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

by Paul Wells

  So he was demanding answers? “I don’t need to see all the answers this week,” he replied. Wait … what?

  He went to Question Period. Harper rarely showed up for Question Period, but today he made an exception. Somehow, however, Ignatieff made it through the hour without asking whether the prime minister would meet the four demands he had just listed for reporters. Bemused, Harper strolled to the National Press Theatre to announce he’d be happy to meet Ignatieff. They would meet the next day on Harper’s turf, at his Langevin Block office. Harper was unimpressed with Ignatieff’s threat because, like everyone else, he was having a hard time figuring out what the threat was. “You usually say, ‘Do X or else,’ ” Harper told reporters. “You don’t just say ‘Or else.’ ”

  When Ignatieff showed up in Harper’s office on Tuesday, June 16, it took the prime minister about three minutes to realize the Liberal leader had no specific request to make. What do you want? Harper asked after the opening pleasantries. I want to see that you’re serious about making Parliament work, he was told. But what would that look like? What specific changes? Eligibility times, enhanced benefits, changes to premiums?

  After two months of riding the EI hobby horse most days in Question Period, Ignatieff was not particularly au fait with the details of the program’s design. They would not have been able to reach a deal that day even if Harper had felt like it. The prime minister suggested, How about some kind of working group to spend the summer looking at the thing? Ignatieff loved the idea. Yes! A working group! And if it spent the summer working, as a group, there was no way Ignatieff could pull the plug on the government. So the sword of Damocles would remain suspended until September. This was fine with Ignatieff. He kept telling everyone the sword was over Harper’s head. But if Ignatieff had looked up, it was pointing down at him.

  He had no trouble selling the notion to Liberal caucus the next morning. Remember that election you’ve been dreading after our rout in the last election only seven months ago? Postponed! Reporters waiting outside the Liberal caucus room heard shouts of joy—from the Conservative caucus room, down the Centre Block hallway. Surely Harper was regaling the troops with tales of conquest? “Appearances can be deceiving,” an MP told me later. In fact Chuck Strahl and some of the other caucus members had put together a barbershop quartet. They’d sung a tune for their colleagues, and brought the house down.

  Ignatieff emerged from his own tuneless caucus meeting, backed by a dozen of the most photogenic Liberal MPs. This was a good day, he said. He did not mention that of his four ultimatum items, Harper had ignored three and sent the fourth to a committee. “Do I look like I’ve been steamrolled?” he asked rhetorically. Well, yes. Yes, he did.

  The Liberal–Conservative EI working group spent the summer getting nowhere. Harper sent Diane Finley, the minister responsible for EI, and just coincidentally the toughest bird in cabinet, and Pierre Poilievre, a young MP from Eastern Ontario with a rare knack for getting under Liberals’ skin. They made a great show of listening intently to the Liberal envoys, retreating to their corner, and returning without having adopted a single comma of the latest Liberal proposal. This was no peace delegation. It was an extension of war by other means. Eventually the meetings ground to a halt.

  June became September, and with it the prospect of yet another stimulus report. By now Ignatieff might as well just poke his own eyes out with barbecue tongs. Instead, he decided to follow his logic to its dreary conclusion. He had warned Harper three times. Surely his word must mean something or it would mean nothing. In Sudbury for the Liberals’ annual Labour Day weekend caucus retreat to plan the parliamentary session, he announced that if it were up to him there’d be no session.

  “After four years of drift, four years of denial, four years of division and discord—Mr. Harper, your time is up,” Ignatieff told his caucus and the television cameras. “The Liberal Party cannot support this government any further. We will hold it to account. We will oppose it in Parliament.

  “We can choose a small Canada—a diminished, mean, and petty country,” he said. “Or we can choose a big Canada. A Canada that is generous and open. A Canada that inspires.… We can be the smartest, healthiest, greenest, most open-minded country there is—but only if we choose to be.”

  Canadians rallied around this bold vision.

  Kidding again.

  Within days, the Liberals started to drift gently downward in the polls as support for the Harper Conservatives inched upward. From a rough tie, Ignatieff’s Liberals soon trailed Harper’s party by fourteen points. It was the same phenomenon as in 2008: Canadians carried no torch for Harper, but if the choice was between him and the only alternative, they’d stick with Harper, thanks. Nor could Ignatieff even hope to appeal to voters directly in a campaign. The NDP had voted against the Conservatives dozens of times since 2006, secure in the knowledge that it would be harmless chest-beating as long as the Liberals propped the government up. Now the NDP voted against Ignatieff’s opposition motion.

