The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  “I guess we can start talking about Reform Party policies,” Mulcair replied.

  It was turning into a lousy week.

  A few different things were going on here. Harper’s minister for helping the world’s poor was paying as much for orange juice as the median Afghan earned in two weeks. The crazy opposition kept refusing to act crazy; their stubborn sanity was driving Harper crazy. To top it all off, Harper faced mounting trouble from a most unfamiliar quarter: the Conservative MPs sitting around and behind him.

  Stephen Woodworth was the cheerful Conservative MP for Kitchener Centre, a lifelong resident of that Ontario city who had first been elected in 2008. He had a motion before the House calling for a special committee of Parliament to study section 223(1) of the Criminal Code, which defines when a human being becomes a human being for the purpose of criminal law. The answer: “when it has completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother.” Woodworth was pretty clearly picking a fight over the notion that a child is not a human being before it is born. Which was almost the same as saying he wanted Parliament to examine the ethics of abortion.

  But Harper had said a hundred times that he didn’t want to reopen the abortion debate. “As long as I’m prime minister,” he’d said, “we are not reopening the abortion debate.” For him the question was nearly life-or-death for the Conservatives: every other party campaigned, every time, on accusations that the Conservatives would take away a woman’s right to choose. Harper was damned if he would ever give them a chance to claim they were right. Social conservatives would have to be content with the government’s tax benefits for parents, or its tough-on-crime policy, or its strong support for Israel’s Likud government. There were plenty of side doors into social conservatism. Harper kept the front door barred tight. So Woodworth was careful not to say his motion was about abortion. “Don’t accept any law that says some human beings are not human beings!” he’d said when he tabled it in February. “It does not matter what result you’re trying to achieve with such a misrepresentation or whose philosophy supports such a misrepresentation. History is littered with disastrous examples of laws which pretended some people were not human beings to achieve some desired result or suit someone’s philosophy.”

  Private members’ motions are among the lowest priorities in the Commons. Few survive for long; most of the rest pop up at random intervals over months or years, debated for an hour in spring and another in autumn. By the luck of things, Woodworth’s motion came up for debate on Thursday, April 26, the fourth day of the week that had seen Bev Oda on every front page and Harper calling the NDP a bastion of support for Hitler. Harper had had plenty of trouble this week without letting his God squad hand the salivating opposition a stick to beat the party with at the next election. He sent his chief government whip, Gordon O’Connor, to shut this Woodworth sideshow down but good.

  “The ultimate intention of this motion is to restrict abortions in Canada at some fetal development stage,” O’Connor said in the House during debate, stripping away Woodworth’s fig leaf. “I cannot understand why those who are adamantly opposed to abortion want to impose their beliefs on others by way of the Criminal Code. There is no law that says that a woman must have an abortion. No one is forcing those who oppose abortion to have one.” Not only had Harper stated repeatedly that he would oppose any attempt to regulate abortion, O’Connor continued, but “society has moved on and I do not believe this proposal should proceed.”

  This was the clearest possible message to anti-abortion Conservatives. They were flat out of luck with this prime minister. MPs who wanted to do anything that had even a whiff of pro-life sentiment to it could abandon any hope of getting it past Harper. They had been waiting for a majority. Now he had sent his chief caucus enforcer to tell them they could wait a lot longer than that. Until the hell in which many of them sincerely believed froze over, say.

  “In the beginning when you’re the new prime minister and everybody is just anxious to get into cabinet … you can bully your backbench,” a member of Harper’s government told me at about the time O’Connor blocked Woodworth’s motion. “And now of course, six and a half years in, the backbench is starting to rise up.”

  In a minority, fresh after the 2006 election, Conservatives were willing to be flexible on ideology because they just wanted to survive in government. After the 2008 election and the coalition near-death experience, Conservatives were willing to be flexible on ideology because they just wanted to survive in government. But now they had a majority—had had one for nearly a year—and Harper’s big oil-to-China play looked like it was going bust, and his caucus members were getting mighty antsy.

