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

by Paul Wells

  But as was so often the case, the Conservatives believed the only damage they could suffer was of their own making and, once they found they were doing that sort of damage, they adjusted to stop. Attacks from the Liberals were not much of a problem, precisely because they came from Liberals.

  “Ethics is not a real wedge for the Liberal Party,” a senior Conservative strategist said. “For an issue to be a wedge, you have to be on one side, the other guys have to be on the other, and the voters have to actually believe that you are on one side and the other guys are on the other.” Liberals couldn’t ever see this, but accountability and ethics were a lousy wedge for them. “I know [the sponsorship scandal] isn’t top of mind for most people right now, but the Liberal brand has not exactly been reinvented on this front. People think that they’re a bunch of scoundrels and we’re a bunch of scoundrels.”

  Monday morning, April 11, was the eve of the English-language leaders’ debate. The Liberal war room did what it did best, leaking a disruptor designed to throw the Conservatives off guard. The Canadian Press newswire moved what would, in any normal month, have been a blockbuster story. “The Harper government misinformed Parliament to win approval for a $50-million G8 fund that lavished money on dubious projects in a Conservative riding, the auditor general has concluded. And she suggests the process by which the funding was approved may have been illegal.”

  “The initial CP story was terrible for us because it accused us of illegality and contempt of Parliament. Contempt of Parliament is bad, illegality is terrible,” the Conservative war room staffer said later. So the Conservatives found a later version of Sheila Fraser’s audit; it reached conclusions similar to those in the draft the Liberals had handed to CP, but in more decorous language. “That turned it into a process story as to who was the leaker. Competing drafts. That’s the sort of tactic of which Jenni Byrne would likely approve, because she knows how to make a quick decision. And she knows that sometimes when you’re losing, muddying the waters is considered a win.”

  Voters watching the spectacle of two political parties duelling to define the extent of government misfeasance might have wished they had more of a choice. As it happened, the NDP had just started running an ad called “You Have a Choice.” At two minutes long, the ad was too long to place in commercial television ad time. It became the opening show at a number of NDP rallies and it helped fill those late-night free-time slots for election advertising that almost nobody is awake to watch. The ad’s total audience probably numbered in the thousands, so it cannot have produced the shift in attitude toward the NDP that made this campaign historic. But it can help us understand the reasons behind that shift.

  The ad was all text, no faces, no voices. For the first half, the background was Tory blue or Liberal red and the music was ominous. Blocks of text spelled out the message. “For too long in Ottawa, scandals and political games have gotten in the way of getting anything done,” the text said. A little later: “And now other leaders are telling you that you have no choice. That you have to vote for more of the same.” Who could this be about? The screen helpfully displayed a blue door and a red door, just as Ignatieff had described them. “Doesn’t sound right, does it?”

  The tone of the music changed—to celestial trumpets. “They’ve been telling JACK LAYTON the same thing for over EIGHT YEARS,” the text read. “Jack Layton has proven them wrong.” The blue background switched to orange. The doom music became peppy acoustic guitar, Layton’s preferred instrument for serenading trapped reporters on the NDP campaign plane. “Fighting for our families. Our veterans. Our seniors.” Here the content of the pitch changed, from hope to accomplishment. “New Democrats sit first or second in 104 ridings across Canada … ridings where only New Democrats defeat Conservatives.” In the remaining forty-five seconds, the words “You can choose” appeared five times.

  You can choose. It was the message Layton had pushed in four campaigns since 2004, while the Liberals gave voters three new leaders. In 2004 Layton had nearly doubled the NDP’s share of the popular vote, to 15.68 percent, and the party grew in the House from thirteen seats to nineteen. In 2008 he nudged his score up to 18 percent of the vote and thirty-seven seats. Each gain was a disappointment because Layton always hoped for so much more. But it was still a gain.

  Preparing Layton for the debate was Brian Topp’s job. Most of the time Topp worked for the show-business union ACTRA in Toronto. He’d spent many years as former NDP premier Roy Romanow’s chief of staff in Saskatchewan. In 2006 and 2008 he was effectively Layton’s campaign manager, but this time Topp stood back while party director Brad Lavigne and Layton’s chief of staff, Anne McGrath, ran most of the campaign.

