The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  Flaherty’s speech tried to set that tone. “Today’s statement lays out a plan that keeps our budget balanced for now. However, in the weeks ahead, we will determine the extent to which we will inject additional stimulus to our economy, joining the efforts of our international partners. Any additional actions to support the economy will have an impact on the bottom-line numbers in our next budget. These actions, or a further deterioration in global economic conditions, could result in a deficit.”

  But that was all vague, conditional and somewhere down the road. The party-financing stuff was now. After Flaherty finished, the other parties had a chance to react. The important question was whether any party would support the government. The Liberal finance critic, Scott Brison, was scathing but noncommittal. Duceppe and Layton said they would vote against the update. Dion took his reaction outside to the TV cameras waiting in the Commons foyer. “We will vote against this plan,” he said. The scrum around him instantly shrank as reporters backed away to file their dispatches by Blackberry.

  Harper had made a career-threatening miscalculation. What saved him was that Ottawa had other leaders tempted by folly too.

  The Conservatives could not have predicted that the economic update would produce something very close to jubilation among their opponents. Glen Pearson was a Liberal MP from London, Ontario, who kept a blog. His account of the atmosphere in the House after Flaherty spoke remains striking. “No sooner was the speech ended than the Prime Minister and his Finance Minister left the House, along with half of the Conservative caucus,” Pearson wrote. “The faces on those that remained told the story in vivid detail. Listening to the response from the three opposition parties, you could tell from their countenance some kind of line had been crossed.

  “In the Opposition Lobby, I saw things I had never witnessed in my two years here. Bloc members were ‘high-fiving’ NDP caucus members, and some women from the Bloc were embracing their counterparts in the Liberal caucus. It was incredible to watch.”

  CTV reporter Rosemary Thompson had asked Dion whether he had talked about a coalition with the other opposition parties. “Well, the option now is for the prime minister,” Dion said, as he launched into a long answer that didn’t answer. The correct answer, if he had cared to give it, was yes. He had already talked to Layton by telephone that morning. “I intend to meet him tonight to start the process,” Layton wrote in an e-mail to his chief of staff, Anne McGrath, and Topp.

  Indeed, meetings were happening all over Ottawa. One line of communication was between two party veterans, Ed Broadbent and Jean Chrétien. Brad Lavigne, a senior Layton advisor, explained the rationale: “We’re not really sure who the Liberal leader is right now.” Dion had announced his resignation, effective after a successor could be chosen. Michael Ignatieff, Bob Rae and New Brunswick MP Dominic LeBlanc planned to run to replace him. “Chrétien’s almost the only guy whose calls get returned by every Liberal faction,” Lavigne said. “So we asked Ed to reach out to him.”

  The reaction of the opposition was obviously huge trouble for the government. But another surprise awaited Harper. The very substance of the economic update was coming under fire from ordinary Canadians. “We were getting the shit kicked out of us in our ridings,” one Ontario Conservative MP recalls. “I had hardcore Conservatives calling, screaming and hollering at me, and e-mails. These are Plus 14s, Plus 12s. That means they’d donated, taken lawn signs.” The MP was referring to the internal Conservative system for identifying supportive voters in a riding and ranking the level of their fervour.

  “They weren’t angry because they wanted to preserve this sacred cow called the political subsidy. Most people hadn’t even been aware it existed. It was that the world was going to hell, Bush was bailing out financial institutions, Lehman Brothers had collapsed, the auto industry was in free fall, people were watching their stock portfolios tumble by 30, 40 percent. It looked like economic Armageddon out there. And folks just wanted us to do something. Now, they weren’t even sure what something was. It wasn’t that they knew we needed a stimulus or something. But they wanted us to be doing something. And then we came out with this irrelevant, extraneous subject of the political subsidies, which had obviously no bearing. So folks were just enraged that this whole political game was starting when the rest of the world was going down in flames. It was like 99 to 1 against. And from across the spectrum.”

