by Paul Wells
PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
COPYRIGHT © 2013 PAUL WELLS
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Wells, Paul (Paul Allen)
The longer I’m Prime Minister : Stephen Harper and Canada, 2006– / Paul Wells.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-307-36134-9
1. Harper, Stephen, 1959–. 2. Canada—Politics and government—2006–. 3. Conservative Party of Canada—History. 4. Prime ministers—Canada—Biography. I. Title. II. Title: Stephen Harper and Canada, 2006–.
FC641.H37W43 2013 971.07′3 C2013-901523-X
Cover design by Andrew Roberts
Cover image: ZUMA Wire Service / Alamy
v3.1
For Katie and Thomas,
who taught me to do my best.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
The Ballad of the Old Grey Mayor
1
Foot in the Door
2
Remedial Reading I
3
Les Québécois or, As We Say in English, the Québécois
4
The Green Shield
5
Excellent Buying Opportunity
6
The Short Second Election of 2008
7
Mess Until I’m Done
8
Remedial Reading II
9
Rise Up, Sea of Troubles
10
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop
11
Self-Unmade Man?
Epilogue
It’s a Big Country
Acknowledgements
About the Author
“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning.”
—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
PROLOGUE
THE BALLAD OF THE OLD GREY MAYOR
If all you look at is Stephen Harper, you won’t see all of the story. If all you look at is “anger” or “control freak” or “Alberta,” you’re left with a mystery, because how could an angry control freak from Alberta get anywhere all by himself? Look around him. Look around yourself. Look over here, just for instance, at Dave Crapper and Paul “Boomer” Throop, driving north to Mont-Laurier on a Friday night in February 2003.
Dave and Boomer began their trip in Chelsea, an affluent Quebec village fifteen minutes from Ottawa. Chelsea is where you live if you need to be able to get to Ottawa but you want peace, quiet and a fair-sized property at a decent price. A lot of Progressive Conservatives from Ottawa retreated to Chelsea after the electoral debacle of 1993, when the party collapsed into mutually hostile constituent elements—Bloc Québécois, Reform Party and a rump of PC dead-enders—and the party’s once-imposing parliamentary majority was reduced to a mating pair, Jean Charest and Elsie Wayne.
That’s what Dave and Boomer had done. After the huge majority of 1984, Dave had worked for Jake Epp, a square-shouldered Manitoban who served, unspectacularly, as Brian Mulroney’s minister of national health and welfare. After a while Dave left Epp’s office to become one of the party’s pollsters. Boomer became the wagonmaster for Mulroney’s tours, a logistical ace who always managed to keep the leader, the crowds, the cameras and the surly court stenos on their appointed rounds. Cocks of the walk, until it all blew up.
“After 1993, everybody left town,” Crapper told me much later. “Elizabeth and I went up to Chelsea and started raising kids.” Throop and his family bought the house next door. Crapper ran the Ottawa office of the Decima Research public-opinion firm for a while, then started his own company in the same line of work. He mostly kept his nose out of politics. Elizabeth Roscoe, his vivacious wife, worked for a lobbying firm. Life was quieter, and a quieter life has its charms. But. “After ten years of that, I thought, ‘Maybe it’s time to get re-engaged.’ ”
The easiest way to get back into a party’s action was to get elected as a delegate for its leadership convention. Joe Clark’s second coming as PC leader hadn’t gone great. He’d finally given up trying, and the party would have a leadership convention in May 2003. Peter MacKay, a big, nervy son of a veteran Mulroney cabinet minister, was running for the leadership. Crapper figured he could be a MacKay delegate. Throop could vote for him. The two of them climbed into Crapper’s car and he steered it toward the future.
Well, to be fair, this was true only to the extent that any car is pointed toward the future. What it felt like was winter-driving hell, and close to pointless to boot. Pontiac, the riding Crapper lived in, covered 27,000 square kilometres, half the area of Nova Scotia. The delegate selection meeting was being held in Mont-Laurier, nearly a three-hour drive from Chelsea. “I’d never been farther north than Maniwaki,” Crapper said. “I thought it was the end of the earth. Mont-Laurier is even farther away.”
When they finally got to the meeting, there were maybe six or eight people in the community hall. One couple had driven from the west end of the riding, four and a half hours. “I think there were as many delegates eligible to go as there were people in the room.”
But if you have done politics for long enough in an earlier life, the reflexes come back without too much strain. “A party organizer working for MacKay shows up from the old Mulroney days, who I know. She instantly recognizes me, and I recognize her, and all of a sudden she’s got somebody to work with now.” When MacKay won the Tory leadership that May in Toronto, Crapper was one of his delegates.
