The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  It was an odd claim. During the period in question, Cadman was weeks from the grave. He never suggested he wanted to run again. The two Conservative operatives who visited Cadman, it emerged, had been Tom Flanagan and Doug Finley. Flanagan’s book Harper’s Team included an account of his and Finley’s visit to Cadman’s office. Flanagan wrote that they were trying to influence Cadman’s vote. He nowhere suggested that he and Finley were trying to get Cadman to run as a Conservative in an election Cadman was inclined to avoid and would, in the end, never live to see.

  As I mentioned, Harper has never spoken to Flanagan since the publication of Flanagan’s book, which Harper sees as a breach of trust. Conservatives close to Harper often mention that the first draft of Flanagan’s book contained far more surprising revelations, which Flanagan removed before publication in an attempt to mollify Harper’s office. For whatever reason, he does not spell out what he and Finley offered Cadman. His account of the episode concludes: “That Doug and I made this last desperate try with Cadman shows how we were all caught up in the attempt to force an election.… It’s an excellent example of how the passions of politics lead to decisions that later make you scratch your head.”

  The Conservatives would have occasion to do more head-scratching on April 15, 2008, when the RCMP raided the Conservative Party headquarters in Ottawa at the request of William Corbett, the commissioner of elections. The Conservatives share an office tower with a lot of other tenants. One of them called a reporter when the cops showed up, and by the time the search was well under way, the hallway outside the office was filled with reporters and TV camera crews. The hallway crowd also included a Liberal Party staffer with a video camera.

  The subject that so fascinated the elections officials was the so-called in-and-out affair. After the 2006 election, local Conservative candidates across the country submitted receipts for advertising and sought reimbursement from Elections Canada. When the agency investigated, it found that the local campaigns hadn’t incurred the expense. The national Conservative campaigns had sent local candidates money; they had returned the money to the national campaign; and they had booked, as local, expenses that had in fact been incurred at the national level. The goal of the whole thing was to get around caps on total national campaign spending. In the end the party had managed to exceed the national advertising limit by more than $1 million with this shell game.

  Typically, the Conservatives had responded to the Elections Canada queries by stonewalling. Few candidates answered questions about their money management. But those who did described what looked like a nationwide effort to increase centralized campaign spending while decentralizing the evidence. Hence the RCMP raid to procure evidence the party would not part with willingly.

  The last springtime headache for Harper was practically carefree compared with the others. It began with the welcome news that somebody in the Conservative caucus was thought to be sexy.

  At the beginning of May the Hill Times, a tabloid newspaper for the parliamentary precinct, published its annual survey of hotness and not-ness in Ottawa. Peter MacKay, the minister of defence, had won the Sexiest Male MP for nine years running, but suddenly he was dethroned by Maxime Bernier, the foreign minister. It made sense. MacKay had his charms, but Bernier, the rookie MP from the Beauce, was a rangy, loping horndog with legs like a gazelle’s, a chest that could repel machine-gun fire and a gimlet eye for a well-turned ankle.

  It was not so much that Ottawa had been slow to warm to him as that a summer cabinet shuffle had forced a communal recalibration: arriving for his swearing-in, Bernier had tumbled out of a staff car outside Rideau Hall and held out his arm to a stunning new companion, a wild-haired brunette whose sundress revealed an even more impressive rack than his own. “Maxime Bernier’s date helped,” Hill Times editor Kate Malloy told reporters. “I think the pictures taken of last year’s swearing-in ceremony added a lot of glamour.”

  The world loves a lover, and Bernier would have had no further trouble if reporters had not started inquiring into rumours about his date’s background. On May 7, Lloyd Robertson told the CTV News audience the latest. “CTV News was handed documents showing that the minister’s former girlfriend had a connection with organized crime and she was not given an RCMP security check.”

