The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  What could he give them next? Would it be enough to repay their continued loyalty? Surely there must be something. But if Harper knew what the next chapter of his extraordinary career might look like, he showed no sign of it.

  EPILOGUE

  IT’S A BIG COUNTRY

  I have never forgotten something Jean Chrétien said during his last week in politics.

  It was December 2003. Chrétien had flown to Abuja, Nigeria, and then to Paris for an extended valedictory visit with France’s president, Jacques Chirac. On his way home, in his Canadian Forces Challenger jet flying west over the Atlantic, he took questions from journalists. After a while he left the impromptu scrum, turned around and headed toward the front of the plane where reporters could not follow. One of the scribes called out a final question: “What’s a good politician?”

  Chrétien answered over his shoulder without missing a beat: “The one who wins.”

  In eighteen years in Ottawa I have wound up covering two winners, Jean Chrétien and Stephen Harper, plus some other people. For a city that is forever falling in love with the Next Big Thing, Ottawa has never been very good at understanding actual winners.

  For years while Chrétien was prime minister, conventional wisdom in the capital was impatient for Paul Martin to push the old buffoon out of the way. As for Harper, until 2011 his victories were tenuous enough that you could always find someone at an Empire Club lunch table willing to lean forward and explain why Harper’s inexplicable lucky streak was about to run out. Oh, he won, but he won’t last. Oh, he may win again but he won’t get a majority. Oh, his trick bag is emptying fast, the ads are backfiring, the people are on to him, and soon his own party will turn on him. And let me tell you, it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

  In Christina McCall’s great social history of the Trudeau Liberals in the 1970s, Grits, there is an unmistakable current of longing for the return of John Turner, then in exile from Trudeau’s Liberal Party. That one of the household gods of Canadian political journalism could look at Trudeau and wish for Turner is a stark demonstration of the penchant among Canadian political reporters for staring gift horses in the mouth.

  Eventually, after enough predictions of a swift demise prove wrong, the very fact of winning, and enduring, is held against a winner. Chrétien’s smiling face found its way onto the cover of Jeffrey Simpson’s book The Friendly Dictatorship, with a South American junta leader’s uniform pasted clumsily beneath it. Of Harper, Frances Russell wrote in the Winnipeg Free Press in April 2013: “The Conservatives under Stephen Harper are running an effective dictatorship. They believe they are quite within their rights to muzzle Parliament, gag civil servants, use taxpayer money for blatant political self-promotion, stand accused of trying to subvert a federal election and hand over much of Canada’s magnificent natural heritage to the multinational oil and gas lobby.” In lines like Russell’s there is much that is true about Harper, and much that is true about both him and others.

  But Chrétien’s brief career-closing salute to “the one who wins” is worth contemplating because it makes an obvious point. In a democracy you can get a lot more done by winning an election than by not winning it. History is written by the victors. All Harper’s opponents ever had to do was beat him. If they don’t like his policies, they need to beat him and implement other policies. If they don’t like the way he won a parliamentary majority with a minority of the popular vote, they are welcome to reform the electoral system—after they beat him under the system in place.

  Beating Harper was absolutely Stéphane Dion’s goal when he became the Liberal leader in 2006. Dion’s motivation was to save the planet, a goal he cherished with perfect sincerity. But he lost the 2008 election. Incredibly, he managed to rally the other opposition leaders against Harper again, weeks later—and he lost again. Now, on most days the only time Dion ever mentions Kyoto, in public at least, is when he’s calling his dog. Harper endures, so Harper governs, so Harper gets his turn to read in the papers about what a lousy son-of-a-bitch he is. It’s one of the perks of office.

  I am not sure he is done winning yet. Then again, he might be. The omens and portents look worse for Harper than they have in years. His lousy 2012 turned into a nightmarish first half of 2013. Thomas Mulcair is the most competent opposition leader he has faced; Justin Trudeau makes Liberals feel good about being Liberal. Maybe one or the other of the opposition leaders will finally be luckier than Harper. Maybe the next time, Mulcair and Trudeau won’t divide the anti-Conservative vote between their parties and leave Harper to win on yet another electoral-split decision. Maybe the Liberals won’t fade in the stretch, as Liberals often do. Maybe Mulcair won’t be whipsawed between the political culture of Quebec, where most of his MPs live, and that of the rest of the country, where most NDP voters do.

