The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  Are there lessons to learn from the others? Perhaps these two. Mulroney and Chrétien were destroyed by lieutenants who became rivals. Trudeau and Mulroney went off chasing dragons and exhausted the nation’s patience.

  By the time Lucien Bouchard and Paul Martin left cabinet and turned, in different ways, against the prime ministers who had made them stars, they had earned independent reputations as visionary leaders. They had built largely autonomous bases of power and influence within their respective parties. Bouchard’s resignation from Mulroney’s cabinet in 1990 consolidated the collapse of the Progressive Conservative coalition. He then built the Bloc Québécois from Mulroney’s Quebec caucus and from the PC voter base in the province. The rise of the Bloc matched, and to some extent provoked, the Reform Party’s expansion in the West. Defeat for the Progressive Conservatives followed in the next election. The party, as constituted, never really recovered.

  Martin’s resignation from Chrétien’s cabinet in 2002—in his trademark style, Martin did not understand that he had quit until Chrétien swore in a new finance minister—turned the Liberal Party against itself. But only briefly. Martin had prepared well. Badly outnumbered, Chrétien manoeuvred with great skill, but his departure was coerced and his party badly damaged.

  Harper has not permitted a Martin or a Bouchard to rise in his government. Nobody in his cabinet combines the two ingredients Bouchard and Martin had at the moment of their apostasies: an independent power base and antagonistic ambitions. David Emerson and Jim Prentice had no broad power base, so when they left they took nothing with them. John Baird and Jason Kenney might manage to hurt Harper in some Bizarro-universe revolt, but it is not easy to imagine them rebelling. Their political identity is indistinguishable from the Harper party’s. During the 2000 election, Martin’s associates were laying money bets all over Ottawa against a third Chrétien majority; in 2011, associates of Kenney and Baird were busy securing the first Harper majority. The biggest detonation Harper has suffered came early, before he won power, when Belinda Stronach left the Conservatives for the Liberals in 2005. Nobody went with her. He won the next election against her new friends. It is hard to imagine Peter MacKay, for instance, leaving to launch an outsider challenge to Harper, but even if he did, the scale of the thing could not match what Bouchard did to Mulroney. Of course there is ego in Harper’s insistence that he remain top boss. But not only ego. A party that devours itself is fodder for its enemies; a party that resists the temptation of regicide can hope to replicate the King–St. Laurent–Pearson–Trudeau–Chrétien daisy chain.

  Rivals are not the only enemy of longevity. So are projects. If the sponsorship scandal and Paul Martin’s ambitions were enough to put paid to Jean Chrétien’s career, the two other durable regimes of Harper’s lifetime—Trudeau’s and Mulroney’s—were sapped in the end by the leaders’ dogged pursuit of goals that bore little obvious relation to the preoccupations of most Canadians.

  Amid global economic turmoil, Trudeau’s three-year battle with René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois after 1976 led to his defeat in the 1979 election, although the voters’ hope that less Trudeau would mean less tension in the federation amounted to wishful thinking. On his return in 1980, Trudeau defeated Lévesque in the referendum and set off to repatriate the Constitution. After he succeeded, Trudeau often seemed bored with the routine stuff of government. His globe-trotting 1983–84 peace tour probably sealed many voters’ perception that Trudeau would always find something to do besides routine public administration. Defeat for the Liberals soon followed.

  For six interminable years, from 1987 to 1993, Mulroney devoted much of his time and some of his strongest cabinet ministers to building the Meech Lake consensus for constitutional reform, buttressing it against attack, and then managing the damage from its collapse. Then he did it all again with the Charlottetown Accord. Both attempts were complete failures. The respites he offered from more than half a decade of constitutional obsession were those noteworthy barrels of fun, continental free trade, the introduction of the GST and the Oka crisis.

  Do not take this as a comprehensive attempt to weigh the value of Trudeau’s contribution to public life, or Mulroney’s. Both men accomplished much. Both lasted longer at 24 Sussex Drive than Harper has so far. It would have been odd if Trudeau had ignored Lévesque, or sought no resolution to constitutional negotiations that began before he became prime minister. It would have been odd if Mulroney had not sought a different solution to the same problems, given his Quebec roots and his competitive streak. But both prime ministers burned their parties out by setting aside the routine preoccupations of everyday political life for grander and more diffuse goals. Chrétien avoided that trap, for the most part, by meeting the premiers less frequently, seeking agreement whenever possible before each meeting, keeping the agenda relentlessly on routine economic and social files. And it worked like a charm: on the day Martin rose against him, the Liberals were still healthy in the polls.

  Harper brings a temper and a vengeful streak to office, but he is also awesomely clear-eyed. Because he is temperamentally the most conservative Canadian prime minister of his lifetime, he will not ever run out of ideas for conservative things to do. So on any day he has a choice, he can do the big conservative thing that would be the end of his career, or he can do some of the small conservative things that won’t. He is amazed that earlier leaders had a hard time choosing.

