The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  Sometimes he’s just a guy. “I was walking into work,” one former Langevin Block denizen said, “and you go in the west doors. And that’s where the PM pulls up.” A motorcade, several black sedans and minivans deep, will arrive from the south and sidle up to the Metcalfe Street curb. “And there’s a family there, and it must have been tourists. They were an Aboriginal couple. And the PM gets out with the RCMP—it’s a big deal if you haven’t seen it before—and they [the tourists] are taking pictures. The PM stops to talk to them. And he brings them into the office and shows them around and spends ten or fifteen minutes talking to them. And I thought that was very touching.”

  There was a pause in our interview. “He does like junk food.” Any favourites? “Skittles, I think.”

  This person also commented on Harper’s sense of humour. Many people do, although for the life of them they can almost never cite examples. Once, at the annual dinner of the parliamentary press gallery when he was in opposition, Harper performed an uncanny impression of John McCallum, then a Liberal cabinet minister, who talks a bit like Elmer Fudd. As soon as Harper became prime minister he stopped going to the gallery dinner. Reporters assumed this was because he hates us, and there is probably a lot to that. But another reason was that he didn’t want to give a speech at the dinner without being funny, and he didn’t want to devote the necessary staff and rehearsal time to speech preparation, so he decided not to bother.

  (I checked the story about bringing the tourists up to the office with someone else. “That sort of thing would have been the exception, not the rule,” I was told.)

  “I didn’t know him at all when I got there,” said the person who reported the fondness for Skittles. “People ask me what he’s like and I say, ‘He’s exactly what you think he’s like.’ Very serious, inscrutable. The closer you get to him, the more he yells at you. We use that as a barometer. The new guy always gets a free ride.”

  One does get a glimpse of the temper. Several people report that he doesn’t yell at a staffer until the staffer has been around for a while. Clearly, then, he has some control over his behaviour. Swearing blue streaks at a staffer thus becomes a sign of trust. Nor is it wise to try too hard to implement whatever instructions he barks when he is feeling shouty. Sandra Buckler, his first communications director, used to take his tirades as her marching orders. A few days later and several degrees calmer, Harper would issue contradictory instructions. Soon, a colleague says, Buckler learned to take Harper’s tantrums as “cathartic,” not as an expression of his truest self.

  Though they change, his moods often last several hours at a time. “He comes into the office sometimes in a bad mood and that will affect how he sees things throughout the day. And if he comes in in a good mood no one can do anything wrong.” The surprising moments of bridge-building and clemency from this government usually come directly from Harper. So do the truly dark outbursts of vengefulness.

  When he first became prime minister in 2006, he built a staff that could handle the ordinary flow of routine government business. He has replaced almost every component of that team again and again, like George Washington’s axe in the old joke—three new blades and two new handles—often replacing a staffer with somebody very different. Yet the tone of the government changes little over time. The office delivers routine. The prime minister delivers surprise, for good and for ill.

  He can carry a grudge. “He will refer to things that were said in Conservative caucus when he was first an MP, when he was first elected as a backbencher, and will use that as a basis for judging that person forever. If he forms a negative impression of someone, he retains it more than a decade after the fact, even if it’s based on a trivial encounter.”

  Since Tom Flanagan wrote his book spilling many of the secrets of the early Harper years, Harper has continued his grudge against him. He probably won’t change his mind on that. More than two years later, Flanagan turned up at a Calgary Stampede event at which Harper was to address the crowd. While he was speaking, the prime minister caught a glimpse of his former chief of staff. Later, in the “green room” set aside for Harper’s use a short distance from the main event, he was livid. “Who the fuck let him in?”

  For all the frequent displays of temper, Harper does not, his staff insists, forbid contradictory viewpoints. He asked Bruce Carson to direct the production of the 2006 election platform because, as he told Carson, “You’re a little to my left politically.” (“You’ve got that right,” Carson replied.)