  Harper has rarely faced sure victory and he doesn’t now. But, say there is an election on the date supposedly “fixed” by law, October 19, 2015, and that Stephen Harper is still the Conservative party leader on that day—even if he loses that election, he will still have been prime minister for nearly a decade. He will have outlasted three more of his predecessors in the longevity stakes: Louis St. Laurent, Robert Borden and Brian Mulroney. Only Chrétien, Laurier, Trudeau, Macdonald and King will have held the job for longer.

  To what purpose? What has he accomplished? It is in the nature of Harper’s project that he would have less to show for his time in office than some of his predecessors. They saw themselves as builders; he is a skeptic and, to use the gentlest available word, an editor. He has always wanted a federal government that meddled less in health care, less in executive federalism, less in municipal affairs, and to some extent less in the world than Liberals have done. He has zigzagged wildly while pursuing those goals, but always in the hope of lasting long enough to pursue them further. He cut taxes so his government and any that succeeded his could not be tempted by ambition. Then he tipped the accounts into the red, to win Michael Ignatieff’s approval after the coalition crisis, before realizing he liked the steady pressure to cut that only a deficit can provide. He is the first prime minister in the history of the country who has wanted to leave behind a government that is doing substantially less than when he arrived. That may be the simplest way to explain why he is so polarizing—why he excites so many voters and infuriates so many more.

  Because he is polarizing, he provokes both his admirers and his detractors into extravagant claims. He is tearing down the beautiful Canadian house, the detractors lament. He’s the only bulwark against the return of a corrupt regime, his supporters warn. Neither position is particularly democratic. Each assumes there is only one proper way to govern. In functioning democracies there are usually at least two, and it is not too early for Canada to become a functioning democracy.

  Here, too, I will probably upset some readers by associating Stephen Harper with any increase in Canadian democracy. Harper is no model parliamentarian. He has always been about doing as much as he can get away with, and explaining himself only later, or not at all, or disingenuously at best. But how much of that is new? Very few elected leaders in Western democracies govern in a sagacious effort to find a Solomonic balance of available views. They take their ball and run as far down the field as they can, spewing boundless contempt on their foes. Just look at Tony Blair at the 1999 Labour Conference. “Today’s Tory party: the party of fox hunting, Pinochet and hereditary peers,” he chided. “The uneatable, the unspeakable and the unelectable.”

  The process is often unlovely. I hope I have helped explain here a lot of what has made the Harper years divisive and disillusioning for admirers of open, thoughtful debate. But voters always get to judge the result, and what Harper does has been broadly approved, for close to a decade, by millions of voters who had despaired of ever seeing someone like them in power. The country cannot stay healthy for long if it systematically shuts out those millions of voters, concentrated between suburban Ontario and the rural British Columbia interior. Harp
er has given those voters a voice. The country has held up pretty well. It’s a big country.

  The result hardly looks like whatever dream of a conservative utopia a thirty-year-old Stephen Harper might once have cherished. More than a decade ago Chrétien’s introduction of same-sex marriage legislation helped spur social conservatives to find common cause with economic conservatives. But all these years later, same-sex couples are still getting married, and that will never change. Paul Martin warned us, through two elections, about Harper’s secret agenda on abortion, but it turned out to be odder than even Martin supposed: Harper has fought some of his toughest political battles, not to restrict abortion rights, but to defend them against the anti-abortion MPs in his own caucus. His policy on official languages is not easily distinguished from Pierre Trudeau’s, and Chrétien would heartily approve of his frosty relations with two successive U.S. presidents—Obama, of course, but also Bush.

  Even where Harper tries his best to change Canada’s political culture—instituting a harshly punitive vision of criminal justice, for example—the culture pushes back, in the form of courts that Harper has taken conspicuous care not to stack with political conservatives. So criminal justice in Canada remains an active dialogue between Harper’s laws and Trudeau’s Charter.

  Throw in the fights Harper has declined to pick. The thirty-year-old would have been amused to hear he would wind up as a fierce defender of supply management, the baroque system of market protection designed by Liberals to coddle agriculture in Quebec and Ontario. Harper helped Barack Obama briefly nationalize General Motors. He is the politician who had Parliament declare Quebec—sorry, “the Québécois”—a nation.

  It should be the business of an author to make the grandest possible claims for his subject. If I’m writing about Harper, it must be because Harper is the damnedest thing you ever did see. But I’m stuck with the evidence of my eyes, which is that Canada, nearly eight years into the Harper era, still looks a lot like Canada. Its weaknesses remain: the timid pulse of its entrepreneurial spirit, its citizens’ chronic incuriosity about the world, a cultural tendency toward reticence that made its democratic debates insufficiently robust before and leaves them barely breathing now.

