by Paul Wells
But his goal now wasn’t to make sense. It was to insulate himself against future attack, to have something on record that he could point to when anyone complained about his earlier positions. A similar motivation sent him to Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto on April 14, 2008, to apologize to a who’s who of Toronto’s Jewish community for having said, in 2006, that the Israeli Air Force bombing of Qana was “a war crime.” The evening’s moderator was Aurel Braun, a political scientist from the University of Toronto, who brooked no critique of Israel’s efforts to defend itself.
His remarks that night were lengthy and often tinged with self-pity. “How many of you feel that nothing Israel says is listened to, because so many people have stopped listening at all?” he asked. “It also happens to be the way I feel I am perceived in some parts of the Jewish community.” He blamed his Qana comment for his perception problem. He called his remark about war crimes “the most painful error of my political life.” Since he was now a politician and thus confined, by his own analysis, to the smaller number of ideas that happen to be true, we can infer he thought his Qana comment was more painful than his stance on the Iraq war. But such quibbling ignores the point of the exercise. Ignatieff had checked, or done his best to check, another item off the list of amends he felt he needed to make.
To Ignatieff’s supporters these periodic mea culpas should have been preoccupying. But in declaring his past sentiments inoperative, he was only doing what he had done all his life.
A diplomat’s son from a storied Russian-Canadian family, Ignatieff had pursued studies in three countries by the time he turned thirty. Afterward he honed an unusual mode of career advancement, showing up at the gate of some exclusive fortress—the BBC or the New England foreign-policy nomenklatura—and finding a way in. He never stormed the ramparts. In such genteel institutions, that would not have worked. Instead, he ingratiated himself with the gatekeepers through observation and deft mimicry. He studied the way people in these clubs talked, the subjects they favoured, the attitudes they prized or scorned. Soon enough he began to speak like them. He did nothing to shake up the BBC, for it was not seeking a Canadian to shake it up. He simply became the kind of fellow the BBC liked to hire. He didn’t revolutionize the liberal-interventionist school of American foreign policy; he simply ducked into a broom closet and emerged saying the sort of stuff that would make the Brookings Institution lads chuckle and nod. Outsiders may join exclusive clubs only on the clubs’ terms, not their own. Long before he moved to Ottawa, Michael Ignatieff was a world champion shucker-off of old flesh.
If nationality was an obstacle, he could camouflage that, too. In the preface to his 2000 book The Rights Revolution, Ignatieff included a few lines written specifically for his Canadian readers. “This book may seem like a report by a visitor from a distant planet,” he wrote. “I want to alert readers that I am a Martian outsider.” Further on, he added what seemed to be a reassurance: writing this book had “deepened my attachment to the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.” Editions of the book released after 2005 omitted these lines.
His skill as a chameleon would cost him in politics, not because it emboldened his opponents but because it bewildered potential supporters. In 2006 I wrote in Maclean’s about Liberals—not Conservatives—who complained about Ignatieff’s “pronoun problem,” his tendency, when sitting in the U.K. or the United States, to use the pronoun “we” in reference to countries that weren’t Canada. Since the 1960s the Liberals had come increasingly to believe theirs was the party that best embodied Canadians’ aspirations, perhaps the only one that bothered to try. It was not a mere curiosity that they had found a leader whose attachment to Canada, both geographical and emotional, was so tenuous. It was a fundamental weakness. Harper would not fail to exploit it.
But meanwhile Ignatieff had more pressing concerns. When he became Liberal leader the party was still proposing a Bloc-supported coalition with the NDP to take power. Ignatieff had signed the same letter all his colleagues had signed, petitioning the governor general to consider the option. But he had taken care to be the last Liberal to sign—as if that made a difference—and, as he later told Peter C. Newman, he didn’t like the whole notion. “I had very substantial objections from the beginning,” he said. Once he took over the party, met Layton and “listened to Canadians,” he said, “my initial feelings that this was the wrong move were redoubled.” He needed to climb down from an adventure he had never liked. The 2009 budget offered an off-ramp.
