The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  Others could have their revolutions. Harper had never had the luxury of overwhelming force, but he had no faith in its efficacy in any case. He had seen revolutions—most recently Mike Harris’s in Ontario—undone. He was an incrementalist to the bone, a Burkean conservative who had come of age in the Alberta of Lougheed and Klein, a diligent student of how Liberals win and make change. He would make his own change, not by revolution or even really by evolution, but by erosion.

  There were a lot of other details to Dion’s climate change plan—with Dion, there were always a lot of other details—but the modified cap-and-trade system was the gist of it. “It’s time for us to be a leader again,” Dion said.

  But being a leader was really hard. Not for “us,” but for him. As the spring of 2007 gave way to summer, Dion found it increasingly difficult to establish himself as the Liberals’ leader. A brief period of rosy polls turned out to be a sugar high from the party’s excellent Montreal convention. The Conservative ads that quoted Ignatieff heckling Dion at Thomson Hall had the desired effect, grinding a few points off Liberal support. Ignatieff’s presence in the ads produced a handy side effect, one that Conservative strategist Patrick Muttart had very much intended: it kept Dion loyalists wondering whether Ignatieff could be trusted, and most other Liberals wondering whether there was any point being a Dion loyalist when Ignatieff was handy.

  The summer of 2007 was not conducive to renewed Liberal solidarity. The leadership candidates had spent themselves into wild amounts of debt, so they all worked the summer barbecue circuit doing debt-retirement benefits. Which meant that most weeks, if Dion wasn’t in your hometown, Rae or Ignatieff or Gerard Kennedy might drop by. For the leader that steady annoyance was relieved in September when he was given something worse to worry about.

  The venue was Outremont, a mostly refined and leafy enclave north of downtown Montreal, an area the Liberals had held since time immemorial, except for a Conservative interlude from 1988 to 1993. The riding’s incumbent, broadcaster Jean Lapierre, quit politics to return to his first love, schmoozing, almost as soon as Dion became leader. Harper called by-elections for September 17 there and in two other Quebec ridings.

  Dion was deluged with free advice about who his candidate should be in Outremont. Liberal grandees told him he could bring the riding’s old standard-bearer, former justice minister Martin Cauchon, back. Marc Garneau, the astronaut, made it known he’d love the riding. But Dion had his own idea: he would find a bespectacled academic. Who didn’t love a bespectacled academic? Dion appointed Jocelyn Coulon, a foreign-policy analyst and former writer of columns for Le Devoir that even Le Devoir readers didn’t read, as the party’s candidate. When the ballots were counted, Coulon had lost by more than four thousand votes to Thomas Mulcair, a prickly veteran of Quebec provincial politics who became Montreal’s first NDP Member of Parliament.

  Denis Lebel, a former mayor of Roberval running as a Conservative, managed to take his riding from the Bloc Québécois. The Liberals couldn’t even scrape together 10 percent of the vote there or in Saint-Hyacinthe–Bagot, the other by-election riding, where the Bloc candidate won.

  Dion had to move quickly to stem nasty infighting caused by the defeats. So he waited a month. Then he asked Denis Coderre, a Montreal MP, to replace Marcel Proulx from Hull-Aylmer as his Quebec lieutenant. Coderre said he’d think about it, then called Proulx to discuss how the transition might go. Unfortunately Proulx didn’t know he was leaving. He quit in a huff. Coderre decided he wanted no part of this mess and refused the assignment. So did Dion’s second? … third? … well, anyway, next choice, a dapper Montrealer named Pablo Rodríguez. Dion wound up rummaging through the Senate to come up with Céline Hervieux-Payette, a Trudeau-era utility infielder who had run and lost in 1984, 1988 and 1993 before Jean Chrétien finally put her where the voters could not trouble her further. Now her job was to enforce discipline on Dion’s behalf. It worked roughly as well as if he had been enforcing discipline for her.

