The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  “Let us pause for a moment to truly reflect and appreciate how far we have come in such a short time,” Harper told the assembled delegates. “Five years ago, the conservative movement in this country was divided, defeated and demoralized. The government of the day ridiculed us, the pundits discounted us, the public said, ‘Don’t bother talking to us until you’ve got your act together.’ Worse, a political juggernaut was poised to take over the Prime Minister’s Office.”

  There was a knowing laugh from the crowd. Once they had feared Paul Martin. But Harper and Peter MacKay had merged their parties and the Conservatives had fought one election to cut into the Liberals, a second to take them down and a third to consolidate victory. Referring to the election just finished, Harper said: “We made important inroads with women voters and new Canadians. We welcomed our first Conservative MP from the Northern Territories in two decades. We swept large parts of Ontario and made gains in the Greater Toronto area. We broke the Liberals’ twenty-year stranglehold on Prince Edward Island, we picked up seats in British Columbia, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and right here in Winnipeg. The Conservative Party is once again Canada’s Party.”

  Of course that last was an applause line, but now Harper would transform it into the theme of his speech. Not long ago Conservatives’ critique of the Liberals had seemed, even to some Conservatives, interchangeable with contempt for Canada. Harper had gone into the 2006 election facing questions about his love for his country. The rest of his speech would show how far he and his party had come from that untenable position.

  “It is not by chance that Canadians of diverse backgrounds, communities and experiences have renewed their faith in our party at this critical time in our history,” he said, “because the Conservative Party has always been Canada’s Party. We are the party that has been there for Canada since the beginning. We are the party whose legacy movements have built and renewed our country. It was Conservatives who founded the Canadian federation in 1867, creating one of the most durable political arrangements anywhere in the world. Conservatives bound this country together with the Canadian Pacific Railway. Under Conservative prime ministers, women and Aboriginal people got the right to vote for the first time. This is the party under whose banner we elected the first Chinese, Black, Japanese, Muslim, Hindu-Canadian members of Parliament. We are the party with the first female cabinet minister, the first Aboriginal senator. We are the party that not only proposed electing a Senate—something all the other parties oppose—we have actually named elected senators. We are the party of Canada’s first Bill of Rights, the party that first gave Aboriginal people living on reserves the same rights as other Canadians. This is our history. This is the truth, past and present. No other party has a better record for bringing Canadians together and of standing up for their country’s interest—because the Conservative Party is Canada’s Party.”

  There were still, there would always be, millions of Canadians who would find Harper’s claim silly or obscene. Millions more might even vote Conservative but would reject, or never pause to consider, its new-found claim to synonymy with the national soul. But one narrow requirement for success in politics has always been the ability to say an audacious thing with a straight face. And one of the goals Harper had set for this party was that it would, someday, stop playing defensive on matters of the heart. Introducing him that night, Laureen Harper had told the crowd that her husband had always been willing to interrupt any meeting to take a phone call from their son, Ben, or daughter, Rachel. She said he had seen the movie High School Musical four times. She was methodically patting an undertaker’s shovel on the caricature of Stephen Harper as a cold or distant father. Now he was staging his own funeral for the notion that the Conservative Party was an unwelcome or unwilling guest at the table of proud Canadians.

  “We will succeed because Conservative values are Canadian values,” he said. “Love of country. Commitment to community. Devotion to family. Respect for peace, order and the law. Reward for risk and hard work. These are the values on which our country was built and, in this way, the Conservative story is Canada’s story. It is a story about people from all walks of life joining together to work toward common goals. A story about harnessing the ingenuity and talents of a diverse population to overcome any challenge that may come our way. It’s about building together what we could never have built alone.”

  This part of his speech, about “common goals” and “building together,” could have been delivered by Tommy Douglas. Suddenly Conservative values were collectivist values too. No matter. He was on a roll. “We acknowledge our enormous debt to those who came before us. The Aboriginals who created Canada’s first communities in a beautiful but harsh land. British settlers who brought with them political traditions and institutions we have moulded to make our own. And all the others from every corner of the earth who have made the difficult decision to leave their families behind and to build a better life. And especially all those here who have made the great sacrifice, our veterans, to stand up for our values.

  “Canada is their legacy to us, and it is our duty to them to uphold the legacy of our forebears, to secure the future of our descendants. We will do so. Because the Conservative Party is Canada’s Party.”

  The crowd roared its approval. The celebration would continue long into the Winnipeg night. The greatest political crisis of Stephen Harper’s life was two weeks away.

  SIX

  THE SHORT SECOND ELECTION OF 2008

  The prime minister of Canada sat alone in his office, staring at a four-page memo, the instrument of his undoing.

  It was Monday afternoon, December 1, 2008. Forty-eight days earlier, Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party had won re-election. A small increase in the popular vote had given them 143 out of the 308 seats in the House of Commons. Not a majority, sure, not technically. But it was sixteen more seats than Harper had controlled in the previous Parliament. Nine more than Paul Martin had after the 2004 election. Enough to govern, surely.

