The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  This had the advantage of being technically correct while proposing a path of events that had no recent precedent. In a parliamentary system, every important vote a government faces is a test of the members’ confidence in the government. Each of Harper’s six budgets since 2006, for instance, had faced a series of votes that put the confidence of the Commons in play. But Ignatieff was describing an immediate, explicit confidence test of a minority government as the first order of business after an election—certainly if the Liberals won the most seats, and by implication, perhaps if the Conservatives did too. This would actually be something new. Harper had faced no explicit first-order-of-business confidence test after the 2006 election. Neither had Joe Clark after the 1979 election. Defeat came later, after much ordinary business had been transacted by governments whose legitimacy was not questioned by their opponents.

  Guy Giorno had left as Harper’s chief of staff at the end of 2010. Now he was the Conservatives’ campaign chairman. Giorno had been famously taciturn at the PMO, never speaking to reporters about anything the government did. Now he spent his days sending out a surprising number of messages on Twitter. “Ignatieff statement pretty clear he will try to form government even if Harper wins most seats,” Giorno tweeted as soon as the Liberal leader’s statement was out. Actually it was really hard to tell, but Ignatieff’s business about “rapidly seeking confidence” suggested it was at least possible.

  As Harper arrived at Rideau Hall, he had been prime minister for five years and two months. Since his last trip here to dissolve a Parliament, in 2008, he had passed Alexander Mackenzie and Lester Pearson in longevity. During the five-week campaign he would outlast R.B. Bennett to become Canada’s tenth-longest-serving prime minister. To do more he would need another election victory, and by his own measure this time it would need to be a majority. Reporters at Rideau Hall asked Harper whether a coalition challenge to a Conservative plurality was in fact Ignatieff’s plan. You bet it is, Harper said. But reporters wanted to ask him about something else too: a letter Harper, Layton and Gilles Duceppe had sent to the governor general of the day, Adrienne Clarkson, in 2004 after Paul Martin’s Liberal majority had been reduced to a minority.

  “Excellency,” the letter had read in part. “You could be asked by the Prime Minister to dissolve the 38th Parliament at any time should the House of Commons fail to support some part of the government’s program.” If that happened, “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.”

  This was rather transparently the prelude to a coalition play, no? Not at all, Harper said. Neither had he intended to form a coalition nor had he ever formed one. That led Duceppe and Layton to dispute their co-signatory’s version of events. “Harper lied to the people, he agreed with the coalition,” the Bloc leader tweeted.

  For the next three days, every national leader had to face questions about whether they would form a coalition government after the May 2 election. Harper, meanwhile, was asked continually whether he had plotted to form one in 2004.

  This was one of many instances when the reporters who thought they were being toughest on Harper were in fact helping him along. Questions about coalitions were fine with him. Even if they were questions about coalitions in which he might have participated. “The PM has, according to our focus groups, so much source credibility on coalitions—by which I mean Canadians just don’t believe he’s going to form a coalition. They just don’t believe it,” the Conservative war room staffer said. “Regardless of what was happening in 2004, they just don’t believe it. And so our view was that by keeping that in the news, by keeping the word ‘coalitions’ in the news, it was probably still a net positive, even though guys like Terry Milewski and so on were focusing on our coalition, not Ignatieff’s coalition.”

  As a result, the reporters weren’t focusing on the Speaker’s contempt finding and Parliament’s contempt vote. “To the extent that Ignatieff wanted at least the first week of the election to be dominated by coverage of contempt, he failed miserably,” the Conservative staffer said.

  While Harper was visiting the governor general, the Conservatives released their first two campaign ads. One was a stark and characteristically simplistic attempt to frame the “ballot question,” the idea that Conservatives hoped would be in voters’ minds when they were walking into a voting booth. The ad began with an image of an election ballot unfolding to reveal the words of a question. (That’d be your ballot question right there.) “What’s this election all about?” a soothing female voice asked. “It starts with leadership. Stephen Harper has led our country through a global recession with a steady, determined hand … why would we risk changing course?”