  If the external situation had enforced discipline until now, a powerful internal incentive to maintain ranks had been Harper’s own performance at the weekly Wednesday morning meeting of the Conservative caucus in the Reading Room of Parliament’s Centre Block. There might be a lot of people in Canada who felt that Stephen Harper didn’t listen to them, but Conservative MPs and senators had been given a weekly chance to feel that they had Harper’s ear.

  “The structure of our national caucus meeting,” the government member told me, “is: we get in the room at 9:30, call to order, sing ‘O Canada,’ there’s a run-down of the agenda and the first person to speak is the prime minister. He talks about what’s in the news. Where he’s been over the past week. Gives his assessment of things. Gives kudos to MPs: those who have done good things, those who have done unique things that people don’t know about but maybe you should. He also strokes egos of people who need their egos stroked.” After a few other reports from senior caucus officers, there are questions from the floor. MPs and senators line up at two microphones. “Probably in a given caucus meeting, twenty or twenty-five MPs will go to the mikes and they’ll talk about everything. From John Weston saying, ‘Oh, don’t forget, everybody, we gotta get exercise,’ to somebody coming to the microphone and saying, ‘We really need to do something about the amount of debt that the CMHC has,’ to some substantive questions.

  “Sometimes people just come to the microphone and rail. And he always pays attention. He always looks people in the eye. He’s always taking notes. He doesn’t engage right away. He lets people come to the microphone and vent and speak and vent and speak. That usually lasts a good solid half an hour. And then at the end he comments on everything that’s been said. He cherry-picks: he doesn’t comment on every comment. I don’t know that he’s thought about it to this extent, but he for sure picks his battles. Over the sweep of our government, there’s certain issues that frequently get raised at the microphone that he just doesn’t touch. Official languages or some sensitive subject, abortion or what have you, he just doesn’t touch.”

  There is something extraordinarily intimate about these meetings, because often the only person in the room who isn’t an elected MP or an appointed senator is Harper’s chief of staff. Ian Brodie in the early days, Guy Giorno later, Nigel Wright after that. Sometimes the director of communications would also be in the room. But nobody else. Just the happy few, the band of brothers and sisters. One constant throughout Harper’s time as a party leader, from 2002 right through to 2013, was the admiration—genuine, as far as I can tell, from dozens of conversations with members of the Conservative caucus—for Harper’s confident dominance of the weekly caucus meeting.

  The election of a majority in 2011 could have given ordinary Conservative members good reason to become even more marginalized: there were forty-two more Conservative MPs after the 2011 election than there had been after the 2006 election, and Harper didn’t need all of their votes to stay in power. That would tend to make some backbenchers lonely and moody, even a little chippy in public. So would the fact that, the longer Harper was prime minister, the greater the number of Conservative MPs who met the six-year qualifying term for their MP pensions. “Once you qualify for the pension, all of a sudden you get a little more cocky about things,” the government member said. One
final ingredient in a potential cocktail of alienation: after enough years in government, an ordinary MP starts to realize he will never get into cabinet no matter how clean he keeps his nose.

  So, some time before the 2011 election, Harper set up caucus advisory committees for every minister. A minister who wanted to propose a bill on any subject or who wanted the government to take a position on an opposition Private Member’s Bill had to get the approval of his caucus advisory committee. Each committee met once a month, chaired by the minister’s parliamentary secretary. A minister bringing an MC—a Memo to Cabinet proposing a new bill—to the cabinet’s Priorities and Planning or Ops committee had to include mention that the bill had been endorsed by his caucus advisory committee. No committee support, no dice. Harper was not shy about sending ministers back to get caucus support they hadn’t bothered to get. Bernard Valcourt, the Mulroney-era veteran who was back in cabinet after twenty years, was floored by the clout Harper had granted ordinary MPs. In the old days, Valcourt told colleagues, Mulroney would simply tell caucus what the proper government had decided on their behalf.