  The House was scheduled to vote on a Ways and Means motion on Monday. It was also a scheduled supply day, which meant MPs would spend most of the day debating a motion from an opposition party, in this case the Liberals. The motion would be votable. So in only ninety-six hours, the Liberals would have two chances to vote down confidence in the government.

  Harper’s first move was to try to stick the pin back into the grenade he’d just dropped into his own lap. On Friday morning, government officials told reporters the party-financing provisions wouldn’t be included in Monday’s Ways and Means motion. Almost immediately, Liberals and New Democrats said they would vote against the government no matter what happened to the party-financing rules. Shortly after lunch on Friday, the Canadian Press moved the text of the Liberals’ supply day motion. “This House has lost confidence in this government and is of the opinion that a viable alternative government can be formed within the present House of Commons.” It was on. The Liberals planned to propose an alternative coalition government to replace the Conservatives.

  Three hours after the CP story moved, Harper walked out of the House of Commons to a microphone in the foyer. Dozens of reporters were waiting. A Conservative media advisory had said he would speak between 5:00 and 5:30 p.m. It was now 5:38.

  The prime minister’s substantive message was that he was pushing the Ways and Means motion, and the supply debate, to December 8, a week later than scheduled. Everyone he was talking to knew that if the opposition’s resolve held, he would not be in less trouble then than now. So he began in earnest to engage the battle over perception. “Less than two months ago, the people of Canada gave our party a strengthened mandate to lead Canada during the most serious global economic crisis in generations.” He listed his government’s actions on the economy, almost all of which predated Flaherty’s update. But Harper promised to add to the meagre tally soon. “These actions represent our first steps. In the next couple of months, the government will present a budget that outlines our next move forward.” That budget would include “expected stimulus measures.”

  From that sketchy defence, he moved to the attack. “While we have been working on the economy, the opposition has been working on a backroom deal to overturn the results of the last election without seeking the consent of voters. They want to take power, not earn it. They want to install a government led by a party that received its lowest vote share since Confederation. They want to install a prime minister, Prime Minister Dion, who was rejected by the voters just six weeks ago. They want to install a coalition that they explicitly promised not to support. The Liberals campaigned against the coalition with the NDP, precisely because they said the NDP’s policies were bad for the economy. And now they plan to enter into the very same coalition under the guise of strengthening the economy. Stéphane Dion and the NDP plan to make this happen by accepting the support of a party that wants to destroy the country. The opposition has every right to defeat the government. But Stéphane Dion does not have the right to take power without an election.”

  Harper called on Canadians to “make their views known” on this matter to MPs. Reporters started to holler questions. Harper said, “Thank you very much and I hope you will all have a good weekend,” and turned on his heel, retreating back inside the Commons. “Sir,” one reporter called after him, “did you make a mistake?” Harper didn’t pause to respond.

  While Harper was talking, his chief of staff, Guy Giorno, was putting the final touches on an e-mail to Conservative MPs. Giorno, a veteran of Ontario Conservative politics in the days when Mike Harris was premier, reinforced Harper’s
fondness for political attack. It was “absolutely essential that we use every single tool and medium at our disposal,” Giorno wrote, to warn Canadians against the opposition’s “crass political opportunism.” The memo included a proposed script for television and radio interviews. The script repeated almost every detail of Harper’s statement in the Commons foyer, complete with scripted ad libs so MPs could be sure their comments sounded natural and unscripted: “This is what bothers me the most” and “I mean, I follow the news” and “And I wish the media would be more clear on this point.” The script ended with a nod to the constitutional and parliamentary gamesmanship that could lie ahead. It suggested MPs say: “I don’t want another election. But what I want even less is a surprise backroom Prime Minister whom I never even had the opportunity to vote for or against.”

  Taken together, Harper’s Friday statement in the foyer and the Giorno memo point toward four decisions the Conservatives had taken almost before they knew they were in a fight.