  What floored me, when I returned from a year abroad and started covering Dion close up again in early 2008, was that the people who worked for Dion saw his judgment—his political gut instinct, which in the end is all any politician ever has—as a problem to be managed, not an asset to be deployed to best advantage. “He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know,” one long-standing Dion supporter told me. “He won’t give a stump speech. He had a good speech a while ago about poverty. Caucus said to him, ‘All right, give that speech thirty times across the country.’ He wouldn’t do it. He said, ‘My views on poverty are known.’ ”

  In Question Period he would, by the middle of his second question every day, be shouting. It made sense; there was much about Harper’s government that would make any adversary angry. But soon the anger seemed rote, because there was not the faintest glimmer of a strategic sense in Dion’s manner of deploying it. Daily outrage in Question Period—and hourly outrage in news releases, always written in identical format and e-mailed to the tiny colony of Ottawa reporters—was not matched by any concerted effort to explain to Canadians why the Liberals thought Harper should outrage Canadians.

  The relatively robust party bank account Dion had inherited in 2006 was now gone, spent on routine party operations without healthy fundraising to replenish it. The Liberals raised one-third as much money in 2007 as the Conservatives did. Even if he had had money to spend, Dion was not sure what to spend it on. “I told him we should run an ad that says three things about Harper,” one of his helpers told me at the time. “[Harper] wanted to take us into Iraq; he wanted to participate in George W. Bush’s missile defence program; he wants to keep our soldiers in Afghanistan. This is when I thought we were going to be against extending the mission. That wouldn’t be a negative ad. It would be purely factual. And it would frame Harper for a year to come. Dion wouldn’t do it.”

  Despite the evident difficulty Dion had in making serious trouble for the Harper government, the Harper Conservatives proved well able to make trouble for themselves by themselves.

  On November 18, 2007, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited shut down the National Research Universal nuclear reactor at Chalk River, 180 kilometres northwest of Ottawa in the Laurentian Hills near the Ontario–Quebec border, for routine maintenance. Inspectors from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission declared that two of the reactor’s cooling pumps lacked the type of emergency power systems the site’s operating licence required. The emergency power systems were the sort of thing that would come in handy if the plant’s main power system ever went offline during, say, an earthquake. Keeping the pumps pumping would prevent a meltdown. An inability to prevent a meltdown would be a problem.

  AECL extended the reactor’s shutdown so they could install the emergency power systems. But this created its own problem: Chalk River produced most of the radioisotopes used for medical treatment around the world. The Harper government quickly introduced emergency legislation to start the reactor back up, with only one of the two recommended power systems in place. Natural Resource Minister Gary Lunn and Health Minister Tony Clement both proclaimed the reactor to be safe. The emergency legislation passed the Commons and Senate the way most of Harper’s bills passed—with very little trouble and with substantial opposition support, indeed in this case from every party. The bill became law on December 12, a scant three weeks after the crisis began. By then Lunn had announced the resignation of AECL chairman Michael Burns. The AECL would be turning over a new leaf. It was time, Tony Clement said, to give AECL better management after this lamentable episode.

  This, in turn, created its own problem, nested inside the others like a Russian doll. Burns hadn’t actually quit over Chalk River. He’d handed in his resignation letter on November 29, he promptly told a Globe and Mail reporter, and for “an entirely different set of reasons,” never defined. Appearing to blast him out the airlock as part of the Chalk River political cleanup was “a clumsy piece of political opportunism,” he said.

  But repurposing Burn
s’s resignation was nowhere near as clumsy as what Harper did next. On December 11, the day the emergency reopening bill roared through the Commons at high speed, Ignatieff led the Liberals in Question Period in place of Dion, who was travelling. The Liberals would support the bill. Indeed, by the end of the day their votes would help ensure its speedy passage. But Ignatieff still had questions. Why would the CNSC have no oversight role on this reactor once the plant was open again, he wanted to know. “Why does the government believe AECL, which was in flagrant violation of its licence, is competent to decide whether the reactor is safe to operate?”

  Something about this line of questioning got right up Harper’s nose. Perhaps it was the snippy tone from a party that was going to support the bill anyway. Perhaps it was simply the refreshing chance to take a poke at Ignatieff instead of Dion. “Mr. Speaker, the government has independent advice indicating there is no safety concern with the reactor,” the prime minister said. “On the contrary, what we do know is that the continuing actions of the Liberal-appointed Nuclear Safety Commission will jeopardize the health and safety and lives of tens of thousands of Canadians.”

