The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  By the time he finally faced Paul Martin in a national campaign as Conservative leader in 2004, Harper had had almost no time to implement any of the lessons he had learned on his way to national leadership because he’d spent most of his time actually running in various contests. His platform was simply the arithmetic mean of the 2000 Progressive Conservative and Canadian Alliance platforms, exactly the sort of difference-blurring he had decried in his Civitas speech. Few voters knew him. His first ads showed him reciting some forgettable boilerplate into the camera and then pausing before saying, with weirdly intense emphasis, “My name is Stephen Harper.” This information alone was news to many of the people seeing the ads. That was the point of them.

  It was amazing that Harper managed to pull close enough to the Liberals to make them sweat. Most polls had him ahead of the Martin Liberals a week before the election. Then interview footage of Conservative candidates surfaced, sounding a little extremist.

  “To heck with the courts, eh?” Randy White said, promising to undo same-sex marriage at the first opportunity. White, one of the original Reform MPs, wasn’t running for re-election, but with this single disastrous interview, he had given everybody who was running something to remember him by.

  Harper had time to learn one last lesson on the weekend before he lost the 2004 election. The Conservatives didn’t run many negative ads in that campaign. The ads they did run in that vein were cheerful and pointless, such as showing trash collectors tossing tax dollars into the back of a garbage truck. “That was based on Harper’s belief at the time that the public didn’t like attack ads,” one Conservative MP said later.

  Martin, facing defeat, didn’t have the luxury of worrying too hard about voters’ sensibilities. In the last weekend of the campaign, the Martin Liberals released a wave of anti-Harper ads, mostly in Ontario, and the tenuous Conservative garbage-truck ad melted away like snow in rain.

  Today, Conservatives who were active with the party in 2004 can tell you about one of the Liberal ads, a rapid-fire succession of shock images: aircraft carriers, factories belching pollution. “He’d sacrifice a woman’s right to choose,” the voice-over said, “and he’s prepared to work with the Bloc Québécois.” The image those Conservatives remember is a handgun pointed into the camera. The weapon quivers as its owner pulls the trigger.

  That Liberal ad would help Conservatives justify to themselves every negative ad they would ever produce going forward. But Martin’s campaign staff didn’t think the gun-in-your-face ad was their most effective attack, and neither did Harper. The ad that took Harper apart was quieter and less scattershot. “Can you increase expenditures, lower taxes and still balance the books?” the ad asked. A photo of Brian Mulroney slid onscreen. “Prime Minister Brian Mulroney tried it. He left behind a deficit of $42 billion a year.” A photo of Ontario Conservative premier Mike Harris, whose party had lost the provincial election a year earlier, appeared next to Mulroney’s. Then Harper’s photo appeared between the two older men. “Now Stephen Harper wants his turn.”

  During that final weekend, the modest gains Jack Layton’s NDP had built vanished as skittish centre-left voters went back to the Liberals. They would not do so in any of the next three elections, but this time their return was enough for Martin to hold power. Harper watched and learned. Where almost everyone else in his party would remember the gun-in-your-face ad, Harper would remember the one that actually worked. The one that simply showed his face in the most unflattering possible context.

  “He learned that if you’re hit and you don’t hit back, you always lose,” the Conservative MP said. “That was a seminal event in the development of Harper tactics.”

  THREE

  LES QUÉBÉCOIS OR, AS WE SAY IN ENGLISH, THE QUÉBÉCOIS

  The Citadel in Quebec City was built in the 1820s by Lt.-Col. Elias Walker Durnford of the Royal Engineers. To this day it is both an active-duty Canadian Forces base and a monument to the utility of planning for multiple contingencies. Durnford built fortifications on every side of the Citadel. In the event of an attack from the west by Americans, the British garrison could use the fort to defend the good people of Quebec City, a few hundred metres to the east. And in the event the good people of Quebec City decided to revolt against British rule, the officers and men of the British garrison could use the fort to defend themselves against the neighbours. One never does know, does one? Even today, this brutish fortress, carved into a cliff face, is a major challenge to get into. On June 23, 2006, taxi cabs full of visiting reporters had to drive through two thick walls, along narrow streets, stopping three times so their passengers could wave press passes at earnest soldiers. Two dozen protesters waved placards outside the Citadel gate. They might as well have been on Mars.