  Bob Fife had the details. It turned out the magnificent woman in the sundress was named Julie Couillard. “One live-in boyfriend had ties to Hell’s Angels boss ‘Mom’ Boucher,” Fife said. “He was later murdered. She then married an enforcer for the Rockers, the farm team for Boucher’s gang.” The RCMP really hadn’t done a background check. Bernier, who by then had moved on from Couillard, apparently had no clue about her history. Single men who had seen the sundress pondered this part of the story and knew it to be credible.

  But the Bloc and the Liberals wouldn’t stop asking questions. On May 8 Harper paused as he left Question Period to say something to the TV cameras. This almost never happened. “I hear that one of my cabinet ministers has an ex-girlfriend,” he said in French. “It’s none of my business. It’s none of Mr. Duceppe’s business, none of Mr. Dion’s business. Mr. Duceppe and Mr. Dion are quite a group of gossipy old busybodies.” Then he repeated the remark, verbatim, in English. We had our clip.

  But Couillard had spent a fair amount of time with men whose business dealings were both complex and occasionally lawless, and the more the forensic reporting came out, the more the story dragged on in the headlines. Finally, on May 26, after nearly a month of this, Harper announced that he had accepted Bernier’s resignation. Bernier had left classified documents in Couillard’s home. “Let me be very clear,” Harper said, first in French and then in English. “This is not to do with the minister’s life or the life of a private citizen, 99 percent of which I think is completely off bounds.”

  The documents, it was soon revealed, had been left in Couillard’s home in April, before the stories about Couillard’s past had broken. Perhaps at some point she simply got tired of being in the headlines because she had selected a flattering dress, and decided to hang Bernier out to dry. In the end it mattered little. She was out of his life, he was out of cabinet, and Harper was left to contemplate how much more frequently damaging revelations came from his own team than from the hapless Liberals opposite.

  Dion could be an extraordinarily quick learner when he thought something was worth learning. For his first eight years in politics he had no reputation as an environmentalist, but after Martin turfed him from cabinet in 2003, he made himself a formidable expert on the subject in a matter of months. But Dion always believed politics was something odd that other men did. He never lowered himself to learning how to do it. He believed he had won the Liberal leadership because Liberals shared his vision on the environment. His own staff told him the only reason he had won was that in the third round of voting at the leadership convention, Gerard Kennedy had delivered a bloc of delegates intact.

  Through the middle of 2008, visitors to Dion’s office, part of an impressive suite reserved for the Official Opposition one flight of stairs up from the prime minister’s Hill office and the cabinet room, were astonished to discover the grand old room was barren. There was only a small photo of Mackenzie King over the mantel, a bust of Wilfrid Laurier in one corner, and Dion. He did not believe a Liberal should be in the opposition leader’s office. So for a year and a half he refused to move in.

  But at least he had his convictions. At least he knew what he wanted to do. Or so you’d think. But when he was not putting out political fires, or simply watching in bemusement while they burned, he spent much of his time in that empty, unloved office doing a one-eighty on his plan for fighting climate change.

  He did not do it out of fecklessness or inattention. Dion had no end of free advice from backseat drivers eager to tell him he would only improve his environmental plan if he replaced cap-and-trade with a proper carbon tax. Elizabeth May, the Green Party leader, said as much on the day he became leader. But he had been categorical, c
alling a flat levy on hydrocarbon burning “simply bad policy,” in part because “for Albertans, it’s a non-starter.”

  The free advice wouldn’t stop. Jeffrey Simpson, the most serious man in Canada, used a Globe column five weeks after Dion got the top job to say Dion wasn’t serious about the environment. “Okay, the first thing Mr. Dion should do is talk to the man he defeated, Michael Ignatieff, whose ideas for improving Canada’s climate-change record were far better than those Mr. Dion peddled, and is still peddling.”

