The Longer I'm Prime Minister: Stephen Harper and Canada, 2006-

by Paul Wells

  Did Harper make the questionnaire better? “Yeah, it was good value actually. I can’t remember the specifics but I remember reading and saying, not bad.”

  I have taken the long way around to Stephen Harper’s appearance in a book about Stephen Harper because if you stare too closely at him you miss context and tumble into caricature. The driven loner. The obsessive knot of resentments. The floating brain in a jar in the basement of 24 Sussex, surrounded by cats and the souls of crushed Liberals. Of course, he is all of those things. But he could not win elections without widespread support in the land, and he could not win again and yet again without a sense of how to guard and grow that support. Lightning does not strike three times on the same forehead. Which suggests that Harper has what every successful federal leader has needed to survive over a long stretch of time: a superior understanding of Canada.

  That is the argument of this book. It sets this volume apart from others, already written and still to come, which portray Harper as little more than a vandal. I offer no blanket endorsement of the twenty-second prime minister. Much of what he has done makes me angry; much more is open to serious debate. But too many people in this country have spent too much time trying to ignore Harper, or to dismiss him, or, with varying degrees of ineptitude, to defeat him. He endures. I figure it is not too soon to try to understand him.

  Most of this book is devoted to examining Harper’s method and political philosophy. He is a very particular fellow: fiercely intelligent, combative, secretive, intense. Watching him work will take most of our time. But I don’t ever want to get too far away from a realization that he comes from deep and broad currents in Canadian political culture. Most people who have voted Conservative at some point since 2004 have done so with real enthusiasm, and most have voted Conservative more than once. As any polarizing figure would, Harper has loud and persistent critics. But he also has admirers, and they number in the millions. Readers who still cannot bring themselves to believe he is the elected prime minister of this country not only misunderstand Stephen Harper. They also misunderstand Canada.

  He has been called a dictator so often that it’s easy to forget how simple it should have been, at first, to defeat him. He won in 2006 with the weakest minority in Canadian parliamentary history. All the opposition parties were situated to the Conservatives’ left. The surprise was not that they sought to ally against him in 2008 but that they waited so long before they moved. And that they moved so poorly. He cannot have expected to last as long as he has.

  And yet he needed to last, because most of what he wanted to do could not be done quickly. He wanted to disabuse Canadians, especially immigrants, of the expectation that they would be governed by Liberals. He wanted to implement deep changes in the practice of federalism, foreign policy and budgeting, a degree at a time as if boiling a frog; and to make those changes as hard to reverse as it would be to reconstitute the frog.

  On November 7, 1984, Brian Mulroney, a newly elected forty-six-year-old with the largest governing caucus in history at his back, popped some tormentor in the House of Commons on the rhetorical snoot with words that would become famous. “We have only been in power for two months,” he said, “but I can tell you this: give us twenty years—and it is coming—and you will not recognize this country.”

  Twenty years later, Mulroney was long gone from power. Another string of Liberal governments had reversed some of his reforms and integrated others into its familiar and highly recognizable narrative. Stephen Harper was warming up on deck. He shared all of Mulroney’s ambition and almost none of his method. He would reorder the cart and the horse by making continued and repeated victory a higher priority than sweeping reform. He would not bother to butter up the parliamentary press gallery. He would assume their antipathy, even provoke it, rather than trust anyone with a notebook to save his hide. He would flatter the most ardent Conservative voters, not the fickle centre, to ensure his base’s loyalty over what would necessarily be a long haul.

  Harper knew what a jilted supporter looked like. It looked like him. He and millions like him had turned away from Mulroney because they had felt Mulroney turning from them. Harper would not make the same mistake. He would never leave conservatives wondering whether it was worth their time to be Conservative. And every day he stayed in office, he would make the decisions only a prime minister can make, knowing few would be noticed, almost none would be contested, and that together they would add up. “You know,” he’d tell his staff, “the longer I’m prime minister … the longer I’m prime minister.”

