The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  A month after his appointment, Baird was in Paris to receive the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This in itself was quite a turnabout. One of Ambrose’s first acts as environment minister had been to remove previous IPCC reports from Environment Canada’s website. Now Baird had penetrated the sanctum sanctorum of global-warming orthodoxy. “It is clear that the science is speaking to us,” he said in Paris. “It is saying that climate change is real, and that climate change is here. I get it.”

  Whether he got it was actually pretty much beside the point. The point was that the leader of the opposition wouldn’t stop talking about climate change and Baird and Harper were worried people were listening. In Hollywood, Al Gore, who had won the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election, was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary for his climate-change movie, An Inconvenient Truth. “This has become a bigger problem,” Baird said in his CBC Radio interview, “not just environmentally but also with the general public.”

  So until the extent of the Dion menace was clear, Harper would change his tune on global warming. The goal was not to persuade committed green voters that their next vote should be Conservative. It was to blunt the combined opposition parties’ attack.

  The environment, a senior staffer for one Conservative minister said, was a classic shield issue for the party. Harper and much of the government’s senior staff talked in terms of “sword” and “shield” issues. “Issues that we can win on, those are sword issues,” the staffer said. “There’s issues that, even if we’re talking about them, they’re largely defensive issues that if we’re not careful, you lose on them. Crime, jobs, the economy, managing government, all that stuff is sword issues. First nations, environment, health, health care, human resources, unemployment insurance, those are shield issues.” Normally, the rule with shield issues was simple: stay away. “You start talking about that shit, no good’s going to come from it.” But a shield must sometimes be raised to fend off an opponent’s attack. This, they felt, was one of those times.

  Baird was handy with a shield. In Question Period he was quick with a snippy rejoinder to any opposition question, and while it was almost impossible to get actual information from him during the daily forty-five-minute jousting sessions, it was equally hard for Liberals and New Democrats to rattle him. Most important, he had paid his dues. In 1984 he had fought in the battle to select a Progressive Conservative nominee for the federal election in Nepean-Carleton, supporting Kay Stanley, whose sister was Marjory LeBreton. Stanley lost the nomination but Baird had tasted enough of politics to know he loved it. In 1995 he ran provincially in Nepean. He won and became the youngest member of the Ontario legislature just as Mike Harris became premier. By 1999 he was in Harris’s cabinet. It’s probably fair to say that during his stint in provincial politics he became more conservative: although in 1985 he had supported Roy McMurtry, the most moderate of candidates to succeed Bill Davis as Ontario Conservative leader, in 2003 he supported Jim Flaherty, the most conservative of the candidates to replace Harris.

  Perhaps it’s significant that candidates Baird backed didn’t often win. A losing streak is handy in politics, because it cements conviction and toughens the hide. It may raise questions about your judgment, but at least it suggests that you’re not in politics for the sole purpose of hitching your wagon to the next sure thing. And it does wonders for your sense of gratitude when you finally discover you’ve managed to pick a winner. In 2006 an old acquaintance of Baird’s spotted him on his way into Hy’s and asked how he had managed to land such key roles in Harper’s government. Baird’s reply, as recounted by this acquaintance: “I just said yes to everything that I was ever asked to do.”

  When Harper ran for the leadership of the united Conservative Party in 2003 and the Harper campaign asked Baird to introduce Harper at a campaign event, Baird said, sure thing. The moment had more significance than it might seem to. Baird’s colleague in the Harris cabinet, Tony Clement, was running against Harper. His old boss, Mike Harris, supported Belinda Stronach. Baird was siding with Harper against his own Ontario network. When Harper asked him to serve as Ontario co-chair for the leadership campaign, he agreed to do that too. In 2006 he agreed to run for Parliament. By then, with John Tory leading the Ontario Conservatives nowhere in particular, Baird was looking for somewhere else to shine. Finally, when Dion made environment the most delicate portfolio in government, Baird didn’t hesitate to accept Harper’s latest request. And if the moment demanded that Baird become someone who “gets it” about “one of the biggest challenges facing the world” as he helped Canada “develop environmental citizenship across the nation,” well, who was he to say no?