  “Obviously you can’t be contradictory for its own sake,” the staffer who recalled Harper’s ability to carry a grudge said. “But I feel like part of what I’m paid to do is to sort of beak off with my own opinions, especially when I’m challenging his. I do it respectfully with the PM, but I don’t hesitate for a second to say what I think. And I would say others at the table—everyone does it differently, but there are always more than two people who, if they feel strongly about something, will find a way of making their views known to the PM. It may not be a full-frontal assault, it may be, ‘Maybe we should canvas public opinion on that to see how it will go down,’ or ‘Maybe the following people will not react to that and we should care if they react poorly because of this,’ rather than sort of telling him, ‘You’re wrong.’ But I don’t feel censored. I don’t feel that I don’t have the luxury of expressing my views.”

  When reminded by staff, Harper will make phone calls to staff members to mark significant moments in their lives. Nobody believes this behaviour comes naturally to him, but he has learned to do it and gotten better at it, and the very fact that it takes an effort means it is appreciated when it happens. “He’s said complimentary things about Jenni [Byrne],” the noticer of the Skittles said. “He’s very generous to Guy [Giorno].” When an employee leaves or a member of his cabinet decides not to run again, Harper often spends a few minutes with them on their last day. The photographer comes in, there’s a handshake photo, and a few minutes to chat and reminisce. On at least three occasions, he has told departing ministers that they are leaving the best job they will ever have.

  Doug Finley, the Conservative senator who died of cancer in May 2013, ran the campaigns of 2006 and 2008 and organized the government’s defence during the 2008 coalition crisis. He was behind most of the party’s fundraising efforts until 2011, when his serious health problems returned. His wife, Diane, is one of the government’s senior cabinet ministers. I had the chance to ask him for some insights into Harper’s personality. “I don’t really know Stephen Harper,” Finley said. “I don’t socialize with him.”

  “He has a profound ability not to care about being hated,” one former ministerial staffer said. He is indifferent to most criticism, and takes considerable pleasure from some, especially if it comes from the academic-media-legal New Class that Kristol and Brimelow warned him about so many years ago. But there was one exception to this general observation. The guffawing that greeted the photo opportunity when Harper took his son and daughter to school a few days after the 2006 election upset him durably. The photos and TV footage showed him shaking his son Ben’s hand, as though they had concluded a real estate deal. Ben was a shy kid, as his father would have been forty years earlier, and it is hard to do anything the way you normally would when you are being followed by a gaggle of photographers. As it happens, I have since had occasion to drop off children at the same Ottawa school many times. Almost none of the parents hug their kids. They’re dropping the kids off at school, after all, not ushering them into the French Foreign Legion. They’ll see them again in a few hours.

  The snark about the handshake took Harper by surprise and, having nothing to do with his work as a political leader, hit him hard. “The notion that he might be a distant or uncaring father hurt him,” a former advisor said. “It’s the only thing I ever saw that did.”

  But let’s return to his office, which, depending on the events of the day, could be the one in Langevin Block or the smaller one on the third floor of the Ce
ntre Block. Harper works effectively with his staff but he likes to be alone for much of the day. “In terms of his work habits,” the person who described a typical day told me, “he is most at home when he is either reading or commenting on memos, watching BNN or Sun News Network or Fox News—but mainly BNN—working on speech drafts. Other things get added to his schedule if they are worthwhile. But a case needs to be made for them.”

  What’s his speech-writing process like? My source named the four-person speech-writing staff, led in recent years by the former Calgary Herald columnist Nigel Hannaford. There has been a lot of turnover in the speech-writing office. It doesn’t sound like rewarding work. Harper “likes his drafts early and he likes to spend a lot of time reading over and commenting on drafts, especially on speeches. He likes to have a lot of time. He likes to go back and forth and make a lot of changes.” It is the speech-writing staff that serves in this tennis match. Harper likes a draft he can react to. Then he reacts in detail.