  Simpson said Dion’s vanquished rival even knew how a carbon tax could be peddled to wary voters: by trading new revenues for forgone revenues from other tax sources. “Mr. Ignatieff properly called his measures ‘tax shifting,’ and described them as ‘the need to shift taxes toward emissions and pollution and away from labour, income and investment over the long term.’ ”

  Dion continued to get such counsel for a year. There’s a broad current of opinion, to which I subscribe, to the effect that it was correct counsel: if you want people to burn fewer hydrocarbons you should make burning hydrocarbons more expensive. It is radically simpler than other methods and will, as price signals always have, inspire feats of ingenuity. And a tax raised over here can always be matched against a tax lowered over there. The challenge lies in persuading voters that, in every case, the “over here” and “over there” will align so their wallet isn’t conscripted to cover the difference. But to say that is to wander into politics, and before Dion ever began to think about that, he was seduced by the policy design.

  In the fall of 2007, John Roy, a Nova Scotia businessman, held a weekend meeting in Merrickville, Ontario, near Ottawa. Scott Brison and John Godfrey, two Liberal MPs, attended, along with figures from business and the public-policy community. They thought hard about how to control carbon and decided, as folks often do, that price signals through a simple tax were the best mechanism. “John Godfrey came with good arguments,” Dion, who hadn’t attended, told Maclean’s reporter John Geddes, who first reported about the meeting. “Scott Brison has been very insistent, I must say.”

  Similar sessions elsewhere reached similar conclusions. Dion finally stopped resisting after a real-world example of a carbon tax appeared. British Columbia’s finance minister, Carole Taylor, introduced the province’s 2008 budget in February. It included a modest tax on fossil fuels. It would start low, then build up over four years to $30 per tonne of carbon emissions, and be offset by tax cuts elsewhere. “I think British Columbia is doing for climate change what Saskatchewan did for medicare,” Dion told reporters during a Vancouver visit.

  And so it came to pass that on June 19 just about the entire Liberal caucus crowded into one of the largest committee rooms in Parliament’s Centre Block to face a crowd of reporters. This was the unveiling of the Liberals’ “Green Shift,” a plan that was “good for the planet, and good for the wallet,” Dion said. Loosely modelled on the B.C. tax shift, Dion’s new plan called for a tax on fossil fuels that would rise, over four years, to $40 per tonne.

  If the tax was modest, the compensating income-tax and business-tax cuts were minuscule. That was partly because Dion wanted to use part of the carbon-tax windfall to pay for public transit and for a range of benefits for families and low-income earners. To Dion that meant his plan was revenue neutral. He even planned to ask the auditor general to verify that every dollar a Liberal government collected would be returned in tax cuts or new programs.

  Harper was unimpressed. He seized on Dion’s change from cap-and-trade to a carbon tax. “Mr. Dion went around the country for years claiming he would never impose a carbon tax,” the prime minister said in Huntsville, Ontario. “He couldn’t be believed then and he cannot be believed now.”

  Conservative research showed that voters gave Harper more credence on economic matters than Dion. That advantage conditioned the Conservative response to Dion’s new plan. Instead of playing defensive on the environment, the Conservatives would play offensive on economic management. The message was not that Dion was bad on the environment or that the Conservatives could be better. It was that he was lousy on the economy and just about anyone would be better. For a week before Dion spoke, the Conservatives had been running TV and radio ads decrying Dion’s “Permanent Tax on Everything.” (The Conservatives knew about almost every move Dion wanted to make well in advance because they read about it in Jane Taber’s column in the Globe and Mail. Dion’s caucus was divided, and chatty caucus members were prone to such leakage.) The TV ads, and a new website (willyoubetricked.ca) linked to the Conservative Party’s home page, featured a mascot, a cheerful black cartoon oil stain with human eyes. The ads and websites all used the same photo of Dion, head cocked quizzically, arms straight out in an epic shrug. Not a Leader.

  The ads were devastating because they resonated with suspicions about Dion that were everywhere in the country, including Ottawa offices occupied by Liberals. Both Rae and Ignatieff had privately urged Dion to force an election now, this June for a July vote. All he had to do was take his entire Liberal caucus into the Commons for a money vote and join the NDP and Bloc, who almost always voted against the government, in doing the same. Rae said the Couillard and in-and-out scandals had weakened Harper and it was time to strike. Ignatieff said the only way to force Canadians to concentrate on the choice they needed to make was to start an election campaign and turn the five-week writ period into a study session on policy alternatives. It would, in the end, turn out to be a stubborn Ignatieff theory about Canadian politics: that Liberals would do better during a campaign than they had before it. He would eventually get to test the theory himself.

