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

by Paul Wells

  What was with the “if”? Why was a freshly re-elected prime minister calling the country’s long-term survival into question? It’s possible he meant nothing at all; after I wrote about that line on my blog, Harper stopped using it in his speeches. But at a minimum it suggested Harper was not immune to a common fallacy among the country’s national leaders: the tendency to believe the country will fall apart if not handled properly—that is, by the person worrying about the falling apart. In 2010 the Conservatives had, properly, mocked Ignatieff for framing just about every issue as a national-unity issue. Now Harper was ringing the same bells. Sometimes it seems the best guarantee of the nation’s survival is the hope that someone will protect it from the careful attention of its leaders.

  As the September return of Parliament approached, Harper made a key change to his PMO staff and, as it turned out, kicked off a season of missteps. His latest communications director, Dimitri Soudas, had been with Harper in various capacities since his opposition days in the Canadian Alliance. When Soudas left to move to Toronto, Harper reached out to a near stranger as a replacement: Angelo Persichilli, sixty-three, an amiable veteran Toronto journalist for both English- and Italian-language publications. Persichilli’s appointment came straight from the Department of Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time. His biggest selling point was a stint at Omni TV, a multilingual station serving several of Canada’s ethnic communities.

  Encouraged by Jason Kenney, Harper’s PMO had become increasingly preoccupied with ethnic media. Omni, and the formidable Chinese-language television chain Fairchild, and Punjabi talk radio, and the daily Sing Tao and Ming Pao newspapers were included in daily mediamonitoring reports prepared for the government by public servants. The ethnic news organizations’ numbers were robust, and their audiences didn’t get much news from other sources. Star readers also read the Globe or the Post, listened to the CBC or to satellite radio, maybe checked out some blogs they liked. Ming Pao readers read Ming Pao. If they liked what they read about the Harper government, increasingly they voted Conservative. The vote was not monolithic—Liberals and New Democrats still competed for votes among assorted ethnic communities—but the Conservatives were patient and attentive.

  In an analysis in Policy Options magazine, Harper’s former advisor Tom Flanagan had described the increasing prominence of ethnic voters in the Conservative coalition. “In the Greater Toronto Area, once the Liberal equivalent of the Tory Fortress Alberta, the Conservatives won 30 of 45 seats” in the 2011 election, Flanagan wrote, “including many in areas such as Brampton that are heavily ethnic.” That was the key to Harper’s majority, because the Conservatives actually lost seats outside Ontario. In fact, Flanagan wrote, “The Conservatives would still have a majority in 2011 even if they had won no seats at all in Quebec.”

  Flanagan’s thesis was provocative and intriguing. A decade earlier, he and Harper had argued that a new Conservative coalition must appeal to “three sisters”: Prairie Reform conservatism; the Toryism of Ontario and the Atlantic provinces; and a nationalist bleu conservatism in Quebec. Harper had done better at producing that alliance in a shorter time than either of them had expected. But with hindsight, Flanagan was starting to believe it was possible to switch the Quebec sister for a new and more faithful coalition partner.

  “Francophone nationalists always present a problem, even when they can be brought to offer support to the Conservatives,” he wrote. “They tend to have an instrumental orientation toward the federal government, seeing it primarily as a source of benefits for Quebec. This raises resistance among other Conservatives, who fear they will have to pay for these benefits to Quebec.” And really, why bother? “By comparison, the support of ethnic voters in Toronto and other metropolitan areas seems more likely to be stable, precisely because the Conservatives have attracted those ethnic voters who were already most like themselves in terms of demographics and politics.”

  So this was the strategy Persichilli represented. Unfortunately, he made it too obvious. Harper’s new spokesman was impeccably bilingual: English and Italian. He spoke no French. And he was only the first of a succession of high-level appointments that seemed to ignore the concerns of francophones inside Quebec and across Canada. On October 17, Harper appointed two new justices to the Supreme Court, both from Ontario. One, Michael Moldaver, spoke no French. At the end of October the government announced that Michael Ferguson would replace the redoubtable Sheila Fraser as auditor general. But even though the job description for the post stipulated that proficiency in English and French was a requirement, Ferguson spoke no French. Taken together, the three appointments seemed like a calculated snub. “Le bilinguisme? So What?” was the headline in Le Devoir. Harper might as well have kept the $2.2-billion payment to Charest’s government for tax harmonization for all the goodwill that remained in Quebec after the trio of appointments.