  Like many of the Conservatives’ favourites, the second ad in this campaign-opening volley would have seemed, to any self-made connoisseur of the political advertiser’s art, almost unfathomably dumb. “Fact,” said a male voice in a tone of unmistakable disdain. In case anyone had missed that, a single word appeared on the screen: “FACT.” “This election, a vote for the Liberals is a vote for Michael Ignatieff,” the voice said. Words on the screen reinforced this information: “A VOTE FOR THE LIBERALS IS A VOTE FOR MICHAEL IGNATIEFF.” The ad cut to black-and-white footage of Ignatieff (identified in block letters as MICHAEL IGNATIEFF) saying, “Nobody speaks for the Liberal Party of Canada but me.”

  Um, what the hell? As usual, there was a point to all this. “The one thing the internal polling is showing is that across the country, ‘Stephen Harper vs. Michael Ignatieff’ is more advantageous to us than ‘candidate vs. candidate,’ ” the Conservative war room staffer explained. “That is to say, if you do [Fabian] Manning,” a Newfoundland Conservative candidate, “against whoever he’s running against, Manning’s margin is smaller than ‘Stephen Harper vs. Michael Ignatieff’ in Newfoundland. By which I mean that [Harper]#s the guy who wins us. He’s the only reason that we’re talking about winning a majority.”

  Hence the “somewhat imbecilic” Ignatieff’s-a-Liberal ad, this staffer said. “That summarizes our appeal. It is, ‘You may even consider yourself a Liberal, but if you vote Liberal you’re voting for that guy.’ And if Canadians are thinking that, that does more to move votes in our corner than any other question.”

  The Conservative then mentioned a Léger poll that ran in newspapers of the Sun chain at the start of the campaign. It asked which leader Canadians wanted to have a beer with, which one they wanted as a neighbour, and so on. “About the same number of Canadians said they would want their daughter to marry Elizabeth May as would want their daughter to marry Michael Ignatieff.” In both cases the number of polled Canadians in question was about 7 percent.

  The Conservative strategist didn’t mention the most significant numbers in the Léger poll. Ignatieff was down at the bottom with Liz May, but look who led. The leader most likely to look like marrying material for respondents’ daughters was Jack Layton. Their preferred neighbour was Layton. Their favourite hockey coach for their kids was Layton. Respondents wanted to have a beer with Layton and would rather have him as their parent. They did score Harper over Layton as the best-dressed leader, but as for the rest, it was a clean sweep. “Jack Layton is the nice guy. The good guy. The buddy,” Léger vice-president Christian Bourque said.

  What he wasn’t, for now, was the guy voters were flocking to see. “Did you hear about Jack last night?” Peter Donolo asked reporters as Michael Ignatieff’s tour buses rolled down Spadina Avenue in Toronto. “Regina. Birthplace of the NDP. Seventy people in the room.” Donolo shook his head in an approximation of sympathy.

  Few reporters within earshot of Donolo’s voice had heard, and none of them had been present. Reporters who were stuck on the NDP bus were the ones who had drawn the short straw. Most of the veterans from the TV networks and the big print outlets were travelling with Harper or Ignatieff. The emerging story by the end of the campaign�
��s first week was the contrast in the two leaders’ styles.

  Harper had an event every morning at a secluded location in front of a hand-picked crowd. He would re-announce part of his budget and take five questions from reporters. Never six. Every afternoon, somewhere else, he’d attend an invitation-only rally where he would stare at a teleprompter screen and read a tale of woe. He had been hard at work, the tale scrolling across the screen said, when a bunch of losers had ejected him from his workplace. He told a crowd west of Montreal that it was great to be in Quebec. “But this is not where I should be. All members of Parliament should be in Ottawa working on the economy. We should be working to protect our economic advantage.”