  For the debates, Topp did what he often does first: he called Romanow for a reminder about how they used to do things in Saskatchewan. Romanow said long discussions of the strategic goals helped him before a debate. Layton had prepared for the 2004, 2006 and 2008 debates by rehearsing scripted answers, but it just made him stiff and nervous. Topp asked whether Layton was prepared to wing it a bit more. You bet, Layton said.

  “The format this year had changed,” Topp said later. “There would be a videotaped question from an ordinary Canadian, and then a direct exchange between two leaders, and a free-form exchange among all four. So we needed two sets of Lego blocks here. First, a substantive answer. We owed that person who had asked the question a substantive answer. And then in the plenary, saying some key things that brought out the differences with other leaders.”

  In 2008 Layton had ignored everyone in the studio except Harper, inadvertently giving Dion room to shine. This year he would diversify his portfolio of targets. “In many ways, we had business with three of the other leaders.” If an NDP breakthrough in Quebec could be blocked, Duceppe would do the blocking. Ignatieff was betting everything on his ability to stop the NDP outside Quebec. “The Liberal campaign was predicated on breaking our vote,” Topp said. “And, also, part of our vote is parked with the Liberals.” So Layton needed to look more credible, as a repository for non-Conservative votes, than Ignatieff. And he needed to look competitive with Harper as a potential prime minister.

  Because Harper’s tight campaign-event security had provoked Ignatieff into returning to one of his preferred personas, that of a champion of democracy, Layton’s team knew Ignatieff would play up his credentials as a great democrat at the debates. “How,” Topp said, “do you bomb that bridge?” The newspapers provided one handy option, because they had been carrying stories about Ignatieff’s lousy attendance record for votes in Parliament. His absences were easy to explain. He had spent months learning how to do a leader’s tour, and he couldn’t be in two places at once. Still, “That seemed to me to be a vivid way to make our point,” Topp said. “Mr. Ignatieff talks a lot about democracy, but he’s got lead boots.”

  Harper’s debate preparation was almost completely different from Layton’s. Like any sane man, Harper hated rehearsing for debates. He is a hard man to contradict. In earlier elections his campaign team had not put much effort into trying. Instead they delivered the candidate to Michael Coates, the Hill+Knowlton Canada boss, who spent a few days going over briefing books and general strategy with the leader. Rehearsal attempts had been half-hearted at best. But in 2008 that time-honoured process had produced a stiff, subdued and weirdly smiling Stephen Harper who had let Stéphane Dion walk all over him.

  So this time Harper’s regular campaign team hung on to him for debate preparation. “The PM, to his credit, bought in 100 percent,” one of them said. One detail of the preparation: Harper would look into the camera for every answer, even when the others were trying to get his attention with a personal criticism. “The goal was to try and recast or reframe it so that rather than looking like we were the ones under attack, there would be a pivot away from the others, into the camera, to use the opportunity to drive the ballot question with the viewers at home,” one of his advisors said. “Number one, don’t make a mistake. Number two, try and s
trategically minimize the others by making a more direct connection with the viewer at home.”

  The campaign’s best guess was that this would annoy Ignatieff especially. “We’d watched a lot of footage,” another Harper advisor said. “It got Ignatieff angry if you didn’t engage with him.”

  So for once Harper had rehearsed his lines and Layton had learned to relax. Both had prepared little tricks to get Ignatieff’s goat. And with all that in mind they all filed into the Government Conference Centre for the first debate.

  As planned, Harper spent the first debate physically pivoting away from whoever was accusing him of something and staring into the camera. “That’s simply not true,” he said again and again, before telling the home audience a tale of modest, responsible government that had little to do with whatever the other guy had just shouted at him.

  For his part, Ignatieff spent most of the night turned toward Harper. “You waste public money,” he said in one typical exchange. “That’s the issue. And that’s why the auditor general’s report is saying, not just that you wasted money, but you didn’t tell Parliament the truth about it.” No matter what Ignatieff said, Harper turned away from him. And each time it made Ignatieff steam a little more.