  “I think the ‘Harper as micromanager’ notion is wrong in a number of ways, but at the speech writer end it’s definitely that. It’s not that he likes to deliver deep and profound speeches. It’s really rare that he will deliver a really meaningful speech.”

  I suggested that perhaps, because it is still hardly clear to anyone—including members of his own cabinet—what Harper conservatism really is, Harper takes pains with his language because whatever he says becomes the song sheet for an entire movement. No, my source said. That’s not it at all. Harper doesn’t spend his afternoons trying to find potent expression for his ideas. He works at removing memorable turns of phrase and identifiable ideas from his speeches. He puts great effort into flattening the prose.

  “I find that oftentimes he makes his speeches more platitudinous rather than more [potent]. A good portion of his edits are taking out either superfluous phrases or ideas that people are trying to put into his mouth.… He tries not to make news with his speeches, even with speeches with which we would want to make news. I can’t explain it because I don’t understand it.”

  I had a hunch. Another former advisor confirmed it. “All the stuff that sounds good in speeches—‘We must,’ ‘I will never,’ ‘Mark my words’—all that becomes a line in the sand. It gets held against you later. So that stuff’s coming out. If it makes the speech-writing staff feel bad, well, they’ll live.”

  There is a secondary reason for Harper’s penchant for literal self-effacement. He wants to be damned sure which line in a speech will get quoted in the papers. So he repeats it in French and English, and to make sure that one line sounds interesting, he makes sure the rest of the speech doesn’t.

  Chrétien mostly left speeches to staff and had no strong opinion about how much personality his writers should make him seem to have. He would grind through the text like a millstone through oats, haul a well-worn cadenza off a mental shelf to get a belated rise out of the stultified audience (“Millions of people would give their shirts for our so-called problems”) and call it a night. Mulroney and Martin were obsessive about reworking speech drafts to insert their own voice. Only Harper spends hours subtracting a voice from his speeches.

  But then, Harper works hard to take himself out of many pictures. Reporters are banished from the doorstep of his cabinet meetings so he will not pause on his way out, as several of his predecessors did, to riff aimlessly on the events of the day while Julie van Dusen and Bob Fife toss questions. We are left with no video of Harper responding to assorted embarrassments or gloating over his foes’ missteps or wishing the Habs well. Mostly we have to guess how he would respond. He doesn’t comment after a visiting premier leaves Ottawa. Did they get along? Are they at daggers drawn? Who’s to say?

  In each of his two meetings with Aboriginal leaders since the 2011 election, his office left visitors to wonder, until very late in the planning, whether Harper would even attend after the opening ceremony. In the end he did but he barely spoke. Is he excited? Revolted? Bored? Who’s to say?

  Canadians know—actually know for a fact, from the evidence of his own testimony—less about Stephen Harper than about any other prime minister who has lasted as long as he has. This helps explain why he has lasted. He lies low because he wants to last.

  The other day upon the stair, I met a man who was not there. He wasn’t there again today, and while millions of voters wish that man would go away, he won’t be there again tomorrow.

  Formlessness makes Harper both harder for his detractors to hate (although never all that hard) and, paradoxically, easier for his admirers to like. Scholars of the storytelling craft tell us that when we know little about a protagonist it can actually be easier to identify with him. In his 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment, the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim examined the structure and enduring power of fairy tales. “The fairy tale … makes clear that it tells about everyman, people very much like us,” Bettelheim wrote. In “Beauty and the Beast,” you never learn much about Beauty. “The protagonists of fairy tales are referred to as ‘a girl,’ for instance, or ‘the youngest brother’ … fairies and witches, giants and godmothers remain equally unnamed, thus facilitating projections and identifications.” If a stranger rides into town, we imagine he must be like us—that, in fact, he is us. If he is a blond stranger with a Flemish accent and henna tattoos, not so much.

