by Paul Wells
The thing he needed to do above all others, he told himself during that long flight from Calgary to Ottawa, was survive. It was the prerequisite for everything else. He had plenty of examples of prime ministers who had not lasted long: Joe Clark, Paul Martin, Kim Campbell. Everybody liked them. Say Joe Clark’s name at Hy’s, the Ottawa steak-house where partisan lines blur nightly in the universal solvent of red wine, and Liberals’ eyes would mist up. Such a lovely guy. Every Liberal loves a Conservative loser.
As for the prime ministers who had lasted longer, they were imperfect models because they had started with advantages the electoral fates had denied Harper. Trudeau, Mulroney and Chrétien had ridden into power on mandates Harper could barely imagine. They could afford to be nice guys—although, come to think of it, they hadn’t bothered. The prime ministers of Harper’s adult life had started strong and petered out, or started weak and collapsed. He must find his own way.
All three of the parties Harper would face across the floor of the House of Commons were situated to his left on a left-right spectrum of political ideas. More Canadians had voted for those parties, taken together, than for his Conservatives. If you made those 308 MPs stand in a row according to their ideology from left to right, from Libby Davies all the way to Rob Anders, the 155th MP in line would be a Liberal. If it ever reached its equilibrium state, this Parliament would have a Liberal prime minister. So Harper would never let it reach equilibrium. He would shock the system regularly, to keep his opponents off balance, divided or both. He would hoard information for himself and dole it out, to the people and to Parliament, through an eyedropper. He would never let mere principle deny him any advantage his opponents had used, or might use if the tables were turned, to hold on to power. He would be nice when he could, reach out when reaching out would help, but when the chips were down he would not hesitate to demonstrate there could be no bigger son of a bitch in Canadian politics than Stephen Joseph Harper.
He would do all these things because he had a mission. His goal was to ensure that Conservatives governed as frequently and as durably in the twenty-first century as Liberals had in the twentieth. He had seen Conservative leaders implement radical change, only to be tossed out for many years by counter-reformationists who undid everything the Conservatives had done. Chrétien after Mulroney. Dalton McGuinty after Mike Harris. He would not be content with that. He wanted to change the terms of the Canadian debate, to re-legitimize the Right’s ideas and de-legitimize the Left’s. And he wanted to do so in such a durable manner that when he left politics he would hand more than rubble to his successor.
But first things first. He had to survive the year. To do that he had to be seen to fulfill his election promises, and to do that he had to avoid surprises. He wouldn’t fulfil every promise or avoid every surprise. But he would do enough of both to hang on.
The centrepiece of the Conservative campaign platform had been the “Five Priorities,” five easy-to-understand promises that were supposed to be the first things a new Conservative government would seek to deliver. They served several purposes. First, they helped depict Harper as a more purposeful, organized leader than the frazzled Paul Martin, who had inherited a Liberal corruption scandal he didn’t know how to handle, and who seemed to have devoted more thought to taking Jean Chrétien’s job than to what he wanted to do with it. Second, they were handy for countering the constant barrage of Liberal accusations that Harper had a hidden agenda of radical change. The Five Priorities are worth quoting in full as they appeared on the PM’s website soon after the election:
We are committed to:
• Cleaning up government by enacting and enforcing the Federal Accountability Act;
• Lower taxes for working Canadians; starting by reducing the GST;
• Protecting Canadian families and communities by strengthening the justice system;
• Supporting parents’ child care choices through direct assistance and by creating more daycare spaces; and
• Delivering the health care Canadians need, when they need it, by addressing the fiscal imbalance and establishing a patient wait times guarantee with the provinces.
Harper told reporters midway through the campaign, “The first four of the five things I’ve talked about are things that, quite frankly, we can do fairly quickly.” And indeed, he would be able to demonstrate progress on the first four priorities by year’s end. (He has still not produced anything resembling a wait-time guarantee.) But the priorities appealed to Harper not only because they were doable, but because they would change things. “They will have longer-term impacts,” he told those reporters at the beginning of January. “The country will be different because of them.”
That was the game. Lock in change that could not be ratcheted back even if he was defeated. Economists had mocked the GST reduction as the worst possible tax cut because it did less than income-tax cuts to stimulate productivity. But that was not the point. The point was to get money out of Ottawa, to reduce surpluses and restrict the ability of the government—any government—to introduce elaborate new social programs. And it had to be hard to reverse without substantial political cost. Same for the $100 cheque per month per child under six. A government handing out those cheques couldn’t run daycares too, and a government that cancelled those cheques would have hell on its hands.
The Five Priorities had been the highlight of a platform document that added similarly terse commitments across most areas of government activity. Lots of bullets. The Conservatives arrived in Ottawa to discover their platform was a hit with senior bureaucrats. Not because the permanent government agreed with the new government’s plans, but because it found them so easy to decode. From there it was short work to transform the platform into a stack of memos explaining how such things would be done, if Harper still wanted to do them.
Mostly he did. Harper had brought in Derek Burney, a former chief of staff to Brian Mulroney, to run the transition. The two men didn’t know each other well. Turning to Burney constituted a frank admission on Harper’s part that neither he nor most of his cabinet and staff knew government well. Burney’s orders were to produce a lean, agile government operation. No time to waste.
