The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  FIVE

  EXCELLENT BUYING OPPORTUNITY

  A few days after Dion held his news conference to discuss the burden of the decision he thought he had to make, a video production crew disembarked at the prime minister’s Harrington Lake country residence, a short drive from Ottawa in Quebec’s Gatineau Hills. Over the years different prime ministers have used Harrington Lake for different things. Margaret Trudeau grew a vegetable garden there. Kim Campbell lived there for the entire summer she was prime minister; she never did get to see the inside of 24 Sussex Drive as anything but a guest. Jean Chrétien used it to get the capital out of his head. He almost never invited PMO staffers or cabinet colleagues to visit. A 2000 campaign ad that showed Chrétien strolling with Paul Martin through the woods near the residence, waving at schoolchildren, could not have been more marvellously fictitious if the two rivals had been depicted rehearsing a piano duet or shucking oysters.

  Stephen and Laureen Harper used Harrington Lake frequently, especially in the summer. They often invited friends, a list mostly curated by Laureen that included staffers, cabinet colleagues and people most denizens of Parliament Hill would never have recognized. But on this late August day, the guest list was short and the agenda was strictly business. Narrowly defined, the day’s goal was to get usable footage of Harper for some television ads. More broadly, Harper’s ambition was to yank Stéphane Dion’s shorts so far up his backside the Liberal leader would never walk the same way again.

  At some point over the summer, between the June launch of Dion’s Green Shift and the August news conference where Dion hinted clumsily at being ready to force an election, Harper had decided an election was coming. He was sure Dion would vote no confidence at an early opportunity to silence Liberal naysayers by demonstrating strength. The Bloc Québécois would vote the same way, because in Quebec, Dion was not strong. The NDP would complete the opposition’s common front because outside Quebec, Dion was not strong. So, despite very different motives, their actions would finally align.

  Despite its numerical weakness, Harper’s was already the longest-lasting minority government in Canada’s history. Now at last it would fall. In June his plan had been to hold on for as long as possible. Over the summer he decided he might as well move before his opponents could.

  The fish-or-cut-bait speech to the Conservative caucus at Saint-Agapit was for show. It was not up to Dion to decide whether there would be fishing or bait-cutting. Harper had already decided there would be an election. The decision came as news to his staff, but they adjusted. The Conservatives had to scramble to pull together a platform and ads, but at least they scrambled. Dion thought he had the advantage. He spent the last month of summer savouring it instead of using it. When the campaign finally began, the Conservatives and the NDP would be more prepared than he was.

  There remained the small matter of the election’s seeming—but only seeming!—illegality. Harper’s government had passed legislation providing for fixed federal election dates. The bill amended the Canada Elections Act to add this language: “Each general election must be held on the third Monday of October in the fourth calendar year following polling day for the last general election, with the first general election after this section comes into force being held on Monday, October 19, 2009.”

  Crystal clear. But this new paragraph came after another new paragraph that was nearly as clear and said, in effect, that the bit about fixed election dates was almost meaningless: “Nothing in this section affects the powers of the Governor General, including the power to dissolve Parliament at the Governor General’s discretion.”

  Now here’s the thing about the governor general’s discretion. She had none. Or rather, ever since the 8th Earl of Elgin had signed the Rebellion Losses Bill in 1849—and with the exception of the 1926 King–Byng crisis, an exception only romantics mistake for the rule—generations of governors general had so construed their discretion as to make it synonymous with the prime minister’s. So, taken as a whole, the fixed-election-date law amounted to saying there would be an election in 2009 unless Harper decided he would rather not wait. With this prime minister it was always a good idea to read the fine print. Especially when the fine print and the headlines were the same size and a paragraph apart.

  Still, many of Harper’s advisors were worried about a voter backlash. Harper had, after all, advertised fixed election dates, and the accountability legislation as a whole, as a change from business as usual. Now he would be displaying electoral opportunism, the purest expression of business as usual. At the very least, his handlers worried about days or weeks of process questions from the sticklers in the press corps distracting from Harper’s campaign messaging.