  Did it matter? Flanagan said Harper didn’t need Quebec. But another veteran Harper advisor disagreed in an interview with me. “Quebec is still seventy-five, soon to be seventy-eight, seats. And lots of things can go wrong elsewhere [in future elections]. So don’t think you can construct a secure majority and forget Quebec.” But beyond the numbers, this person said, “no prime minister ever lets the allure of Quebec and national reconciliation and national-unity issues get far from their mind. Even a redneck, recovering libertarian from Calgary. Nobody gets that far in Canadian politics without the allure of Quebec being a constant presence.”

  Despite these moves, Harper continued, in other ways, to show unrequited interest in Quebec. He appointed André Bachand, a former Progressive Conservative MP who had left politics in 2004 declaring that Harper had “the charisma of a picnic table,” as a senior Quebec advisor in the PMO. Harper visited Quebec for public events at least once a month. They were written into his schedule—rendezvous he never missed—but the regular visits went unnoticed by reporters and did nothing to help the Conservatives’ poll standings in Quebec. The notion that Harper had not written Quebec off had its own disquieting corollary. He seemed to be trying, but trying was doing him little good. He kept undermining his own efforts with countervailing slights. He kept losing the tune.

  Harper’s efforts with the conservative “sister” he knew best, Western Reform populism, went better. Here he knew the tune as well as if the Beatles had written it. At the end of September 2011, Rob Nicholson, the justice minister, tabled Bill C-10, which bundled together nine tough-on-crime measures the Conservatives had not yet managed to pass before the bills had died on the order paper, victims of assorted previous elections and prorogations. These included mandatory minimum jail terms for drug- and sex-related offences, longer sentences, delay or elimination of pardon eligibility, and more. Tough-on-crime measures were a perennial for this government, and while criminologists worried that such changes would end hope of rehabilitation and produce a hardened criminal underclass, the stance was popular with voters.

  Passing this latest bill had been an election commitment for the Conservatives. Their next three moves were also designed to reward the party’s voter base. On October 18, Gerry Ritz, the agriculture minister, introduced a bill to end the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly. A week later Vic Toews, the minister of public safety, introduced a bill to end the national long-gun registry. In the 1990s, when Reform was the dominant party in Western Canada, you used to be able to find a bumper sticker on Alberta cars with a great big “NO” on it. Beside the big word were little words explaining what the driver was against:

  • Kyoto

  • Wheat Board

  • Gun Registry

  On December 11, Harper completed the bumper-sticker trifecta. “We are invoking Canada’s legal right to formally withdraw from Kyoto,” Peter Kent, Harper’s latest environment minister, told reporters in the foyer outside the House of Commons. “This decision formalizes what we’ve said since 2006: that we will not implement the Kyoto Protocol.” In combination with the measures on the Wheat Board and the long-gun reg
istry, abandoning Kyoto durably marked Harper as a man who would at least sometimes deliver the kind of government Albertans, in particular, had longed for: laissez-faire, less interventionist, willing to scrap programs that had seemed designed in Ottawa to penalize the rural and resource-producing regions of the country for doing what came naturally. “As long as Mr. Harper’s in charge,” Kevin Libin wrote in the National Post, “the Conservatives will continue to be animated by the alienated spirit of the West, ever suspicious of the potential excesses of federal power.” (In the years ahead the Conservatives would sometimes seem to be on the ropes, their popularity finally in danger of running out. Harper’s opponents could be certain that whenever an election came, Conservatives would remind every riding in the Prairie West that it was Harper who had finally buried the bumper-sticker Liberal demons of the 1990s—and only Harper who could ensure those demons would not rise again.)

