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

by Paul Wells

  Giorno and Lietaer were persuaded that the spectacle of Ignatieff urging crowds to rebellion could look good only to Liberal partisans. “You’ve got Stephen Harper on the one hand saying times are dangerous and we need a stable government,” our Conservative war room source said later. “And then you got a guy yelling at people to rise up?”

  Recall the lesson of the Angus Reid real-time focus groups: “The level of annoyance grew markedly when the leaders attacked each other.” Here was Michael Ignatieff travelling the country staging a re-enactment of those moments.

  The same weekend, another party leader gave another speech that wound up sounding better to him than to a lot of voters. The Parti Québécois was holding its national convention in Montreal. Pauline Marois, the party’s leader, won a resounding 93.08 percent endorsement from delegates in a confidence vote on April 16 as she prepared for a campaign against the Liberal premier, Jean Charest. Gilles Duceppe was a guest speaker at the convention.

  When Bloc support is strong, the party’s leaders have tended to present it as the federal voice of all Quebecers, sovereignist and federalist alike. When it sags a little, as it was doing now, Bloc leaders like to remind sovereignist voters of their duty to support the movement’s Ottawa operation. “My friends, I say this often,” Duceppe told the convention. “Before being Péquistes and Bloquistes, we are all sovereigntists. We are going to finish the campaign side-by-side. More united than ever. We have only one task to accomplish. Elect the maximum number of sovereigntists in Ottawa and then we go to the next phase: electing a PQ government.”

  In fact, he had not been campaigning on a promise to make his party a cog in a great separatist scheme. This was something of a rebranding exercise. “A strong Bloc in Ottawa. A PQ in power in Quebec. And everything becomes possible again.” That last sentence echoed the “yes” camp’s slogan during the 1995 referendum, which had split the province against itself. The crowd in the room loved it, as the crowd in the room had loved Ignatieff’s “rise up” speech. Partisans always love the partisan stuff. The people outside, who have had quite enough of feuds and quarrels, were less enamoured. The day before Duceppe spoke, the daily Nanos tracking poll put the Bloc at 38.7 percent support in Quebec. Within a week they would fall to 30.3 percent, losing one-fifth of that support. From there the collapse would only accelerate.

  As voters looked around for a respite from the campaign’s dominant discourse, they found a man who had been putting things a little differently for most of the time he had been in federal politics. “It’s whether we elect parliamentarians to bicker or build that will be the defining issue of our time,” Jack Layton had said in January 2003, at the Toronto convention where he became NDP leader. “And we say, let’s build.”

  Now it was more than eight years later. When the reward for all the building began to accumulate, it was in Quebec. There are reasons for that. The NDP’s attempt to reach out to Quebec francophones was as old as the party itself.

  Since the 1930s, the party’s predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, had support only among Quebec’s anglophone Montrealers. Francophones saw it as a creature of English Canada. The archbishop of Montreal warned Roman Catholics not to support this socialist menace. So, at the NDP’s founding convention in 1961, organizers were so happy to see a few francophone nationalists show up that they basically let them write the party’s constitutional policy. The results included very Quebec-friendly language on “co-operative federalism, equality of rights for the French and English languages, the right of a province to opt out of joint federal-provincial programs within provincial jurisdiction without financial penalty, and the recognition of French Canada as a nation,” Michael Oliver and Charles Taylor wrote in a 1991 book, Our Canada. The party’s first president, associate president and vice-president were Quebec francophones.

  But from the beginning the NDP was squeezed between extremes: the rising separatist movement and Pierre Trudeau’s hardline federalism. In the 1968 election Tommy Douglas’s formidable Quebec lieutenant, Robert Cliche, lost narrowly to Eric Kierans, a former provincial health minister running for the federal Liberals. The party had no more momentum in Quebec until 1984, when Trudeau retired, Brian Mulroney swept Quebec, and the Liberals were reduced to forty seats Canada-wide. Ed Broadbent saw a chance to mow the Liberals’ lawn. He visited Quebec constantly. In the Commons, he and Lorne Nystrom and a few others asked questions in French as often as they could. In 1988, the party won its highest-ever share of the popular vote in Quebec, 14.4 percent. That didn’t translate into a single elected NDP MP from Quebec. Then Broadbent retired and the party was nearly swept away in the 1993 election.

