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

by Paul Wells

  But the softening was, in large measure, only rhetorical. Flaherty’s 2012 budget was one of the most intensely political he had ever delivered; the most striking language was buried at the end of chapter 4, “Sustainable Social Programs and a Secure Retirement.” A PMO staffer was on hand at the budget lockdown to point out the juicy passages. “Recently, concerns have been raised that some charities may not be respecting the rules regarding political activities,” the budget document said. “There have also been calls for greater public transparency related to the political activities of charities, including the extent to which they may be funded by foreign sources.” The budget announced government plans to impose a legal requirement that charities disclose their foreign funding for political activities.

  There was more. When John Baird was environment minister and the Conservatives were running their green shield play, Baird had announced the appointment of David McLaughlin as president of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. McLaughlin had been Kim Campbell’s chief of staff during her heady summer stint as prime minister in 1993. He would “give excellent leadership to the Round Table,” Baird had said in 2007. Now, it turned out McLaughlin had also provided its last leadership. The budget shut down the NRTEE. “A mature and expanded community of environmental policy stakeholders” would advise the government, the budget announced. Like who? Like the environmental NGOs the budget now threatened with audits.

  At least the government offered an explanation for the NRTEE closure. Not so for the First Nations Statistical Institute, which was essentially Statistics Canada, ahem, for Aboriginal populations. A chart in Annex 1 showed the FNSI would have its budget cut by $5 million in 2013–14. I asked a Treasury Board guy at the budget lock-up how much the institute’s current budget was. He looked in the Estimates. “Five million dollars,” he said. Buh-bye.

  Near the beginning of this book, I chronicled the opposition’s coordinated effort to block the nomination of Calgary oilman Gwyn Morgan as head of a Public Appointments Commission. Harper promptly said he would not propose another nominee, and that “of course” he could only proceed with the review committee after he won a majority. Now he had his majority. The budget shut down the appointments commission secretariat. Why was the government doing the opposite of what Harper had said it would do in 2006? “The Government has significantly strengthened the rigour and accessibility of the public appointments system over the past five years,” the budget said with an admirably straight face.

  Finally, the budget hinted at further changes to the balance between the environment and business considerations. It would be autumn before the significance of those hints became clear. That’s when Flaherty tabled his second budget implementation bill of the year, a 457-page behemoth that included amendments to the Indian Act, the Fisheries Act, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and the Navigable Waters Protection Act. That last change gives some of the flavour of the bill, because it changed the act’s name to the Navigation Protection Act. The law was originally designed to protect water against boats. Now it would protect boats against water.

  Within weeks of the tabling of the Budget Implementation Act, a small group of Aboriginal women launched a series of protests that would spread across the country before Christmas. Dubbed “Idle No More,” the protests would last for weeks and serve as vivid notice of the strife Jim Prentice had described when he warned against “the absence of ‘social license.’ ” Harper had vowed to be busier than any majority prime minister in his lifetime. Within months of making that promise, he was indeed very busy, because he was dealing with a crisis in Canada–U.S. relations, a crisis in Aboriginal relations, a divided West, and blocked paths west and south for oil-sands bitumen. At the end of April 2012, Tom Mulcair became leader of the NDP opposition. The strange interlude during which Harper faced no real opposition had come to an end. And not a moment too soon. He had spent months slapping himself silly.

  ELEVEN

  SELF-UNMADE MAN?

  In September 2012, the Information Commissioner, Suzanne Legault, released an unusually optimistic report to Parliament. “We also saw, for the first time in 10 years, a reversal of the declining performance of federal institutions in their fulfillment of their obligations under the Access to Information Act,” she wrote. The decline in open government that began under Jean Chrétien and had continued through Paul Martin’s brief tenure and on throughout Stephen Harper’s years had now been partly compensated by a modest improvement. And although “this improvement was only slight,” and the access to information system remained “fragile,” Legault thought it was “nonetheless noteworthy.”