  Five months after his election, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the ministers of his cabinet had come to the most impenetrable redoubt in the Dominion to celebrate Harper’s close relationship with the people of Quebec.

  It was the first federal cabinet meeting held in Quebec City since the 1950s. It was the eve of St. Jean Baptiste Day or, as Harper called it, Quebec’s “Fête Nationale.” On the day itself he would attend a picnic at the home of his industry minister, the strapping libertarian divorcé Maxime Bernier, in the Beauce. Compared to the Citadel, Bernier’s house would be a model of openness and accessibility, although there would be a guest list and government staffers to control who got anywhere near the festivities.

  But only the logistics of the event bespoke the prime minister’s customary fever-pitch wariness at the possibility of being confronted by a surprise or a stranger. The tone of the official communications was jubilant. As indeed it might be. Harper had lasted five months, longer than Charles Tupper, John Turner and Kim Campbell had. Ian Brodie had staged a brief, jokey ceremony in the PMO to mark each of those benchmarks. By October, Harper would outlast Joe Clark, which would mean he need no longer fear going down as the shortest-serving elected prime minister.

  What was more, he was building up a record to run on, whenever he would need to. The PMO communiqué from Quebec City noted that “great progress had been made on the issues that matter to Canadians.” In “just under five months,” the government had passed the Federal Accountability Act through the House of Commons; lowered the GST by one point; introduced legislation “to crack down on street-racing and gun and gang crime”; put in place the “Choice in Child Care” program, which would send parents $100 monthly cheques for each child under the age of six; extended the military mission in Afghanistan; and “ushered in a new era of open federalism, as evidenced by the recent agreement between the Government and Quebec that established a formal role for the province at UNESCO.”

  If anything, the list of achievements was modest compared to what Harper had actually accomplished to date. On February 21, twenty-nine days after the election, Harper had announced that Kevin Lynch, a former deputy minister at Finance and Industry, would become Clerk of the Privy Council, the head of the federal bureaucracy. Eight days later he confirmed Marshall Rothstein as the first Harper-appointed Supreme Court justice, following quick and genteel vetting of the nominee by a parliamentary committee. In March, Harper had visited Afghanistan, then flown to Cancún for meetings with George W. Bush and Mexican president Vicente Fox. He wore a sportsman’s vest over his blue shirt during the photo op, a tour of a Mayan pyramid—precisely the same ungainly get-up Paul Martin had worn during the previous year’s Three Amigos summit. The Globe and Mail assigned their columnist Leah McLaren to make fun of Harper on the next day’s front page. “Stephen darling, can we talk?” the column began. It was the best laugh the press gallery had had since two days after the election, when Harper walked his kids to school and bid nine-year-old Ben farewell with a brisk handshake. Harper took careful note of the mockery. His revenge on the press gallery smart alecks would be a dish served cold and in bulk.

  On April 21 Harper announced that Gwyn Morgan, the former EnCana CEO, would lead a Public Appointme
nts Commission to provide “more open, honest and accountable government for Canadians.” Three and a half weeks later he scrapped the whole idea of a Public Appointments Commission after the opposition majority backed an NDP motion to brand Morgan “unsuitable” for the job. You see, Morgan had donated to the Conservatives and helped raise funds for them. And he’d given a speech to the Fraser Institute. “The vast majority of violent, lawless immigrants come from countries where the culture is dominated by violence and lawlessness,” he’d said in that speech. “Jamaica has one of the world’s highest crime rates driven mainly by the violence between gangs competing for dominance in the Caribbean drug trade. Why do we expect different behaviour in Toronto, Ontario, than in Kingston, Jamaica?”