  In the end they needn’t have worried. The more sanguine voices around the table pointed out that very few voters even knew a fixed-election law had been passed. Canadians had never voted in a federal election whose date had been known months or years in advance. So they would miss the next—first—fixed election about as much as they would miss anything else they had never had long enough to miss, such as a third arm or a new internal organ that spontaneously generated cheeseburgers. As so often happens in Canadian politics, the calmer voices would turn out to be right.

  And so Harper settled into a wingback chair in a Harrington Lake study while a small knot of senior staffers, including Patrick Muttart and the Conservatives’ Toronto-based admaker, Perry Miele, read to him from a long list of questions. They had no script as such. Harper might briefly discuss the gist of a possible answer with his helpers before launching into a full-blown monologue. If he stumbled he would start again. If they liked an answer he would repeat it a few more times in hopes of a better performance. But mostly he was riffing on themes.

  The Conservative leader was wearing a navy sweater vest over a lighter-blue dress shirt. Nobody in the video crew wanted him in a suit. They wanted something softer. The sweater vest was what was in his dresser. “He doesn’t have an unlimited wardrobe,” said someone who was there.

  Harper’s answers to the many questions were much like his getup: improvised, but with a goal. Later the campaign team would pore over hours’ worth of digital video recordings to find, and then display for voters, evidence of a gentler Stephen Harper.

  The ads, when they ran, were tiny perfect imitations of real moments. There were three of them. Each opened with a shot of a maple leaf flag flapping, then cut to Harper in his sweater vest conversing with his off-camera visitors. In one ad he talked about his children. “You know, the time is precious. But being a father is the best experience of my life.” In another he marvelled at the importance of immigrants’ contribution to Canada. “We can build this country together.”

  The third ad offered Harper’s gratitude to veterans. “What you always remember when you meet a Canadian veteran is that everything we have in this country was earned. And those men and women went out and put their lives on the line for this country. Never forget what they contributed. But more important, never forget how precious it is—how precious what we have is.”

  It would be easy to miss the significance of the most telling detail in the ads if you didn’t know to look for it. In each of the three versions, after Harper finished delivering his folksy homily, the soundtrack’s string orchestra swelled and a closing message appeared over a blue background: “Canada: We’re Better Off With Stephen Harper.” This was new. Until 2008, Harper had never been popular enough for it to be worth making his persona the centrepiece of his party’s campaign pitch.

  In 2004 voters barely had a clue who he was. So he appeared in those hilariously contrived ads in which he complained about the Liberals, offered some kind of solution, and then paused and added, slowly, “My name is Stephen Harper.” Viewers came away wondering about his speaking style but pretty sure that, whoever this guy was, his name must be Stephen Harper.

  When the next campaign began, at the end of 2005, Harper had been opposition leader through two years of constant electoral brink
smanship. It hadn’t helped him much. The Conservatives’ research showed that Harper, personally, was not a popular guy. Voters were intrigued by the notion of getting rid of the Liberals, but telling them they would be handing power to Harper didn’t generate much excitement. So even in ads in which Harper appeared, the party took care not to tell you who he was.

  This practice reached its surreal pinnacle in an ad that featured various people talking about the leader without ever naming him. An unidentified blonde-haired lady whom experts would have identified as Laureen Harper sat next to … some fellow … on a sofa. “He works long hours,” she said. “He works very hard.” A voice-over described the same … fellow … as “a leader who looks more like one of them” and as “a leader who will not just bring the country together but finally take it forward.” Great. And what was his name? The ad was not helpful on this score. “Stand up for Canada,” the voice-over said.

  But that was 2006. Two and a half years in power had made Harper the party’s best asset. The new ads reflected their voter research. The election was his decision. The vote would be a referendum on his record and the alternative. And the mistakes, when they came, would be his own.

