The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  The most persuasive rationale for Harper’s census crusade came, not from any accredited member of the government, but from Stephen Taylor, a young blogger with such impeccable Conservative connections that it was not always easy to tell where the Harper government ended and Taylor’s own opinions began. Taylor had organized the big Parliament Hill protest against the Dion-led coalition in 2008. On July 22, 2010, he published a blog post under the headline “Census Change Is about Smaller Government.”

  “ ‘If you measure it, it matters’ is the motto of those net tax-receiving organizations who only matter if they can make their case,” Taylor wrote. Harper “has tried the ideological argument against these groups for years. But ideology is by its nature debatable; removing the framework of debate is his shortcut to victory.”

  Come again?

  “If one day we have no idea how many divorced Hindu public transit users there are in East Vancouver, government policy will not be concocted to address them specifically,” Taylor wrote. And indeed if there were an organization representing those folks, “they’d be against the census change.” Harper’s “greatest challenge,” Taylor concluded, “is to dismantle the modern welfare state. If it can’t be measured, future governments can’t pander.”

  Taylor was making his argument at an odd moment in the history of the Harper government, so the notion that Harper was in the business of dismantling anything might have been hard for some observers to swallow. The government was still spending tens of billions of dollars more than it had in 2008, running up really big deficits to punt the economy out of a ditch. Conservative MPs were pasting on their best smiles so they could hand out big fake infrastructure cheques to dazed Chamber of Commerce presidents in towns across the country. Harper had just finished playing host to the most expensive G-8 and G-20 summits in the history of international schmoozing. The welfare state, or at least the bloated state, looked just fine, thank you. But soon there would be cuts, in waves, to dozens of programs. Statistics Canada’s ability to keep track of the changes in Canadian society caused by those cuts would soon reveal itself to be much weakened. Not incidentally, the agency itself would see its own budgets for other data-collection programs cut again, repeatedly. Those later cuts would get far less coverage than the pinprick that ended the mandatory long-form census. But Harper’s changes were real whether the press covered them or not.

  As 2010 progressed, Ignatieff seemed finally to be getting the hang of this opposition leader business. Under Donolo’s tutelage, he sought to give the impression that he was setting an agenda rather than being dragged along by someone else’s. In March he had convened a “thinkers’ conference” in Montreal, with Liberals and friendly experts gathering to discuss the economy, social policy and global affairs. Being Ignatieff, he could not merely judge the meeting to have been pleasant or stimulating. “We are trying to think of new ways for this society to govern itself,” he said as it wrapped up. “I think we’ve renewed our democracy this weekend.”

  From there the Liberal leader spent much of the summer on a tour bus grinding out the miles between barbecue rallies in one small town after another. Here the Harvard man would learn the niceties of retail campaigning. Reporters dutifully followed along and recorded his progress. He rolled up his sleeves. He shook hands. All was good. The summer tour ended. A fall tour began. The party called it “Open Mike.” He was Mike. He was open. He would show up anywhere and talk about anything. Unlike the other fellow.

  The other fellow was having a rough autumn. On October 12, at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Canada withdrew its bid for a temporary seat on the Security Council after two rounds of voting made it clear we couldn’t win. It was the first time in the organization’s sixty years that Canada had sought a Security Council seat and failed to win it. Three weeks later, Jim Prentice, who had entered Harper’s government as the closest thing it had to a deputy prime minister, got tired of playing make-believe environment minister and announced he was quitting politics to help run a bank.

  On November 10 Harper admitted that he would keep more than a thousand troops in Kabul to train the Afghan army after the Kandahar combat mission ended in 2011. It was a complete flip-flop. He had argued strongly in the 2008 campaign for a clear end to Canada’s military involvement. At one point Hillary Clinton had stopped by Ottawa to argue for Canadian troops to stay past 2011; Harper and his ministers nearly ran her out of town. “We just want to be absolutely clear that Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan ends in 2011,” the PMO had said in an e-mail to reporters in August. Three months later, it was absolutely clear it wouldn’t.

  On December 9, Bev Oda, the minister of international development, admitted that a memo from her department recommending a $7-million grant to Kairos, an ecumenical aid organization, had been altered clumsily to make it seem to have recommended the opposite. Really clumsily.

  Under RECOMMENDATION, the memo said, “That you sign below to indicate that you approve a contribution.” Someone had pencilled the word “NOT” before “approve.” It would take Oda a little longer to admit she had ordered the alteration herself. This was pretty much what Tony Clement had done to the chief statistician on the census: try to make faceless officials take the fall for a political decision.

  This list doesn’t even begin to exhaust the controversies that rattled the Harper government as 2011 approached. As was reliably the case with Harper, most of the damage was self-inflicted. Ignatieff’s challenge was how to respond. He made two mistakes. That was all Harper needed to finish him off.

  The first mistake was to abandon a promising line of argument the Liberals had begun to put forward on October 18. “We had a good day,” Ralph Goodale, the Liberals’ wisest strategist, wrote afterward on the party’s website. “In four coordinated events—Scott Brison at the Empire Club in Toronto, Marc Garneau at the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, Michael Ignatieff at an Open Mike event in Guelph and my speech to the Economic Club in Ottawa, we sent a message: The Liberal Party regards the economy—and the concerns of middle-class families—as our nation’s top priority.”