  Dion resisted. He wanted to spend the summer pitching his Green Shift to voters. “You want to know why I’m happy with this?” he said to me that summer. “I’m happy because people are talking about it. This policy assumes cynicism won’t win. The cynicism that says, ‘Oh, people will never believe a politician who says if we raise one tax we’ll lower another. They’ll just hear the first half and then walk away.’ I think we in the politico-media class—people in your line of work and mine—are far more cynical than most people. A lot of people will vote because they believe in somebody.”

  At the beginning of August, Harper and his Conservative caucus met in Lévis, across the river from Quebec City, to plot strategy for the fall parliamentary session. They capped two days of meetings with a rally on a fairground in the small town of Saint-Agapit. Outside the hall where Harper spoke, folks were lining up for a chance to shake Maxime Bernier’s hand. He might as well indulge them and bask in his popularity; he would be sleeping in the doghouse for a few more years before Harper began to forgive his indiscretions.

  Inside the hall, Harper essentially called Dion a chicken. One of the prime minister’s less temperate remarks had been that a carbon tax would “screw everybody across the country.” Dion had called for an “adult” debate. Fair enough, Harper said now. “If Mr. Dion wants a real debate—not just among politicians, but a debate open to everybody—all he has to do is follow through on his latest threat to force an election.”

  It wasn’t the first time Ottawa had been on election alert, Harper said. And it was all quite tiresome by now. “Canadians deserve to have a Parliament that works. They want the government to keep governing, to address the issues that matter to them, to keep the country moving forward. So Mr. Dion must decide to either fish or cut bait.”

  Two weeks later, Dion took a seat in the National Press Theatre on Wellington Street, with a row of maple leaf flags behind him and four rows of reporters in front of him. He had, he revealed, just come back from summer vacation. “I cut bait. I caught fish. I won the competition. It tasted like victory. All this because I struck at the right time.”

  Ooh. A metaphor. Time for reporters’ questions. Was Harper correct to say Parliament had become dysfunctional?

  “The truth is when the Parliament has difficulties, it’s because the Conservatives are delaying committees,” Dion said.
r />   Was he thinking about forcing an election?

  “I’m considering different possibilities,” he said, “and one is to stop strategic voting when we disagree with the government.” In other words, Liberals would turn out in full force, instead of sending in a corporal’s guard for confidence votes. It would, at that point, suddenly no longer be up to the Liberals to decide whether they should force an election. It would be up to the other opposition parties to decide whether they had the stomach for one.

  “Timing is important in politics,” Dion said. “Like for fishing!”

  He said he wanted to make Canada “Richard Peregrino.” Or at least that’s the way I kept hearing it. Explanation is in order. In the spring I had brunched with a Liberal friend who was working on the Liberal platform. “What do you think of this for a campaign slogan?” she asked. “Richard Peregrino.”

  I stared blankly. “It’s a bit … opaque.”

  It took me three minutes to figure out that what she’d actually said was, “Richer, Fairer, Greener.” Which was what Dion wanted to make Canada. But the imaginary name stuck in my head, so now once again Dion seemed to be saying Canada should be more like this guy Richard Peregrino.

  One reporter asked whether, if Harper ever asked for an election, Michaëlle Jean could refuse to dissolve Parliament. There was, after all, a fixed-election-date law on the books. There was not supposed to be an election until October 2009. Surely the governor general could say no?

  Dion found it an uninteresting question. “In my opinion, the governor general does what the prime minister asks her.” Nobody in the room realized it was foreshadowing, and with regard not just to the election’s start but to its aftermath. At this point Harper had been prime minister for two years and seven months, longer than nine of his predecessors, including Paul Martin. Watching the Dion news conference on television, Harper saw an upstart pipsqueak daring to talk as though the choice of an election date should lie with him. Harper didn’t like that kind of talk. Not one bit.