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

by Paul Wells

  It became “pretty clear,” this source continued, that unlike the first Mulroney–Reagan meeting in Quebec City in 1985, there was little concerted sherpa work around the Harper–Obama visit. Mulroney believed that unless they were very careful, Canadians would always get the short end of the stick in negotiation with the Americans. “We’re small in scale and we’re largely captive to their market,” the source said. “So we take conditions, we don’t make conditions. We take a price instead of setting price.” To compensate for that tendency, “there has to be a high level of engagement from people who are known to be serious in terms of speaking on behalf of the PM and that the PM is engaged with the President. He is calling, they are talking.” But this time, “none of that went on and we drifted into that meeting.”

  Shortly before Obama arrived, I visited the Langevin Block with my Maclean’s colleague John Geddes to meet a Harper advisor. It was clear from that conversation that Harper had no intention of troubling the president of Canada’s overwhelmingly powerful neighbour with suggestions for an agenda. “We’re not the new guy, he is,” the advisor told us. “We’re here to listen.”

  In the middle of a global economic crisis, with Obama trying to get U.S. troops farther into Afghanistan and right out of Iraq, and both countries pondering a massive investment to prop up the faltering General Motors, Harper took a remarkably passive approach to summit planning. Since no meeting of heads of government can be counted a success if it produces no paper, at least a memorandum of understanding, our inside source says, “the Americans slapped on what was the cookie cutter of the day. The cookie cutter for 2009, Obama-style, were bilateral clean energy MOUs, clean energy dialogue.”

  So, when Obama came to Ottawa on February 19, he toured the House of Commons and held a joint media availability with Harper. “We are establishing a U.S.–Canada clean energy dialogue,” Harper told the scribes, “which commits senior officials from both countries to collaborate on the development of clean energy science and technologies that will reduce greenhouse gases and combat climate change.” The announcement included a clean energy fund, work to study carbon capture and sequestration, and a plan to study the creation of an energy-efficient “smart grid” for power distribution.

  Nine months later, Obama and the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, announced “enhanced co-operation on Energy Security, Energy Efficiency, Clean Energy, and Climate Change,” including a clean energy fund, carbon capture and smart grids. In January 2011, Obama and China’s Hu Jintao announced “Cooperation on Climate Change, Clean Energy, and the Environment.” Four months later, Obama and Polish premier Donald Tusk “welcomed new momentum in the two countries’ cooperation on energy and climate security.” Soon Obama was in Canberra to release a “Statement on Energy Cooperation” with the Australians.

  For Obama, handing out memos of understanding on clean energy was the equivalent of a bantam hockey player handing out mugs with crests on them to families he’s billeted with at tournaments. Jim Prentice, the environment minister at the time, tried to make the thing sound exciting in an interview with Policy Options magazine. “On a scale that has never actually been achieved previously, we will be working together with the United States on these working groups, and one of them is very specifically focused on new technologies.” Prentice and his U.S. counterpart, the Nobel-winning physicist Stephen Chu, who served as Obama’s energy secretary, reported back to their leaders about the dialogue in September 2009. Chu delivered a second report with his new Canadian counterpart, Peter Kent, in February 2011. Prentice had by this point given up on federal politics and gone into banking. Chu and Kent promised to report further to their bosses in “spring 2011.” They finally got around to it fifteen months later.

  Nobody cared. If the best that can be said of the Obama–Harper relationship is that it lacks animosity, that is still a credit to both leaders because it bucks a long-established trend. The feuds between Diefenbaker and Kennedy, Reagan and Trudeau, Bush and Chrétien are part of the shared history of the two countries. In their turn, between these two, there has mostly been apathy. In the end it wasn’t their age or their outsider status that Obama and Harper shared. It was this: neither man had any personal friendships with foreign leaders of the kind Bill Clinton and Brian Mulroney cultivated in their day. These two, Obama and Harper, found their human warmth closer to home to the extent they found any. In their meetings they briskly ticked off items on a to-do list. They even managed to get some big projects accomplished. They bailed out General Motors and kicked off an apparently endless negotiation to enhance the continental security perimeter. Then they parted company and returned to other matters they actually cared about.

