitting immediately instead of on December 12. There would be no confidence vote until the New Year.

  What on earth took him so long in there? What could they have talked about? Not much, it turns out. “He spent very little time with her,” Guy Giorno said in an interview. “And then she left and returned after a delay.” So she made him cool his heels alone for almost the entire two hours? “She can speak for herself,” Giorno said, then added, “Well, she ought not, as a matter of constitutional convention.”

  Another Harper advisor suspects the delay was a way of asserting a power Jean had no intention of using. Still, the decision was hers, and she left the meeting room to press that point home, then returned and granted what the prime minister had requested. The overwhelming weight of the constitutional advice the PMO had gathered in the days leading up to the meeting had suggested she would do just that.

  What if Jean had said no? What if she had let Parliament keep sitting despite his request? In his 2010 book Harperland, Lawrence Martin quotes Teneycke on other options Harper might have had. “Well, among them, the Queen,” Teneycke said.

  Could Harper really have asked the Queen to countermand the governor general? Giorno argues that the question is simply meaningless because what Harper was asking for was not something any governor general would have refused. “I don’t want to contradict my good friend, my very good friend,” Giorno says now, referring to Teneycke, “but I can only believe that Lawrence took Kory down a path where Kory was wildly speculating. Because that’s not, I’m sorry, that’s … how do I say it? Not only did it not happen that way. There’s no conceivable reality from which one could conceivably come to that conclusion.”

  Giorno isn’t even sure what “going to the Queen” would entail. “Ask the Queen to come over and rule the country directly? Fire the governor general? I don’t think it works.”

  In the end, simply by acceding to Harper’s wishes, Jean concocted an exquisitely simple stress test for the Dion-led coalition. If this was indeed a durable realignment of forces within the four walls of the House of Commons, proroguing wouldn’t change it. A confidence vote that didn’t end Harper’s career on December 8 could do so on January 30 or in February. All the opposition parties had to do was stick together.

  That didn’t happen. Michael Ignatieff, Dion’s likely successor as Liberal leader, had stayed mum throughout the crisis. But in a Liberal caucus meeting that began minutes after Harper’s Rideau Hall media statement ended, Ignatieff said there was nothing to gain by pushing the coalition now. The government’s defeat could lead to two outcomes: Michaëlle Jean handing power to an untested new Liberal-led government—or an election. He did not think an election would go well for the Liberals.

  As the poll numbers began arriving, they bore out Ignatieff’s hunch. Boy, did they ever. Polling on December 2 and 3, EKOS asked: “If a federal election were held tomorrow, which party would you vote for?” Nationally 44 percent said they would vote Conservative, to 24.1 percent for the Liberals and 14.5 percent for the NDP. EKOS also asked which option respondents preferred as a solution to the impasse. A plurality, 37 percent, favoured “Parliament taking a break for a month or so to see whether the Conservatives can get the confidence of parliament when it comes back into session.” Fewer, 28 percent, wanted to give the coalition a chance to govern. Only 19 percent wanted an election.

  Strategic Counsel, on December 5: Conservatives 45 percent, Liberals 24 percent, NDP 14 percent.

  Ipsos Reid, same day: Conservatives 46 percent, Liberals 23 percent, NDP 13 percent.

  All three polls put the Conservatives in majority-government territory, with support nearly one-fifth higher than in the election only a month earlier. There were important regional variations, of course: the coalition was far more popular in Quebec than elsewhere, for instance. But the implication was obvious. The reaction of the opposition parties had succeeded in producing the clear referendum Harper had sought and failed to obtain in the election campaign. Canadians were realizing the available choices came down to a government composed of Conservatives and led by Harper, or a government composed of Liberals and New Democrats, supported by the Bloc, and led in the next several weeks of a global economic crisis by Stéphane Dion. In the main they supported Harper. If forced to vote, they appeared ready to do so in a way that would put his job out of reach of the combined opposition. It was over.