  Layton didn’t run for his party’s leadership as the candidate of a Quebec rapprochement. If anything, his target market was Toronto. But he had been born in Hudson on Montreal’s West Island, so he had some roots in Quebec. He had inherited a half century of NDP effort in Quebec. Unlike the recent succession of Liberal leaders, he was playing a long game, so he was content to keep the NDP’s Quebec effort going. In 2004, Layton nearly tripled the NDP’s vote share in Quebec—to 4.6 percent. By 2008, it was at 12.2, almost back to where Ed Broadbent had brought the party twenty years earlier. It was a cruelly limited return on political investment.

  But even before that modest result, the basis for longer-term Quebec growth had come along in the person of Thomas Mulcair. After he won the Outremont by-election in 2007 and held it in the 2008 general election, Mulcair became, with Vancouver’s Libby Davies, one of Layton’s two deputy leaders. So Quebec was genuinely familiar territory for the NDP by the time Layton arrived for a rally at the Olympia Theatre, an ornate vaudeville house in Duceppe’s riding of Laurier–Sainte-Marie, on April 23. When the crowd finally filed in—maybe two thousand people in Duceppe’s own riding—Layton delivered a version of his stump speech with one addition. “My friends,” he said, “I am ready to be your prime minister. And I fully understand what that means.”

  While the NDP’s growth in Quebec was little short of spectacular, it was soon impressive everywhere else. Everywhere except Ontario. By the morning of April 25, according to the daily Nanos tracking polls, NDP support there was four points lower than in the Atlantic region, seven points lower than in the Prairies, ten points lower than in British Columbia, thirteen points lower than in Quebec. This was looking less like a Quebecled NDP wave than like a national wave from which Ontarians were opting out. Ontario was the only region of the country where NDP support was no higher than on the day of the English-language debate.

  That was what Nanos said in the morning. EKOS that afternoon told a different story. Frank Graves, the chairman of the rival polling firm, released the astonishing results of his own weekend survey. EKOS found the NDP finally picking up momentum in Ontario, while they raced ahead in Quebec. Now Layton’s party was only five points behind the Conservatives nationally—and four points ahead of Ignatieff’s Liberals.

  “These results, if they were to hold, would produce a profound transformation in the Canadian political firmament, tantamount and arguably more far-reaching than the Reform explosion in 1993,” Graves wrote. He projected as many as a hundred seats for the NDP—and a combined Liberal–NDP seat count that would easily top the Conservatives. Harper had spent the campaign telling voters what that would mean: Jack Layton as prime minister.

  Ignatieff soldiered on, sometimes sticking with the modest, constructive policy-wonk stuff that informed his “family pack” platform. At one point, he promised to convene a first ministers’ meeting on health care within sixty days of becoming prime minister. He had to keep acting as if such a thing could ever happen. But the Liberals knew Layton was becoming a serious threat. They responded with one of their curiously Byzantine TV ads. This one featured a traffic light flashing NDP orange while circus music played. The ad criticized Layton for being a “career politician” and his candidates for being “ridiculously inexperienced.” Finally the orange light turned red. “Not so fa
st, Jack.”

  The Conservatives paid Layton the compliment of a clear, hard-hitting ad about the 2008 coalition. It reminded everyone of a detail in Brian Topp’s own book about that period: that Layton had begun discussing a coalition with Duceppe “before our votes were even counted.”

  Harper was facing a growing number of questions about the polls from a travelling press corps that seemed to think questions about polls are hard to answer. In fact his campaign was increasingly confident that all the movement in public opinion was among people who had not been considering voting Conservative in the first place. When the Conservatives finally hit trouble, once again it was at their own hand.

