by Conrad Black
The government made an immense effort in constituencies with large numbers of immigrants, where the minister of immigration, Jason Kenney, had already done a great deal of work to assure a good result. The campaign ended amid efforts by the Sun Media chain of English and French tabloid newspapers and its allied cable television stations to hype a story about Jack Layton being found naked in a massage parlour in 1996. On election night, May 2, Stephen Harper raised his party’s standing for the fourth consecutive time, an unprecedented record in modern national elections in serious democracies, and won his long-sought majority. The great Liberal Party was in tatters and the Bloc Québécois was virtually exterminated. The results (2008 results in brackets) were: Conservatives, 166 MPs and 39.6 per cent of the vote (143 MPs and 37.6 per cent); Liberals, 34 MPs and 18.9 per cent (77 MPs and 26.3 per cent); NDP, 103 MPs and 30.6 per cent (37 MPs and 18.2 per cent); Bloc Québécois, 4 MPs and 6.04 per cent (49 MPs and 10 per cent); Green, 1 MP and 3.9 per cent (no MPs and 6.8 per cent). Ignatieff and Duceppe were defeated in their own constituencies and announced their retirement from politics on election night. The centre had once again become a position of weakness, as Ignatieff could not slice votes back from Harper, who ran successfully as a moderate and effective conservative just trying to complete his mandate, or from Layton, who ran as a good and an unfrightening progressive. Quebec had finally figured out that the Bloc couldn’t do anything for it, but could not chin itself on the vague Ignatieff or the cold Albertan Harper, though all three national English-speaking party leaders were impressively bilingual. Layton now had 57 per cent of his NDP MPs from Quebec, though 64 per cent of his vote had come from other provinces. There were the usual unlikely beneficiaries of such a sudden Quebec tidal wave. The Progressive Conservatives elected there in 1958 had been reasonably plausible, because they had been chosen by Duplessis and his close associates, but one of Mulroney’s Quebec caucus elected on the tide in 1984 was the courier delivery man who brought the constituency association nomination instructions from national headquarters and was chosen by the party executives who were the addressees. Layton had some unilingual English MPs from French districts, a couple of teenage students, and a woman who had been in California during the election and was only dimly aware that she had been nominated.
The burning question was whether the Liberals could be revived or would merge with the NDP. But Stephen Harper, if he just lived out his term, would be the sixth-longest serving prime minister (after King, Macdonald, Trudeau, Laurier, and Chrétien) and appeared for the indefinite future to have almost as fragmented an opposition as Chrétien had enjoyed. But his mastery was of his own design; Chrétien’s had been the serendipity of perseverance and the errors of opponents.
Jack Layton died of cancer on August 22, 2011, and Harper generously awarded him a state funeral. He was a well-liked man who had led his party to astonishing heights. He was replaced as leader by Thomas Mulcair, MP from Outremont, Quebec, and a former minister in Jean Charest’s Liberal Quebec government. Mulcair (b. 1954) was a formidable and hirsute parliamentarian and debater and promised to be a strong leader of the Opposition, if not as personally affable as the always smiling Jack Layton, who was everyone’s idea of someone to have a beer with in a tavern. All three of the major opposition leaders in the late election had now vanished from the scene (although Ignatieff’s predecessor, Dion, continued as an MP and shadow minister).
Eventually, the Liberals – having flunked at their old system of elevating the previous runner-up to the head of the party (Turner, Chrétien, and Martin) and struck out badly in their effort to revive the unlikely leader from afar with Dion and Ignatieff (and Bob Rae, though the interim leader from 2011 to 2013, declined to run for the leadership) – tried something altogether different: dynastic heredity, with Justin Trudeau, elected Liberal leader in April 2013. He had been an MP since 2008, had not made much impact in the House, and was dogged by suggestions that he might be intellectually thin for the position. But he carried a name that with time was somewhat magic, was a better looking and less combative man than his father, and was less dogmatically fixed in a social-democratic time warp. He didn’t have his father’s formidable personality and flinty toughness and bitchy genius for repartee, but he didn’t have to fight the separatists from such a tight corner either; his father had done that for the country (and won).
Harper opened his new term by engaging a special adviser in Quebec – former MP André Bachand, who had quit in 2004 saying that Harper “has the charisma of a picnic table” – and trying to devise some way to entice Quebeckers, now effectively the only region of the country his tactics had not penetrated. He also ended the marketing monopoly of the Canadian Wheat Board, ended the long-gun registry as a service to farmers and hunters, and gave notice of withdrawal from the Kyoto accord, which had been an insane leap aboard the global warming alarm movement that, if implemented, would move scores of billions of dollars around between countries that did not deserve to be penalized and those that did not deserve to be rewarded, for scientifically false reasons. Only the recipient countries had signed it with any sincerity. (Effectively, successful economies would have to pay huge penalties to primitive countries because of their industrial and vehicular carbon use, and underdeveloped countries, usually despotisms, would receive bonanzas. China, though the greatest polluter, would be a beneficiary, and so would Russia, because it was a much smaller carbon-user than the former Soviet Union. It was nonsense, and almost all the anticipated payout countries balked.)