  On Monday, December 8, Dion announced he would resign as Liberal leader as soon as his caucus could find an interim leader. It didn’t take long. On Wednesday, Michael Ignatieff became the new interim Liberal leader. There was no suspense to what followed. On CTV’s Question Period on December 7, speaking even before Dion had announced his resignation, Ignatieff had left Harper all kinds of room to avoid a further confidence-vote showdown. “Coalition if necessary but not necessarily coalition,” he told CTV. “I think it’s very important for Canadians to have the coalition option so that if Mr. Harper presents a budget which is not in the national interest we can present to Canadians a coalition alternative to spare us a national election.” This was fantasy: if the opposition had not been able to take power while avoiding an election at the beginning of December, they would not have more luck at the end of January. The first choice facing the new Liberal leader-of-sorts would be whether to submit the coalition notion for the voters’ approval in a winter election. And thanks to the polls, Ignatieff already knew how they’d respond.

  “Public opinion was crucially important,” Mark Cameron, Harper’s former policy advisor, said later. “You know, there were protests and counter-protests goin
g on. I think if public opinion polls had shown that 60 percent of the population thought that Harper was on the wrong track and the coalition was a good idea, and if only they’d put Bob Rae there instead of Dion, then people would embrace it, the result would have been different. I don’t think Harper would have been able to do what he did if public opinion wasn’t behind it. Because I’m sure the governor general was looking at public opinion polls too.”

  This thought led directly to another, more surprising one. “In some ways, the events of that two-week period were the real election campaign of 2008,” Cameron said. “The election was kind of a bland issueless election, despite the fact that you had this economic crisis going on all around you. In some ways, the real election was the swings in public opinion of that two-week period.”

  This short second election of 2008 was a watershed moment for Harper. He could never be sure before now that a working plurality of Canadians would prefer him to the alternative in a direct comparison. Suddenly and quite against his wishes, circumstances had conspired to produce such a direct, binary choice. And more Canadians had preferred Harper to the alternative. He knew that, when it came to it, the country would have his back.

  The lesson was not lost on Harper. After Christmas he sat down with Ken Whyte, the editor of Maclean’s magazine, for an interview. The opposition coalition, at least theoretically still a menace hanging over his government, was much on his mind. “Obviously, if we had an election today somebody will have a majority,” he said, “because it will be either Canada’s Conservative government or the coalition.”

  Whyte was plainly surprised by the notion. “So you think they’d actually run as a coalition?”

  “I don’t think they have any choice: if they defeat us as a coalition they have to run as a coalition, and I think those will be the real choices before the electorate. The electorate will know that if you’re not electing the Conservative government you’re going to be electing a coalition that will include the NDP and the separatists.”

  The election Harper was thinking about was the one that still loomed as a possible consequence of the 2009 budget, now only weeks away. In the event, Ignatieff would back away from a confrontation, a manoeuvre with which he would soon become wearyingly familiar, and Harper would live to fight another day. But Harper would hang on to his plan to run the next election as a clear choice between a Conservative majority and an opposition coalition. He would make no secret of it, repeating that line dozens of times, until eventually senior ministers repeated it too. The opposition parties had more than two years’ advance notice of Harper’s strategy for the next election. Surely with that much warning they could confound him. Surely.

  SEVEN

  MESS UNTIL I’M DONE

  Stephen Harper had called the 2008 election hoping to calm the opposition by thumping them soundly, so that he could concentrate on governing instead of on survival. Fat chance. The election’s outcome led straight to the crisis that nearly ruined him. And after Michaëlle Jean prorogued Parliament and the coalition had fallen by the wayside, he had to keep on patching holes.

  Harper had appointed no senators since he had put Michael Fortier in the Red Chamber immediately after winning the 2006 election. He had run, after all, on a promise to get senators elected, not appointed. Steady attrition meant that more and more Senate vacancies were opening up. Harper didn’t care. But during the coalition crisis he’d learned that Stéphane Dion had been preparing to fill those vacancies with Liberal, NDP, even Green Party senators who, once they were in, could not be removed before they turned seventy-five. It was one of those moments when you realize you’re vulnerable in a place you hadn’t even been looking. If Dion had succeeded, a bulwark of Liberal hegemony would have been fortified durably, no matter what Harper managed to do later. To Harper that was unacceptable.