  Of course Harper is often, and plausibly, dismissed as a mere fiddler and mucker-about because of the way he avoids grand battles. “His strong bias is towards arch-incrementalism,” one of his advisors says. “He backs away from ideas which he feels may be controversial. And that creates a lot of frustration.”

  The former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai said in the early 1970s that it was “too early to tell” what the impact of the French Revolution had been. Assessing Harperism will take time too. He has often done his best to present the appearance of drift and indecision. It is worth noting that there are two groups who think he is making some kind of difference: partisans to his left and partisans on the right. Liberals and New Democrats are pretty sure Harper stands for something they don’t like. Their antipathy is mirrored by stubborn support for Harper on the right. Brian Mulroney was, on the face of things, a bolder leader. But Mulroney suffered an exodus of millions of voters from his electoral base. Harper’s smaller base has stayed solid and grown by hairs. A few newspaper columnists who proclaim their nonpartisanship—Dan Gardner in the Ottawa Citizen, Andrew Coyne in the National Post—are always eager to complain he is not sufficiently partisan. But conservatives are pretty sure he is a conservative.

  The best explanation I have seen for Harper’s management style comes not from Canada during his tenure at 24 Sussex Drive, but from the social science literature of a half century ago and a landmark paper written in 1959 by Charles Edward Lindblom, a professor of economics at Yale University. “The Science of ‘Muddling Through’ ” was published in the journal Public Administration Review and quickly became a classic. I had always believed “muddling through” was a pejorative expression political scientists used to designate a lack of political courage. But Lindblom used the notion to subvert the mid-century conventional wisdom about how change happens, or should.

  Lindblom’s work challenged the whole concept of “rational planning,” whereby public servants study problems and come up with the best solutions. To Lindblom the notion was fraught with pitfalls, beginning with the notion that anyone can agree on what the “best” solution would look like.

  His paper begins by taking the rational-planning model seriously, the better to watch it collapse under the weight of its own absurdity. Lindblom invites his readers to imagine an administrator in charge of coming up with a government response to price inflation. One way to begin would be to list all the values he would try to address with his inflation policy—full employment, protecting business profits or individuals’ savings, avoiding a stock market crash, and so on. Then the
administrator would rank desirable values in order of importance. Next, make a list of all the possible outcomes any change in policy could achieve, and decide which outcomes would advance the largest number of the most desirable values. “This would of course require a prodigious inquiry into values held by members of society,” Lindblom wrote, “and an equally prodigious set of calculations on how much of each value is equal to how much of each other value.”

  Only then would our administrator, presumably toiling in a cubicle a few feet from the person in charge of eliminating poverty, list all the possible mechanisms for achieving the outcome that could advance the desired values. These might range from the least interventionist—leaving all prices to the market—to the most interventionist, forcibly nationalizing the means of production. Plus every possible intermediate policy. Can’t leave any possible mechanism out! We are rational planners. We base our policy on evidence, not hunches!

  Then the administrator would compare each policy mechanism against all the others, using commonly accepted models and theories, to predict its efficiency and effectiveness at producing the best outcome to promote the best values. All this with a nervous eye on the clock, because the task would need to be finished before the problem at issue fixed itself. And indeed, before all human life on Earth became extinct.

  Then Lindblom proposes another administrator working in an entirely different manner. This one picks only one goal, based mostly on a best guess about what the best goal should be—in the case of inflation, say, to keep prices level. Our second administrator, if feeling especially ambitious, might throw in one or two secondary goals, such as full employment. Any other goals would be beyond the work of the day. “Were he pressed,” Lindblom wrote, “he would quickly admit that he was ignoring many related values and many possible important consequences of his policies.”

  Step two for our more modest mandarin would be to “outline those relatively few policy alternatives” that came to mind and compare their likely outcomes. “In comparing his limited number of alternatives, most of them familiar from past controversies, he would not ordinarily find a body of theory precise enough to carry him through a comparison of their respective consequences,” Lindblom writes. Instead, he would simply recall what worked in the past in similar circumstances. Time is short, the flesh is weak, and the concoction of a grand matrix for comparing the advantages and costs of all possible decisions must always wait for another day, which never comes. Our second administrator simply picks something and tries it.

  “Because practitioners of the second approach expect to achieve their goals only partially,” Lindblom writes in a sentence that has haunted me since the first time I read it, “they would expect to repeat endlessly the sequence just described, as conditions and aspirations changed and as accuracy of prediction improved.”

  The fragment that leaps off the page for any student of Stephen Harper is, “expect to repeat endlessly.” This is an ideal model for leaders who plan to be around for a while.

  Having listed his two models for solving a policy problem, Lindblom dismisses the first. “For complex problems, the first of these two approaches is of course impossible,” he writes. “It assumes intellectual capacities and sources of information that men simply do not possess, and it is even more absurd as an approach to policy when the time and money that can be allocated to a policy problem is limited, as is always the case.” In fact, he points out that “public agencies are in effect usually instructed not to practice the first method.” No administrator—no mid-level bureaucrat, no elected official—has ever been instructed to take infinite time and unlimited resources to exhaust an examination of all possible combinations of all possible solutions to a problem. It’s always, “Have a paper on my desk by Tuesday.”