  The first decision, really more a reflex, was that when attacked they would attack right back. By now this was such an obvious part of the Harper modus operandi that a more contrite or passive stance would have been surprising. The second decision was to waste little time fussing about factual accuracy. As constitutional scholars would soon remind everyone, when Harper said the opposition wanted to “overturn the results of the last election,” he was talking humbug. The election had returned 308 Members of Parliament. It was up to them to select a government among them and show their support for it by voting confidence in it. There was a forest of rules, traditions and conditions surrounding the exercise of that selection, but there would be nothing illegal or unconstitutional about a Dion-led coalition government. If a majority of MPs supported the project, Harper could not stop it.

  Of course, Harper knew this. And of course, before he was in government, he had made the same argument. Before the 1997 election, Harper announced he would not run again as a Reform Party candidate. In an interview with TVO, the Ontario government educational network, he speculated on what would happen if Liberal support declined. “I think you’re going to face, some day, a minority parliament, with the Liberals maybe having the largest number of seats,” he said, “and what will be the test is whether there’s then any party in opposition that’s able to form a coalition or working alliance with the others.”

  Such a coalition would have been created in defiance of the party with the largest number of seats in the House, just like the one that threatened to take Harper out in 2008. And it is impossible to imagine that Harper didn’t expect the Bloc Québécois to participate in such a coalition back when he was bruiting it about. At the moment he spoke to TVO in 1997 the Bloc had fifty seats. Reform, the Progressive Conservatives and the NDP had sixty-one seats among them.

  Harper’s apparent support for a coalition alternative to the governing party was even clearer in 2004, after Paul Martin’s Liberals were reduced to a minority. Harper, Duceppe and Layton showed up in the National Press Theatre across Wellington Street from the Commons on September 9, 2004, to present a joint opposition agenda for the new Parliament. And they revealed that they had sent a letter to the governor general of the time, Adrienne Clarkson. “We respectfully point out,” the letter said, “that the opposition parties, who together constitute a majority in the House, have been in close consultation. We believe that, should a request for dissolution arise this should give you cause, as constitutional practice has determined, to consult the opposition leaders and consider all of your options before exercising your constitutional authority.”

  “There has been some informal chitter-chatter around the Hill,” Harper said when reporters asked him what the letter was meant to accomplish, “that if a prime minister were weakened by his own party or defeated in the House that he could just automatically call an election. That’s not our understanding of how the constitutional system works, particularly in a minority Parliament.”

  So the defeat of a government need not mean an election? No, Harper said. If the government was defeated, “the governor general should first consult widely before accepting any advice to dissolve Parliament. So I would not want the prime minister to think that he can simply fail in the House of Commons as a route to another general election. That’s not the way our system works.” But that was 2004. This was now.

  Harper’s third decision was to begin preparing contingencies for a defeat on a confidence motion. If he could not avoid a confidence vote, and if he lost it, he would ask the governor general to dissolve Parliament and call another election. The other parties would plead with Michaëlle Jean not to send their coalition proposal to the electorate. The “I don’t want another election, but …” talking points anticipated that fight.

  The fourth decision was the most important. Outnumbered in the Commons, Harper was seeking a wider arena. He did not have the people’s representatives on his side, but he could appeal to the people. He had no guarantee of success. Only seven weeks earlier, more Canadians had supported the coalition parties than the Conservatives. He had to persuade at least some of them that what they were heading toward wasn’t what they had asked for.

  During the long wait before Harper’s statement in the foyer, Teneycke chatted with reporters. “We are going to stand our ground on principle,” the PM’s message man said. “I’m saying we’re not backing down.” But as the crisis headed into the weekend, the Conservatives backed down some more. On Saturday morning, Baird made a flurry of phone calls to reporters to tell them the government was abandoning the party-financing provision that had got them into this mess. He showed up at the CBC building on Queen Street in Ottawa to make the same vow on camera. In a conference call with reporters on Sunday, Flaherty said the pay-equity and right-to-strike restrictions would be removed too. Since there had been very little in the economic update besides the measures the government was now abandoning, the tactical retreat amounted to a blanket repudiation of a major statement by the finance minister. It would not have been astonishing to see Flaherty resign over the disavowal. He stayed on. This was not a fight over the proper care and feeding of ministers of the Crown. It had become bigger than that.