  But its strengths persist. A strong suspicion that governments should not indefinitely spend more than they raise in revenue. A hardy tolerance for cultural difference. A strong optimistic streak. Persistent faith that the marriage of French and English cultural traditions continues to be more of a strong point than a hassle—though Lord knows it has been plenty of that.

  A big country is the sum of all its political currents, an often chaotic conversation stretching across generations. Stephen Harper has brought to that conversation millions of Canadians who believed they had been shut out before. In so doing he has put many others, who had grown to assume their voices would be the ones that mattered, through an extended ordeal. It’s been healthy for all of them, empowering in one case, humbling in another. One day Harper’s opponents will grow tired of losing and figure out how to win. Harper’s successors, strengthened by his example, will continue his project. The result will be the same as always: Canada, glorious, a little dented, and free.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In 2002 I made a deal to write a book for Anne Collins, then chickened out. That made her the first publisher to think I had a book in me, and I’ve felt since then that I owed her one. She made the entire process as painless and sometimes pleasant as it could be, and her confidence came in handy when I couldn’t find my own.

  Jackie Kaiser was my agent for that long-lost un-book and for two successful book projects since then. I never venture into the wilds of Toronto publishing without her, and I’m always grateful for her wisdom and support.

  Much of this book, especially the chapters on the 2008 and 2011 elections, is based on reporting and writing I did for Maclean’s magazine. I’m forever grateful to Anthony Wilson-Smith for giving me a home there a decade ago and to Ken Whyte for encouraging me to think big at every step of a long professional collaboration that has come to define my career. I am especially grateful to Mark Stevenson and Anne-Marie Owens for giving me the time, during a hectic period in the magazine’s history, to do this book. I am proud to have the company of many other authors at Maclean’s, which has become the kind of place where just about everyone thinks about ways to give good stories the length and depth they need. My extended absences from the Ottawa bureau put pressure on John Geddes, Aaron Wherry, Susan Allan, Jason Kirby, Michael Petrou and Nick Taylor-Vaisey. They all accepted without complaint. I’m looking forward to pulling my weight again.

  My sources, most of whom spoke anonymously, were generous with their time and their insight. One reason for Stephen Harper’s success is that he doesn’t run a chatty shop. I suspect he would have been relieved to see how out of practice some of his current and former staffers were, as they tried to dish with a reporter. To everyone who shared their insight, to the limit of their comfort zone and sometimes a little further, I’m thankful. Harper could have tried to fight this project and made my life harder; he didn’t. Nigel Wright, who politely declined to speak to me, put the word out in the PMO that others should be less reticent, and thus helped me immensely.

  One night, as I wondered how I was going to get this thing done, I put out an open call on Twitter for research help. Many answered the call. I decided Melissa Bourgeois was a serious customer; her interview transcription, research memos, secondary-source reading and other assistance proved my hunch was correct and improved my work at every stage.

  In figuring out this book’s format and pacing I drew inspiration from two musicians, Randy Weston and Hector Berlioz, and two authors, John Steinbeck and Jean-François Lisée. Strange but true.

  I have been a pain in the ass to a bunch of friends for two years, and if that continues I am now officially out of excuses. Thanks for their patience to Tabatha Southey, Lorne and Joan Samson, Eugene Haslam and Kari Howard, Sean McAdam and Carrie Wallace, Howard Singleton, Kady O’Malley, Andrew Potter, Scott Gilmore and Catherine McKenna, Joanne Chianello, Graham Fraser and Barbara Uteck.

  Everything good I have ever done springs from the love and support of my parents, Allen and Eleanor Wells. My final thanks go to the woman who is first in my heart. Lisa Samson appears in the prologue of this book as Lisa McAdam. She managed to keep her curiosity in check while I wrote all this without showing her any of it. I’m so happy that now I get to share this book, and the rest of my life, with Lisa and Katie and Thomas.

  Any errors of fact or judgment are, of course, mine alone.

  Paul Wells is the political editor of Maclean’s magazine. His previous book, Right Side Up: The Fall of Paul Martin and the Rise of Stephen Harper’s New Conservatism, was a national bestseller and his blog, Inkless Wells, is a must-read among Canadians who follow politics. He has worked for the National Post and The Gazette in Montreal, and has written for L’actualité, La Presse, Time and the Literary Review of Canada. He lives in Ottawa.