Ministers traditionally receive “mandate letters,” prepared by the PMO with help from the bureaucracy, telling them what the boss expects them to do. Mandate letters usually cover a year of plans or more. Harper’s covered only six months.
“He actually went over them line by line with me, and in a very meticulous fashion,” Burney said. If one of the mandate letters contradicted language in the Conservative election platform, Harper would have Burney fix the letter. “It was very different from what I was used to. Mulroney would have said, ‘Well, what do these letters say, Derek?’ And you’d explain them for five seconds and he’d sign them, or not.”
Bruce Carson was a veteran Progressive Conservative from the Clark and Mulroney years who’d been brought into the Harper shop to provide institutional memory for a team that didn’t have much. “It was a great way to move a very inexperienced group of people along,” he said of the mandate letters. There was a note of urgency here as in so much of what Harper was doing, Carson observed. “The prime minister was very concerned that we were going to be defeated in months.”
Harper brought the same message to his first cabinet meeting: one screw-up could wreck this government before it even got started. “I am the kingpin,” he told his ministers, according to someone who was in the room. “So whatever you do around me, you have to know that I am sacrosanct.”
While Harper had it in him to be charming, that was always strictly optional. Here he had to make it perfectly clear who would lose if any minister’s actions made the government look bad. None of the ministers had played that role in a federal government before, except Rob Nicholson, the government House leader, who’d spent the summer of 1993 as Kim Campbell’s minister of science. Harper’s cabinet members were unbelievably green. And now the boss was telling them that if ther
e was trouble he would cut them loose. As the years in power went on, Harper’s threat would look mostly hollow. Firing a minister brings its own kind of trouble and it would take a lot for Harper to cross that line. But the greenhorns didn’t know that yet, and they took the boss’s warning to heart.
In Ottawa it used to be that when a cabinet minister was too green to know his boss was bluffing, a seasoned staffer could take the minister aside and whisper some wisdom into the ministerial ear. Unfortunately, in the Harper government, that wouldn’t be possible for a while. “We were just massively fucking short on staff,” one of Harper’s senior staffers says. This was true to some extent in the PMO, and far more so in the dozens of ministers’ offices around the Hill.
There were at least four reasons for this. First, the supply of seasoned Conservative Hill staffers was low. In a parliamentary system, long sentences in opposition are supposed to help a party prepare for government. But during the thirteen years after the electoral debacle of 1993 that system pretty much broke. There weren’t enough of the dwindling corporal’s guard who had stuck out the intervening years with a succession of Progressive Conservative leaders—Jean Charest, Clark, Peter MacKay—to run much of anything. Meanwhile few Reform and Alliance staffers had viewed their time in opposition as training for government because until very shortly before Harper nearly won the 2004 election, nobody thought a Reform or Alliance leader could do it.
Second, the inner circle aboard Mr. Happy’s Flying Circus were hardly the only people in Canada to notice how weak Harper’s parliamentary hand was. Government work meant leaving a job somewhere else, uprooting oneself and perhaps one’s family for a move to Ottawa, and total immersion in a punishing workload, all for maybe eight months of power, an unwinnable confidence vote and a quick ticket back to ignominy. Conservative provincial governments in Alberta, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, and Gordon Campbell’s decidedly bluish B.C. Liberals, offered more stability.
Third, Harper was not in the business of making it easier for young professionals to give government work a quick try. The first of the Five Priorities he planned to tick off was an Accountability Act designed to reduce the influence of money on federal politics. In an election that followed months of lurid evidence before Justice John Gomery’s inquiry into corruption among Liberal Party bagmen in Quebec, the promise of a cleaner politics had helped propel Harper to power.
A centrepiece of the Accountability Act was a five-year ban on lobbying the federal government for former ministers and their staff. So a potential eight-month tour of duty in a Hill office would get a former staffer banned from using the knowledge and connections he’d acquired to help guide clients through the Ottawa jungle—all the way until 2011. Later, Harper government sources would insist that passing the accountability legislation hadn’t made the difference for many potential staffers. The likelihood that the entire government would fall at any moment was a bigger deterrent, they said. Still, among the few Conservative-linked professionals who did already have marketable skills and connections when Harper was elected, a fair number preferred to stay outside the government and trade on those assets rather than go inside and trigger the ban.
The fourth thing that limited the government’s ability to hire staffers was that not all Conservatives were welcome.
I’ve been using the name of Harper’s party, the Conservative Party of Canada, more or less interchangeably with the short name for the party that governed Canada at intervals from 1867 to 1993, the Progressive Conservatives. But of course in many ways they’re not the same party. The Progressive Conservative Party of Canada was legally wound down at the end of 2003, along with the Canadian Alliance, to allow the creation of the new Conservative Party of Canada. And the culture of the new party is different from the old versions too. Sometimes the differences are too slight to deserve mention. On most days, former Progressive Conservatives work alongside former Reformers without even noticing that there used to be a distinction. But if that is so, it is precisely because Conservatives, tired of losing, worked to ensure that the Conservative Party would function as a heterogeneous but cohesive body. Sometimes that work has entailed a little judicious pruning. The spring of 2006 was one such time.