  And yet the public administration literature is full of rational-planning models. Quoting the head of the RAND Corporation’s economics division, Lindblom says it might be possible to approximate a rational-planning solution to a traffic problem on the George Washington Bridge in New York. But the likelihood of listing, modelling and ranking the appropriate solutions to a major foreign-policy crisis—during the few hours or days the crisis might last—is close to zero. So, boldly for his time, Lindblom chooses to treat the more modest method, the only possible way of proceeding, as if it were desirable. He calls his muddling-through model more realistic than rational planning. He gives it a more palatable name, the “branch method,” described as “continually building out from the current situation, step-by-step and by small degrees.” The rational-planning model is the “root method,” forever from the ground up.

  To Lindblom the root method is so useless that it falls at the first hurdle. What is the end or goal a policy seeks to achieve? In practice, even that first question can rally no broadly accepted response. “On many critical objectives, citizens disagree, congressmen disagree, and public administrators disagree.” This is the eternal problem with the officious technocrat who barges every now and then into politics, usually from the ranks of corporate management, the academy or the newspaper columns, and demands that “the best people” be gathered to crunch some problem and come up with “the right solution.” Honest people genuinely disagree about who is best and what is right. Constrain cost or expand opportunity? Liberate business or rein in its excesses? Exhort or regulate? Create conditions so that a few may rise or so the many can worry less? Nobody agrees. This is why we have politics. Even if only one person makes the calls, he will not call similar problems in the same way every week. A value of paramount importance this week, in this context, may be less important next week in another.

  There is, simply, no practical way to decide first what is important and then to select the method for achieving it. Acting is choosing. “Except roughly and vaguely, I know of no way to describe—or even to understand—what my relative evaluations are for, say, freedom and security, speed and accuracy in governmental decisions, or low taxes and better schools than to describe my preferences among specific policy choices that might be made between the alternatives in each of the pairs,” Lindblom writes. You decide your values, and demonstrate them, with a succession of choices over time. This is Aristotle: character defined by habitual action. Or as Wynton Marsalis says, “What you do is what you will do.”

  But if all you do is toil away, how do you know you’re doing the right thing? Simple: the “right thing” in the branch method is the policy that draws broad support. The administrator does not seek agreement on the end goal, merely on the next step. This “agreement on the policy itself … remains possible even when agreement on values is not,” Lindblom writes.

  This reasoning would be especially appealing to a government with a weak parliamentary minority, because it corresponds perfectly to the brutal reality of frequent confidence votes. The best policy for Harper was almost always the policy that allowed one of the opposition parties to support it. In the next chapter, we will watch Harper win a majority of seats in the 2011 election, but in fact he had a majority for every confidence motion he took to the Commons for the first five years he was prime minister. If the New Democrats had different reasons for, say, supporting a tax on income trusts than Harper did, he had the luxury of not caring. What mattered was their votes. More broadly, this helps explain how Harper can often command greater public-opinion support for some policies, like directly electing senators, than he enjoys for his government as such.

  “In an important sense, therefore,” Lindblom wrote, “it is not irrational for an administrator to defend a policy as good without being able to specify what it is good for.”

  To idealistic observers who are not comfortable with considering how the world actually works, muddling through is a horrible model. Lindblom’s branch-method administrator selects from among policies that are pretty closely aligned with what is already being done. He ignores most of the possible outcomes of a decision. He relies on repetition to correct for both of these apparent shortcomings. If a policy works out po
orly he stops doing it. If it works but is insufficient, he makes another incremental change that nudges outcomes further along a desirable path.

  The “administrators” Lindblom was addressing were, for the most part, civil servants, but in a second paper published in 1979, twenty years after the first, he gives important hints about why politicians might embrace his method of successive limited comparisons, too. In “Still Muddling, Not Yet Through,” Lindblom presents a more explicitly political case for his branch method: “It reduces the stakes in each political controversy, thus encouraging losers to bear their losses without disrupting the political system.”

  This is politics as boiling a frog: if you raise the temperature a degree at a time the frog won’t notice. The big political upheavals in Canada have often come after leaders sought dramatic, system-wide change—the repatriation of the Constitution, the Meech and Charlottetown debacles. Suddenly potential losers self-identify, organize and put their hearts into the fight. Harper has never wanted any of that. He knows what happens when an opposition gets its act together, because he led an opposition that did that.

  “Moreover,” Lindblom adds, “incrementalism in politics is not, in principle, slow moving.” Just as it’s possible to advocate radical change forever without getting any. Quebec’s sovereignty movement has held two secession referendums in forty-five years and gotten precisely nowhere. In contrast, “Incremental steps can be made quickly because they are only incremental. They do not rock the boat, and do not stir up the great antagonisms and paralyzing schisms as do proposals for more drastic change.”

  For this reason, “incremental politics is also a way of ‘smuggling’ changes into the political system.” Lindblom mentions the rise of big bureaucracy, “a development that sneaked up on most citizens, who never debated the issues and who did not understand at the time that such a transformation was in process.”