MacKay did win the Conservative leadership, but it got a bit hairy there in the home stretch. MacKay was first on every ballot, but he showed no growth from ballot to ballot and it was frankly pretty nervous-making. So between the third and fourth ballots he signed this weird little pact with David Orchard, a Saskatchewan farmer with a droopy moustache and a stack of conspiracy theories about how free trade was the nation’s bane. Paranoid nationalism has always had its subscribers, and Orchard came to the convention with 600-odd delegates who would not go anywhere or do anything except on David Orchard’s say-so. MacKay couldn’t be sure Orchard wouldn’t take the bunch of them to Jim Prentice, the prim and manicured Calgary lawyer who was too close behind MacKay for comfort. So MacKay and Orchard signed a loony handwritten deal promising to re-examine the impact of Canada–U.S. free trade and forswearing any merger talk with the Canadian Alliance, which Orchard judged too right-wing, too pro–free trade, and way too pro-American. Sealing the pact with Orchard was all it took for MacKay to win.
Before too long it turned out he’d signed the Orchard deal with his fingers crossed behind his back, just like Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver. It was actually free trade he’d ignore and the Canadian Alliance he’d re-examine. Before the year was out, the Progressive Cons
ervative Party of Canada was dead as a legal entity, Stephen Harper was running to lead a new Conservative Party, and Peter MacKay wasn’t doing anything but watching.
The party Dave Crapper had given his adult life to was gone. He was furious, right? “Didn’t bother me. By that point the mathematics of it all was really very apparent to everyone. Everybody was looking at Chrétien leaving and Martin coming in, and we knew we’d be obliterated again if we didn’t get back together.” And after the Elsie Wayne years, “We knew what obliteration looked like. Whatever resistance there was at that point evaporated really fast.”
And actually, even though the new party was called Conservative and the old party was called Progressive, for much of his career Crapper had worked for people who not only would have been at home in the new party but had in effect already beaten him to it. The first MP he’d ever worked for, as early as 1979, when Joe Clark became prime minister, was a Mennonite from Kitchener named John Reimer. Reimer supported Stockwell Day in the 2000 Canadian Alliance leadership race, although he found Day a bit too relaxed about abortion. Crapper’s next boss, Jake Epp, was another Mennonite from the riding Vic Toews would one day represent. He joined the Alliance and supported Stock Day in 2000 as well.
So to Crapper the new party looked mostly like its old self reconstituted. Though the ingredients were now mixed in different proportions. “In the Progressive Conservative days, the progressives were on the top, typically, and the conservatives were the grouchy guys at the back. And now it was the conservatives who were on top and it was the progressives who were grouchy. Or otherwise.”
For the most part, Crapper wasn’t grouchy. In any case there was little time for introspection. Harper became the new party’s leader. Paul Martin, the new prime minister, flinched only briefly before calling the 2004 election. The Conservatives needed a candidate in Pontiac, Crapper’s riding.
“The danger of getting yourself re-engaged in a Quebec riding as a Conservative is that there’s often very few of you,” he said. “So when it comes to campaign time, the few of you around get leaned on. And it’s sort of like, ‘If you don’t find somebody to run, it’s going to be you.’ Which is a ridiculous proposition. I’m not gonna be the candidate.”
Crapper started looking around for an idea. He didn’t have to look far. Perhaps the Old Grey Mayor would run again.
The Reform side of the party had already found the candidate they called the Old Grey Mayor in 2000. “She was the mayor of Chelsea and her name was, and continues to be, Judy Grant. She was sort of a kind of Elsie Wayne without the class. Hang ’em high, shoot first, ask questions later. Just a charming, wonderful diamond-in-the-rough type personality. I love her to bits. Foul-mouthed, ill-tempered and big-hearted. A great old lady.”
So the Old Grey Mayor had run for the Alliance in 2000, in a Quebec riding where no Reform candidate had ever run, and she came in third with almost 15 percent of the vote. That’s more than triple what Joe Clark’s candidate got in Pontiac that year.
There was, in fact, some Conservative history in Pontiac, just as there was in any number of places across Canada where the Conservative gene hadn’t had a chance to express itself, whether because the vote was divided among competing parties, or supporters were demoralized, or whatever. In 1984 and 1988 a fellow named Barry Moore from Maniwaki had ridden Mulroney’s coattails into Ottawa. Moore lost in 1993 like everyone else, but while representing Pontiac he’d had some luck putting down Conservative roots in what was, historically, a very Liberal riding. If you took away the Ottawa River you’d see very little difference between the western portion of Pontiac riding and the Eastern Ontario ridings that routinely return Conservative MPs from the Reform wing of the party, such as Scott Reid and Pierre Poilievre. In this region, county after county is full of people who want nothing better from the federal government than a good letting alone.
So, as the 2004 election approached at a heady clip, Dave Crapper and Boomer Throop and Barry Moore took Judy Grant out for dinner and said, “Look, Judy, this is something you should give another shot at.” And she let them twist her arm, and she did run again, this time as a Conservative.
She gave it a hell of a go. Crapper knocked on the door of a couple of young entrepreneurs living in Chelsea, Sean and Lisa McAdam, former Reform Party staffers who had connections to some of the founding members of the Reform Party out west. “There was a real desire on the part of the Western guys to see the party succeed in Quebec,” Crapper told me. Sean and Lisa were enlisted to work the phones. Soon campaign money was coming east, and the Pontiac riding Conservative association went into the writ period with $65,000 in the bank. By the time the votes were counted, in a riding where 73 percent of the residents speak French at home, the Old Grey Mayor, whose French had always been rudimentary, walked off with 22 percent of the vote. Which was the third- or fourth-best score for the Conservative Party in all of Quebec.