  Here was a promising change of pace for the Liberals. Since 2004 they had questioned much about Harper: his patriotism, his sense of fair play, his candidates’ positions on abortion, his love of the arts, his respect for parliamentary procedure. What they had not done was develop a sustained critique of his economic management. Sustained would be the important word here. As time went on, Harper had worked hard to project the image of a prudent leader with a sure hand on the levers of the economy. Especially after the rocky 2008 campaign and the coalition crisis that followed, fuelled by the perception that Harper had taken his attention off the economy, the Conservatives had multiplied their appeals to pocketbook issues. The Liberals appeared to have finally decided to push Harper off that position of strength. They believed a series of decisions had suddenly made it easier to do so.

  As a Liberal, Goodale wrote, he believed “hard-pressed middle-class families are being left to fend for themselves by this Conservative government. On everything from family care, to the high cost of higher education, to adequate pensions for a decent retirement, the Tory response is: Let them eat cake.” Worse than that: not only were Conservatives ignoring families (so the Liberals proclaimed), they were obsessed with an odd assortment of other projects. “Conservatives prioritize a more costly & less reliable census, stealth fighters, bigger jails and an extravagant G20 weekend,” Goodale wrote.

  For six years Harper had portrayed the choice facing Canadians as one between a party that cared for hard-working families and one that had lost touch. Now Ignatieff was attempting some judo: the choice was precisely that, he and his colleagues were saying, but it was the Liberals who cared for families. The Conservatives were intrigued by the change, and a little bit worried. “If they’d kept that up, it might have been effective,” one Harper strategist said about the Liberals’ attempt to paint themselves as the truest friend of Canadian families. �
�We might have had to adjust.”

  But in the end they didn’t have to. The constant flood of mini-scandals gave the Liberals a target-rich environment, and they fired at everything. Detainee documents, Oda documents, the cost of new jet fighters, the Conservatives’ virtuosic skill at denying the opposition new information on any of it. The Liberals’ one-day blitz on the economy failed to turn into a sustained line of argument. The Conservatives got over their initial mild alarm.

  The second mistake was narrower, less subtle, and devastating. In the endless game of poker over election timing, the Liberals tipped their hand.

  Late in the autumn La Presse ran a column by Vincent Marissal in which he quoted senior Liberals who said they didn’t intend to let the next Harper budget pass a confidence vote if they could help it. The Conservatives took Marissal’s column as gospel, and pounced.

  Jim Flaherty had delivered the 2009 budget on January 27, a not unusual time. In 2011 he waited and waited before finally conceding he would deliver one on March 23. The two-month gap before the budget was a hole the Conservatives had consciously opened up in the winter political calendar. They proceeded to fill that space with an even longer and heavier-by-far anti-Ignatieff advertising barrage, the longest they had ever run against any Liberal. Earlier ad blitzes had run a few weeks. “This one went on for part of January, all of February and almost all of March,” a Harper strategist said. He called the decision to leak the timing of the Liberals’ next election attempt one of the worst strategic blunders in the history of that party.

  The arrival of new Conservative attack ads gave the Liberals yet another chance to respond. For once, some of them were tempted to do so. Bob Richardson, a Toronto lobbyist who would be in charge of campaign advertising, figured the campaign was on as soon as the Conservatives fired a shot, and was eager to fight back. Donolo had the same instinct. Gordon Ashworth resisted. Ashworth was Ignatieff’s campaign manager, a role he had played for Jean Chrétien through the 1990s. He didn’t want to blow the Liberals’ budget before an election.

  In the end, the Liberals finally produced some ads to counter the Conservative barrage. So did the NDP, figuring as Bob Richardson had, that the campaign was, for all intents and purposes, already under way. But the Conservatives weren’t putting up ads to set the scene for a campaign. They were seeking to end it before it began; the resources they allotted were commensurate with that ambition. In the weeks before the budget, a Liberal strategist said, the Conservatives bought airtime to run 1,600 ads. “We had 131, and the NDP had, like, 25 or something,” the Liberal said. “It was a massacre.”

  EIGHT

  REMEDIAL READING II

  Let us pause from the rush of events and consider this fellow Harper. The hope for this book is that his response to events reveals much about him. But if we examine his administrative style for the length of a chapter we may learn more. Doing it now will help us understand what came next.

  “Let’s go through a typical day,” somebody who works in the Langevin Block suggested. “He wakes up and he will do various media reviews with his wife, just by himself. And then he will come into the office for around 8:30–8:40 a.m. and he will meet with his senior staff. And they will then proceed to give him a media review. But he will have a sense of what some people have written already.”

  This is striking because Harper has often protested that he doesn’t read the newspapers. He gets what he needs to know, he says, from his staff and the enormous bureaucracy that feeds it. But sometimes he is ahead of them when he arrives at work. Laureen Harper reads the papers, the blogs and Twitter. She will often mention reporters’ work to them when she bumps into them at receptions around town. A recommendation or condemnation from her is probably a big influence on Harper’s reading.