  One of the surprises Ignatieff’s staff had to deal with when he moved back to Canada was that this veteran of Harvard and the BBC was a lousy debater. His skin was thin. He had an acute tendency to over-personalize the questions at hand. Once, during the 2006 Liberal leadership debates, Bob Rae made an offhand, not unkind remark about Ignatieff’s mother. Ignatieff wandered way off topic to defend his family’s honour, horrifying his young entourage. When he became Liberal leader in early 2009, they had actually scheduled rehearsal time to improve his game. Dwight Duncan, the Ontario finance minister, would show up for these rehearsals and pretend to be Stephen Harper. He would go up one side of Ignatieff and down the other. Gradually it became harder and harder to get Ignatieff to make time for the sessions. Eventually they stopped. Unfortunately, now there was an election on and Ignatieff couldn’t ignore these debates because they made him feel bad.

  In the English debate, Duceppe was off to one end. The luck of the draw put Layton between Ignatieff and Harper so they had to shout past him to get at each other. Layton was able to strike a more conversational tone. He set about making the populist pitch that had been the basis for Ignatieff’s “jets, jails and corporate tax cuts” attack. On the tax cuts: “You did get it through,” he said to Harper, “with the support of Mr. Ignatieff, who now, by the way, pretends to oppose the things that he voted for.”

  Then Layton made a more general point. “I’m asking myself, because I remember a Stephen Harper once upon a time who came here to change Ottawa. Was going to stick up for the little guy. But you’ve become what you used to oppose.”

  And, when his one-on-one with Ignatieff came, Layton bombed the democracy bridge. He talked about Ignatieff’s lousy attendance record for Commons votes. Ignatieff’s smile slowly curdled. “You know, most Canadians, if they don’t show up for work, they don’t get a promotion,” Layton said.

  After the debate the Angus Reid polling group ran a series of focus groups using an Internet-based response tool called ReactionPlus. For years pollsters have sat audiences down and made them watch debates with a dial to record whether they like what they’re seeing or not. Angus Reid measured their responses on ten different axes to indicate whether they were “curious,” “engaged,” “confused,” “happy” and so on.

  For the most part, the focus groups did not need the happy button. “The primary reaction of Canadians to the English debate was annoyance,” Angus Reid reported later. “Certain feelings, such as engagement, excitement, happiness and even interest, barely registered.” But the level of annoyance was not a monotone. It grew markedly when the leaders attacked each other. And it declined when leaders discussed their concrete policy proposals, especially if those proposals were about the economy, health care or education.

  Canadians were sick to tears of watching Harper and Ignatieff go at each other. “The level of interest and happiness definitely soars,” the ReactionPlus report read, “when attacks are avoided and the party leaders express their policy ideas in a clear and concrete fashion.” And despite his shots at Harper for losing sight of the little guy and at Ignatieff for losing sight of Parliament, respondents felt Layton had been the most constructive of the leaders.

  The next night, the leaders debated in French. Angus Reid ran a similar set of multi-dimensional focus groups. “Respondents clearly reacted more strongly to some leaders and themes than to others,” the firm reported later. “Prime Minister Harper elicited strongly negative reactions, no matter what he was talking about. Duceppe and Layton inspire more interest and happy sentiments, whereas Ignatieff provokes a decidedly mixed reaction.” Here again, Angus Reid found that attacking and interrupting were a bad idea. The audience, they reported, was in a much better mood “when leaders outline concrete policies or talk about working collaboratively more.”

  Taken together, the Angus Reid focus groups showed that voters were done with leaders who spent all their time attacking one another. They were almost pleading for leaders to work together. Stephen Harper was simply not going to do that. For two years he had said the alternative to a Conservative majority was anarchy. It was a marvellous, polarizing argument: less than half of the electorate thought a Harper majority would be preferable, in all circumstances, to an opposition coalition. But less than half the electorate was all he needed anyway.

  Most of the rest of the population, however, thought a coalition was a pretty good idea. In a polarized landscape, most Canadians who were not planning to vote Conservative were eager to get Harper out of 24 Sussex Drive. It made them more likely to be fond of any mechanism for achieving that end. Coalitions are about working together and overcoming differences. But what did those voters see when they looked at the alternatives to Harper? They saw Ignatieff, who offered them a red door and a blue door, as if they were idiots. They saw Duceppe, whose separatist party destroyed the legitimacy of coalitions even when it wanted to support one. And then, as if for the first time, they saw Jack Layton, whose message seemed simple, respectful and empowering: you have a choice.