Longing on a large scale, Don DeLillo wrote, is what makes history. In 2004 Judy Grant was running for Parliament for the second time, but she had a fresh wave of new company: in that year, fully 222 people ran for the Conservative Party as first-time candidates. In Cardigan riding on Prince Edward Island, Peter McQuaid, Premier Pat Binns’s former chief of staff, took a run at Lawrence MacAulay. That was a doomed enterprise if ever there was one, but at least it showed some cheek. In York-Simcoe, Peter Van Loan, a former president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, won easily against a Liberal who was herself running for the first time. In Saskatoon-Humboldt a mining geophysicist and rock-ribbed opponent of abortion named Brad Trost won the closest four-way race in the country, ahead of a New Democrat, a Liberal and the independent Jim Pankiw, a one-time Reformer who had a hard time keeping friends. In the pretty farm country of Durham outside Oshawa, a former executive vice-president of CTV named Bev Oda became Canada’s first Japanese-Canadian Member of Parliament.
Everywhere you looked in 2004 you could find new Conservatives who were not, of course, newly conservative but who had decided now was the time to make their move. Leslie Soobrian in York West, the president of the Cricket Council of Ontario. Lida Preyma in Etobicoke Centre, an international-relations specialist from the University of Toronto. Payam Eslami, a financial advisor in Saint-Léonard–Saint-Michel. All of them had a story to tell. Each had friends egging them on, a network of supporters, a volunteer staff. Many fought off challengers at nomination meetings for the right to be a candidate. Each raised money, organized a campaign office, rallied thousands of voters on election day. Together they reflected an enormous cultural potential that had gone largely untapped during years of Liberal rule. In many cases, they were conservatives who hadn’t felt at home in Mulroney’s PC Party either, for all its electoral success.
Most of the new candidates didn’t win in 2004. In his first election as Conservative leader, Stephen Harper won 29.63 percent of the popular vote, eight points less than the combined Alliance and Tory vote in 2000, and 99 seats. Voters weren’t sure what to make of the new party and its cool, brittle leader. Harper gave serious thought to quitting politics after 2004, but eventually decided his position at the top wasn’t one of the changes the party needed to make.
The changes he did make were the subject of my 2006 book, Right Side Up: The Fall of Paul Martin and the Rise of Stephen Harper’s New Conservatism. I won’t belabour them here. But for the purposes of this prologue, it’s worth noting that one thing he did was to appoint Lawrence Cannon, a former Quebec Liberal minister for communications, as his deputy chief of staff and Quebec lieutenant in 2005.
Cannon wanted to get into Parliament. He was thinking of running in Aylmer, right across the river from Ottawa. Dave Crapper gave him a visit, showed him the 2004 election returns for Pontiac, showed him the riding association’s $25,000 bank balance, and pretty soon Lawrence Cannon was happy to declare himself a son of Pontiac. The Conservative breakthrough in Quebec, ten seats including Cannon’s, was one of the great stories of 2006.
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Along the way Crapper had done some polling for the Conservatives. Harper paired him up with Dimitri Pantazopoulos, the old Alliance pollster. One Tory and one Reformer, for balance. “From a research perspective pollsters from the Reform side of the party think in terms of values,” Crapper said. For illustration’s sake, he improvised a question of the general sort Harper liked to see in a poll: “ ‘Some people think that it’s important for Canada to have an independent foreign policy and getting too close to the Americans is not a good idea. Other people say that we’re economically intertwined and geographically tied to the United States and so to cooperate with them is in our best interest. Which of these two views is most like your own?’ ” The goal of a question like this is not just to find out who’s likely to support some measure that’s being considered right now. It’s to glean a broader sense of respondents’ values, not just as a group but as a set of subgroups the party can follow, and learn to appeal to, over time.
“One of the first pieces of our research was that we wrote up a questionnaire. I said to Dimitri, it’s a good questionnaire, we’re ready to go, we know what we’re going to get. He said, ‘We’re not done yet.’ I said, what else do we have to do? He said, ‘We have to run it by Stephen.’ I’m thinking, who’s Stephen?”
The Stephen whom Pantazopoulos was referring to was Harper. Crapper said, “The questionnaire goes in the fax machine to his office and the next day it comes back and there are whole questions struck out, there are new questions scrolled in pen, words substituted throughout. Stephen Harper was reviewing, editing questionnaires!”
Crapper had been on Allan Gregg’s staff for almost the entire time Gregg had been Brian Mulroney’s pollster. He had done polls for Pat Binns for a decade while Binns was premier of PEI. Neither of them had looked at a poll before it went into the field, let alone proofread draft lists of questions. “I couldn’t believe it. Sign of things to come, obviously. I had just never seen that level of hands-on involvement in my trade before by any politician I had ever worked with. Guys are always interested in what you’re doing and certainly curious about what you find out, but they’re never writing the questions.”