  As the Harrington Lake ads began going to air in the last week of August, Harper’s new communications director, Kory Teneycke, started taking reporters out to lunch. My turn came on Thursday, August 21, at a fabulously cheap and plentiful Chinese buffet on Albert Street. Teneycke ladled himself some wonton soup, swore me to secrecy, then announced that Harper had concluded, at some point during the summer, that getting anything done in the current Parliament was like “swimming in molasses.” He would meet the opposition leaders soon. Very soon. “We’re not talking weeks here.” Unless one of Harper’s opponents promised to refrain from voting no confidence, Harper would ask the governor general to dissolve Parliament and call an election.

  A day later, Teneycke decided he’d be warning reporters about a fall election until Christmas if he did it one lunch date at a time. So he summoned representatives from all the Ottawa news bureaus to a briefing room inside the Langevin Block. “An election would clear the air and give a government—ours or a Liberal government—some open water to manoeuvre in,” he said, still off the record. Why bring all these reporters in to tell them the plan? “If you have to guess, you may guess wrong,” Teneycke said. “So I’m telling you so you’ll guess right.”

  There followed several days of kabuki theatre. One by one, the opposition leaders visited 24 Sussex while reporters and camera crews waited outside. Each came out warning that Harper was desperate to have an election and announcing that they wondered why he was in such a rush.

  So nobody was really surprised when Harper’s motorcade took the two-minute drive from his house to Rideau Hall on the morning of September 7. He disappeared inside Michaëlle Jean’s residence for half an hour and emerged for a short stroll from the front door to a podium in the Canadian Heritage Garden.

  He was wearing a standard-issue two-piece suit and tie. But his remarks, oddly jovial and grandfatherly, made it clear he was still in a mental sweater vest. “Bon matin, good morning,” Harper said. He made a little show of pausing to peer at the journalists clustered before him. “I guess I never realized until now how many of you there really are.” He smiled bashfully. Just a regular fellow.

  “Between now and October 14, Canadians will choose a government to look out for their interests at a time of global economic trouble,” he said, reading his prepared text. “They will choose between a clear direction or uncertainty, between common sense or risky experiments, between steadiness or recklessness.”

  Reporters, always on the lookout for surprises and missteps, pay little attention to such bland statements. But here was the entire argument of the Harper campaign in two sentences. Twenty months earlier, a Conservative vote had represented a risky experiment, even for some who had cast such a vote—certainly for many who had considered doing so but decided against it. Now Harper was hoping he could be seen as the reassuring alternative to risk.

  “Canadians know that I’m not one for big talk or grand slogans,” Harper said. “I believe we show who we are, and how much we care, by what we do.” What he had done was get government out of your wallet. “Today, Tax Freedom Day—the day you stop working for the government and start working for yourself—arrives eleven days earlier than it did in 2005.” Against that kind of simple fiscal restraint stood “an Opposition whose increasingly strident criticism attempts to mask unclear and risky agendas.”

  That much was, by now, familiar rhetoric from Harper. What followed really wasn’t. Harper announced a desire to conclude on a personal note. Then he recited some homey-sounding thoughts Muttart had written for him. “Over the past two and a half years I’ve had a tremendous opportunity,” he said. “An opportunity for which I will be forever grateful. The opportunity to serve as the prime minister of the best country in the world.” With that he closed the clipboard that held the text of his speech, took a sip of water and waited for questions.

  One of the first was about the Harrington Lake sweater-vest ads. Harper explained, accurately, that his staff was behind this sudden confessional burst. “They feel that voters don’t yet know me the way they”—his staff—“know me, the way my caucus knows me. And we should probably go out of our way to highlight the non-podium parts of the job.

  “You know, people say it must be tough to balance your family life with being prime minister. In fact, if I didn’t have this family life, I don’t think I could stay balanced as prime minister. As you all know who have been dads, once you become a dad, that’s pretty central to your character and your life.”