It was a straightforward stimulus budget, seeking to pep up the sagging economy with a multi-billion-dollar Keynesian sugar high. Jim Flaherty’s spending plan featured modest income-tax relief, incentives for home improvements, and billions for major public infrastructure projects. He called for a $33.7-billion deficit in the 2009/2010 fiscal year, and $29.8 billion the year after. There was not a word about public financing of political parties. The Bloc and NDP hated it all. It broadly resembled what they had nearly brought down the government in order to implement, but Layton in particular now preferred a clear path to NDP cabinet seats over policy consistency.
Ignatieff convened the scribes at the National Press Theatre for a formal news conference instead of the no-frills scrum opposition leaders usually used to reveal their budget reactions. Stimulus spending was all well and good, he said, but Liberals would be “watching like hawks” to make sure the money actually got out. “We are putting this government on probation. We’ve put down a very clear marker. This government has to get the money out the door. If this government fails to meet these targets, it will not survive for long.”
Concretely, what the Ignatieff Liberals proposed was an amendment to the budget bill. The Liberals would support the budget if the government promised to report to Parliament at the end of March, June and December on “the actual implementation of the budget.” Each report would be subject to a confidence vote, so the opposition could bring the government down any time. In particular, the Liberals demanded information on “the protection of the most vulnerable in Canadian society, the minimizing of existing job losses, the creation of the employment opportunities of tomorrow,” and “the provision of economic stimulus in a manner fair to all regions of Canada.”
It took about an hour for Jay Hill, the government House leader, to say the Conservatives would support that amendment. Probably Harper and Hill had taken that long to get their breath back after turning cartwheels in the cabinet room. The coalition uprising had forced Harper to spend billions of dollars quickly, something most governments are tempted to do anyway. Now Ignatieff was requiring Harper to explain, frequently and in detail, how he was spending those billions and how Canadians were benefiting. Twist my rubber arm, was Harper’s reply. Within weeks, the Conservatives had developed strategies and graphic designs and Message Event Proposals for the many hundreds of sod turnings, ribbon cuttings and profoundly convivial chamber-of-commerce luncheons their economic action plan would entail. The Liberal-mandated quarterly stimulus reports would not be sullen reports to the teacher; they would be full of colour photos and zippy charts. Their none-too-subliminal message every time would be, What kind of fool would want to stop this fun and hold an election?
All this would become clear later. For now Ignatieff had saved his party’s hide. Jack Layton was furious, because the Liberals’ assent to the budget marked the effective end of the coalition experiment. Harper had finally come out as a deficit-spending Keynesian. Eventually he would be criticized, from left and right, for his spending binge. It would be silly criticism. The spending binge was the single condition of his survival as a political leader. After 2010 he would wind the spending down sharply, retiring most of the stimulus programs; the auditor general would even congratulate him on the care he and his officials had taken in ensuring that the proper rules were followed in disbursing the money. The only real surprise, perhaps, was how much he enjoyed the spending binge while it was happening. Glossy reports. Signs everywhere with jaunty,
upward-pointing arrows. TV commercials praising Ottawa’s munificence. It was a heady time for a small-government guy, as long as he showed a little flexibility.
The other pressing project of Harper’s winter was securing and preparing for the visit of the man who had suddenly become the world’s most prized social guest, Barack Obama. The forty-fourth president had been sworn in a week before Flaherty delivered his stimulus budget. Harper’s PMO was deeply worried about screwing up this new relationship with the new leader of Canada’s most important neighbour. It would not be hard to do. There was a long history of shaky relations, with gusts to open hostility, between presidents and prime ministers of different party stripes. Kennedy thought Diefenbaker was a buffoon. Trudeau thought much the same of Reagan.
