The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  “What a great night!” Harper said. “Quelle belle soirée!” A pause to bask in the applause. “Friends, I have to say it: ‘A strong, stable, national, majority Conservative government.’ ”

  He thanked the voters of Calgary Southwest for returning him—and “for giving me the honour of following in the footsteps of Preston Manning,” a bit of family detail that has been true since Harper first ran in this riding in 2002, but which he had not mentioned in front of a national audience before this night. He spoke of his love for his children, Ben and Rachel, and for Laureen. He thanked the voters, who “chose hope, unity of purpose and a strong Canada.”

  As is always the case in victory speeches, there was a measure of claptrap in this one. Six voters in ten had not voted for his party. So much for unity of purpose. Those who voted against the Conservatives were so desperate for a sturdy alternative that more than a million of them had abandoned the Liberals and Bloc for a bicyclists’ party led by a former city councillor with a bum hip. They too had voted for a strong Canada. They disagreed with Harper, in almost every particular, over what would make Canada strong.

  Every election comes down to a choice between “change” and “more of the same.” But in a parliamentary system we get to have both. Those Canadians who wanted stability had it. Only seven incumbent Conservatives were defeated in this election, compared with eighty-two incumbents from other parties. The Conservative vote had grown again, by about 600,000 votes, but most of the voters who supported one of Harper’s candidates were doing so for the fourth time. Harper vexed his detractors as few prime ministers ever had, but he satisfied his supporters. He was becoming what he had hoped conservatism could become in this country: a habit.

  Those voters who rejected Harper’s brand of stability showed their preference for risk by taking a big one. For twenty years, the largest (or, in 2000, second-largest) segment of Quebec’s voting population had chosen to abstain from real engagement in federal politics by supporting the Bloc. On May 2, 2011, they tried something different. Layton became the first anglophone leader of a national party to win in Quebec when a party led by a francophone was also on offer. Fifty-seven percent of his caucus now came from Quebec. But 64 percent of the NDP’s popular vote came from outside Quebec. Layton had MPs from eight provinces. Even in Saskatchewan, where a trick of the electoral system locked him out, his party won nearly a third of the vote. He was a truly national opposition leader, facing a truly national prime minister. In a sense it was not wrong of Harper to say the voters “chose hope.” They simply disagreed about what constituted hope.

  “Because Canadians chose hope, we can now begin to come together again,” Harper said on election night. “For our part, we are intensely aware that we are, and we must be, the government of all Canadians, including those who did not vote for us.” What on earth could that mean? “All those lessons of the past few years—holding to our principles, but also of listening, of caring, of adapting—those lessons that have come with a minority government, we must continue to practise as a majority government.”

  Within weeks Harper would use his majority to pass the budget that had precipitated this election. That budget listed, but gave no detail on, more than $2 billion in cuts to government spending. Fully two years later, the Parliamentary Budget Officer would still be in court trying to decipher those cuts to public services for Canadians paid with Canadians’ tax dollars. The two drafts of Sheila Fraser’s G-8 audit that leaked during the campaign were not the final draft. Soon a final draft would be public. The daily grind would continue. But it was not grinding Stephen Harper down. On his fourth try, he had won his biggest victory. Layton had secured a historic breakthrough for his own party. Then there was Ignatieff.

  In 1984, in The Needs of Strangers, Ignatieff had written, with the innocence of a man who does not anticipate the tests life exacts, about what motivated him. “If you ask me what my needs are,” he wrote, “I will tell you that I need the chance to understand and be understood, to love and be loved, to forgive and be forgiven, and the chance to create something which will outlast my life, and the chance to belong to a society whose purposes and commitments I share.”

  Ignatieff had held up well as the first election returns came in. But when the results arrived in his own riding, Etobicoke-Lakeshore, and showed that he had lost to a Conservative management consultant named Bernard Trottier, Ignatieff’s whole body shook. Under him, the Liberals had won the lowest share of the popular vote in the party’s history. Now this personal humiliation. The next day he would announce his resignation from his party’s leadership.