  Five months later she announced that the thaw in the Harper government’s information freeze was already over. “We are at a record low in terms of timeliness,” she told CBC Radio. “Requests for extensions [by departments] are at a record high.” The Department of National Defence, in one case, had asked for a 1,110-day extension. Stephen Harper was continuing to put as much space as he could between what he was doing and what he was willing to let Canadians know about it.

  Still, diligent reporters in Ottawa and elsewhere kept nagging. In most cases delays eventually came to an end. And so it came to light, one morning in April 2012, that Bev Oda was finicky about hotels.

  Canadian Press reporter Jennifer Ditchburn had requested Oda’s expense account for a June 2011 trip to London to attend a conference on immunization. Because Bill Gates and other high-flying types were on hand for the meeting, the venue was the lovely Grange St. Paul’s hotel. Oda took one look at the dump and told her staff she needed to decamp to something more suited to her tastes. Off she went in her chauffeured luxury car to the Savoy, where rooms were more than double the rate at the Grange and where, cementing her fate, the minister from a resolutely Tim Hortons–branded government slaked her thirst—the night before discussing policies for alleviating the consequences of grinding poverty—with a yummy $16 glass of room-service orange juice.

  The government’s immediate response to the ensuing five-alarm shitstorm was to see how much money it would take to make the story go away. Justin Broekema, Oda’s press spokesperson, said the minister had “personally paid the portion of the expenses in question.” It took only a few hours’ pushing for this line of defence to collapse: Oda’s staff admitted, upon reflection, that she had paid, not a few days after the conference in 2011, but in a panic when the story was about to splatter across the Internet in 2012. The next line of defence was a rare show of contrition from a member of this government in the House of Commons, where Oda apologized “unreservedly” for her poor judgment.

  Of course she had apologized only when caught, not because her conscience held her to a high standard. Opposition MPs roared: Where was Oda’s pink slip? Commentators joined the chorus, including some with impeccable conservative credentials. “Whatever one thinks of the Harper government, it’s pretty hard to see why Bev Oda remains a cabinet minister,” wrote Toronto Sun co-founder Peter Worthington. Worthington did pause to note that Oda’s background before politics was in media: TVOntario first, then City-TV, then Global, and finally at CTV. “Perhaps all that time working for rich TV outlets conditioned her to spend her employers’ money without accountability,” he wrote. “Maybe such habits were hard to break.” At any rate, Oda had little to show for her time in government except for providing “a horrid example to the rest of the country of politicians feeding at the trough, then saying ‘sorry’ when they’re caught.”

  Two days after her apology, Oda’s office said she had repaid “all incremental costs … including the car service in London.” She just gave and gave. But … when had she paid for that car? Minutes before the release came out. So, like, two days after she first apologized for the extravagance. Three days after she had paid the difference between the Grange rooms and the Savoy.

  In the Commons, Harper proclaimed his support for Oda. Perhaps not as robustly as on the many previous occasions when he had needed
to do the same. “The minister has apologized and has taken appropriate measures,” he said wearily in Question Period. This was after she had repaid the hotel bill but before she repaid the car bill. But his public show of support masked a private decision. The pink slip everyone was clamouring for was on its way, and would arrive rather more rapidly than the access-to-information memos that had made it necessary. On July 4, Oda announced she was retiring from politics. Julian Fantino, the former head of Ontario’s provincial police and a relative newcomer to Ottawa, would replace her. Andrew MacDougall, Harper’s latest communications director, tweeted a categorical announcement: “There will be no other cabinet shuffles. Il n’y aura aucun autre remaniement ministériel.”

  At the time, Oda’s tale seemed anecdotal, the story of a Conservative who had forgotten—apparently from the outset, for she had a long history of getting into trouble for salty expense bills—that her party’s appeal was supposed to be populist, not plutocratic. But the government’s response to the mess became characteristic. It foreshadowed Harper’s response to later, bigger trouble. And it came during a week of nasty news of various sorts that would characterize much of Harper’s star-crossed majority mandate.