  All of this cozy mise en scène—the sweater-vest ads, the Prime Minister Dad shtick—served a strategic purpose. Muttart had long felt that while mothers in large middle-class families should represent a pool of Conservative support, other women were harder to reach. “When we did the demographic stuff, we’d always sort of written off non-married women who had less than two kids in any situation,” one senior strategist recalled.

  But the summer of 2008 had been a time of rising economic uncertainty, and the Conservatives began to see opportunity among voters most preoccupied by economic concerns. During the campaign’s first week, one independent pollster was in the field finding results that matched the Conservatives’ research. Environics found the Conservatives leading the Liberals 38 percent to 28 percent, with the NDP at 19 percent. Among men the Conservatives led 41 percent to 28 percent. But the lead among women was almost as strong: 35 percent to 28 percent. This latest poll capped a six-month trend during which Environics found ever-increasing Conservative advantage among women. “I find this an extremely interesting development,” Environics’ Donna Dasko told reporters from Maclean’s after she released the poll. “I can’t quite figure out why it is. There certainly has been a traditional advantage for the Liberals in women’s votes.”

  If Environics’ numbers were accurate and held, they would mean trouble for Dion. “If the Liberals don’t have an advantage among women, they do not win,” Liberal Party pollster Michael Marzolini told Maclean’s. “Especially women over fifty-five—that is over 25 percent of the entire electorate.”

  But as the campaign began, Dion pretty much had his pick of troubles to choose from. As Harper was leaving the Rideau Hall grounds, Dion walked into the House of Commons foyer with his wife, Janine Krieber. “The next thirty-seven days will be some of the most crucial in our history,” the Liberal leader said. “There has never been a federal election that has more clearly provided Canadians with such a stark choice between two visions for our country.” Harper, he said, had “formed the most conservative government in history.”

  But beyond drawing stark contrasts with his main opponent, Dion was plainly relieved that the campaign had begun. “I am excited about this election that will give me the opportunity to have a direct dialogue with you,” he said. “And for the first time, you will be able to lea
rn more about who I am and what I stand for.”

  It was amazing that such a belated introduction was even necessary. Dion had been an MP for more than a dozen years, leader of the opposition for nearly two. Now he hoped he could accomplish in five weeks what he had so far never managed: persuade Canadians to share his opinion of himself. And some of the necessary repair work was right at home, among his fellow francophone Quebecers, among whom he had not exactly caught fire.

  “My friends, I am as proud a Quebecer as Gilles Duceppe,” he said in French. “The role that we can play—that we should play—in this Canada that we have built is more important than ever before.… Nothing is too big, nothing is too ambitious for the hearts of Quebecers.” He closed with a similarly sweeping appeal to the broader Canadian population. “My fellow Canadians, we Liberals will speak to your great minds and your big hearts about our vision,” he said. What lay ahead “may well be the most crucial election campaign in our history.”

  With that, Dion walked out of the Centre Block to a waiting campaign bus. There was no Liberal campaign airplane. Dion would not have one for three more days. His staff had not managed to book one in time. The mismatch between the Liberal leader’s rhetoric and his means was jarring. Dion hoped to make history, but Canadians didn’t know him, Quebecers didn’t trust him, and airlines wouldn’t rent to him. Harper was seeking to broaden his coalition. Dion was trying to hang on to his.

  Harper’s first campaign stop, hours after the writ drop at Rideau Hall, was in Quebec City. “It’s true that not everyone in Quebec agrees with everything I’ve done,” he told a crowd at the Hilton. “But you know, not everyone in Alberta agrees with everything I’ve done either.” And yet, he said in another confessional moment, he tried to earn Quebecers’ support by “speaking your language.” His French might not be perfect, “but I hope that every day it’s getting better.… Because a prime minister must be able to transmit your pride to the world.” The party already had ads running in Quebec, feel-good images of Harper and his Quebec cabinet ministers chatting around a sunlit table. “Le Québec prend des forces,” the ads’ Quebec-only slogan said. Quebec is gathering strength.