The vieux jeu is still being played out in Quebec. The Parti Québécois came back for the third time in 2012, but with a minority government in a fragmented Assembly, representing only 32 per cent of the vote and with the most improbable premier Quebec has ever had, the unfathomably humdrum Pauline Marois (b. 1949). She reduced the province to wedge politics of the lowest sub-American variety. In the guise of requiring that Muslim women reveal their identities, the government of Quebec, in what was portentously described as a Charter of Values, purported to have the right to dictate the size of religious ornaments people may wear. A mutation of the infamous language police (much sought out by bemused tourists) was envisioned as, effectively, an apparel police, to impose what was really an assault on the religious, specifically Roman Catholic heritage of French Canada. This is a heritage the atheistic separatists, in their ahistorical nihilism, wish to expunge, even as their own fortunes fade. Thomas Mulcair, Jack Layton’s successor as federal leader of the Opposition, expanded Layton’s mischievous election pitch for the separatist vote in federal elections by explicitly promising to honour Quebec’s oppressive language laws in the federal workforce in Quebec, and to gut or repeal Chrétien’s Clarity Act. Mulcair tried tentatively to convince English Canada that he was the true federalist, because only by the grovelling appeasement of these restrictive impulses would Quebec’s confidence be reinforced sufficiently for it to resist the temptations of independence. Such sophistry usually announces and precedes the collapse of the movement whose tenets it expresses at their most absurd.
And when Premier Marois called an election for April 7, 2014, ostensibly to approve the Charter of Values and catapult her government into a majority on the charter’s assumed popularity, the campaign quickly degenerated into a slanging match about separatism and a possible referendum. Marois was decisively defeated, lost her own district in Charlevoix, and brought Parti Québécois support down to 25.5 per cent, almost where it was in its first general election in 1970. Lévesque had lasted nine years as premier. Parizeau, Bouchard, and Bernard Landry also lasted nine years between them, and Marois, in the party’s third try, lasted just eighteen months. The new premier, Liberal Philippe Couillard, former health minister in the Charest government, was elected in the usually separatist district of Roberval, although he was the most unambiguously federalist Quebec Liberal leader since Jean Lesage, if not Adélard Godbout. It is possible that Stephen Harper’s ability to govern without Quebec, with cold indiffere
nce but without antipathy, has contributed to the weakening of Quebec nationalism. This ability will be increased by the attribution of new constituencies, mainly in English Canada, for the 2015 election. Harper skilfully bought Bloc Québécois support for this measure in exchange for tax concessions from Ottawa. The fact that Harper does not always highlight his achievements should not deny him the credit for them.
Two prolonged controversies arose: the reticence of the United States government to approve the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline that would, if built, ultimately move 830,000 barrels a day of tar sands oil from Alberta all the way to the Gulf Coast and eliminate one-half of U.S. oil imports from the Middle East. There was also robust discussion about proposed pipelines from the same source to Kitimat, British Columbia, for shipment by tanker to East Asia. Both projects raised environmental questions and the pipeline to the West Coast also raised the question of the rights of native people. There was tremendous lobbying on all sides as the Obama administration waffled characteristically between the agitation of interest groups. In Canada, an outfit plumped imaginatively for “ethical oil,” which meant oil the sale of which did not benefit antagonistic, and especially terrorism-supporting, governments. Harper was commendably firm that he was not going to avoid job creation to please the environmentalists, while promising ecological vigilance.
The other issue that raised its ungainly head concerned Conservative senators who were alleged by Senate committee and RCMP investigations to have abused their expense accounts, and especially in travel allowances. In an odd move, the prime minister’s chief of staff, Nigel Wright, a well-to-do and highly regarded alumnus of Bay Street, paid Senator Mike Duffy, a Parliament Hill roué and television veteran of more than thirty years, ninety thousand dollars, with which he repaid what was deemed to be his overstated travel allowance draws as a senator. On its face, this was merely a wealthy friend assisting a journeyman senator to wind down an embarrassment for the government, and the proceeds went to the taxpayers. But a considerable controversy ensued, and Wright resigned a few days after the arrangement was made public, because of Duffy’s own indiscretions, at the end of February 2013. Wright was not indicted, and the government appeared to be following the Chrétien formula of leaving it to the snail’s pace of the RCMP. However, charges have been laid against others and sworn evidence will be required, which can scarcely fail to embarrass the government.
The parliamentary press corps does not like Harper’s cold and manipulative style, and he enjoys no great reservoir of public sympathy, and after eight years sometimes seems tired, unimaginative, and peevish. The government has not renewed its program with fresh ideas and targets, much less transformative reforms and prestigious new faces, but it is still managing competently. Its law-and-order plans are primitive demagogy for the benefit of voters it could not possibly fail to attract without them. But they are not determining of the government’s merits, which, even if it merely sits on its record and runs the departments, has provided good and consistent government and made Canada a much more successful country than the old socialistic, high tax, slow growth nanny state the Liberals loved to create and manage. (The NDP are no longer, as St. Laurent good-naturedly said of its precursor, the CCF, just “Liberals in a hurry.”)