  So on December 22, while the House was prorogued, he appointed eighteen senators, hailing from eight provinces and the Yukon. Many, like the party fundraiser Irving Gerstein, were loyal Conservatives of long standing. One of them, a high-strung young Algonquin from Maniwaki, Quebec, named Patrick Brazeau, was meant to symbolize the success the Conservatives were having in winning support among some off-reserve Aboriginal Canadians. Two of the new appointees were stars of television journalism, Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy. Duffy had made no secret of his desire for a Senate seat since long before the Conservatives were elected. Word of his appointment came seven weeks after he aired footage of Stéphane Dion flubbing an interview.

  Announcing his newly made senators, Harper said he would continue to work for a reformed Senate. “If Senate vacancies are to be filled, however, they should be filled by the government that Canadians elected rather than by a coalition that no one voted for.” That made tactical sense. It also made a mockery of convictions some might have thought Harper held dear. But he had no conviction dearer than the need to keep winning. Having managed to leap off the train tracks an instant before the coalition locomotive would have rolled over him, he was in even less of a mood to play nice than usual.

  The dangers his government now faced were myriad, as any government’s always are. But we can divide the important challenges into two broad contexts and two new interlocutors. The contexts were global economic upheaval and a shooting war in Afghanistan that grew nastier by the month. The interlocutors were a pair of Harvard liberals: Michael Ignatieff (PhD in History, 1976) and Barack Hussein Obama (Juris Doctor, 1991).

  In some ways Ignatieff looked like a more formidable opponent by far than Dion. At the Montreal leadership convention in 2006 he had led on the first ballot, the position every previous Liberal leader had occupied. A trick of alliances spoiled his victory, a mishap that had finally been corrected. The caucus liked him. If there is one myth about Ignatieff that was never true, it is that he is frosty or arrogant. Up close, chatting with anyone at all, he is a gentle and attentive listener. He speaks both English and French well. He had written all those books. He was almost dashing. This last is hard to remember, but there is documented evidence. There is, for instance, a 2004 novel by the Toronto journalist and author Patricia Pearson called Playing House. Its main character runs into the Harvard academic and essayist Michael Ignatieff at an Italian restaurant in New York City. She’s briefly smitten. “He was, I mused, everything that I’d ever dreamed suitable,” Pearson’s narrator says. “Accomplished, bold, socially gracious, a touch mischievous, emotionally pent-up in a wonderfully provocative way. One could sense real excitement within that crumpet. I was half in love with him by the time he’d analyzed the Middle East and the tartufo had arrived.”

  The problem with Ignatieff in politics was that, for the first time in his life, the tartufo never seemed to arrive. Alf Apps and Ian Davey had brought him back from Harvard as a man of ideas. In journalism, especially as it is practised at the BBC, he knew what that meant: say something provocative about big issues. But every time he did that in political life in Canada, he got into trouble. He spent the years from 2006 to 2009 repairing self-inflicted damage to his reputation.

  In August 2007, for instance, he published a story in the New York Times Magazine called “Getting Iraq Wrong.” His goal, transparently, was to get on the right side of the Iraq war. This was a challenge because he had been one of the war’s pre-eminent academic cheerleaders. The magnitude of the circle he needed to square was clear in every line of the piece. Parts of it were nearly incoherent, as if Google-translated from Finnish. The “unfolding catastrophe in Iraq,” he wrote, had “condemned the judgment” not only of George W. Bush but of “many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion.” How had this happened? Ignatieff spent much of the rest of the article asserting a difference between “professional thinkers,” who could pretty much just say whatever sounded good, and politicians, who had to get stuff right.

  “Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely int
eresting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life,” he wrote. “In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources.”

  In his previous submission to the New York Times, barely two years earlier, he had laid out the arguments he was now disowning. “A relativist America is properly inconceivable,” he wrote then. “Leave relativism, complexity and realism to other nations. America is the last nation left whose citizens don’t laugh out loud when their leader asks God to bless the country and further its mighty work of freedom. It is the last country with a mission, a mandate and a dream, as old as its founders. All of this may be dangerous, even delusional, but it is also unavoidable. It is impossible to think of America without these properties of self-belief.”

  Now Ignatieff was saying that those had been “merely interesting” notions, “fun to play with.” One presumes he would have been miffed if anyone had made that claim against him in 2005. It was on the basis of such idle riffing that his Liberal recruiters had called him up for a run at the party’s highest post.