  That was the good news, as far as empowering the caucus went. The bad news was that a caucus advisory committee was still barely a half a dozen MPs out of a caucus of 166 MPs and 50 senators. By the nature of things it couldn’t be fully representative, so a minister could still get blindsided by reactions from part of the country to something his committee thought would be fine. It still left the great majority of the caucus unconsulted on any given question. Finally, it was simply a veto mechanism—a way to stop things from happening instead of making things happen. Harper had promised major transformations. His own caucus wondered what those might be. And the only formal new tool they had was to block, not to build. “The role of the caucus, of reaching out to the caucus—there is a growing gap there in our party right now,” the government member said. “And that’s why you’re seeing Private Members’ Bills on abortion, like Stephen Woodworth’s and a few other people’s. Idle hands—with pensions, and the assumption that they’re going to get re-elected. Deadly combo.”

  It was a curious moment for Harper, and indeed for the entire Canadian conservative movement. They had spent a decade in opposition, divided against one another. Under Harper they had found a measure of unity, then growing confidence, and now, at last, a majority. And it was starting to be no fun at all.

  Harper’s attempt to come up with a sweeping agenda for change was sputtering. Making deals with China wasn’t easier than making deals in the United States. The courts were picking off some of the Conservatives’ most cherished objectives. In October 2011 the Supreme Court had thrown out the Harper government’s attempt to shut down Vancouver’s Insite supervised-injection site for narcotic drug users. Two months later Jim Flaherty’s project for a national securities regulator that would simplify Canadian money markets was also blocked by the top court. In a series of lower-court decisions through 2012 and 2013, judges simply ignored the minimum sentences set by new federal legislation, using words such as “outrageous,” “cruel” and “intolerable” to describe them. But there remained one element of Harper’s agenda that he could still implement.

  At the beginning of 2001, in the bitter aftermath of the disjointed conservative movement’s third straight defeat by Jean Chrétien’s Liberals, Harper, Tom Flanagan and four others had sent the so-called Firewall Letter to Alberta premier Ralph Klein. Recall what that letter’s sentence on firewalls actually said: “It is imperative to take the initiative, to build firewalls around Alberta, to limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach upon legitimate provincial jurisdiction.”

  But there are ways and ways to limit an aggressive federal government’s encroachments. You can build a firewall against Ottawa—or you can declaw the federal government. As we saw in chapter 3, Harper set out early to do the latter. The GST cut substantially reduced the federal government’s revenues by an annually recurring $12 billion or so, according to Université Laval economist Stephen Gordon. The decision to continue Paul Martin’s health-care transfer agreement with the provinces, which ran through 2014, ensured that a growing stream of money was leaving Ottawa. Martin had made those transfers heavily conditional on the provinces cooperating closely with the federal government and one another, reporting results regularly, and jumping through other accountability hoops. Harper cut all those threads. By Harper’s third term in office, the health transfers had been free windfalls for the provinces for years.

  Next came the Canada First Defence Strategy, announced in 2008 as a plan to increase defence spending from $18 billion in 2008/09 to more than $30 billion in 2027/28. By 2010, as Harper began to rein in stimulus spending and get deficits under control, he trimmed future defence allocations substantially. His early enthusiasm for a heavily militarized Canada had taken a bit of a beating in the sands of Afghanistan. But the general goal of increasing military budgets remained, and every dollar earmarked for armies was one that could not be used to encroach on provincial jurisdictions.

  Jails were yet another boom industry under the Conservatives. According to a 2011 report from Correctional Services Canada, the cost of the federal penitentiaries system was on track to grow from $1.6 billion in 2005/06 to $3.1 billion in 2013/14.