  The indiscretion that kicked off Oda-gate was simple human nature. Bev Oda liked her creature comforts was all. It was perhaps worth noting, as Worthington had, that she developed her lifestyle habits in the field of broadcasting at a time when quasi-monopoly broadcast licences and copious ad revenues meant nobody was looking too closely at expense accounts.

  The next step, despite the government’s best efforts to stem the flow of information, was that the story broke in public. As soon as it became clear the news was going to get out, a two-track response kicked in. First, minimize the problem. This could include an acknowledgement that, while there may once have been a problem, it was already fixed. In other situations the government would insist that, whatever the nature of today’s unpleasantness, it was nothing compared with the mess the Liberals made; messes they would make again, too, if Canadians recklessly restored them or their ilk (wary glance at the NDP benches) to power.

  Even while minimizing the problem, Harper, or his political machine, would also seek to make the problem go away. Often the erasure would be attempted through the judicious application of money. Oda had spent too much taxpayer money too sloppily? Then, she would be made to pay it back, and if the problem kept growing, she would be made to pay again.

  Even the delay between the damage control and the ejection of the offending team player was characteristic of the Harper damage-control style. Like many political leaders, Harper was rarely eager to let anyone go, because each time he did, the opposition parties ignored the victory and simply started clamouring for the next sacrifice. But more than once Harper had marked a Conservative for demotion or dismissal even while defending the person in public. He had backed Gordon O’Connor, Helena Guergis and, of course, Oda herself for a long time before removing them.

  No part of this pattern was unique to Harper. But he was ruthless in damage control, as in much else, because he was convinced that an unscheduled bit of trouble, a careless remark or an unexpected move could threaten his hold on power. Such things had given him serious trouble before. He lost the 2004 election because a few of his candidates said things that didn’t square with his attempts to present a moderate face for the Conservatives. He had nearly blown an easy win in 2008 because he had let overconfidence lull him into discussing excellent buying opportunities. When his opponents or the press gallery called him ruthless, he could hardly believe what he was hearing. If he had not been ruthless, he would never have survived this long. Usually he believed that, if anything, he was too soft.

  He had displayed many of his damage-control techniques during an odd episode in 2006, little noticed at the time but significant in hindsight—after Nigel Wright’s payment to Senator Mike Duffy came to light. In the early days of the campaign for the 2006 election, an Ottawa lawyer named Alan Riddell stepped aside as the Conservatives’ nominated candidate in the Ottawa South riding. The party wanted to run Alan Cutler, a public servant who had blown the whistle on the Liberal sponsorship scandal, in the riding. In addition, Riddell had run for the Conservatives in 2004 and lost after the Ottawa Sun ran an embarrassing story about a prank Riddell had played in his student days. After he lost, the Sun retracted its story, but the damage was done. So Riddell dropped out, the party thanked him for his efforts, and Cutler became the candidate.

  Then a CBC reporter asked Riddell why he had pulled out of the race so late. Riddell replied that the party had made it easy by agreeing to cover his campaign expenses. He put the cost at about $50,000. Reporters following Harper on the campaign trail promptly asked him about the deal with Riddell. “In fact there is no agreement and he hasn’t been paid anything,” Harper said. When asked again later that day—it was the end of 2005 and Harper was still an underdog scrumming twice a day—he repeated himself: “The party does not have an agreement to pay Mr. Riddell these expenses, and Mr. Riddell has not been paid anything to date.”