  On March 10, 2009, Harper went to Brampton to deliver his first Liberal-mandated quarterly update on his Economic Action Plan in a speech before an invited audience at the Pearson Convention Centre. Shame about the name of the place. CANADA IS WEATHERING THE STORM, the finance department news release read. “Ladies and gentlemen, in times like these I’m reminded of a quote by investor Warren Buffet,” Harper told his audience. “He once said, ‘It is only when the tide goes out that you know who was swimming naked.’ The global economic crisis has revealed quite a few skinny dippers but Canada is not one of them.” Hee-hee. The release accompanying Harper’s speech also bragged about EXTRAORDINARY AND UNPRECEDENTED ACTION. The word “Action” appeared fifty times in the release. This was a surprise, as Parliament had not yet even passed the budget implementation bill that would allow money to start flowing. But it looked impressive. Who could want to stop all this action, or at least all this mentioning of action? Guess. “I must admit I have been very frustrated with the opposition since the election,” Harper said. They had “formed a coalition to try and prevent us from even bringing our budget forward.” Now they were daring to ask questions and propose amendments. Harper asked his audience to “send them a message: Stop the political games!”

  A day later Ignatieff announced he had finally realized it might not be the best idea to let the Conservative fox issue quarterly updates on the quality of its henhouse management. The Liberals would henceforth release their own reports. When he was asked why Harper was still blaming the opposition for stuff, he replied, “My only hypothesis is this economy’s falling like a stone and he’d like you to write about something else.”

  At the end of March a few thousand Liberals repaired to Vancouver for a leadership convention to rubber-stamp Ignatieff’s takeover of the party. A tribute to Stéphane Dion went hours over schedule. The departing loser’s speech was interminable. Louise Arbour, the former Supreme Court justice turned United Nations high commissioner for human rights, was inexplicably present at the convention. Probably somebody thought she’d make a fine Liberal leader someday. Her speech had been scheduled after Dion’s, and was broadcast late at night to a country situated, for the most part, assorted time zones to the east. Arbour’s coming-out as a Liberal person of interest played mostly to insomniacs.

  On May 12, with Ignatieff formally ensconced as leader and guaranteed not to go anywhere any time soon, the Conservatives released their attack ads against him. “Why is Michael Ignatieff back in Canada after being away for thirty-four years? Does he have a plan for the economy? No,” the trademark snarky voice-over intoned. The ad featured footage of Ignatieff blowing kisses to supporters. The screen flashed quotes from his writings. “Horribly arrogant.” “Cosmopolitan.”

  “With no long-term plan for the economy, he’s not in it for Canada—just in it for himself. It’s the only reason he’s back. Michael Ignatieff: Just Visiting.”

  Muttart, the ads’ architect, had the Conservatives register a website in Montenegro so its URL could read www.ignatieff.me, reinforcing the aura of egotism around the Liberal leader.

  The content of the ads would have been uncontroversial to many Liberals, as they had been expressing the same sentiments back in 2006. The notion that Ignatieff’s long sojourn out of the country should count pr
etty seriously against him was a common topic among Liberals—until he became their leader. Now that Harper was making it the focus of an ad campaign depressingly reminiscent of the one that had put lead in Dion’s wings, Liberals were outraged.

  Outraged but unwilling to do anything to respond. On CTV, Steve MacKinnon, the party’s former national director, proclaimed that the most important effect of the Just Visiting ads was to boost donations to the Liberals. A member of the party’s national executive leaked me an internal memo, written by party president Alf Apps, detailing a plan to create a $25-million annual war chest to respond to such attacks. “I believe the advertising campaign undertaken by our opponents last week has created the opportunity to galvanize the entire Party,” Apps wrote, “around a reinvigorated fundraising effort now, even before the summer commences.”

  He was wrong. The Liberals never came anywhere close to raising the kind of money Apps was talking about. Two years would pass before they would buy any ads, on the eve of the next election. In the interim, having watched the Conservative ad machine take Stéphane Dion apart, they chose to repeat the experience.