  Profoundly missing the point, the Liberals saw that their leader had failed to catch on with voters in the debates and promptly released their most negative ad of the campaign. “Where would Harper’s cuts leave your family’s health? The stakes are too high,” the new Liberal ad said, as a cardiogram line on the screen flatlined. It was hard to imagine a generic tool less suited to the particular circumstance. Ignatieff had not asked a single question about health care in Question Period in 2011. But Liberals always used medicare scare ads when they were losing. It was a revered tradition in the party. Meanwhile the Liberals were not using precious ad time to explain how they would govern. The most important event of the campaign, the English-language debate, had come and gone, and with it Ignatieff’s hope of changing the dynamic. Now he had to try something new. His problem was that he had been trying something new every day or so. Now he needed to try something new and a little crazy. He was the right man for the job.

  On Friday, April 15, Ignatieff was doing another town hall, in a hotel ballroom in Sudbury. “While I was on the bus this afternoon I found myself thinking about a wonderful singer called Bruce Springsteen,” he said. “Does everybody like Bruce Springsteen? I like Bruce Springsteen.” He told the crowd about “a wonderful song called ‘The Rising.’ And in that song there’s a wonderful refrain: ‘Rise up.’ ” In fact, that refrain is actually in “My City of Ruins,” another song from the album The Rising, but it’s a common error. “And I began thinking about it today. Because we’re in a funny place in this election campaign right now.”

  Ignatieff was hunched, his tall body curving gently around the microphone he held in both hands.

  “We’ve got a prime minister who shut down Parliament twice and Canadians kind
of shrugged,” he said, quietly. “We’ve got a prime minister who’s found in contempt of Parliament. It’s never happened before in the history of our country and people say, kind of, ‘So what?’ We got a prime minister who tried to shut down the long-form census and people thought, that’s crazy, but kind of, ‘So what?’ And then we have a prime minister who just went out and smeared a member of his own caucus, tried to destroy her public reputation, and people say, kind of, ‘So what?’ ”

  There was more in this vein. Nobody travelling with the Liberal leader had planned or expected any of this. “And I kept hearing that refrain from Bruce Springsteen—Rise up. Rise up. Rise up, Canada!” He nearly shouted this. The crowd began to clap, but Ignatieff kept going. “Why do we have to put up with this? Rise up! Rise up! … Rise up! This goes beyond partisan politics! This goes beyond the Liberal Party! This is about our country! This is about our democracy! Rise up! Rise up!” Many members of the crowd plainly had taken a moment to decide how to respond to all this energy, but by now almost all of them were on their feet.

  Later, on the flight to Regina, the campaign videographer showed the footage of the sermon to Peter Donolo. The video guy then took his computer to the front of the plane where Ignatieff sat. The campaign crew made two decisions: First, get that Sudbury footage up on YouTube post-haste. Second, get more of the off-the-cuff Ignatieff in front of Canadians. This idea came from Patrice Ryan, one of the leader’s Quebec advisors, a son of Claude Ryan, the former Quebec provincial Liberal leader. Right there on the flight to Regina they decided to buy a half-hour of TV time eight days hence, on Easter Sunday, to show Michael Ignatieff to Canadians once again.

  That weekend, the “rise up” video appeared on YouTube, with Ignatieff’s sermon accompanied by quiet inspirational music. Guy Giorno and Jason Lietaer, the Conservatives’ war room communications director, watched it in the office they shared at the party’s sprawling campaign headquarters in an industrial park outside Ottawa. Giorno’s and Lietaer’s reaction would not have pleased the Liberals. They briefly wondered whether the video was some kind of cruel hoax against the Liberals. But no, it couldn’t be: that really was Ignatieff saying that stuff, after all. They did consider the possibility that this was the ad that would finally turn the nation against them. Naah. They started sharing the footage as widely as possible. “With any luck,” Lietaer wrote on Twitter, “this will go viral.”