Jean Chrétien got along famously with Bill Clinton, but when George W. Bush came to office, the relationship started off badly and never recovered. In the sort of snub only Canadians ever notice, Bush became the first president of the modern era (defined, in this instance, as “since Ronald Reagan”) to visit any other country before Canada. Of course there were extenuating circumstances: Bush was a Texan whose state bordered on Mexico. Visiting Mexico was easy and automatic. No matter; the Conservatives’ Canadian Alliance forebears had heckled Chrétien mercilessly for missing the big get. Then came the terrifying 9/11 attacks and Bush’s speech days later to a joint session of Congress. Britain’s Tony Blair sat in the VIP gallery next to Mrs. Bush. Chrétien was not even in town. Then came Chrétien’s decision to stay out of the Iraq war followed by Paul Martin’s decision to stay out of Bush’s continental missile-defence project. From the standpoint of bilateral relations, none of it was pretty.
Harper had been a keen student of every step in this deteriorating relationship. He was quite sure he could do better. On May 28, 2002, he had made Canada–U.S. relations, and more specifically the proper bond between presidents and prime ministers, the subject of his first speech to the House of Commons as leader of the Canadian Alliance opposition. The occasion was a doomed opposition motion of no confidence against the majority Chrétien government condemning Chrétien’s “failure to persuade the U.S. government to end protectionist policies.”
The reason things were going badly with Washington, Harper said, was “the consistent and complete inability of the present Canadian government to make our case to American authorities, to Congress and especially to the Bush administration.” Chrétien was so lost he kept making trade trips to China instead of concentrating on Washington, Harper claimed. “The Prime Minister went back to the future. He tried to revive the failed trade diversification of the 1970s, the Trudeau government’s so-called third option strategy, which did not work then and is not working now.”
Harper pointed out that if Brian Mulroney had understood nothing else, he had understood the Americans. The lesson from Mulroney: “The United States is our closest neighbour, our best ally, our biggest customer and our most consistent friend. Whatever else, we forget these things at our own peril.… We will be unable to get the U.S. administration on board unless whoever is in the White House and leading members of congress value and respect what our Prime Minister brings to the table.”
So it was striking that on George W. Bush’s last day in the White House, when his spokesperson released a list of the farewell telephone calls the two-term president had made to the leaders he had most enjoyed working with over the years, Harper’s name was not on the list. Bush spoke to Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. He spoke to British prime minister Gordon Brown. He called Denmark’s Anders Fogh Rasmussen, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvilli, Germany’s Angela Merkel, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, Israel’s Shimon Peres, Japan’s Tarō Asō, Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev and his boss Vladimir Putin, and South Korea’s Lee Myung-bak. Bush did not need to phone Australia’s John Howard; the Howards were in Washington visiting the Bushes. He called the former Mexican president, Vicente Fox. He didn’t need to call Felipe Calderón because Calderón had just visited with him.
But Bush didn’t call Harper. There’s no way of knowing why not, but the omission seems significant. One possibility: Bush’s most important foreign-policy adventure, certainly the defining project of his presidency, was the war in Iraq. He and his advisors cannot have failed to notice how quickly Harper backed away from Iraq as he approached power.
In January 2003, Harper had stood in the Commons to remind MPs that as early as the previous October, he had noted: “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein operates programs to produce weapons of mass destruction. Experience confirms this. British, Canadian and American intelligence leaves no doubt on the matter.” Therefore, Canada must help depose Saddam Hussein, he said. Failure to do so “is not fitting with the greatness of our history or with our standing as a nation.”
On March 26, 2003, six days after the American tanks rolled into the Iraqi desert, Harper told the Commons: “We should be there with our allies when it counts against Saddam Hussein.” That August, he said to Maclean’s: “Canada remains alienated from its allies, shut out of the reconstruction process to some degree, unable to influence events. There is no upside to the position Canada took.”