  On April 27, every Sun paper in the country carried an article signed by Pierre Karl Péladeau, the company CEO. Sun Media had launched an upstart cable TV news and commentary network during the campaign’s second week. The company VP in charge was Kory Teneycke, Harper’s former communications director. Sun News clearly had Ignatieff on the brain. One of its first “scoops” had been a laughable account by reporter Brian Lilley asserting that Ignatieff had been a major planner of the Iraq war. The evidence was his presence at a 2002 conference in Washington. As Glen McGregor, a reporter for the rival Ottawa Citizen, pointed out within hours of Lilley’s report, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch attended the conference too. So if Ignatieff planned the war, so did they.

  But what Péladeau now revealed went much further than torquing a story. “Three weeks ago, our vice-president for Sun News, Kory Teneycke, was contacted by the former deputy chief of staff to Prime Minister Harper, Patrick Muttart. He claimed to be in possession of a report prepared by a ‘U.S. source,’ outlining the activities and whereabouts of Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff in the weeks and months leading to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.” This was clearly the basis for Lilley’s story. But Muttart’s shady source had offered more than attendance at a conference: “Muttart also provided a compelling electronic image of a man very closely resembling Michael Ignatieff in American military fatigues, brandishing a rifle in a picture purported to have been taken in Kuwait in December 2002.”

  This would be—well, it would be something if it were true. Teneycke, Péladeau wrote, “was properly skeptical and due diligence was conducted.” In dramatic terms, Péladeau said that after putting “a lot of pressure” on Muttart, Teneycke got a better copy of the photo and it turned out to be bunk. “But it is the ultimate source of this material that is profoundly troubling to me, my colleagues and, I think, should be of concern to all Canadians. It is my belief that this planted information was intended to first and foremost seriously damage Michael Ignatieff’s campaign, but in the process to damage the integrity and credibility of Sun Media and, more pointedly, that of our new television operation, Sun News. If any proof is needed to dispel the false yet still prevalent notion that Sun Media and the Sun News Network are the official organs of the Conservative Party of Canada, I offer this unfortunate episode as Exhibit A.”

  As proof of his network’s independence, this was incomplete. Sun News had in fact run everything Muttart had given them except the bogus photo. And while they may not feel like the official organs of the Conservative Party, four days after they published Péladeau’s nostra not entirely culpa, every Sun paper in the country (outside Toronto, where there was a wrestling match to cover) would carry Harper’s photo on Page One with the words, “HE’S OUR MAN.”

  Still, on the morning Péladeau’s op-ed ran, members of the Conservative campaign team were told that Muttart, the architect of Harper’s 2006 victory and of everything the party had done to Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff for four years, had been dumped from the campaign. It was a classic Harper move. One person on his team was indispensable: the guy in the ads. Everyone else would be cut loose if they became a liability. The harsh treatment of Muttart, a soft-spoken and likeable man to whom the Conservatives owed so much, made many in the Conservative campaign angry. They grumbled briefly and went back to work for Harper. Just as he knew they would.

  Perhaps the most effective weapon remaining to the Conservatives was Jason Kenney. The immigration minister had been key to the Conservatives’ outreach to immigrants and ethnic minority groups for years. But in the 2006 and 2008 elections he had stayed in Ottawa to oversee war room communications. This time Kenney spent almost the entire campaign on the road, and almost all of that around Toronto and Vancouver, where the biggest gains in ethnic vote could be logged.

  “I just didn’t think me sitting around Ottawa, working with a bunch of twenty-five-year-olds at the tactics meeting, was a great use of my time,” Kenney said. Now he was doing half a dozen events a day. “I did an editorial board meeting with Sing Tao Toronto. The editor said, ‘You’re getting more coverage in our papers than the three leaders. And you’re now getting to the point of overexposure.’ I think that week I had three separate Chinese media conferences alone doing policy announcements.”