  Only five years earlier, when Baird had been Ontario energy minister, he’d showed up at a Queen’s Park reception thrown by an anti-Kyoto lobby group, the Canadian Coalition for Responsible Environmental Solutions, which was organized by a former Mike Harris chief of staff now working for National Public Relations, Guy Giorno. A Greenpeace activist who snuck into the reception wrote in Toronto’s Now Magazine that “a particularly passionate” Baird “made his anti-Kyoto rallying cry.” But that was then. Times had changed.

  Leaders who demand loyalty, and followers who display it, are easy to mock because loyalty necessarily involves giving up a measure of freedom. There can be no grace in a politician who always hurries to endorse whatever the boss just said. But loyal followers are the only force-multiplier a politician has. They can go where he can’t, see what he doesn’t, spread his message, amplify his action. Harper had particularly good reasons to put loyalty ahead of other virtues in deploying his lieutenants.

  First, he had that lousy minority. Others might forget how weak his numeric position in the Commons was. He never would. His caucus would have enough trouble even if it stuck together.

  Second, the writings of Brimelow and Kristol had taught him to expect he would be surrounded by a New Class of bureaucrats, academics and pundits, casually and implacably opposed to anything he wanted to do. The first several months in Ottawa hadn’t done much to suggest to him that Brimelow and Kristol were wrong.

  Third, if by the late 2000s anyone should have learned the value of loyalty, it was a Canadian prime minister. There were plenty of examples of how badly things could go wrong if a leader couldn’t trust his people. Chrétien and Mulroney had been able to survive against all external adversaries. But each was brought down by a challenger from his own ranks. Mulroney brought Lucien Bouchard into politics in 1988 to serve as his Quebec lieutenant. Two years later, Bouchard blew up Mulroney’s Quebec caucus and wrecked his party’s electoral chances in Quebec, and if it was conviction more than ambition that made him do it, that was slim consolation to Mulroney or to Progressive Conservatives. Chrétien and Paul Martin made a formidable team for twelve years after Chrétien stomped Martin on the first ballot at the 1990 leadership convention. When Martin finally got tired of waiting for the top job to open up, he turned the Liberal Party against its leader. The infighting wound up costing the party more than a fresh face was worth. Harper concluded he must never let a Paul Martin rise too high within his own party.

  Finally, Harper knew the damage a disloyal lieutenant could do to a leader because for years that was the kind of lieutenant he’d been.

  Preston Manning’s memoir of his years as Reform Party leader, Think Big, is in part a chronicle of Stephen Harper’s troublemaking years. At almost every turn, if Harper felt that Manning was making a bad decision, the young renegade felt free to agitate against his leader, whether through rebellious action or indiscreet communication. When Manning took a long time deciding whether to support the Charlottetown constitutional amendments in 1992, Harper, who was sure Manning shouldn’t, chafed at the boss’s indecision. “When these internal disagreements were eventually leaked to the media—as such disagreements invariably are—they gave our opponents fresh ammunition,” Manning wrote. “ ‘Friendly fire’ invariably attracts ‘enemy
fire.’ ” When Manning hired Rick Anderson, a Liberal-connected Charlottetown supporter, as Reform’s national campaign director, Harper objected and was “prepared to air his objections in the media.”

  In 1994 two Globe columnists, “fed by a disgruntled caucus member,” wrote columns that alleged Manning was abusing his parliamentary expense account. During the Easter break from Parliament, “Stephen Harper and several other caucus members went public with their criticism,” Manning wrote. “Even though procedures existed for handling any complaints … Stephen went to the media.”

  There followed a special caucus meeting and several rounds of internal finger-pointing. Manning’s relations with his wife, Sandra, at whom “part of Stephen’s attack had been directed,” suffered. She felt he hadn’t done enough to defend her.

