The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  Harper and Charest would still talk, but the special relationship was over. And soon, Mulroney’s own past would come back to haunt him in a way that would lead Harper to shun his predecessor and, crucially, to stop seeking his advice about a province Harper otherwise did not know well himself.

  As he often did, Harper gave this personal snub a partisan interpretation. Conservatives in Ottawa started to remind one another that most members of the Quebec Liberal Party voted Liberal federally as well. Maybe it was time to try a new partner.

  On December 9, 2007, Harper gave a speech to a business crowd in Rivière-du-Loup, northeast of Quebec City. It was Mario Dumont’s riding, and the young conservative opposition leader was present. Reaching out publicly to Charest’s most prominent political opponent was more than payback. It was Harper’s attempt to build a more genuinely conservative base for Conservatives in Quebec. But his streak of bad luck in that province hadn’t run out yet.

  FOUR

  THE GREEN SHIELD

  By Sunday afternoon, October 15, 2006, the candidates for leader of the Liberal Party had been nice to one another all summer and they had had just about enough of it. Party leadership contests have a dependable story arc. They begin with protestations of goodwill and end in appalling mudslinging. It’s the arithmetic product of human nature and the certainty that only one candidate can have the prize.

  On this particular sunny Sunday the candidates converged on Roy Thomson Hall for their last official debate before delegates would choose a new leader in December. The crowd that filled the King Street concert hall to watch them fairly glittered. Toronto Liberals are always different from Liberals elsewhere because more of them have gone straight from power to money. Many have followed a tour of duty in Bytown with a soft landing on Bay Street, at Queen’s Park, or, at the very worst, at Massey College, to pursue a genteel afterlife as a deal broker, visiting fellow or general-purpose layer-on of hands.

  Of the brochette of aspirant leaders on the Thomson Hall stage, Michael Ignatieff was the acknowledged front-runner, a fine-looking lug with a soft-focus reputation as a public intellectual with an international background in safari jackets and faculty lounges. But he had made things interesting by putting blood in the water. His own. In the summer a shooting war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon had killed hundreds, including dozens of civilians in an apartment building in Qana, a village in south Lebanon. Ignatieff’s first public comment on the slaughter was weirdly insouciant. “Qana was, frankly, inevitable,” he told the Toronto Star. “This is the kind of dirty war you’re in when you have to do this and I’m not losing sleep about that.” When many Liberals managed to take that poorly, he essayed some equally clumsy damage control. On October 8, on the wildly popular French-language Radio-Canada talk show Tout le monde en parle, he buffed his credentials—“I was a professor of human rights, and I am also a professor of the laws of war”—before delivering what he apparently intended as an expert opinion: “and what happened in Qana was a war crime. And I should have said that. That’s clear.”

  For his pains, Ignatieff lost the public support of a Jewish MP from Toronto, Susan Kadis, and he showed up at Roy Thomson Hall shaken and defensive. His rivals came with the sense that Liberals’ allegiances were up for grabs in a way they hadn’t been until now. They fell on one another like dogs.

  During an exchange on foreign policy, Ignatieff inexplicably decided this was a good week to accuse his old college roommate Bob Rae of flip-flopping. On Afghanistan, Ignatieff said, “I actually don’t know where you stand.”

  Rae drew himself up to his full five and a half feet. “For a guy that’s changed his mind three times in a week with respect to the Middle East …”

  With that the hostilities were engaged. The surprise scrapper of the afternoon was Stéphane Dion. The political scientist son of a political scientist, the owlish and intermittently comprehensible Dion had done yeoman work as Jean Chrétien’s national-unity enforcer before recycling himself as Paul Martin’s environment minister. Dion often presented as an A student on every subject in the world except English syntax and political strategy, but there was a clever design to his work that day. Appearing before the Liberal Party’s landed gentry, he sought to position himself as the only real Liberal in a field that included a Harvard Yard expat, a Habs goalie and the man whose 1990 Ontario election victory had ended David Peterson’s career as the province’s first Liberal premier since the Second World War.