  The first time he ran for the job he lost. The second time he barely won. Today he dominates Canadian politics as few before him have done. He fought his way into the history books. Here’s one now.

  ONE

  FOOT IN THE DOOR

  Sometimes it seems the very time zones conspire against a prime minister from Alberta. Jean Chrétien used to celebrate his election victories with a morning-after news conference in Shawinigan and be back in Ottawa before the capital’s bureaucrats got back to their offices from lunch. It was one of a thousand ways the continuity of Liberal power—Central Canadian power—was reaffirmed. Or used to be.

  On Tuesday morning, January 24, 2006, the day after the election that changed his life, Stephen Harper boarded his Airbus A320 campaign jet in Calgary at 10:30 a.m. It was already half past noon in Ottawa. The flight from one city to the other would take four hours.

  In Ottawa, at the Conservative Party election office in a downtown office building, contracts for the campaign staff had run out at midnight on Monday. Only three staffers bothered to show up for work the next day. They found the phones ringing off the hook as world leaders—Jacques Chirac in Paris, Gerhard Schröder in Berlin—called to congratulate the new guy. Swiftly consulting the post-election plan, the bleary-eyed and hungover campaign workers discovered there was none for today. So they sheepishly asked the long-distance operators of world powers whether they could take the numbers and have the next prime minister of Canada call back whenever he showed up at the office.

  So the first day of the new Conservative era was pretty much blown from the start. Nor could Harper assume the new Conservative era had many more days left in it.

  The Canadian people had handed him a mandate fit for a pessimist. Out of the 308 seats in the House of Commons, the Conservative Party of Canada had won 124, to 103 for Paul Martin’s Liberals, 51 for the Bloc Québécois and 29 for Jack Layton’s NDP. That tally left Harper 31 seats shy of a majority. It was the smallest minority in the history of Canadian federal politics, with the smallest percentage of total seats and the largest number of seats short of a majority. Even Joe Clark had done better in 1979, winning 12 more seats than Harper in a Commons that held 26 fewer MPs. Fat lot of good that wider margin of victory had done Joe, because he lost everything nine months later.

  So the Chrétien–Martin years were over, but unless a lot of things changed quickly the Liberals would be back.

  In an early January vote conducted at the back of the campaign plane, the indefatigable wisenheimers of the parliamentary press gallery had dubbed Harper’s A320 “Mr. Happy’s Flying Circus.” The name was suggested by Sun columnist Greg Weston, and it fulfilled the traditional mandate of such campaign-plane christening ceremonies, which was heavy-handed irony. Harper’s a sourpuss, so let’s make fun of that. The name was especially fitting on the flight to Ottawa, because the mood on the campaign plane of the man who would become the first Conservative prime minister in thirteen years was not jubilant.

  “We’d been through this once before,” one person who was on that A320 said later, “by which I mean a sense of slight disappointment as the election returns came in.” Built in 2003 from the remains of the Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance, the Conservative Party still had a new-car smell to it, but this was already its second federal election campaign. In 2004 Harper had managed to pull ahead of the Martin Liberals in voter intention in the last half of the campaig
n. Then the Liberals managed to shut Harper down with a potent barrage of negative ads in Ontario in the last weekend. But even as late as voting day, nobody was really sure how effective those ads had been. Harper’s team had spent much of election day ’04 trying to figure out what they’d do if they won enough seats to form a government. Harper was late delivering his concession speech because his staff had taken most of the day to work on a victory speech. This time he got to deliver his victory speech, but little about the results gave him comfort.

  “We thought the Liberals would have a leadership campaign on a fairly short timeline,” one of his senior advisors said later. “There was no fucking way the Liberals would let their leadership campaign go on much beyond the first week of September. Surely they wouldn’t be that stupid. And then we’d be possibly back into an election campaign the following spring, if not by Christmas.