  After the media review, senior staff convene a meeting with Harper focused largely on the issues of the day rather than long-term planning, with a strong emphasis on communications. “He will give broad assent and feedback. He may make some comments on memos that have been submitted to him in the days prior. And that will be sort of his morning meeting, which lasts about an hour or so.”

  A typical workday for the prime minister is hard to define because there can never be such a thing. Sometimes a visitor will show up—Justin Bieber or the recipients of the Canada Vanier Scholarships. Sometimes there is a trip to a factory or a meeting with a world leader. It’s a complex job. But on quiet days, “there is mainly a mixture of meetings in the office; but really there’s work time, where he’s reading memos. The main way he prefers to be briefed is via a memorandum. Obviously, you meet with him and talk to him. But if you want to pitch something to him, a short note is how he likes to be briefed. One or two pages maximum.”

  This sounds all right as a way to function until you remember that before a weekly meeting of the Priorities and Planning committee of cabinet, Harper might have fifty such memos to digest. “And then he will engage with you on that basis. So he spends the day on a few notes, reading things, writing speeches. And then whatever events or round-tables with people outside of the government that get added to his calendar. And then the day ends and he goes home to his family.”

  In his early days as prime minister, Harper would scribble substantial notes in the margins of the memos sent to him by the bureaucrats. The memos would return to the Privy Council Office dotted with comments. Bureaucrats took the running commentary as evidence that Harper reads closely documents that nobody expected would receive his personal attention.

  Once Harper wanted Canada Post to issue a commemorative stamp to mark the anniversary of the Montreal Canadiens hockey club in 2008. A memo came to him explaining that the prime minister does not normally request specific subjects for stamps, because it is important to keep Canada Post above the partisan fray, or beneath it—or in any event away from it. Note in margin of memo: “I don’t care. I want the stamp.” Sometime later another memo returned to the effect that this sort of thing just wasn’t done, and perhaps somebody on the PMO staff could designate a suitable arm’s-length surrogate who would ask for a Habs centennial stamp. Probably he needn’t fuss anyway, because this was the sort of stamp Canada Post would normally produce on its own. Harper’s note in margin: “Who is not reading my comments?” Today on the Canada Post website you can still purchase an impressive set of 100th-anniversary Habs commemorative stamps.

  After a few years in office, Harper’s staff decided the marginal comments left too many hostages to fortune: they might provide proof, for posterity or the Conservatives’ opponents, of Harper’s direct involvement in a file. The handwritten comments disappeared thereafter, although on each page of a memo Harper has reviewed there is still a checkmark and the initials “SH.”

  If Harper can be imperious with the mostly faceless strangers of the public service, he is surprisingly collaborative with his partisan political staff. Several people who have worked for Harper say hierarchies tend to flatten in his presence. Just as almost any minister can get up in Question Period and answer a question on almost any file, similarly, job titles and formal responsibilities matter little within the confines of his office. Hierarchies snap back into place as soon as everyone leaves, but if you are in the room he wants to hear from you. This helps explain how Ray Novak, who began life as a gopher for Harper, wound up as his chief of staff. He was in almost all the meetings. Nobody told him not to talk.

  I almost never speak with the prime minister. I do not react well to the elaborate ceremonies that both his office and my own colleagues have erected around his news conferences, and to say the least, there aren’t a lot of chances to run into the guy on an informal basis. But I used to speak with him occasionally, before 2006, and still manage it on the odd occasion. For instance, I chatted with him in 2012 at a summer garden party for journalists at 24 Sussex. There is normally one such party every June and another, inside the residence, shortly before Christmas. He asked me about the economic crisis in Europe. I responded with platitudes. �
�No,” he said. “You’ve lived in Europe. You pay a lot of attention to what’s going on over there. What do you think will happen?” I realized that Harper would rather get some added value out of his afternoon than trade small talk about the weather. I felt flattered by the attention and pressured to come up with something smart. I forget what I told him.

  I checked my impression with people who speak to him more often, and who knew his predecessors. There’s a pretty robust consensus: a conversation with Stephen Harper is a real conversation. He listens, is curious, asks questions, responds with something that relates to what you said, contests your conclusions if he disagrees, shuts up if you know more. This is rarer than it probably sounds. A conversation with Jean Chrétien is largely a series of anecdotes from Chrétien about his many adventures. It is reliably great entertainment and educational to boot, but a half an hour later you realize you didn’t say much. A conversation with Brian Mulroney is an audience at a baroque monologue, played at half speed and an octave down, about Mulroney’s courage and honour in the face of grave injustices inflicted on him. Paul Martin will quiz an interlocutor until he can find something in his own background that matches the other person’s life story. The unspoken theme of a conversation with Paul Martin is, “You know what? We’re a lot alike.”

  So, in an encounter with the prime ministers I’ve known, you are actually least likely to come away from a conversation with Harper muttering, “What the hell was that?”