  Kenney was already known as the “minister for curry in a hurry” because of his prominence at ethnic community events. But “I’m learning a lot on this campaign,” he said. “I’m kind of finding new frontiers here. Like Punjabi talk radio. Huge! People talk for days about what was said on the radio show a few days ago. They’ve got huge advertisers, cutthroat competition.”

  The Conservatives were banking heavily on what Kenney once called “very ethnic” ridings for their seat gains. “I can tell you that in the polling we’ve done in Cantonese and Mandarin households that we are in the range of two-thirds of the decided vote,” he said. “I think what we’ve seen in this election is the initial erosion of the Liberal base amongst new Canadians going to complete erosion. And I think a huge amount of that has gone in our direction.”

  On Friday night, April 29, with only three days until the election, Sun News journalists announced on Twitter that they were about to break into regular programming. The story was a kind of blockbuster. In 1996, the network’s single anonymous former police source said, Jack Layton had been found naked in a massage parlour at which illegal activities had been going on. The story was served up in high Sun TV fashion, with Layton described as the “suspected John.”

  The campaign put out an immediate statement from Olivia Chow, Layton’s wife, an incumbent NDP MP, calling the story “nothing more than a smear campaign.” Layton scrummed in British Columbia. “Absolutely nothing wrong was done. There’s no wrongdoing here and yet the smears start,” he said Friday night. “This is why a lot of people get turned off politics and don’t even want to get involved.”

  That the story was popping up on a network whose affiliated newspapers were about to call Harper “OUR MAN” made some observers wonder whether the Conservatives might be the story’s source. Then and forever after, Conservatives swore it wasn’t so. “I know the oppo we have on Layton,” the war room staffer said, using the term for potentially damaging opposition research. “That’s not the oppo we have. And Jack Layton’s not our enemy in Toronto. He’s our friend in Toronto. We want him to go up in Toronto.”

  The Conservatives were playing two big games, to some extent contradictory, in different parts of the country. Their best hope for keeping their majority was for the New Democrats and Liberals to split the anti-Conservative vote in Ontario. Their second-best hope was to drive down the NDP vote in British Columbia. To that end, the Conservatives uncorked the largest ad buy of the campaign during the last five days before the Elections Canada ad blackout came into effect at midnight on Saturday, April 30. Almost the largest ad buy any party would make in this campaign.

  Unlike most campaign ads, these didn’t appear on the party’s website or on YouTube. The Conservatives never announced they were running them. In British Columbia, the ads carried a straight anti-Layton message using the two most potent arguments the Conservatives had. They accused Layton of wanting to impose a gas tax through his carbon cap-and-trade scheme, and of scheming with the Bloc separatists to form a coalition. In Ontario,
the ads didn’t even mention Layton. They featured a mix of the Conservatives’ patriotic and anti-Ignatieff messages. They began with Harper standing tall while Canadian flags flapped and inspirational music played. Then they faded to the old TV footage of Ignatieff telling an American audience that the United States was “your country as much as it is mine.”

  The Ontario ads were designed to send Liberal votes in two directions, either to Harper if voters could stomach that option, or to the NDP if that option was more palatable. In the closing days of the campaign, the Conservatives were, in a real sense, campaigning for Jack Layton in Ontario without admitting it. Harper’s five questions a day were now almost entirely about how he would react if he fell short of a majority. In the Conservative war room, staffers chipped in a few bucks for the traditional betting pool. The bulk of the betting action put the Conservatives between 151 and 165 seats. They would need 155 for a majority.

  In the end, Stephen Harper’s party won 167 seats and 39.62 percent of the popular vote. The players in the Conservative war room betting pool had guessed low. Harper walked back out onto the stage of the Telus Convention Centre in Calgary, as he had done now on three previous election nights. This was almost becoming routine. Not quite. Laureen, always happy on these nights, was weeping openly. Her husband had won power twice before. Now he had won time.