  “This whole issue—which really wasn’t about expenses at all—was the most painful experience our family had endured to date,” Manning wrote. “What made it particularly hard to endure was that it was initiated not by an external opponent, but by one of our own.” If being a Member of Parliament meant his family would be attacked, Manning wanted no part of it. “That night, I took off my House of Commons pin—given only to MPs—threw it into my briefcase, and never put it on again until the day I left Parliament.”

  So yeah, Harper liked Baird, because for all his pluck, the thing he resembled least was a young Stephen Harper.

  Within four months Baird had developed a new environmental policy that, at least rhetorically, reversed the order of priorities in Ambrose’s doomed attempt. In Toronto on April 26, 2007, he released “Turning the Corner: An Action Plan to Reduce Greenhouse Gases and Air Pollution.” At last the Conservatives were giving climate change top billing. Baird said his plan would “force industry to reduce greenhouse gases and air pollution.”

  Canada “needs to do a U-Turn,” Baird went on, “because we are going in the wrong direction. Since the Liberals promised to reduce greenhouse gases in 1997, they have only gone up.” He promised “tough industrial regulations” as a centrepiece of this effort. Finally, the rubber was going to meet the road. No messing around. Real business. Really. No fooling. Total serious face.

  It was all baloney. What I’m about to write will ruin the suspense, but in October 2011, Scott Vaughan, the federal commissioner of the environment and sustainable development, released a report called “Climate Change Plans Under the Kyoto Implementation Act.” Vaughan found that Baird’s 2007 release of “Turning the Corner” was the high-water mark of federal rhetorical ambition on greenhouse gases, and that Baird and his successors had proceeded methodically to ratchet down their ambition and action ever since.

  The centrepiece of “Turning the Corner” was those tough industrial regulations Baird mentioned, in the form of the proposed “Regulatory Framework for Industrial Greenhouse Gas Emissions.” It would have been so amazing, guys. It would have set short-, medium- and long-term targets for “emission intensity,” a measure of emission per unit of energy output. It would have provided compliance mechanisms that gave firms a range of options for meeting their targets. This unprecedented—really, magical—mix of tough targets and comfy enforcement was, Vaughan wrote, supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 164 million tonnes by 2012.

  In the end it would never be implemented. After an extended display of bravado, Environment Canada finally announced in 2010 that it would ignore its own promises regarding a Regulatory Framework “due to a decision to align Government of Canada actions to address climate change with those of the United States.” By then, it was clear that the Obama administration’s actions to address climate change would be sufficiently close to non-existent that Canada could safely align with them.

  In addition to the 164 million tonnes of reductions from the framework that was never implemented, Baird in 2007 was counting on a further 80 million tonnes of reductions from a $1.5-billion Clean Air and Climate Change Trust Fund, which, Vaughan wrote after the money vanished without a trace, was designed to provide “federal funding to provinces and territories for GHG emission reduction measures.” Again in 2010, Environment Canada finally admitted a pretty big design flaw in the Trust Fund: “Because the fund was established on an arm’s-length basis, provincial and territorial governments were not required to report to the federal government on how the resources were used,” Vaughan wrote. “Therefore the impact of the fund on GHG reductions could not be assessed.”

  So the Framework provided no framework and the Trust Fund displayed a culpable excess of trust. In the end, the Trust Fund functioned as the much larger GST cut had done: it succeeded in getting money out of Ottawa. What happened after it left was, to Harper’s mind, none of Ottawa’s business. It should have been called the Decentralized Federalism Trust Fund, but in 2007, making it sound green was important for the purposes of shield politics.

  The most generous possible measure of the Harper government’s ambition on climate change—the friendliest way to measure whether Harper “got it,” whether his government was providing “environmental citizenship” as a priority for Harper’s children and grandchildren as much as anyone else—was the total amount of its own greenhouse gas reduction targets. This is not even a measure of actual reductions; it’s just a record of how much the government said it wanted to reduce emissions. Vaughan found that between 2007 and 2010, the Harper government’s total expected greenhouse gas emission reductions had fallen from 282 million tonnes to 28 million tonnes, a reduction of 90 percent.