  The other parties had seemed to agree that it was enough. For seven weeks Harper had been doing the things a prime minister gets to do. Nobody had said boo. Nobody tried to stop him. God knows they’d had plenty of chances to pipe up, if they thought they had a case. He’d appointed a new cabinet. Met with the premiers. Travelled abroad and spoken for Canada at summits of the mighty. He had trooped into the red Senate chamber along with everyone else and listened while Governor General Michaëlle Jean read a Speech from the Throne full of plans and projects for his Conservative government. He had watched the Liberals, led by Stéphane Dion, vote for that Throne Speech fair and square, which meant they had signed on to this notion of a Conservative government. A Throne Speech vote is like a Chinese finger trap: you stick your thumb in and you can’t pull it out, everybody knows that; and Dion’s thumb was in the trap and he’d told the world he was retiring from politics anyway; and of course he was, because Stephen Harper had handed him his teeth rattling around in a zip-lock bag on election night—lowest popular vote in Liberal history, lowest seat count in Liberal history, and what the hell was Dion supposed to do but skulk back to the University of Montreal and teach half-term graduate seminars on how to be a great big loser? So of course Dion and the rest of them were going to let Harper keep governing. Nothing else was possible.

  Except here’s the thing. Damnedest thing. Funny thing. Stéphane Dion was about to take Harper’s job away from him. That’s what it said right there in the astonishing document in Harper’s lap.

  Alone in his office on the third floor of the Centre Block of Parliament in Ottawa, he stared at his copy of the news release of an agreement Dion, Jack Layton of the New Democratic Party and Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc Québécois had signed in a public ceremony a couple of hours earlier. Its pussy-footing, shit-eating title blackened Harper’s mood even further: “A policy accord to address the present economic crisis.”

  The first paragraph of the text, under the heading “Preamble,” gave the game awa
y. “The new Government is supported by parties that share a commitment to fiscal responsibility, a progressive agenda and a belief in the role of Government to act as a partner with Canadians and Quebecers. Where appropriate, these goals should be pursued in full partnership and consultation with the provincial and territorial governments.”

  The new Government. A new government. A new government that wouldn’t be Stephen Harper’s government, but a cabal of his tormentors.

  The signatories of this accord had conspired to kick Harper out of his office. They would form a government to take the Conservatives’ place. Stéphane Dion would become prime minister. Jack Layton would sit in Dion’s cabinet. Gilles Duceppe would promise that no Bloc Québécois mischief would unseat them. “The Liberal Party of Canada and the New Democratic Party of Canada will adhere to this agreement until June 30, 2011 unless renewed,” their contract accord said.

  Fuckers.

  There was a knock at the door. Ray Novak let in three guests. As Harper’s principal secretary, he controlled access to the prime minister. He was present at most important meetings. Even before he had been promoted to this new role on July 1, Novak had always played on files. His advice had always mattered to Harper. But now he had a title that matched the awesome clout that had accreted around him through years of managing not to screw up in the boss’s presence. One cabinet minister said that when you couldn’t get something done through ordinary channels you went to Ray. But only if you really had to. Novak could help or end a Conservative career in Ottawa as surely as Harper could. Usually it was impossible for an outsider to tell the difference between the master’s actions and those of the apprentice. This cabinet minister called an e-mail of complaint to Novak “the nuclear option.”

  The three men Novak ushered into the boss’s presence late that afternoon were ministers in Harper’s government. As today was Monday, the Cabinet Operations committee had been holding its weekly meeting down the hall. The government had two central co-ordinating committees. Priorities and Planning met on Tuesdays and attempted to plan the government’s action over the long term. Since the long term is regularly pre-empted by one damned thing or another, Ops met on Mondays to try to help the government win its immediate battles amid the chaos of any given week. Ops was for putting out fires. As luck would have it, here was a nice toasty fire now.

  “Don’t forget, Operations Committee was created by Mulroney, right?” a senior Conservative said much later. “He created Operations Committee, and the idea of Operations Committee was supposed to be that it was the political committee. That’s where you put your most political ministers, your hardcore political guys. When Ops was first created there were no staff. It was the committee to which you threw the 51–49 political decisions. It was the Machiavelli committee. Still is.”

  All the members of Ops had heard the news that Statist and More Statist, propped up by Wants-an-Independent-Statist, had come together to launch a bicycle-clip junta. But the news had broken too late to make the agenda. So the committee had worked through the written order of business feeling more than a little ridiculous. “Okay, well I’m looking for permission to consult on the next phase of the drug patent legislation and I’m here seeking government’s approval to support this Private Member’s Bill,” someone later said, paraphrasing the surreal ordinariness of the proceedings. “And the whole time we’re just like, ‘What the fuck are we doing?’ ”

  So when the Ops meeting broke at five-thirty, and somebody reminded the assembled ministers that the next scheduled meeting was Monday a week hence, everyone laughed darkly. The way things were going, they would not have to worry about that meeting.

  As their colleagues left, three ministers lingered. They discussed the real business of the day, which was the abyss. After a few minutes they decided to share some ideas with the prime minister.