  When Harper first ran for prime minister in 2004, his name was so meaningless to Canadians that he sought to pour meaning into it with those issue-based television ads that ended with the oddly insistent “My name is Stephen Harper” tag. By 2006 his name had become a problem. His opponents had defined him, and he had been rather more successful at defining himself—as a jerk—than he wanted. So he kept his name out of his campaign advertising. Eventually he won the election, and then sought to reduce his presence in his own government. Some readers will recall that public servants have been told to refer systematically to the “Harper Government,” but that didn’t begin until he had been the prime minister for nearly five years. At first they were told to call it “Canada’s New Government.” Thus facilitating projections and identifications, Bettelheim would say.

  I used to be surprised by e-mails from readers who, when they were not critical of Harper, were sure he was bold or compassionate or brilliant. On some days he has been all of those things. But on most days he is not, in public, much of anything. Observers looking for something to dislike get less fodder than they would if he were a loudmouth, although they manage with what’s available. Observers looking for a hero draw the hero’s chiselled features in the outline Harper leaves blank.

  The point of this word craft and image manipulation is not to amuse a bored prime minister, or to help him cope with shyness, or to mess with the press gallery’s head. It is to last. The point of everything he does is to last. The surest rebuttal Harper can offer to a half century of Liberal hegemony is not to race around doing things the next Liberal could undo. The surest rebuttal is to last and not be Liberal. “He always says, ‘My models aren’t Conservative prime ministers,’ ” one of his ministers told me. “ ‘My models are successful prime ministers.’ ”

  The most successful prime minister was William Lyon Mackenzie King, or at least the most durable. Flanagan, Harper’s estranged former advisor, has called Harper “Mackenzie King without a ouija board.” King held the job for a total of twenty-one years in three separate terms. But in a sense, that was not the end of him. When he was done, he handed the keys to Louis St. Laurent, who lost after eight years to Diefenbaker but was promptly avenged by Pearson and Trudeau and, after another pause, by Chrétien. This is what hegemony looks like.

  King’s style is taught in political science classes, never approvingly, as “muddling through.” But if you muddle for twenty-one years you can get through a lot. King directed the wartime industrialization of the Canadian state and guided its transformation into the social postwar state. The Canada he left behind would have been unrecognizable to anyone in 1921, when he set to work.
And when he finished, Canadians let his successors continue along his path. King was no saint, though he often sought to converse with saints. But he accomplished great change in the only lasting way it has ever been done in Canada: through endurance.

  How many decisions does a prime minister make in a day? Sixty? A hundred? Almost none go reported. He doesn’t even have to keep most of them secret: the rush of events ensures they won’t be noticed and assayed by the gallery. As the 2011 election approached, Harper was approaching two thousand days in office. Imagine how different the outcome would have been if a different prime minister, with different assumptions, prejudices and instincts, had made those thousands of decisions.

  Consider Insite, the Vancouver supervised-injection site for drug users. Harper granted temporary extensions to its licence until 2008, but then launched a campaign to get the place shut down. Finally, in 2011 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Insite must stay open. Since Harper was in power, Ken Dryden and Ujjal Dosanjh were not the Liberal ministers of health and public safety, and Insite, the pilot project, was not followed by injection sites in other provinces. Multiply that decision by thousands. Follow Harper with another Conservative prime minister who plays the long game—this is Harper’s hope, not my prediction, for I offer none—and you start to get something that looks like Conservative hegemony.

  As a student of successful prime ministers, Harper has certainly also contemplated those who failed. Some deserve little attention because they didn’t understand politics or were robbed by fate: Joe Clark, John Turner, Kim Campbell, Paul Martin. In Harper’s lifetime, this leaves Diefenbaker, Trudeau, Mulroney, Chrétien. Flanagan has also written that the largest majorities collapse under the weight of their own internal contradictions. That was Diefenbaker’s burden, but because it has not been Harper’s it needn’t preoccupy us.