  Harper sent Jim Flaherty to Victoria for a meeting with provincial finance ministers a week before Christmas 2011, to lock in the next step in this long-term strategy. Everyone knew Martin’s ten-year agreement on health funding would wrap up in 2014. At some point, what would surely be arduous negotiations over the structure of the transfers after 2014 would have to begin. If previous haggling over transfer payments was any indication, the negotiations could take many months, open up rifts among governments, and generally be a headache for everyone concerned.

  Harper decided to skip all that.

  The provincial finance ministers in Victoria had expected only to receive a general update on the economy from Flaherty. But the finance minister arrived at a working lunch with his provincial counterparts to tell them the negotiations were already over, quite literally before they could begin. He handed out copies of a funding formula to them all. Graham Steele, Nova Scotia’s finance minister, asked Flaherty what the process would be from now on, according to one news report. There’s no process, Flaherty replied. Here’s your funding formula. Good luck with it.

  Well, they howled about that for months in the provincial capitals. No negotiation. No offer and counter-offer. It wasn’t even a take-it-or-leave-it proposal; it was just, “Here it comes.” And what was most galling of all was that Flaherty’s plan called for growth in federal transfers to the provinces to decline once the Martin deal ran out.

  Flaherty’s offer was this: The 6 percent annual increase in the Canada Health Transfer and 3 percent annual increase in the Canada Social Transfer, mandated in the Martin deal, would continue for three more years, until the 2016/17 fiscal year. But after that, until at least 2024, increases in the CHT would be tied to economic growth, while the CST would continue at 3 percent. In a period of ordinary growth, that translated into maybe 4 or 5 percent growth in the total transfer envelope per year. In no case would annual transfer growth fall below 3 percent before 2024.

  The contrast of this approach with the history of federal transfers was striking. As the Mulroney and Chrétien governments wrestled with deficits, the cash component of federal transfers for health and social programs was cut in every single year from 1988 to 1995. Chrétien had returned to transfer growth in 1997, Martin had locked the growth in, and Harper was ensuring it would continue through 2024, by far the longest period of growth in federal transfers to the provinces in the period after the Second World War.

  The contrast with Harper’s plans for other federal spending, net of transfers, was perhaps even more striking. While health transfers would continue growing, total federal spending was projected to decline. There wasn’t a cabinet minister or federal department in Ottawa who could
look forward to the steadily growing fiscal pie Flaherty had given to the provinces. What’s more, the transfers were blank cheques. Martin and Chrétien had convened all those Ottawa first ministers’ meetings on health care because they were demanding a lot in return for their money: public accountability, new national programs, a shared health information network and more. Harper and Flaherty made no such demand. There was not a syllable in Flaherty’s papers about provincial health reforms in return for federal money. If the provinces wanted to spend the new money on Frisbees, Harper and Flaherty would not stop them.

  What was the net effect of all these changes? When the Conservatives were elected in 2006, total federal government revenues amounted to about 16.2 percent of Canada’s GDP. That was low-ish by recent historical standards, thanks largely to the substantial income-tax cuts Chrétien implemented to win the 2000 election. Harper cut taxes again, to under 14.5 percent of GDP, where, as I write this in mid-2013, they are projected to remain until 2018. This is the lowest federal revenue as a fraction of the total economy in Stephen Harper’s lifetime. Spending has had a more dramatic time of it, because Harper and Flaherty injected billions in infrastructure stimulus after the 2008–09 recession. But they were diligent about winding that spending down after 2010. So from a peak of 14.5 percent of GDP in 2009/10, total program spending is projected to fall to 12.5 percent in 2017/18. It has been this low only once before in Harper’s lifetime, again when Chrétien cut spending to afford the 2000 tax cuts.

  But that’s total spending, and it includes three main envelopes: transfers to persons, such as employment insurance and elderly benefits; transfers to other levels of government, for health care, welfare and the like; and direct program expenses, which means everything Ottawa runs itself. The three streams aren’t projected to evolve the same way through this decade. Transfers to persons and to provinces are projected to hold steady as a fraction of GDP. Direct federal spending is declining.