  That would be Rae. It was okay “to make errors because you have heart, because you have a conscience,” the former New Democrat said in reference to the smoking crater in which he had left the province’s economy in 1995.

  Dion saw his chance. “When Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin decided to put the fiscal house in order, they had compassion, Bob. They had compassion.” Point made: Rae defended a failed NDP government. Dion defended Liberals.

  Then Ignatieff, Dion and Ken Dryden faced off on the environment. Ignatieff had all kinds of proposals, including one for a carbon tax that would discourage burning fossil fuels by making it more expensive. Dion had adapted to his role as the Martin government’s chief environmentalist with an ardour that was genuinely surprising. And while he had never put it this bluntly, he had long believed that if he was right about something, nobody else could be right about it too. So he was sure there was no need for what Ignatieff was proposing. Plus, today was “I’m a Real Liberal Day.” “You need to pay tribute to what the former government has done,” Dion told Ignatieff.

  “Stéphane, we didn’t get it done,” Ignatieff said, accurately: greenhouse gas emissions had soared, instead of declining, since Chrétien had made Canada the ninety-eighth country to ratify the Kyoto Accord at the end of 2002. “We didn’t get it done and we have to get it done and we have to understand—”

  “This is unfair,” Dion cut in. For a moment he appeared to have nothing more to say.

  Flummoxed, Ignatieff repeated his point. “We didn’t get it done!” he said, left fist hammering each word in the air.

  “You don’t know what you speak about,” Dion said. “You don’t know what you speak about. You think it’s easy to make priorities?” The crowd erupted in applause, although perhaps they were applauding different things. Ignatieff’s boldness? Dion’s intransigence? Were some clapping to make this seem like a happy room and to make it harder for either man to say any more? Applause by itself offers only punctuation, not text.

  The next morning in the Langevin Block in Ottawa, Patrick Muttart had a brief chat with Ian Brodie. Muttart had pulled Greg Weston’s Ottawa Sun column about the Roy Thomson Hall debate from the morning press clippings. Weston was one of the media voices Brodie’s PMO paid close attention to. He was no great admirer of the Harper government, but he had an unerring ability to spot what mattered in the daily avalanche of stuff that never would. Muttart had circled the seventh paragraph of this morning’s Weston column and showed it to Brodie: “But most of all, over the course of two hours, the Liberals provided ample television footage the Conservatives can use to smear the next Liberal leader—whoever it may be—in an election probably only months from now.”

  Muttart, a methodical man, had already set his staff to archiving video of the debate, time-logged according to speaker and target. Perhaps it would come in handy.

  The Conservatives watched the protracted Liberal leadership race with a kind of amazement. Harper had been elected with the weakest minority in history, thirty seats shy of a majority—rather, twenty-nine once the Liberal Peter Milliken returned as Speaker. Harper had a cabinet of rookies. Surely he was vulnerable. Surely, sensing this, the Liberals would replace Martin as quickly as possible. In the early days Brodie had worried that Martin would reconsider his retirement—or that the party would turn again to Jean Chrétien.

  Instead, the Liberals took nearly a year to find a replacement for Martin. So by the time Dion became Liberal leader on the fourth ballot on December 2, 2006, the Conservatives we
re ready for the new leader.

  Well, they would have been if the Liberals had picked Rae. The Conservatives had really hoped the Liberals would pick Rae.

  “I was surprised when we did the research at how much people knew, or remembered or thought they remembered—what a strong view people had of what Bob Rae was like as a premier,” one of Harper’s advisors said. “Even outside of Ontario.” Rae ran a rookie one-term NDP government during a deep recession with high unemployment. Near the end of his run, he managed to alienate the NDP voter base with tough public-sector cost-containing measures, so that by the time he was turfed in 1995 just about nobody in Ontario liked him. There were good reasons why Ontario had been a hard province for anybody to govern in the early 1990s, but the one who had the job was Rae and he was still paying the price in public perception.