  “Yes, Canada is doing relatively well,” he said in St. John’s. “But a sea of troubles is lapping at our shores.” And in this uncertain world, Canada itself was facing more uncertainty. “There won’t be a Conservative minority government after this election,” he told the St. John’s crowd. “There will either be Mr. Ignatieff, put in power by the NDP and the Bloc Québécois, or there will be what Canada needs—a strong, stable, majority Conservative government.”

  Majority or chaos. It was the frame Harper had sought for this election since the polls had spiked in his favour during the 2008 coalition crisis. He had warned the Liberals a hundred times that he would come at them in just this way and still they had no rebuttal ready. But Harper took care to describe his half of the choice in as soothing a manner as possible. “It’s not just any majority,” one of his cabinet ministers said later, “it’s a majority in a box. A strong, stable, national majority.” Stability was key. A vote for the Conservatives was portrayed as a vote against monkey business. Harper had begun rolling out new policy, such as an income-splitting scheme to reduce couples’ tax burden. But he would introduce these policies only after the deficit was eliminated, a few years down the road.

  Ignatieff had great fun mocking Harper’s time-delayed promises. “He’s not going to deliver it until rainwater turns to beer!” But the Conservatives calculated that “later” was precisely when voters felt like seeing governments spend their money.

  The strategy was a refinement of the plan that had won Harper re-election, but not a majority, in 2008. Then, too, he had run as an agent of comfort against radicals. The nature of the radicalism had changed. In 2008, it had been Dion’s Green Shift, which Harper depicted as mad science in the policy lab. In 2011, Ignatieff was not offering any plan as bold. But the three-year-old bungled coalition experiment allowed Harper to depict his opponents—not just Ignatieff, but the lot of them—as a procedural risk. You cannot be sure of a Harper government, he was saying, unless you make sure to vote for Harper Conservatives.

  Meanwhile, he took care to eliminate a potential irritant, just as he had done in each previous election. In 2000, conservatives had lost because their movement was split into two parties; by 2004 Harper had united the parties. In 2004, they had lost because a few yahoos had said ridiculous things; by 2006 Harper had imposed rigorous message discipline. In 2006, it was too easy to doubt he loved his country; in the 2008 campaign, he ran around hugging farmers and pulling the Canadian Shield out of his back pocket.

  In 2008, his own big mouth had handed his opponents an excellent buying opportunity. So in 2011, he would keep it shut as much as he could without making his reticence a story. There would be no chatty-Cathy fake breakfasts with the scribes this campaign. And, as I’ve already mentioned, there would be precisely five questions a day at news conferences. Not six, five. Four from the travelling press, one from a local reporter.

  This advice came from Jenni Byrne. She was Harper’s campaign manager in this election, a more direct operational role than Giorno’s as campaign chair. She believed that when Harper lost control of his message it usually happened in one of two ways. Sometimes the boss became “Angry Stephen,” getting way too hot for his own good. Sometimes he became “Professor Stephen,” wandering off into theoretical discussions that left him saying something much more interesting than what he meant to say. Interesting clips turned up on the television news. They obliterated message discipline. The longer Harper talked, the more likely Angry Stephen and Professor Stephen were to show up. According to lore around the Conservative war room, Harper’s 2008 mention of “excellent buying opportunities” amid global banking turmoil came in response to a seventh question. So now he stopped at five.

  But you could ask Ignatieff whatever you liked. The Liberal leader did have a few choreographed message events. At one, on March 29 at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, he gave a detailed presentation of his plan to make university tuition more affordable. It was a neater package, more modest and better presented, than Dion’s equivalent event three years earlier. But it was at the evening rallies that Ignatieff really blossomed. When he turned a couple of the rallies into town-hall events where anyone could ask him about anything, he was hooked.