At some point Ian Brodie, Harper’s chief of staff, noticed that a disproportionate number of the people applying for staff jobs had a history with the Progressive Conservatives. This made sense: the PCs had been a party of government; Reform was an insurgency. PCs were more likely to have spent time in NGOs, think tanks, university administrations and industry associations. They would fit right in at government offices.
Brodie decided too many of them were fitting in. He vetoed one appointment immediately. Graham Fox, the son of Mulroney’s communications director, Bill Fox, had served before he was thirty as Joe Clark’s chief of staff, during the late stages of Clark’s doomed political comeback. Effortlessly bilingual, he spoke frequently on behalf of the Conservatives on radio and TV in both languages. Peter MacKay wanted Fox to be his chief of staff. Brodie kiboshed the appointment. And, sources say, he then put a young assistant with impeccable Reform credentials, Jenni Byrne, in charge of making sure the Reform and Alliance wings of the party were well represented in ministers’ offices.
This was no total ban on Progressive Conservatives. David McLaughlin, who had served as Mulroney’s final chief of staff and written a book about Kim Campbell’s lousy campaign, became Jim Flaherty’s chief at Finance. Blair Dickerson, another Mulroney-era survivor, would run Gary Lunn’s office at Natural Resources. But Byrne stopped other Red Tory appointments and worked her Reform and Alliance connections to find people who could take their places. Byrne’s loyalty to Brodie and Harper, her willingness to work hard, and the pleasure she took in delivering bad news and enforcing tough calls got noticed. If the cause of Canadian conservatism meant a few Red Tories had to get whacked, Jenni Byrne was okay with that. Her star began to rise in the PMO.
As the young government made its first steps, its approach could be summed up in a few words: clarity, purpose, control. These people were convinced they had to walk a fine line. They were haunted by the thought of slipping up. Talking without thinking had cost the Canadian Alliance years of turmoil when Stockwell Day had led it. Last-minute eruptions of inanity and extremism from Harper’s candidates cost him the 2004 election. His own smart mouth had gotten him in so much trouble with several intemperate comments he’d made after returning to politics in 2002 that he’d determined to duct-tape his piehole shut unless he knew precisely what was going to come out of it. At a news conference in the first week of March in the foyer of the House of Commons, almost every answer from the new PM carried a red stamp that declared CLEARED BY CENSORS. “Let me just say the following things …” he’d say, and “Je peux dire seulement …” and “I can simply tell you …” and “Let me just say.” He left the impression that a lot was going on but that the scribes would hear only selected bits of it.
Behind the scenes Harper was building an elaborate system to ensure that, while there was indeed a lot going on, the scribes would never see most of it. On Friday, April 28, 2006, the commissioner of information, John Reid, released a special report to Parliament describing part of the system in detail.
Reid was, or had spent much of his life as, a Liberal. He was elected as an MP in 1965 and defeated in 1984, then pursued assorted worthy causes until Jean Chrétien appointed him to the information commissioner’s job in 1998. He was in the last year of his seven-year term when Harper took over. Reid had perhaps disappointed, and in the end had done his best to torment, Chrétien. He didn’t give a damn which party was in power: if a government limited Canadians’ right to know how they are governed it would hear from John Reid. He called Chrétien’s 2002 “reform” of the access-to-information law “a bureaucrat’s dream” because it had so many loopholes any official could easily cheat its stated goal of greater public access to information.
When it became clear that Harper would win the 2
006 election, Reid wrote, he had permitted himself to hope that Harper would bring in a new era of government. Hadn’t Harper mocked Paul Martin for bringing in a discussion paper on access to information instead of a full-fledged bill? Hadn’t he warned Canadians that Martin wanted to “make the government more secretive than it already is”?
And yet, barely three months after the election that brought Harper to power, “the new government has done exactly the things for which its predecessor had been ridiculed,” Reid wrote. Instead of reform, Harper launched a discussion paper. “All of the positions the government now takes in the discussion paper are contrary to the positions the Conservative Party took, and its leader espoused, during the election campaign.” But, warned Reid, Harper wasn’t just stalling, using the discussion paper to delay reform. He was actively rolling back the protections of the existing access act. The instrument he was using to accomplish this feat was the new Accountability Act.
What a jolly contradiction in terms. The Accountability Act was supposed to increase accountability by limiting the influence of money on politics. It would ban corporate and union donations to political parties and put a tight lid on private donations. It would put that five-year lobbying cap on former members of the government.
What did this have to do with access to information? The new bill sought to do two apparently contradictory things. It would extend the access act’s purview to a bunch of Crown corporations that had been shielded from its provisions until now. These included the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the assorted officers of Parliament, including the information commissioner, the commissioner of official languages, and so on. On the face of it, this change looked like an extension of the access law’s range, and therefore a good thing. The part about the CBC would delight conservatives, who were sure the public broadcaster was a grotesque money pit and could now seek to prove it, one access request at a time.