  Dion, on the other hand, was a near unknown. After more than a decade in public life he had led few Canadians to form an opinion about him. “And we were worried,” said the Harper advisor. “For the people who knew him in the public—which was, again, a small chunk—they thought he was basically honest. ‘Corrupt Liberals’ was a critical piece of branding for us. So the fact that he was basically honest and not involved in any of the sponsorship stuff in any way was a huge threat to our brand against the Grits.”

  The few who knew anything about Dion were more likely to admire him. Francophone voters in Quebec, the Conservatives found, were willing to hear Dion make a case for himself. Ontarians were always worried, more than Canadians in other provinces, about Quebec’s place in or out of Confederation. “People [in Ontario] who were potential Liberal voters but could be Conservative voters under different circumstances, they thought, ‘Oh well, they’ve got a franco guy and he’s a serious player on the national unity file. We’ve gotta give him a chance to show his thing.’ ”

  Taken together, these two vague notions that a few voters had about Dion contained the seeds of trouble for the Conservatives. A Dion-led party would be harder to depict as crooked. And it would be seen as one that could defend Canada in a unity crisis. “It’s a very small piece of the population,” the Harper advisor continued. “But if those had grown, we were in trouble. And so we had to get ahead of that. We had to get ahead of that.”

  Somebody was going to tell Canadians who Stéphane Dion was, and the Harper crew decided it was going to be them. “We had to create the persona of Stéphane Dion,” the Harper advisor said. “Like, we were going to do it or they were going to do it.”

  The party Dion had inherited was strongly counselling him to do the defining, and fast. In an article in the November 2008 issue of Policy Options magazine, Steven MacKinnon, a former Liberal Party national director, wrote that a group of party brass had handed Dion a proposed transition plan almost immediately after he became leader. In the report, Liberal admen recommended that the new leader “undertake an immediate advertising campaign to ‘introduce’ himself or herself to Canadian voters, define his or her priorities and contrast his or her record with that of the governing Conservatives,” MacKinnon wrote. “This recommendation prophetically predicted that the new leader would face a ‘race to the frame’ against an anticipated Conservative onslaught of negative advertising.” The Liberals had the resources to make such a move: the Liberals ended 2006 “firmly in the black,” MacKinnon wrote, thanks largely to convention revenues.

  And the race to define Dion was truly a race, because the Conservatives were beginning from a standing start. They had had the elements of an anti-Rae campaign in place before the December convention. The ad scripts wrote themselves. Dion took more study, and the first ads against him did not run until January 28, 2007, nearly two months after he won his new job.

  The ads were simplicity itself: footage of the Ignatieff–Dion confrontation at Roy Thomson Hall, with Dion’s lines spelled out on the screen, partly because the Conservatives believed most listeners wouldn’t understand Dion’s accented English. “This is unfair,” the words on the screen said, and “Do you think it’s easy to make priorities?” A stern voice concluded: “Leaders set priorities. Leaders get things done. Stéphane Dion is not a leader.”

  Soon after the ads started running, the Canadian Press reported on a Decima poll about perceptions of the Conservative image campaign. The article suggested that the poll showed the ads were a dud, but it’s hard to read the numbers that way. A week after the ads began, 38 percent of respondents reported seeing them. That’s a huge number. Of course seeing isn’t always believing. Only 22 percent of respondents said the ads were fair, and only 26 percent said the ads would affect their vote. Perhaps some people who saw the ad decided they would never vote Conservative again. Probably most of the rest who said the ad would affect their vote were already going to vote Conservative and had simply had their choice confirmed. But the goal of any single campaign tactic is not to change each of the next hundred voters’ choices. It’s a good day at the office if you can shave off one or two in a hundred. Large clusters of ridings can swing from one side to another on margins of a few hundred votes out of tens of thousands.

  In the end, Dion would ignore the party panel’s advice. There would be no Liberal ads to define the new leader. The frame he sat in would remain the one designed and built for him by the Conservative Party skunkworks.