  The decision to get out of Kyoto was deeply embarrassing to Canadians who cared about government taking a role in controlling greenhouse gas emissions. But it came as no surprise. From the accord’s first days, the Liberals had been more eager to advertise their fondness for the notion of a global pact to reduce carbon emissions than to do anything to meet the onerous target Jean Chrétien had volunteered to meet. Since his election Harper had continued to do nearly nothing to reduce carbon emissions, while accusing the Liberals of the past for doing less and the Liberals across the aisle for wanting to do more. In 2007 the government’s own National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy had predicted that the Conservatives’ policies on carbon emissions would “leave Canada in non-compliance” with Kyoto. And 2007, when John Baird was the environment minister and the Conservatives were shielding themselves against Stéphane Dion, was the high-water mark of Harper’s pretend enthusiasm for the environment. Since then, Dion had lost and gone away, Barack Obama had proven easy to distract from environmental issues, and economic uncertainty had pushed the environment far down on the list of Canadians’ preoccupations. Affecting a blasé attitude toward greenhouse gas emissions seemed a cost-free position to Harper. And then the bill came due.

  “I support the State Department’s announcement today regarding the need to seek additional information about the Keystone XL Pipeline proposal,” Barack Obama said in a White House news release on November 10, 2011. “We should take the time to ensure that all questions are properly addressed and all the potential impacts are properly understood.”

  Keystone XL was a peculiar beast. A $5-billion project, the pipeline was designed to carry oil released from the northern Alberta oil sands its full 1,179-mile length, from Hardisty, Alberta, to Steele City, Nebraska, in the American heartland. A second component of the Keystone pipeline network would complete the line all the way to the Gulf Coast. Once completed, the network would move 830,000 barrels of oil-sands oil into the U.S. energy grid every day, a figure that represented about half of U.S. oil imports from the Middle East. That’s a lot.

  TransCanada, the pipeline’s proponent, announced the project in 2008, before Obama was elected president. In October 2010, Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said the administration was “inclined” to approve Keystone. This was about the same time the U.S. environmentalist lobby was starting to focus on Keystone for precisely one reason: it needed the administration’s approval. Essentially it needed Barack Obama’s approval. In the highly decentralized U.S. congressional and regulatory system, there weren’t a lot of things the president could control directly, but Keystone XL was one of them. If Obama approved it, the pipeline from Canada would be built. If he refused, it would not.

  This rare concentration of authority in the president’s office made it worth environmentalists’ effort to concentrate a lot of energy on swaying the Keystone decision. The protests intensified. In August 2011, Daryl Hannah, who once played a mermaid in a Ron Howard movie, was arrested in front of the White House for protesting against Keystone. “President Obama’s decision on this enormous fossil fuel project will not be a quiet deal with oil industry lobbyists,” she wrote in a Huffington Post article the same day. “It will be witnessed by millions of voters.” In September, nine Nobel peace prize winners, including Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, sent Obama a letter urging him to back off on Keystone.

  So Obama did. The delay meant a final decision would come only after the 2012 presidential election. “While we are disappointed with the delay, we remain hopeful the project will be decided on its merits and eventually approved,” Harper’s spokesman Andrew MacDougall told reporters. (Less than two months after Harper had appointed him as his communications director, Angelo Persichilli was already rarely speaking to reporters. He would resign from the PMO the following spring, pleading inability to keep up with Ottawa workloads.)

  MacDougall’s comment understated the boss’s mood. Harper wasn’t disappointed, he was furious. Three days after Obama announced the delay, Harper flew to Hawaii for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, where he chatted with the president at an outdoor picnic table under a beach umbrella. Reporters watching the exchange wrote that the two men looked relaxed and laughed more than once. “The leaders discussed the recent announcement regarding the presidential permit process for the Keystone XL pipeline application,” a White House press release said later.