  It was a stretch to suggest that “tens of thousands” of lives were at stake because of the Nuclear Safety Commission and its chair, Linda Keen. But what was more surprising was the way he was connecting her to the Liberals.

  On the next round of questions, he acknowledged that Keen’s actions might be “within [her] legislative authority.” But they were “not in the public interest. It is in the public interest to get this reactor back online and get these medical radioisotopes produced.” He called on the Liberals to “stop protecting their appointee and get on with getting these medical isotopes produced.”

  Again with the suggestion of a Liberal connection to the safety commission.

  Ignatieff chose to ignore that. “Mr. Speaker, since when is the Prime Minister of Canada an expert on nuclear safety?” The Liberal benches roared their approval of this actually not terribly clever line. Ignatieff had delivered it promptly, ad lib, and in comprehensible English. The sound Liberal MPs were making reflected relief at the change from Dion more than admiration of Ignatieff’s rapier wit.

  But Harper did not like seeing happy Liberals under any circumstance. He let his temper shape his response. “Since when does the Liberal Party have a right, from the grave through one of its previous appointees, to block the production of necessary medical products in the country?”

  The evidence for Harper’s assertion that Keen was a Liberal partisan of any stripe was shaky. Keen had been born in Alberta, had worked for Conservative Alberta governments, and had entered the public service while Brian Mulroney was prime minister. She had indeed joined the CNSC while Jean Chrétien was prime minister. But there would never be any evidence that she was carrying out Liberal orders by remote control. But then, that wasn’t really what Harper had in mind. What he had in mind was two things.

  First, Keen was plainly, on the face of things, one of those people—the Kristol–Brimelow New Class of mandarins—academics, lawyers and teachers and journalists and assorted smarty-pants—whose patron saint, Count Michael Ignatieff of Harvard Yard, was even now getting up in Harper’s grill. Well, if Roy McMurtry could turn out, retroactively, to have been a cog in the Liberal machine as soon as he endorsed gay marriage, then it only made sense that Linda Keen would be diagnosed as a Liberal predator drone as soon as she stuck her head up.

  Second, Keen had triggered another old instinct in Harper, a vintage bit of Brimelovian resource-sector atavism. The people who ran the nuclear plant wanted to make the nuclear plant go. And here was this dame saying it should stop. Just as Trudeau had said the West mustn’t rise. Just as a global cartel of scientists and socialists had said the very source of Canada’s wealth and power, burning hydrocarbons, must somehow be treated as a pestilence and a source of—yet more!—tax revenue and a pretext for—yet more!—regulatory burden. The very thought of this technocrat trying to tell him how to run a power plant made him rage.

  One more thing. Harper might simply have had the notion of partisan appointees carrying out partisan agendas on the brain, and if that was the case, it would be no great surprise. As Tim Naumetz reported later for Canwest News, cabinet records showed that eight days before he called Keen a Liberal zombie spy, Harper had appointed Ronald Barriault, a former Progressive Conservative candidate in the 2006 New Brunswick provincial election, to the Nuclear Safety Commission. A psychologist would say Harper was projecting.

  Name-calling in the House was not sufficient revenge against Keen. In January, Lunn wrote a letter to Keen saying he was thinking of firing her. The Ottawa Citizen got its hands on the letter and published its contents. After a week of controversy, late in the evening of January 15, the government dismissed Keen. The next morning, she and Lunn had been scheduled to testify about the whole mess before a parliamentary committee. Now her services would not be required.

  On the substance of things, Keen’s behaviour is open to debate. Much later she finally did testify to a parliamentary committee and said she had thought the chances of a Chalk River meltdown to be tiny, on the order of a thousand to one. But safety standards required that the risk be closer to a million to one. So to her, the risk was a thousand times greater than it needed to be. To Harper, opposing her was a safe bet, because the likelihood that nothing untoward would happen was 99.9 percent. It was never Keen’s job to make a bet. It was her job, as head of the safety council, to be obsessive about safety. She’d done what the job required. So Harper fired her.