  “I don’t think we really understood how effective it would be if done over a sustained period of time between writ periods,” Dan Brock, one of Ignatieff’s aides, said after the 2011 election. “We thought, ‘Canadians are going to reject this, because this is just over the top. Canadians are going to say, “You shouldn’t be doing this.” ’ And that’s exactly wrong. Canadians aren’t going to say that. They’re too busy living their lives. They pay a little bit of attention to [politics], and if that little bit of attention is dominated by a particular message, effectively delivered and repeated over and over again, it’s going to sink in. And it did.”

  But it’s not quite accurate to say Ignatieff had no response to the ads. He waited almost two weeks, though, then delivered an empty threat. In Gander, Newfoundland, near the end of May, he told a partisan crowd he had a message for Harper. “If you mess with me, I will mess with you until I’m done.” The next day in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, he tried again. “Don’t trifle with me,” he said. “Don’t try this rough stuff with me.”

  Here we see another example of Ignatieff as anthropologist, Goodall among the apes, peering through the foliage and scratching observations into his Moleskine notebook: These creatures sometimes establish social hierarchy through displays of bravado. Very well, then. In order to gain their trust, I too will engage in chest-thumping behaviour. Unfortunately, he was new to this particular stretch of veldt and had not yet observed the consequences of conspicuous failure to deliver on a threat. An ape who threatened too often to attack without following up on that threat was, in fact, revealing weakness. Soon enough the rest of the band would tear him up.

  The Liberals had launched a website, onprobation.ca, featuring photos of empty fields where the Conservatives had announced infrastructure projects. But the funny thing about probation is that it’s a binary state of existence. If you’re not failing, you’re passing. Every day the Liberals declared themselves Harper’s probation cop and didn’t bust him, they were effectively endorsing him. This Parliament was custom-designed to be brutal on Liberals. They were up first in Question Period. They appeared to be holding Harper’s fate in their hands. But Ignatieff could not stop Harper alone and he could not ally with the NDP and Bloc to stop him without triggering acid flashbacks from the coalition crisis. Ignatieff’s response was to keep talking tough, doubling down on a bluff.

  He was aided, if that’s the word, by Ian Davey, a slouching and cheerful Toronto lawyer who was making an elaborate show of hating every minute he spent in Ottawa running the Office of the Leader of the Opposition. Davey and Apps were lifelong Liberals whose shtick, ever since John Turner’s leadership, had been to stand outside the party’s power hierarchy and remark loudly on how badly the Proper Liberals were screwing everything up. Davey’s dad was Keith Davey, the fabled Rainmaker, the guy who kept Pearson viable, taught Pierre Trudeau how to play rough, and had done his best to save Turner. To call Keith Davey an insider was like saying eggs taste eggy: true, but it understated things. Ian adored his dad, but his enduring gesture of rebellion was to affect an outsider stance. He’d sit there in his fourth-floor office, kitty-corner from Ignatieff’s, roll his eyes and tell a visitor he hated the place, hated the town, hated the games, but what’s a guy to do?

  Davey’s hunch was that the Liberals need to own a patch of the water-front stretching from the business-friendly centre all the way over to a brand of economic populism most New Democrats could endorse. Ignatieff had the centre nailed down, everyone hoped, but he needed help on the left, so Davey encouraged him to talk up employment insurance. EI was fantastic Big Ottawa stuff, real Rainmaker Liberalism, just like the old days. Times were tough. People needed help. Government would send them a cheque. Harper hated the program, thought it made people lazy. Ignatieff would champion its fast expansion.

  Improving EI was “the most effective, rapid and targeted form of stimulus the government can offer our economy right now,” Ignatieff wrote in the National Post on May 23, 2009. Expand the rolls by 150,000 EI recipients and you’d have “money flowing into communities that have been hit the hardest by this recession. That’s the kind of immediate, targeted and effective stimulus we need right now.” The fields of infrastructure were empty. Big Ottawa could help communities “directly, right now, by improving access to EI.”