  Of the three visitors at the door, Jim Prentice was the chair of Ops. In the Mulroney days, that role had gone to the deputy prime minister. Prentice didn’t have the title but he still had the responsibility. A handsome and meticulous Calgary lawyer, Prentice came from the Progressive Conservative side of the Conservative Party. He had boundless ambition, had run for the PC leadership and would, it was generally assumed, run to replace Harper someday, but he was cautious by nature. Jay Hill was Prentice’s vice-chair, a Reformer from Prince George–Peace River in British Columbia. Like Harper, he had come to Ottawa in 1993 with Preston Manning’s astonishing bumper crop of rookie Reform MPs. Harper had left politics from 1997 to 2002. Hill never left. He would never have Prentice’s polish, but he had seen strange sights and he knew how to count. The third man, James Moore, was the youngest minister in cabinet, just thirty-three, built like a bear, an avid reader, a hell of a talker. Despite their disparate backgrounds, the three now occupied the same state of high anxiety.

  After Novak ushered them into Harper’s presence, Prentice laid out the Ops guys’ consensus: Harper should ask the governor general to prorogue Parliament, suspending the legislative session almost before it had begun. It was for the good of the country, Prentice said. It would give everyone a chance to cool down.

  Other visitors earlier in the day had given Harper similar advice. But Harper was tempted by another path. Let them win, he said. Let Stéphane Dion try to run the country, with Jack Layton tugging him to the left and Gilles Duceppe exercising a perpetual veto. The coalition will fall apart in six months. We’ll pick up the pieces in the next election. Come back stronger than ever.

  James Moore cut in. “It might be good politics to let them govern, screw up after three months and then we can go back to the country and win two hundred seats. That might happen.” But he also pointed out that it might not. Given a choice between staying together in power and facing the voters in an election, the coalition would stick together for as long as possible. Meanwhile they would be shovelling the Harper government’s secrets out the front door for the press to feed on. “But even if they do do well,” Moore added, “they’ll do well in their context. And that’s bad for Canada. A three-headed government, led by a wonky and weak Stéphane Dion. Being bullied by a strong-armed separatist whose real goal is to be premier of Quebec.” Moore went on in this vein for a minute. “This is bad for Canada, boss. You can’t do that. You have a bigger obligation.”

  The prime minister was unconvinced. It fell to Jay Hill to make the most direct appeal. “Prime minister,” he said quietly, “if you give up power now, I don’t know if you can survive as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.”

  So that was late Monday afternoon. By then the gravest political crisis of Stephen Harper’s career was four days old.

  But let’s back up.

  Foresight probably shouldn’t count if you don’t know you’re displaying any. In his first budget speech as minister of finance, on May 2, 2006, Jim Flaherty gave a bullish description of the economy his party had just inherited from the Liberals. This took some finessing. “Mr. Speaker,” Flaherty declaimed, “Canadians have reached a level of accomplishment few other countries can rival. Our economy has shown great resilience, and in spite of a heavy tax burden, Canadian workers and business people have shown the world what talent and hard work can do.” In fact, as he listed the bounties from across the land, Flaherty must have spared a moment to wonder once again how the Liberals had managed to blow the election. Unemployment was at a thirty-year low. Corporate profits were at record levels. Nominal GDP was beating six-month-old projections by $20 billion.

  It’s at moments like this that speech writers like to insert a to-be-sure passage so the speaker can acknowledge difficulties and not come off looking like some kind of loopy Pollyanna. And here came that caveat now. “The challenges we need to watch for are still mostly external,” Flaherty said. “Uncertainty about commodities prices. The risk of a sudden correction in U.S. house prices. And the impact of a higher dollar on our manufacturers.”

  More than two years later, when the Western economy started to fall ap
art, money nerds would spend endless hours debating whether anyone had seen this coming. Everyone knew “the risk of a sudden correction in U.S. house prices” was one of “the challenges we need to watch for.” Nobody planned for it, is all. Flaherty spent the rest of the 2006 budget speech giving away the year’s surplus, and future years’ surpluses, in tax cuts.

  And not much more was heard from the gods of bad luck until well into the 2008 election campaign. As he launched that campaign on September 7, Harper was banking on a little economic uncertainty to make the idea of changing from the Conservatives to the Liberals look risky. “Between now and October 14, Canadians will choose a government to look out for their interests at a time of global economic trouble,” he told reporters in the Canadian Heritage Garden on the grounds of Rideau Hall.

  If anything, Harper was understating the economic trouble at hand. He had spent the summer getting apocalyptic updates from Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney and from finance department officials. “That was one of the reasons that he wanted to have the election in fall 2008 rather than waiting,” a former Harper advisor said later. “He was worried that the collapse had [already] happened.”

  A week into the campaign, Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. The markets went off a cliff. Harper and Flaherty couldn’t co-ordinate their messages. Harper claimed the battered stock markets offered “some great buying opportunities.” Three days later, Flaherty took over $25 billion of bank-held mortgages. Harper’s opponents hammered him for being passive during a global crisis. They didn’t stop him from winning, but maybe they planted a doubt in voters’ minds.