Stephen Harper has changed that trajectory, and has retained his standing as the preferred choice to head the government, from respect and not affection or panache. His tactical chicanery is generally a little more artistic than irritating, and he is in many areas, including almost all aspects of foreign policy, a man of firm and well-thought-out beliefs. His speech to the Israeli Knesset on January 20, 2014, was a seminal address that squarely blamed the Arabs for refusing to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, even as he increased aid to the Palestinian Authority. He declined to join in the relaxation of sanctions on Iran over its nuclear military program, and sent six CF-18s to Poland to watch Ukraine in April 2014 when that country was threatened by Russian aggression. The effectiveness of his bold and principled foreign policy is undercut by his failure to deliver on his promise to strengthen Canada’s defence capability. Canada’s only maintenance vessel broke down in the central Pacific in early 2014 and had to be towed by the Navy to Pearl Harbor, where it was decommissioned. Harper passed on opportunities to buy sophisticated helicopter and aircraft carriers from the Netherlands, France, and the United States.
Harper avoids whole categories of issues, including abortion, euthanasia, and the Constitution, and seems unable to focus on the desirability of income tax cuts against very selective sales tax increases in optional spending areas, presumably because of his determination to keep federal revenues low (under 14 per cent of GDP, the lowest figure in more than fifty years), despite the undisputed fact that reducing income taxes on people and corporations and defence spending are the best ways to stimulate economic growth. He has no grasp of joint public–private sector cooperation, and has thus passed on opportunities to help take the country into an ownership position in the automobile industry. (He did join with the Obama administration in the bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler but had no interest in accumulating equity in that industry in Canada.) But he has performed an essential service in giving the country a serious moderate-conservative party fully capable of governing and competing with the orthodoxy of nearly fifty years, only modestly challenged by Mulroney and Chrétien, that taxing and spending were the answer to all public policy issues.
If he does not become a little less of a time-server and placeman and resume his status as an agent of well-considered change, more focused on reform and less on mere longevity for the love of incumbency, the country will quickly tire of him. In mid-2014, he had yet to complete the transition from a conservative guerrilla warrior sabotaging the march of the left, to a creative author of original policy. And although he has governed competently, he is afflicted by a stubborn authoritarianism, inaccessibility, and what Macauley described, in reference to King William III (whom he admired) as “an almost repulsive coldness.” Yet, while political predictions are hazardous, barring something completely unforeseeable, however long he lasts, Stephen Harper will likely be an accomplished and capable prime minister.
This chronicle, as a work of non-fiction, must end at the present, and the dessicated and oppressively serious ambiance created by Harper and his regime may seem an anti-climax to a story largely unfolded by colourful personalities in tumultuous circumstances. But panache has often been scarce in Canada, and most of it has come from the French, who have recently focused more on their own province than on their country. But the competence, determination, and, up to a point, the sly tactical agility of Harper, are a large part of the Canadian story too. (Macdonald, King, and Mulroney, who governed between them for nearly sixty years, were not tyros either.) Stephen Harper has been generally successful, and that quality is the largest single component of the history of Canada, a country that has grown steadily, always pursued admirable goals, has never been defeated, and has rarely embarrassed itself.
* Between the two, they had held the district for sixty-seven years, ten terms each.
* The position of governor general had become a method of promotion of minorities. Jules Léger was followed by the German-Canadian former Manitoba NDP premier Edward Schreyer; then the first woman to hold the position, the outstanding former Speaker and federal minister Jeanne Sauvé; then the Ukrainian-Canadian Ramon Hnatyshyn, followed by the Acadian Roméo LeBlanc, both journeyman MPs; then the Chinese-Canadian ex-television reporter and provincial agent in Paris Adrienne Clarkson.
* This was the seventh time a government had lost the confidence of the House: Macdonald in 1873 (though he resigned without a vote), King and Meighen in 1926 (Meighen lost the vote), Diefenbaker in 1963, Trudeau (deliberately) in 1974, Clark in 1979, Martin in 2005, and now Harper deliberately.
CONCLUSION
Reflections and Prospects
This narrative has followed the arrival of Europeans in Canada all the
way forward from the bold vision of Champlain. If the war with Britain had not already ended after Champlain’s heroic resistance, when the Kirke family seized Quebec in 1629, the whole French effort in Canada, which did not yet have one hundred permanent French residents, would have failed 130 years before the British did take Quebec, and would have been absorbed entirely by British Americans. Champlain resurrected it, and through Jean Talon’s importation of adequate numbers of fertile young French women to enracinate the French in an inhospitable place, and the establishment of enough industry, the colony was built into an autonomous community behind the fierce defence of Frontenac and the Vaudreuils. Fortuitously, as France could not possibly maintain such an entity against British control of the high seas indefinitely, Britain gained French Canada as a prize of war after it had become self-sustaining and unburdensome. While they were lethargically determining what to do with it, the British were motivated by the disaffection of the Americans to guaranty the security of the French Canadians in exchange for their loyalty, and to encourage and receive Loyalists from the United States into what became English Canada, and to make a reasonable effort to protect Canada from the Americans.