  Opposition negotiating teams were camped out in three downtown hotels—Liberals and Bloc at the Château Laurier, NDP and Bloc at the Marriott, Liberals and NDP at the Sheraton. The negotiators showed up at the annual press gallery dinner at the Museum of Civilization on Saturday night flushed with excitement. In the cold outside the museum, Doug Finley, Harper’s dour Scottish campaign manager, stood cradling a Scotch and taking a smoke break. One reporter suggested Harper’s options came down to “fight” or “contrite.”

  “Oh, we won’t be contrite,” Finley said.

  On Sunday, the Conservatives made their best attempt to shut down the coalition, with Flaherty throwing off ballast in that conference call with reporters. To their astonishment it had no effect. So the Conservative Party released a recording of a conference call Layton had held with NDP MPs on Saturday. One of the newest NDP MPs was Linda Duncan, the party’s lone Alberta caucus member. Instead of sending her office the instructions for the Layton call, the NDP had mistakenly sent them to Conservative MP John Duncan. So the Conservatives were able to dial into Layton’s call, unbeknownst to the NDP.

  During the call, Layton addressed worries that the Bloc would be unsteady supporters of the coalition. “I actually believe they’re the least of our problems,” he said. “This whole thing wouldn’t have happened if the moves hadn’t been made with the Bloc to lock them in early because you couldn’t put three people together in three hours.” To the Conservatives, this sounded like what it was: proof the coalition had been in the planning since long before Flaherty’s botched fall update.

  “We thought that releasing the tapes would kind of blow the whole thing apart,” the former PMO advisor said later. “There would be Liberals that would be horrified by this, and that this was going to be the bomb that was going to stop
the momentum. And it didn’t at all. Everyone kind of rallied around.” Even Dion’s Liberal leadership rival and probable successor, Michael Ignatieff, wasn’t publicly offside. “That’s when we really realized that we were against it, because you know, basically everyone—Ignatieff was quiet, and everyone else was completely on board with going forward with this.”

  Monday morning, November 30, “the prime minister was sick as a dog,” one former MP recalls. “He was pale, he was morose, and I don’t think at that moment he knew what to do.” Part of it was simple illness. The food in Lima had been treacherous. Of the eight thousand delegates at the APEC summit, more than a hundred developed upset stomachs or worse. The Peruvian government put out a news release blaming the weather in Lima, “characterized at this time of year by midday heat, but cool breezes in the mornings and afternoons,” for “upset stomachs” among “unprepared diners.” Stephen Harper was one of the victims. The APEC food had caught up with him as soon as he landed back in Ottawa and its effects had lingered, mutating into a sullen and thuggish flu.

  The day began with a Tactics meeting at Langevin. The PM’s senior staff reviewed what was in the press: their imminent defeat. They reviewed what was likely to come up at Question Period that day: their imminent defeat. As one participant recalls, Harper said to the room, “I’ve decided I’m going to let this confidence vote happen and let them try to form the government. They’ll screw it up so badly, they’ll be so disorganized, that within a few months we’ll be back into another election.”

  Almost all of Harper’s team thought this was a bad idea. Conservatives can name few exceptions. Jason Kenney was one. The forty-year-old Calgary Southeast MP, a full member of cabinet since only a month earlier, found the “let them screw up” option tempting. So did Pierre Poilievre, eleven years younger than Kenney, the Calgary-born MP for Nepean-Carleton near Ottawa. The two men were Conservatives in the Harper mode, bookish and eloquent but viscerally sure of themselves and certain their opponents would be unmasked and undone by the pressure of power.