  Whatever Obama told Harper, by the time the prime minister got back to Ottawa, he had concluded the United States must no longer be Canada’s only important energy export market. The conversation in Hawaii had happened on a Sunday. On Tuesday, at a meeting of cabinet’s Priorities and Planning committee in Ottawa, Harper handed out orders to a half-dozen ministers. “It was awesome,” someone who was there said later. Energy exports were the government’s new top strategic priority, Harper said. Asia was now the most important region to target as an export market, China the most important country. Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline to the seaport at Kitimat, B.C.—the most important petroleum export project after Keystone—must get built. Environmental assessment for that project and dozens of others must be streamlined. Reconciliation with Aboriginal groups that could block those pipelines must be fast-tracked. Environmental groups that tried to slow the process down were opponents of Canadian prosperity and must be treated as such.

  Some of the decisions Harper announced at that Tuesday morning cabinet committee meeting had roots deeper than annoyance at Keystone’s being temporarily thwarted by Obama. Mark Carney, the Bank of Canada governor, had been badgering Harper for months over the global distribution of Canadian trade and investment. Canada was over-invested in the United States and Europe, where there was barely any economic growth at best and looming catastrophe at worst, and under-invested in Asia. Sure, China might be a bubble about to burst. But nobody could be sure, and the cost of staying away from China and missing a continued boom would be higher than the cost of getting in just as a boom ended. Similarly, two of Jim Flaherty’s previous budgets had included language about speeding up environmental assessments of resource development projects. In a lot of ways, the angry orders Harper barked to his ministers after the Keystone delay weren’t out of character. But they kicked off a long arc of activity, lasting until the spring of 2012, that he would come to regret.

  Less than two weeks after that cabinet meeting, Harper was in Vancouver for the Grey Cup game. He sat for an interview with a local television station and chatted happily about his love of football. Then he was asked about Enbridge Inc.#s Northern Gateway project. Environmental hearings would soon begin on the project, which aimed to run twin pipelines from Bruderheim, north of Edmonton, across British Columbia to the sea terminal at Kitimat, to put oil-sands bitumen onto Asia-bound tanker ships. Harper’s mood darkened.

  “I think we’ll see significant American interests trying to line up against the Northern Gateway project, precisely because it’s not in the interests of the United States. It’s in the interests of Canada,” he said. “They’ll funnel money through environmental g
roups and others in order to try to slow it down. But, as I say, we’ll make sure that the best interests of Canada are protected.”

  With that statement, he had just accused the Canadian environmental movement of being a front for U.S. energy interests. There was, depending how far you cared to stretch it, some truth in that notion. Certainly, Canadian environmentalist organizations had been getting money from abroad. As Gary Mason had written in the Globe and Mail that September: “In 2006, for instance, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund of New York paid a couple of Canadian environmental groups a total of $200,000 to ‘prevent the development of a tanker port and pipeline that would endanger the Great Bear Rainforest.’ The Brainerd Foundation of Washington State gave money to the B.C.-based Dogwood Initiative to ‘help grow public opposition to counter the Enbridge pipeline construction.’ ”

  So, were the Brainerd Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund fronts for ExxonMobil, kneecapping Enbridge to keep Canada on top? That was where credulity came in for some stretching. The Brainerd Foundation was endowed with nothing more nefarious than software money—for desktop publishing, to be specific. And while it’s true that the Rockefeller family got rich in oil, that happened before Alberta joined Confederation. The Rockefeller Foundation, founded in 1913, helped create the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and (in another of the foundation’s periodic fits of cross-border meddling) the Montreal Neurological Institute. Tying these activities into a global theory of U.S. oil-industry hegemony would take some doing, but by the end of 2011 Harper was in a mood to try.

  His mood was, in general, expansive. Lisa LaFlamme from CTV sat him down in December and asked how he liked having a parliamentary majority. “I want to make sure that we use it,” he said. “You know, I’ve seen too many majority governments—the bureaucracy talks them into going to sleep for three years, and then they all of a sudden realize they’re close to an election.” For a prime minister usually intent on under-promising, this was cheeky. The majority governments he had seen in his life included Trudeau’s, Mulroney’s and Chrétien’s. Harper was implicitly dismissing them as nappers. What on earth did he have in mind to top them?