  “What we were absolutely determined not to do was to make the Joe Clark mistake of sitting around governing like we had a majority, and saying that the other guys were going to let us govern forever. And therefore end up being humiliated the way Clark was humiliated. We thought we had a very, very short time before we would be back in the electoral soup.”

  The assumption here was that simple arithmetic would govern Harper’s fate. He could divide the opposition parties among themselves, push them back on their heels, but he would always be outnumbered. On any day the other parties wanted him defeated they would take him down. His only real hope was to set a leader-like tone and get moving on fulfilling some promises so he’d have something to run on when the next battle came.

  Since 2002, Harper had run for the Canadian Alliance leadership and in a by-election for his Calgary Southwest seat. Then he had run for the leadership of the united Conservative Party, then led it in national elections in 2004 and 2006. Five campaigns in four years. He was tired of running and believed he’d have to run again soon.

  Harper’s jet had plenty of newspapers on board, but on the flight back to Ottawa it was copies of the Calgary Herald that had the most currency. The Herald went to press later than the Toronto newspapers, so it had the most up-to-date election results. Fortunately, Ray Novak had grabbed a copy on his way to the airport. Novak was Harper’s executive assistant—slim, soft-spoken, meticulous, so dedicated to looking after Harper’s needs that he had eventually moved into an apartment over the garage at Stornoway, the Official Opposition leader’s residence, so he could trot across the driveway and do whatever Harper needed doing each day before breakfast.

  At the front of the plane, Harper and his chief of staff, Ian Brodie, shared the precious copy of the Herald. Brodie, thirty-eight, was a political scientist who had studied at the University of Calgary and taught at the University of Western Ontario. He had done odd jobs for Harper for a few years but had only been in charge of the leader’s office since the previous summer. Brodie would hire most of the key players in a Harper Prime Minister’s Office and in the offices of most ministers. He scanned the Herald columns looking for the names of Conservative MPs who might form a cabinet.

  Harper was more interested for now in seeing whom the Liberals had managed to elect. He would stand up most days in Question Period and face opposition attacks. He wanted to know who would be doing the attacking.

  Numbers alone didn’t tell the whole story of Liberal discomfiture. Much of Martin’s cabinet had gone down to defeat, and not just recent promotions of uncertain value such as Tony Valeri and Tony Ianno. Anne McLellan, Martin’s deputy prime minister, had finally lost her lonely Edmonton redoubt. Pierre Pettigrew and Liza Frulla had lost in Montreal. Reg Alcock in Winnipeg. “Their outlook is quite grim,” Harper said. He wasn’t gloating. This was no time to gloat. It was just data.

  The Conservatives’ own weaknesses were obvious. Ten seats in Quebec were more than the Conservatives had hoped for, more than they expected, but it was still only ten seats, and not one of them anywhere close to Montreal. The Conservatives were shut out of Toronto too, although if the truth be told, their caucus was full of MPs who knew Toronto at least as well as they knew their own ridings—former Ontario provincial ministers Jim Flaherty and Tony Clement, guys like Mike Chong, who had a long history as a student and businessman in Toronto. In Vancouver, too, the Conservatives were denied a foothold.

  Sometimes two weaknesses add up to a surprise. “By the time we got off that plane,” one of the passengers said, “it had been noted by several people that the one guy who would be truly wasted in opposition was Emerson.” For years the very mention of David Emerson’s name had made just about every political organizer in British Columbia drool. Whatever your criteria for success in Canada, Emerson had all the boxes ticked off. PhD economist from Queen’s. Deputy minister in Finance for the B.C. government. Bank president. Lumber baron. Vice-chairman of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives. Eyebrows like shelves of granite. No wonder Paul Martin had handed Emerson a safe Vancouver seat without the inconvenience of a nomination battle in 2004. No wonder he’d made Emerson his minister of industry.