  He had rehearsed the town-hall format throughout his 2010 tours under that catchy name, “Open Mike.” Unfortunately, openness came with a risk. Or rather, a certainty: each time Ignatieff took a dozen questions on as many topics, it was impossible to know which clip would show up on the evening news. The freewheeling energy of the events was lost on most voters, who saw none of it. But Ignatieff’s improvisational skill was intoxicating to everyone on the Liberal bus. Here again, the Liberals had a problem they didn’t even notice. Ignatieff had most of his best thinkers travelling with him, including Donolo. Harper had most of his campaign brass—Byrne, Giorno, Muttart, Nigel Wright—on the ground. The leader’s tour is still the most important part of a national campaign, but it’s not the whole campaign. That nuance got lost around the open mike.

  When the travelling Liberal campaign staff collapsed at the hotel each night and turned on the TV, they were bemused by what they saw. None of the Open Mike energy was making it onto the news. The travelling reporters, relaxing down in the hotel bar, were telling one another that this was a fresh, energized Michael Ignatieff. But on the first Thursday night CBC-TV “At Issue” panel of the campaign, the pundits, who like almost everyone else in Canada were not travelling with the Liberal leader, said not a word about Open Mike. To them there was no such thing.

  Ignatieff had a chance to improve his campaign’s focus on April 3, two weeks into the campaign, with the release in Ottawa of the Liberal party’s electoral platform. This event played to several strengths of the current Liberal team. Ignatieff spoke off the cuff, and well. The event was webcast on the Internet (the party said nearly ten thousand people watched), so it felt modern. The platform’s themes and the event’s tone were consistent with discussions during Ignatieff’s April 2010 thinkers’ conference in Montreal, so for once the Liberals looked like a party with consistent ideas and some follow-through.

  The centrepiece of the platform was a “Family Pack,” designed to pitch the Liberals as a party of modest, pragmatic activism. Five interrelated policies: $1 billion for tuition assistance; $400 million to improve the Guaranteed Income Supplement; $400 million for a green home-renovation tax credit; $1 billion in benefits for people who stay home to care for family members; and $500 million a year for new child care spaces.

  The platform was an effort to re-establish the party as a champion of working families. To the extent that it offered the Liberals as an answer to ordinary people’s real-life preoccupations, it helped position Ignatieff as an alternative to what he called Harper’s obsession with “jets, jails and corporate tax cuts.” If the Liberals had stayed steadily on that theme since December they would have been in better shape now. But if they could at least stay steadily on that theme through April, all would not be lost.

  They could not stay steadily on that theme, or any theme. On the very day Ignatieff released his platform, the Canadian Press revealed that Bruce Carson had been convicted of fraud five times before he became a senior advisor in Harper’s PMO. That was three more than the number of convictions Harper claimed to know about before
he hired Carson anyway. Given a choice between discussing home retrofit tax credits and Bruce Carson’s criminal record, Ignatieff much preferred the latter.

  Meanwhile, the crowd control around Harper’s campaign events started to backfire. A steady trickle of headlines revealed that ordinary Canadians were being turned away from Harper events. In one case, a young woman was apparently rejected because the RCMP had found a picture on her Facebook page that showed her standing with Ignatieff. Ignatieff started devoting the first several minutes of his town-hall events to welcoming all visitors from any party. “It’s called democracy,” he would say. In Toronto, Liberal adman Bob Richardson produced an online-only ad on a day’s notice: shots of a computer screen as somebody inspected, and then rejected, some innocent’s Facebook page. The “Hey Stephen Harper, Stop Creeping Me on Facebook” ad passed 100,000 views on YouTube within days.

  Privately, these attacks drew mixed reactions from bemused Conservatives. After a few days of the ejections-from-rallies stories, Harper’s staff decided to be contrite. Giorno and Byrne found most of the complaints from the travelling press to be self-serving and not worth worrying about. But ordinary people were a different matter. “When Terry Milewski is asking, ‘Why aren’t you letting me ask another question?’ we kind of like laugh at it,” the Conservative war room staffer said. “When Terry Milewski’s asking, ‘Why are you kicking people out of your rallies?’ we’re like, ‘This is not good. This needs to be fixed.’ ” After three days, Harper apologized for the excesses of his event organizers.