  Eight weeks after Vaughan released that report, Canada formally withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol.

  But now we are well ahead of ourselves. Through 2007, John Baird would tell you he was a full-bore environmental crusader. Dion, in contrast, was trying to figure out his own climate change policy.

  It was one of Dion’s particularities that if you suggested something to him that was not already on his mind, he would disagree immediately and forcefully. Most times he would also say you were reckless to propose whatever you had just suggested. It was entirely possible that, after retreating to his corner to think for a bit, he would change his mind. But first he had to persuade himself that the idea he had rejected was not only an excellent idea, but that it was his own.

  The Liberal leader spent the first half of 2007 going through this odd dance with regard to the most important issue he could imagine, global warming. There was no record of climate change skepticism in Dion’s past, no indication that he had surrounded himself with global warming deniers, no doubt that he really did believe this was a challenge that faced this generation and engaged generations to come. But there remained the question of what to do about it.

  During the leadership campaign, Ignatieff had proposed a carbon tax. As policy tools go, this one is simplicity itself: for every tonne of hydrocarbon-based fuel you burn, you pay a set supplementary cost. Businesses doing what businesses do, trying to contain costs, will suddenly become way more interested in burning less carbon and figure out ways to accomplish that goal. Dion didn’t like the idea, largely because it came from Ignatieff. He preferred a cap-and-trade system. It’s a little trickier. Everybody in a given sector is given a limit to the quantity of hydrocarbons they can burn. A business that exceeds its limit can buy permission to keep going by purchasing carbon credits from another firm that hasn’t yet hit its cap. This produces a commodities market in which the commodity being traded is the right to burn fuel. Burning fuel is free, or at least devoid of supplementary cost, until the moment you hit your cap. Then it becomes expensive. As an extra incentive, if you ensure you’ll never hit your cap, you can sell your unused permissions to some more profligate neighbour.

  Dion, as a former environment minister who had named his family dog Kyoto and built his leadership campaign on environmental awareness to such an extent that his supporters at the convention wore green scarves, had thought this all through and decided what the best policy would be, and that was that. Just kidding. No, what he really did was
spend the first half of 2007 sending out mixed messages.

  On March 1, as he left the Commons after Question Period, Dion was asked whether he was considering a carbon tax. “We have a set of possibilities, and it’s a possibility,” he said. The next day his office sent out a news release. It promised that whatever Dion proposed would be “bold,” but added, “What we are considering is not a carbon tax.”

  On March 16 he proposed a modified cap-and-trade system. Instead of allowing open-market trading of emissions credits, a Liberal government would set fines for each tonne of emissions over a business’s cap. The money would go into an account to finance green projects. What was the cap? Nothing gentle here: the cap would be 6 percent below the 1990 emissions level for the largest industrial sectors. When would the system be implemented? January 1, 2008: in less than a year.

  The date contained a built-in assumption: that an election was imminent. It had been a constant assumption on Parliament Hill at every moment from 2006 forward. The new wrinkle in this spring of 2007 was that many thought Harper would do something to provoke the election himself. A “poison pill,” maybe, something crazy in the budget that the opposition parties couldn’t stomach. Something.

  As is so often the case when everyone in Ottawa knows something, it wasn’t true. Three years of minority government had given the capital a case of chronic jitters that had blown out the Hill’s political radar, to the extent it has ever had one. Harper’s interest lay not in hurrying an election but in delaying one. The Conservatives’ research showed that voters they considered gettable in 2006 but who hadn’t voted for them had resisted, in many cases, because they worried about a hidden Conservative agenda. Those worries were receding at a glacial pace as Harper showed his governing style. As a handy bonus, while he was calming swing voters, he was getting to make the dozens of decisions a day that only a prime minister can make.