  But the “not-a-leader” ad has been talked to death elsewhere. At least as important in Harper’s response to Dion’s rise was a quiet ceremony at Rideau Hall on January 4, 2007, nearly a month before the ads hit the air.

  “The public’s been clear to us, they want [the environment] to be a priority,” Harper told reporters outside Rideau Hall after his first cabinet shuffle. “I think it should be a priority, a priority for my children and grandchildren as much as anyone else’s.”

  He would not actually have grandchildren for years, if ever. But today he had a new justice minister, Rob Nicholson. Vic Toews had moved from justice to president of the Treasury Board. Monte Solberg and Diane Finley had swapped portfolios, so she was now in charge of immigration and he took over human resources. And more significant than any of that, John Baird was his new environment minister.

  Harper shunted Rona Ambrose, the incumbent in the environment portfolio, to intergovernmental affairs to make room for Baird. As Mike Chong had already discovered, being intergovernmental affairs minister in Harper’s government was tantamount to not being a cabinet minister at all. For the next two years, teams of bloodhounds would have trouble finding any trace of Ambrose.

  In Harper’s eyes Ambrose, a poised and efficient Edmontonian not yet forty, had done nothing wrong. But understandably enough, she had become associated with the Conservatives’ environmental policy. That policy had essentially no fans. The Conservatives now faced an opponent who would lead with his environmental policy. Ambrose had become inconvenient.

  “Our initial plan was to focus on pollution as opposed to carbon emissions,” a senior Conservative who worked on the Harper government’s various early environmental policies said. “Focus on NOx and SOx”—nitrogen oxides and sulphur oxides—“and the actual pollutants that cause smog. Bring in a much more vigorous program on that, [a program] we felt people actually cared about more because it affected people directly.”

  What the Conservatives soon discovered was that reducing industrial pollutants brought few political rewards at considerable economic cost. Environmental groups had had to fight hard enough to get Chrétien, and then Martin, to take the Kyoto Accord’s targets for aggressive reductions in carbon emissions seriously. They were not impressed by a government that proposed to ignore carbon and go after airborne pollutants instead. “We would have been charging a lot of chemical companies, coal producers, and so on huge dollars to make these [pollutant] reductions,” the senior Conservative said. “And we would not have been getting any credit from environmental groups.”

  Unfortunately the Conservatives figured all of this out after Ambrose had made her big move. In October 2006 she introduced
her Clean Air Act, Bill C-30. Every opposition party announced it would vote against the bill. Ottawa went through one of its periodic frenzies of election speculation. Jack Layton persuaded Harper to send the bill to a special committee for review. There it was amended until it was unrecognizable, as the combined majority of opposition MPs wrote whatever they liked into the bill. Eventually it would become clear that Ambrose’s Clean Air Act, like her career as the government’s environmental champion, was over.

  Baird wasted no time arguing that his appointment indicated Harper was now going to take the environment seriously. In an interview on CBC Radio’s The House two days after the Rideau Hall ceremony, he called climate change “one of the biggest challenges facing the world.… It requires collective action. It requires Canada to do its part.”

  Many Canadian voters, and many Conservative supporters among them, were certain there was no long-term trend toward warmer temperatures. Others believed that if there was, human activity had nothing to do with it. Still others believed that even if the sum of human activity was warming the atmosphere, nothing a small population like Canada’s could do would change things. Around the cabinet table itself, a Harper advisor said, “there was a mix of views, some of them quite grey,” on the validity of climate science.

  But Baird would have none of that skepticism. “I think the overwhelming majority of the science, you know, says that this is a huge problem. We accept that and we want to take action.”

  Within days, Baird was in Vancouver meeting with the leadership of Canada’s environmentalist movement, including Greenpeace Canada, Pollution Probe, the Pembina Institute and the David Suzuki Foundation. The news release announcing the meeting was full of chirpy quotes from the minister. “Environmental groups are important to Canada’s New Government’s efforts to achieve shared environmental goals,” he said. “Furthermore, the millions of Canadians who are members of these organizations are instrumental in helping Canada develop environmental citizenship across the nation.”