  The AECL controversy would soon be nearly forgotten as a series of more titillating revelations superseded it. But in retrospect, and in the context of this chapter’s broader discussion of environmental policy, the Linda Keen firing begins to look like what poker players would call a “tell,” an unconscious reaction that betrays a player’s state of mind. From the day Dion became Liberal leader, Harper had sought to portray the Conservatives as cautious custodians of the nation’s environmental conscience. But it was clear that when Canada’s natural resources were at play, he was strongly inclined to view counsels of restraint, caution and prudence as troublemaking.

  The Keen firing said much about how Harper viewed his responsibilities in government. Two of the spring’s other cow-pies seemed also to offer insight into how he ran his party. Yet another featured a gorgeous woman with ties to biker gangs.

  At the end of February the Globe ran a story about a new book by Vancouver journalist Tom Zytaruk. The book was a tribute to Chuck Cadman, a former Canadian Alliance MP who lost the Conservative nomination in 2004, ran as an independent anyway and won his Surrey North riding. He died of skin cancer shortly after he voted to support Paul Martin’s Liberal government in the spring of 2005. His vote helped keep the Martin government from falling until months later, long after Cadman himself had died.

  That Cadman’s vote had been hotly vied for at the time was known. What Zytaruk’s book revealed was that two Conservative operatives had sought to secure his vote for their side. “The Tories actually walked in with a list of offers written down on a piece of paper. Included in their proposal was a $1-million life insurance policy—no small carrot for a man with advanced cancer,” Zytaruk wrote.

  Cadman’s widow, Dona, was by 2008 the designated Conservative candidate in Surrey North. In a phone interview with the Globe she corroborated Zytaruk’s account. “Chuck was really insulted,” she told the paper’s reporters. “He was quite mad about it, thinking they could bribe him with that.”

  After Cadman died, Zytaruk had learned that Harper was paying a visit to Cadman’s widow and interviewed the future prime minister in the driveway of Cadman’s home. His book contained excerpts from that interview. “Of the offer to Chuck, it was only to replace financial considerations he might lose due to an election, okay,” Harper explained. He said the two who had approached Cadman “were legitimately representing the party,” but that Harper had told them they’d b
e “wasting their time. I said Chuck had made up his mind he was going to vote with the Liberals.”

  It’s really illegal to offer an MP a financial inducement to change his vote. When the story came out, the Conservatives said Zytaruk had misquoted Harper. Zytaruk produced a recording of the interview. The Conservatives produced experts who said the tape had been altered. Months later, a court-ordered analysis would find that none of the sections of the tape that contained quotes from Harper had been edited. Meanwhile Harper served Dion a notice of intent to sue for libel for statements about the Cadman affair that had appeared on the Liberal Party website. The suit served its purpose, scaring the Liberals away from an attack on Harper’s personal credibility. For a while, in a rare display of cheek, the Liberals’ youth wing hired a car to drive around downtown Ottawa playing the tape of Zytaruk’s interview with Harper. That stopped right away after the lawsuit was filed.

  In their defence of the suit, the Liberals sought legal advice from Peter Russell, a University of Toronto law professor. “This use of legal action to silence the opposition is characteristic of authoritarian governments,” Russell wrote. “It is incompatible with democratic government.” Russell’s opinion was correct insofar as no prime minister had ever sued an opposition leader. But he neglected to mention a case where a cabinet minister had sued an opposition leader. It was a case that might have been expected to occur to him, since in 2005 Stéphane Dion had sued Gilles Duceppe, the Bloc Québécois leader, for publishing a pamphlet that tried to connect Dion to the Liberal sponsorship scandal.

  What nobody was ever able to explain was how the Conservative Party could even have procured life-insurance coverage for a man who was, as a matter of public knowledge, dying of cancer. It remains the one big stumper in this whole saga. Through the spring of 2008 Harper and other Conservatives argued that all that had ever been discussed was defraying the normal costs of Cadman’s campaign for re-election.