  TEN

  CAN’T STOP WON’T STOP

  On June 3, 2011, everybody in Ottawa with a fancy title and a dry-cleaning budget crowded into the Senate to hear the new governor general, David Johnston, read the Speech from the Throne. There is a protocol to these things. The GG gets the first page or so to wax poetic about what a wonderful country this is. Then he reads several pages of drearier stuff provided by the PMO, vaguely sketching government priorities for the coming parliamentary session. Once you know the routine, it is fairly easy to spot the joint between the vice-regal prose and the business of government.

  “Each of us can answer the call to service in our own way and, together, continue this bold experiment that we call Canada,” Johnston read, and it really was Johnston speaking. “Canadians have expressed their desire for a strong, stable national government in this new Parliament,” he said next, transforming into a ventriloquist’s puppet. Truly the constitutional monarchy is a wondrous thing.

  What was not part of the script was the grim-faced and pigtailed twenty-one-year-old woman who strode to the middle of the Senate’s red-carpeted centre aisle and held up a red cardboard stop sign with the words STOP HARPER! carefully written on it in white. Brigette DePape, a University of Ottawa graduate who had been working in the Senate as a page, was promptly hustled out of the Red Chamber by security, but she had a news release ready for distribution to the press gallery. “Harper’s agenda is disastrous for this country and for my generation,” she had written. “We have to stop him from wasting billions on fighter jets, military bases, and corporate tax cuts while cutting social programs and destroying the climate.”

  DePape’s career as a part-time defender of the nation’s honour was launched. Unfortunately, if she really had wanted to STOP HARPER, her timing was lousy. His party had, as a matter of some public notoriety, just won a majority of seats in the less elegant green-carpeted House of Commons down the hall. It had been hard enough to STOP HARPER when his elected opponents had him and his colleagues outnumbered. As a matter of simple arithmetic, it would now be impossible. “Those who now see the NDP as the wave of the future, inevitably seizing the commanding heights of the nation’s polity, should look again,” Conrad Black wrote from his Florida prison cell for the National Post. “Harper is safer than Chrétien was in the days of four sizable opposition parties.”

  Indeed, as Chantal Hébert wrote in the Star, an NDP opposition leader “may in fact wield even less influence than most of those who have held the same position in past majority Parliaments.” That’s because all the unelected networks of power that had vexed Harper his whole adult life—Senate, courts and bureaucracy—had been built and staffed by Liberals. Harper was slowly changing each of those organizations with new appointments, transforming them from Liberal-appointed bastions to Conservative-appointed bastions. At no point in between had they ever been NDP-appointed bastions.

  What could possibly stop this man from imposing his will on the people of Canada? Perhaps only a strong sense of what had got him this far. In Calgary the morning after his election victory he held a news conference. A reporter asked Harper how he would reassure people who had feared a Conservative majority. He had been expecting the question. “One of the things I’ve learned is that surprises are not generally well received by the public,” he replied. It was a clear reference to the aftermath of the 2008 election, when h
e had sprung the party-financing changes without having campaigned for them. He had paid dearly for that, and learned a lesson. “So, we intend to move forward with what Canadians understand about us, and I think with what they are more and more comfortable with.”

  Maintaining the public’s trust was essential. “It’s what every government needs to realize. You know it well when you’re a minority government,” he said. “You face a sense of hanging every day. But even as a majority you have to, on an ongoing basis, keep the trust of the population. And that’s what we will be committed to doing—not only where we won but in areas where we didn’t win. Trying to gain more trust.”

  He meant it as he said it, and the argument was the fruit of long reflection. His opponents had always claimed that the more power Canadians gave Harper, the further he would stray from Canadian values. He had grown the Conservative vote by proving the prediction wrong—not to the people who had never voted Conservative and would never consider it, of course, not to them; but to a broad-enough coalition of other voters.