  In Calgary, insulting Gwyn Morgan is just not done. Two hours after the committee meeting ended, Harper struck a blow for the oilman’s wounded honour by announcing he was scrapping the appointments commission altogether. “Obviously I’m very disappointed with what I think is an irresponsible decision,” he said. “Here you have a top CEO in the country and a number of his colleagues who are willing to work for nothing to clean up the appointments process. For partisan reasons, the other parties, the opposition parties, don’t want to do that.”

  But the appointments commission wasn’t going away forever. “We won’t be able to clean up the process in this minority Parliament,” Harper said. “We’ll obviously need a majority government to do that in the future. That’s obviously what we’ll be taking to the people of Canada at the appropriate time.”

  Remember that last bit. Maybe circle that paragraph if you’re not reading a library copy. We’ll come back to it later—when there’s a majority government.

  But back to the cabinet meeting carved into the cliff face. It was artifice designed to portray something real, or something Harper hoped might be real. All by itself, the notion of a “cabinet meeting” in Quebec City was an alluring fiction. Already, Harper was rarely convening his entire cabinet as a deliberative body anywhere, and he would do so more rarely the longer he was in office. The Operations committee met on Mondays to put out fires. Priorities and Planning met on Tuesdays to try to plan stuff. The full cabinet did meet every day at lunch, no exceptions, no exemptions, to rehearse for Question Period. But as a decision-making body “the cabinet” was close to being a white lie.

  Bringing them all to the Citadel was for a good cause, though. In these early days Harper was excited about his chances in Quebec. He knew his crew was still strange and new in parts of the province that were more used to voting Liberal or Bloc. He had been lucky so far. He meant to keep pushing his luck.

  “The biggest story of the evening of January 23, anywhere in Canada, was the result for our party in the province of Quebec,” he had told the Montreal Board of Trade on April 20. “Counted out by almost every observer at the outset, we gained more than a quarter of the Quebec vote, winning the ridings of the outstanding Members of Parliament we have here today, and finishing second in most of the rest.”

  How did it happen? “No doubt, Quebecers were attracted by elements of our platform,” he said. “But I think it is more profound than that. I believe the population understood the real meaning of our slogan—that it is now more than just ‘time for a change.’ It is time for a new departure toward the future, time to turn the page on history.”

  The Conservatives’ English-language election slogan had been “Stand Up for Canada.” In French they had used “Changeons pour vrai”—“Let’s Make a Real Change.” The change, Harper told the Montreal business swells, was providing a real alternative to “a government that was directionless”—that would be the Liberals—“and an opposition that was useless”—the Bloc Québécois.

  Harper estimated that Quebecers, by voting Conservative in modest numbers, had shown they wanted to “turn the page on an era of political polarization.” The Liberals believed everything should be run out of Ottawa. The Bloc believed everything should be run out of Quebec City. “The truth is that Quebecers want neither the Liberal view of federalism nor the Bloc view of independence. They’ve had forty years to adopt one or the other and they aren’t going to.” As he spoke, the Bloc was just sixteen years old, but never mind. “Quebecers want a stronger Quebec in a better Canada,” he said. “This is a message our government has heard. We are going to turn the page. Not just by rejecting separation … but by changing the debate, changing the agenda and changing the federation.”

  All of this was self-serving. It was a political speech, after all. But there was truth to it too, and the speech serves as a useful guide to significant changes Harper would pursue throughout his time as prime minister. It helps explain his attempts to expand the Conservative Party in Quebec, attempts that would often be tentative and hobbled by the way the province made him feel defensive and uncertain. But they also explain his adopted Albertan attitude toward the respective roles of federal and provincial governments, and the steps he would take to change those roles substantially.

  First, Harper described his understanding of the “fiscal imbalance” and his plan to correct it. Young people today will have a hard time staying awake while their elders explain to them that in the early years of the twenty-first century every provincial government in Canada was worried about a mismatch between federal and provincial finances. The Chrétien Liberals had run a succession of surpluses. They had used them to increase transfers to the provinces—but only on condition that the provinces accept Ottawa-imposed mandates to run their social programs in ways that pleased Chrétien. Meanwhile most of the provinces were running deficits and didn’t know how to dig out of them. Why couldn’t the feds simply transfer money and responsibility to the provinces and butt out? “The money is in Ottawa,” a succession of provincial treasurers would say, “and the needs are in the provinces.”