This is prehistory in relation to the scope of this book, but it is necessary background for understanding what happened next. As soon as the Iraq adventure went sour, Harper put as much distance as he could between himself and the allies he had insisted Canada must support: Bush, Tony Blair and Australia’s John Howard. This may have been smart politics, but that is not how it would have looked to Bush, Blair and Howard. They stuck with their policy after it became unpopular. Harper cut and ran.
By late April 2004 there had been more than eight hundred coalition fatalities in Iraq. On April 25 on CTV, Harper was asked about sending Canadian soldiers into the battle. “Given our limited military capacity and the extent to which our people are already over-committed across the world, I don’t think that’s feasible.” Campaigning in Barrie, Ontario, several weeks later, he said his 2003 stance “was about putting pressure on Saddam to comply with UN resolutions.” If Canada had helped to apply that pressure, “we could have avoided a war.” That’s nice, but it does not square with the public record. The war was six days old when Harper said “we should be there … when it counts.” A year later he was claiming that when he said that, it no longer counted.
By December 2005, campaigning for votes once again, Harper was hurrying to correct U.S. conservatives who were too eager to embrace him as an ally on Iraq. A Washington Times columnist called him Bush’s best supporter. Harper paused from the campaign trail to send the staunchly right-wing little paper a letter: “While I support the removal of Saddam Hussein and applaud the efforts to establish democracy and freedom in Iraq, I would not commit Canadian troops to that country.”
In January 2006, Harper became prime minister. He worked fine with Bush. But there were no chummy photo ops, no visits to the ranch in Texas. By settling a long-standing dispute over softwood lumber exports, Harper had early success at ensuring that bilateral relations remained cordial and productive. They were never warm.
At intervals, for reasons having nothing at all to do with foreign policy, the Conservatives convene focus groups with undecided voters, seeking their impressions of the government and of other party leaders. These groups may include handing participants a picture of a party leader and a stack of photos that might evoke a strong emotional response: a bag of money, an army tank, a mother hugging her child. One of the cards portrays an American flag. Group convenors have noticed that the flag card is never perceived as a compliment when it is laid next to a party leader’s photo. It always evokes a criticism: “Too close to the Americans.” The longer Harper was prime minister, the less often participants associated him with the Stars and Stripes in this game of associative tarot. Harper went into power thinking he needed to be close to the American president. He realized that keeping power required keeping his distance.
Now
Bush was gone and Obama was coming. In person. The newspapers brought the glad tidings on Sunday, January 11, 2009, that the new president’s first foreign trip would be a hop up north soon after his inauguration. The Toronto Star called it “the result of days of behind-the-scenes contact between Ottawa and the president-elect’s transition team.”
There were reasons to hope the two leaders would get along. They were from roughly the same generation, younger than many world leaders. Both had run as outsiders who wanted to shake up their respective capitals. I know this is thin gruel, but Harper’s communications staff peddled it with admirable relish to reporters in Ottawa. They needed to hope the meeting would go well. All Obama had heard about Harper before the election was that his former chief of staff had babbled something to TV reporters about NAFTA that wound up casting doubt on Obama’s credibility. “Would they be the sort of people who’d remember something like that?” one PMO source wondered. “We certainly would have.” If Obama remembered and carried a grudge, Harper would be toast.
Attitudes aside, the trip was hobbled by lackadaisical planning. Later, a former ministerial staffer who had worked on the Obama visit said the Harper PMO was so eager to land Obama first that they never got around to thinking too deeply about what the visit might actually accomplish.
“Once the word went out that Obama was coming to Canada, then it was time to do some serious pre-meeting meetings,” this source said. “Set the table so to speak. It was pretty peculiar, because you couldn’t really find out who was doing that work for Harper. Giorno was reported to be doing some work with [Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm] Emanuel, chief to chief. It was suggested that Patrick Muttart was doing some of the work. Patrick’s a good guy, but he’s hardly a policy wonk. [Bruce] Carson was sort of neither here nor there.”