  Unfortunately for Harper’s version of events, there was an e-mail trail, which somebody on Riddell’s campaign promptly leaked to reporters. Riddell wound up suing the party for his expenses, and on January 11, 2007, Judge Denis Power of Ontario Superior Court ruled “that Alan M. Riddell and the Conservative Party of Canada entered into a binding agreement on November 25, 2005.” He could hardly reach any other conclusion. Among the pieces of evidence produced in court was a November 25 e-mail from Mike Donison, the Conservatives’ former director general, to Riddell’s lawyer. The e-mail read, in part: “There is now a binding agreement between Mr. Riddell and the Conservative Party of Canada.”

  Donison and Don Plett, the party’s former president, testified that Riddell had cancelled the agreement by speaking about it to reporters. What they couldn’t do was produce any written evidence of such a confidentiality clause. How much did Harper know about the deal? Apparently a fair bit. In testimony at trial, Plett said he and other party officials had met with Riddell on November 21. “We assure[d] Mr. Riddell that we were representatives there representing, among others, the Prime Minister, at that time the Leader of the Opposition,” Plett testified. “Ian Brodie made it quite clear that’s who he was representing when he came. We discussed some financial compensation, paying Alan Riddell’s nomination expenses.” The evidence also included an earlier e-mail from Donison to Ray Novak, Harper’s closest advisor and future chief of staff, informing him of the status of negotiations. (“He truly is an idiot,” Donison writes in that e-mail, referring to Riddell.) So it was clear there was a “binding agreement.” It was clear Harper was in the loop. And it was clear that, even after his party’s private business became public, Harper preferred to claim there was no such business. This story is worth repeating because it demonstrates again two of Harper’s work habits: a preoccupation with confidentiality and a willingness to use money to make a problem go away.

  So in 2012, when word of Oda’s spending habits got out and the attempts to use her money to make the problem go away didn’t work, the resulting lousy headlines put Harper in a vile mood. Oda wasn’t even his only problem. He had come to realize he was being seriously pressed, for the first time he could remember, by an effective opposition leader. Thomas Mulcair had spent a dozen years in Quebec’s National Assembly, most of them in opposition, before he jumped to federal politics. The second-largest province’s legislature has its quirks but it’s a serious place. Debate is intense. The stakes are always high, because the fate of at least one nation is in play, depending on how you count these things. Quebec politicians learn how to parse opponents’ words, and expect their own will be examined as closely. In that pressure cooker, Mulcair had spent years honing a low-key, persistent line of attack.

  “They’re very good at defining their adversaries,” Mulcair had said after his first Question Period in late March. “We’re going to start to define them.”
He had a little lectern on his desk, from which he would read a simple question in a steady voice. Other New Democrats soon followed suit. The level of histrionics plummeted, at least on the opposition side of the House. There was strategy in this. The Conservatives had long preferred the NDP to the Liberals because they feared the Liberals, the party’s strong brand, its long record of winning. They figured New Democrats should be easy to beat: to Conservatives, the party simply looked crazy. The Conservative Party greeted Mulcair’s arrival in Jack Layton’s old job at first not with attack ads against Mulcair, but with a website designed to portray the NDP caucus as a pack of loons. You could click on any member of Mulcair’s shadow cabinet and a pop-up window would explain what an extremist flake he or she was. Toronto MP Andrew Cash, who used to sing in a rock band, “supports Occupy Toronto’s plans to replace Canada’s economic system with radical alternatives,” the website said. Quebec’s Charmaine Borg “apparently thinks the tax relief offered by our government is a mistake.” Sudbury’s Glenn Thibeault “cannot be counted on to stand up for his constituents in the face of radical special interests.”

  But in Question Period the New Democrats were so nice and low-key. It was plainly getting under Harper’s skin. A couple of days into the Oda mess, Mulcair asked Harper the kind of flat, uninflected question that was his specialty. “Will he,” he asked of Harper, “keep our troops in Afghanistan past 2014? Yes, or no?”

  Harper had had just about enough of this … this … this using Question Period for questions. “Unlike the NDP we are not going to ideologically have a position regardless of circumstances,” he said. “The leader of the NDP, in 1939, did not even want to support war against Hitler.”