  Alone among Liberals, Emerson’s assets looked equally good from Harper’s side of the political fence. The hole he could plug in a Harper government was not just geographic but demographic. The Harper Conservatives were a populist party. Their MPs hadn’t spent a lot of time in boardrooms. For the most part this was an asset. Their opponents were used to railing against “fat-cat Tories.” Misunderstanding the Harper Conservatives led the Liberals and NDP to guess wrong about how they’d react to a given situation.

  But fat cats vote too, and it’s handy to have a couple of them under your tent. “Once you merged the old PC and the old Reform-Alliance party in B.C., you didn’t have a lot of ties to the B.C. business community,” a former senior Harper advisor told me. “Jay Hill’s a good guy, James Moore’s a good guy, Chuck Strahl’s a good guy. There’s lots of good people. Stock.” Stockwell Day. “But nobody with that connection to the B.C. business community.”

  It would not be possible to recruit Emerson without embarrassment. Campaigning in Vancouver Kingsway, Emerson had said nasty things about the Conservatives. He had, for instance, warned voters that Harper wanted a Canada where “the strong survive, the weak die.” But that was just Emerson being a good Liberal soldier. Now Harper had won, Emerson was strong; and surely he didn’t want to die. A few days after the election, at the Vancouver airport, Emerson ran into John Reynolds, the big, silver-haired former Canadian Alliance MP who had lent his name to the Conservative campaign as national co-chairman. Small talk turned into something else and soon Reynolds was on the phone to Ottawa. This guy isn’t happy being stuck in opposition, Reynolds said. We should make something happen for him.

  The negotiations went quickly. In fact they could barely be called negotiations. Would you like to keep coming to cabinet meetings, David? Why, yes I would. All righty then. It helped that Emerson had no clue about the outrage his precipitous floor-crossing would provoke among residents of Vancouver Kingsway who had thought they were voting for a Liberal. Blissfully unaware that actions have consequences, Emerson became Harper’s minister of international trade.

  The other surprise, when the new cabinet showed up at Rideau Hall to be sworn in on February 6, was the arrival of Michael Fortier. Fortier was a Montreal corporate lawyer, a glittering specimen with French cuffs on every shirt and a perfect little stubble beard like a meticulously tended Japanese garden. He was the other national co-chair, with Reynolds, of the Harper campaign. The title didn’t mean much. The real campaign work was done by less well-known people. But Fortier’s name had helped Harper’s campaign look serious, and now he was rewarded with a seat in the Senate and a post as minister of public works and government services.

  If Emerson’s appointment was the product of hasty improvisation, Fortier’s was the fruit of longer planning. Right up to the middle of the campaign, Harper had shown little strength in Quebec. The weakness preoccupied him: for a long time it seemed entirely possible he’d w
in enough seats to form a government without getting anybody elected in Quebec, or anybody good at least. So he and his staff developed a set of public gestures that any Canadian prime minister could make, no matter how weak his Quebec caucus, to show good faith. He could begin every public statement, wherever he made it, in French. He could visit the premier of Quebec in Quebec City instead of making the guy schlump it to Ottawa. (Incredibly, no prime minister in decades had made this simple concession.) And he could use his power to name cabinet ministers who weren’t MPs, perhaps combining it with his power to appoint any adult property holder to the Senate.

  In the end, Harper did pretty well in Quebec. Four of the ten who got elected in the province landed in cabinet. But he implemented most of his Quebec charm offensive anyway, including the part about putting Fortier into the Senate and his cabinet.

  So, by the cold February day his government was sworn in, Harper had plugged two of the most gaping holes his team had discovered in their fortifications, as they pored over the election returns in the Herald, while soaring over the prairies in Mr. Happy’s Flying Circus. He now had ministers from two of Canada’s three biggest cities. True, a large number of the voters who had elected the minister from Vancouver would decide, upon learning of his defection, that they would like to see his head on a pike. And the guy from Montreal would never really get the hang of life in Parliament. What mattered was that Harper had them. His first move was to cement his victory by expanding his base and by reaching out, inelegantly, to segments of the Canadian electorate that had rejected him.