  The EI thing reliably led Harper to call Ignatieff another big-government big spender. Ignatieff pushed back. “My party has an unimpeachable record in fiscal responsibility,” he said in the Commons. Unfortunately, millions of Canadians didn’t believe that. Ian Brodie, nearly a year out of his job as Harper’s chief of staff but still loyal, told a conference at Carleton University that the Gomery Commission’s 2005 investigation into political corruption had durably blown the Liberals’ brand advantage as fiscal managers. “The idea that the Liberal party has a brand as a fiscally responsible organization—I never once saw a single piece of market-research evidence to support that,” he said. “Never.”

  Of course that’s the sort of thing Ian Brodie would say. Corroboration for his claim came the same week, however, in a new poll by the EKOS firm, whose director, Frank Graves, was generally thought to be fond of Liberals. The poll showed that respondents gave Harper the edge over both Ignatieff and Layton on decisiveness, patriotism—and economic management. The economy stuff was hard on Ignatieff’s pride, and suggested he would have a harder time shielding himself against accusations of irresponsibility than he hoped. But the truly striking gap was on the response to the question about which leader respondents regarded as “a patriotic Canadian.” Harper’s advantage there was thirty-four points, nearly double his next-widest margin.

  Shortly before EKOS released that poll, I received an e-mail from a Harper advisor:

  ON BACKGROUND … IF YOU CHOOSE TO USE … “SENIOR CONSERVATIVE” IS FINE.

  The simple fact that we are debating the “Canadianness” of the Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada is a victory for Conservatives. Iggy is now playing defence on the #1 brand attribute of the Liberal Party. Even after the sponsorship scandal the Liberals still owned being the “Canada Party.” The party with the pan-Canadian vision. The party best able to keep the country together. The party with the independent foreign policy. Having a Liberal play defence on his “Canada” credentials is as bad as a Republican having to defend his commitment to the U.S. military or a New Democrat having to defend her commitment to the labour movement. Attacks on Iggy related to “arrogance and elitism” (e.g. the “arrogance spot”) and/or “tax and spend” (e.g. the “economy” spot) are standard operating procedure—the personalization of negative brand attributes associated with the party itself. But the attacks on Ignatieff’s long-term commitment to the country are much deeper and much more problematic for a Liberal.

  Ignatieff had hurried to write a book about the Canadian side of his prominent family and
his travels in his native land, plainly designed, like the New York Times Magazine article and the trip to Holy Blossom Temple, to patch his leaky viability. The title of the book was True Patriot Love. At least there was no fooling him about what needed patching. The Conservatives had his number. Muttart and Finley had pored over his extensive writing with a vengeance. Canadian Conservatives had visited the BBC tape archives in London, which featured hundreds of hours of Ignatieff having fun playing with merely interesting ideas. They had rented an airplane to fly low over Ignatieff’s summer home in the south of France, snapping photos. One Conservative marvelled in private at the news that, as far as anyone at the party could ascertain, Ignatieff had made it to his sixty-third year on God’s earth without obtaining a driver’s licence. What a freak. “How can you know the country if you’ve never driven through it?”

  On May 28 in the House of Commons, Ignatieff was blustering about how Harper should fire Jim Flaherty. “I cannot fire the Leader of the Opposition,” Harper rejoined cheerfully. “And with all the tapes I have on him, I would not want to.” It was the simple truth. Ignatieff would remain Liberal leader for nearly two more years. Twisting.

  On Thursday, June 11, Harper went to Cambridge, Ontario, to release his second quarterly update on what it pleased him to call his Economic Action Plan. How could Ignatieff give Harper a pass? How could he stand in front of the money train? Ignatieff scrummed in Montreal, careful to say nothing that would commit him one way or the other, then limped home to Stornoway for the weekend, and brain-stormed. On Monday in the National Press Theatre he pleaded with Harper to throw him a bone. Of course that’s not how he phrased it. It was time for another ultimatum! He demanded a meeting with Harper. He wanted details from him on EI. He wanted to know how the government planned to produce medical isotopes in the wake of the Chalk River debacle. He wanted to know the precise amount of stimulus money the government had spent to date. And he wanted to see a plan for getting out of budgetary deficit.