  The Chrétien Liberals said that notion was poppycock. The Martin Liberals said roughly the same. Harper campaigned on a promise to eliminate the fiscal imbalance. At his Board of Trade speech he outlined his plan. First, he would define the fiscal imbalance in ways that were congenial to him. Here he was mightily helped by the fact that the fiscal imbalance was a figment of a few premiers’ imaginations. It described the temporary result of several governments’ choices, and choices can change. If any of the provinces simply raised their taxes they would have more money without Ottawa’s help, whereas if Ottawa cut its own taxes it would eventually run out of money to spread around.

  Harper liked the sound of that last bit, the bit about cutting taxes. “Probably the most important fiscal imbalance in this country is between all levels of government and the citizens and businesses of this country, who are all overtaxed,” he said. “Under the previous Government, billions upon billions of dollars were taken from Canadians through over-taxation—nothing more, nothing less.” Over a decade, “roughly 100 billions of dollars in ‘unexpected’ surpluses poured into Ottawa.” Some of it went to pay down debt, but much went to “off-budget, unplanned and poorly thought out spending, including literally billions in well-known examples of waste, mismanagement and scandal.”

  Why not leave the money in Canadians’ pockets? It could have helped parents buy schoolbooks for their kids. This, Harper said, was why he would cut taxes (“not just the GST, but personal taxes, business taxes, capital gains taxes”) in his first budget and as often after as he could.

  Harper knew full well that helping parents buy schoolbooks wasn’t quite what the premiers had in mind when they started beating the fiscal-imbalance drum. They wanted the federal government to inflate provincial coffers instead of its own, so that provincial governments could impress their electorates. But Harper would not be even a junior-league political strategist if he allowed others to define the problems he wanted to solve. The good news for the premiers was that, on top of tax cuts, he did indeed intend to shift the money balance between Ottawa and the provinces.

  “But here in Quebec, fiscal imbalance has attained a significant im
portance,” he said to the Board of Trade. “It is used by those who allege that federalism is detrimental to Quebec’s interests. This squabbling has kept the Bloc alive—artificially. But under the new approach to federalism that I’m proposing, Quebec will have its place. And the Bloc? Not so much.” Cool. How?

  Harper promised “specific proposals” for the fiscal imbalance within a year. “And let me tell you what those proposals will not include: they will not include increasing federal spending in areas of exclusive provincial jurisdiction.”

  This was significant. If Harper meant what he was saying—and in the years to come it would become clear that he did, mostly—he was signalling a major shift in federal priorities. Chrétien and Martin had increasingly made highly conditional health-care transfers the focus of their activity, Chrétien grudgingly, Martin with a sort of mad delight. Harper was planning to spend far more than they had on areas of exclusive federal jurisdiction, such as defence and criminal law. He had campaigned on a promise to follow Martin’s plan for increasing health-care transfers at a genuinely hectic clip through 2015. But provincial health ministers would soon be delighted to discover he had no intention of policing the forest of strings Martin had hoped to attach to those transfers. Ottawa was out of the business of “buying change,” a favoured Liberal-era euphemism for blackmailing provinces into compliance. It was now simply giving money to provinces as it was to parents, trusting in both cases that the recipients would find a good use for it all by themselves.

  Harper also talked about providing a seat for Quebec at the Canadian delegation in UNESCO. Two weeks after the Board of Trade speech he would fly to Quebec City to sign an agreement with Jean Charest setting out the terms of Quebec’s participation in UNESCO. The coverage of the UNESCO deal would be huge. The ceremony, in the ceremonial Salon Rouge of the National Assembly, would be front-page news. It’s the little things that count. And in the mind of Harper’s team, UNESCO was definitely a little thing.