  Now with a majority, he needed to be more of an incrementalist, not less, because the likelihood of any grand plan being read as proof of some hidden agenda was higher than ever before. He would recall Parliament to pass exactly the same budget he had failed to pass in March, confirming his campaign argument that all he had ever intended to do was to proceed with the nation’s business, unhindered by confidence votes and forced elections. In the months ahead, Harper would make ostentatious peace offerings to parts of the country where Conservatives had done poorly. At the beginning of September 2011, in the most visible example, he would travel to Quebec’s Assemblée nationale to give the province $2.2 billion. Successive Quebec governments had argued for fourteen years that Ottawa owed the province that much after Quebec harmonized its provincial sales tax with the Goods and Services Tax. The federal finance department had always rejected the claim, since Quebec’s harmonization had been incomplete and its losses had been smaller than those of other provinces that had more consistently aligned their sales-tax systems with Ottawa’s. Harper ignored the argument and offered compensation; even after Quebec returned half as many Conservative MPs in 2011 as it had in 2008, he followed through.

  But at the same post-victory news conference in which he laid out an agenda that sounded as though it would be modest on most days and generous on some, he revealed another enduring characteristic: a suspicion that when other parties disagreed with his own, it was because they didn’t like his party’s geographic and emotional heartland. Now that the election returns were in, he said, “I think Western Canada can breathe a lot easier. There were a lot of policies being floated by the other parties—whether it’s on west coast transportation or the energy sector—that simply did not reflect the needs and concerns of this part of the country.” He didn’t specify. In Calgary he hardly needed to. The opposition parties had united to support an NDP motion calling for a ban on tanker ships off the British Columbia coast. Ignatieff and Layton had both advocated cap-and-trade schemes to limit carbon emissions. As recently as 2009, Harper’s ministers had once advocated the same thing, but those days were forgotten now, at least by Harper. “I actually agreed during the campaign that the economic policies of our opponents were actually quite dangerous for the country as a whole. Obviously some specific policies seem to be almost targeted to do damage in Western Canada. I think it’s a great thing that those policies won’t be coming to fruition in the West.”

  Taken together, Harper’s statements the morning after the 2011 election foreshadowed much of his third mandate, the most consequential to date. He would advance steadily and, as far as possible, with no sudden moves. But his instincts, including a deep suspicion of anyone who challenged the resource-producing base of Alberta power, would often get in the way.

  Two weeks after the election, Harper named a new cabinet much like the old one. John Baird replaced the defeated Lawrence Cannon as foreign minister. Tony Clement moved from Industry to Treasury Board, where he would have a substantial say in spending cuts. The new-old cabinet was “fundamentally about stability and continuity,” Harper said.

  At the beginning of June, Parliament met, watched bemused as Brigette DePape was hustled out of the Throne Speech, passed the familiar budget, and sat for a little longer than expected when the NDP filibustered back-to-work legislation for striking Canada Post workers. The Conservatives were amazed that Layton would hold up Parliament, for more than fifty hours non-stop, over something as unfashionable as union rights. But Layton had learned from Harper: as the NDP continued to work toward the centre, he wanted to make sure his party’s traditional base did not feel left out. As a bonus, the NDP caucus, with dozens of rookie MPs, had the opportunity to camp out for a few days in the opposition lobbies and bond. Finally the legislation passed, the postal lockout ended, and everyone went home for the summer.

  Two unusual things happened. On the Conservative side, for the first time anyone could remember, everyone took a vacation. Cabinet ministers scattered to the winds. The PMO staff went home to their families. “From 2004 on, we were never sure whether we’d be in an election from one month to the next,” one member of the government said. “That went on for years. The PM would schedule meetings over the Christmas holidays, just to make sure nobody let their guard down. Suddenly we were in, and we were safe for a while. It was time for a break.” Hard thinking about the deeper meaning of this mandate could wait. By autumn, two cabinet ministers, Peter MacKay and James Moore, were engaged to be married. Not to each other.

  The summer’s other surprise was bigger. Jack Layton died. It was almost that sudden. Everyone knew he’d been ill. But he had been such a force on the campaign trail, despite the cane he used after hip surgery. The election had been such a triumph. And then it was over so quickly. On June 15 he’d invited the news cameras to Stornoway, where a National Capital Commission guy in chinos and a blue polo shirt handed him the keys to the place. “History,” Layton said for the cameras. Two weeks later he and his wife, Olivia Chow, threw a garden party for reporters. There were nice crab sandwiches. On July 3, after the House rose for the summer, he and Chow rode a rickshaw in Toronto’s Pride parade. He used to walk the length of the parade route, but those days were gone.

  Then, on July 25, he gave that news conference, gaunt and hoarse under the TV lights, announcing he would step aside from the leadership to fight “a new form of cancer.” On August 22 he was dead. So much in politics is contrived drama and fake emotion. Then something like this happens.

  Harper and Layton had chatted on the floor of the House during the postal-worker filibuster. “I don’t mind telling you that I could see at that point that he was a much sicker man than he had been before the election,” Harper told reporters the day after Layton died. “But even at that moment, with the big personal challenge he had in front of him and with the big political battle we had going on between us, he was just still full of optimism and goodwill. And that’s what I will remember.”

  Two days before he died, Layton huddled with his family and close associates to write a public farewell letter. “Canada is a great country, one of the hopes of the world,” he wrote. “We can be a better one … because we finally have a party system at the national level where there are real choices; where your vote matters; where working for change can actually bring about change.” The letter ended with an exhortation that would become famous. “So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”

  It’s possible to overstate the significance of the contrast between the tone of Layton’s farewell letter and the tone Harper tried to set as he settled at last into the luxury of confidence in power. The comparison was hardly fair, for one thing. Layton was leaving the cares of the world, cares that would still be with Harper for years to come. But Harper would struggle, through the summer and well beyond, to find a discourse that matched his government’s new situation.

  Once the shock and genuine grief cause
d by Layton’s death began to fade, the strangeness of Harper’s position would begin to sink in. Duceppe and Ignatieff had lost their seats in the election. Now Layton was dead. Of the leaders who had shown up for the televised debates in April, only Harper still led his party. Leaderless and outnumbered even in the aggregate, his foes could do him no harm. But the situation was less novel than it appeared, and less safe. Except during the near coup of December 2008, his foes had never come close to harming him as much as he could harm himself. Given more of the playing field than he had ever enjoyed before, Harper would soon increase his rate of goal scoring. Some of the loveliest shots would be on his own net.

  From the outset, simply finding an appropriate tone was a challenge. “Friends, remember we are not here to do politics,” he said in July at a Conservative Calgary Stampede breakfast. “Sure, we do politics. But that’s the instrument—it’s not the music. Our party is called to a great purpose. Our mission is to preserve and promote the future of our great nation and its people in a time of extraordinary, global change.” New forces were rising in the world, he said. “Some we will be pleased to work with. Some we must resist.” In a way he was echoing his Civitas speech, more than a decade earlier, in which he had argued that conservatism had been the West’s staunchest defender against evil and decadence for centuries.

  But then came this odd bit, which he’d first uttered a few weeks earlier in Ottawa. “In a few short years, we will celebrate the 150th anniversary of our united country. If, in fifty more years, we wish our descendants to celebrate Canada’s 200th anniversary, then we must be all we can be in the world today, and we must shoulder a bigger load, in a world that will require it of us.”

  What was with the “if”? Why was a freshly re-elected prime minister calling the country’s long-term survival into question? It’s possible he meant nothing at all; after I wrote about that line on my blog, Harper stopped using it in his speeches. But at a minimum it suggested Harper was not immune to a common fallacy among the country’s national leaders: the tendency to believe the country will fall apart if not handled properly—that is, by the person worrying about the falling apart. In 2010 the Conservatives had, properly, mocked Ignatieff for framing just about every issue as a national-unity issue. Now Harper was ringing the same bells. Sometimes it seems the best guarantee of the nation’s survival is the hope that someone will protect it from the careful attention of its leaders.