  The story Ignatieff had been telling himself since January now lay in tatters. He was not Harper’s probation cop. He had no credible threat to make. Within weeks Ignatieff fired Ian Davey and most of the senior OLO staff. As if any of this were their fault. The new head of the leader’s office was Peter Donolo, a former communications director to Jean Chrétien. Donolo had been a big player in Chrétien’s Ottawa, a key enabler for Chrétien’s Happy Warrior shtick. Maybe he’d bring some of the old mojo with him. Donolo coaxed a bunch of Toronto and Montreal Liberals of the same vintage to join him. He built a much more formal organizational structure than Davey had done. The mid-evening beer seminars among OLO staffers ground to a halt. There was work to do, and for once everyone knew their assignment. One of the conditions Donolo set for his return to politics was that, to the extent this sort of thing could be controlled, he wanted a year’s peace before Ignatieff would even think about trying to call another election.

  On October 3, the National Arts Centre held its annual fundraising gala. It was precisely the sort of black-tie arts gala Harper had denigrated during the 2008 election, in fact the grandest such date on Ottawa’s social calendar. The orchestra’s big guest that year was Yo-Yo Ma, the legendary American cellist. The Bytown swells in their tuxes and gowns were having their customary moderately good time. Then came a bit of fussing as stagehands adjusted a piano near centre stage. A lumbering fellow in a dark suit with an open-necked shirt appeared. It was Stephen Harper. It was the prime minister of Canada. It was Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, sitting at the piano and belting out a creditable rendition of the Beatles chestnut “With a Little Help from My Friends.”

  Laureen Harper had been honorary chairwoman of the NAC’s gala committee since 2005. The longer the government lasted, the more the arts centre’s wily CEO, Peter Herrndorf, worked on solidifying the institution’s relationship with Laureen. As long as she enjoyed her increasingly frequent visits to the arts centre, perhaps it would be safe from a government whose affection for orchestras and theatre was otherwise rarely demonstrated. Stephen Harper’s game efforts at the keyboard, on the other hand, were not a PR contrivance. He really did have guys over to 24 Sussex fairly regularly to play. At some point every amateur musician feels ready for an audience, or is pushed in front of one by loved ones whether he’s ready or not. Jean Chrétien, a less than convincing valve-trombone player, had squeezed out a few notes on occasion at Liberal caucus parties. A generation earlier, Chrétien’s mentor, Mitchell Sharp, was a very occasional guest pianist at the NAC. So it does little good to parse Harper’s coming-out on the piano too closely. Was it canny self-promotion? Exuberant self-expression?

  The answer, of course, is that it was some of both. What made the appearance resonate was its moment. A year earlier, Harper had come close to engineering his own downfall at the hands of the combined opposition. In the days before he hit the stage, his most prominent opponent, Ignatieff, had struck again and missed. Harper was final
ly beginning to look like something more than an accidental prime minister. He might last long enough in the job to learn to enjoy it. The NAC gala had about it the mood of a belated victory party.

  Trouble did not stay away long. Four days after Harper’s NAC debut, on October 7, the Military Police Complaints Commission investigating claims of abuse of Afghan prisoners suspended its public hearings in Gatineau, across the river from Ottawa, while lawyers argued over the hearings’ proper scope. That same morning, an affidavit from a former mid-ranking diplomat in Afghanistan, Richard Colvin, was sealed by court order at the instigation of government lawyers. Colvin’s affidavit claimed widespread abuse of prisoners taken by the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan after the prisoners had been handed over to Afghan authorities.

  The move to seal the affidavit drew widespread public attention, and did not stand long. On October 14, the complaints commission, or MPCC, unsealed the affidavit. In it, Colvin had written that he had become aware of serious problems within a month after landing in Afghanistan in April 2006. “I soon became aware of a number of what, in my judgment, were problems in Canadian policy and/or practice, including regarding Afghan detainees,” he wrote. “I spent considerable time on the detainee file and sent many reports on detainee-related issues to Canadian officials.” Colvin had seen nothing that looked like a response to his concerns.

  It was an explosive allegation. Harper’s government had insisted since 2006 that it had no evidence of Canadian soldiers knowingly handing over prisoners to be tortured. If there had been any, the Canadian soldiers involved would have been complicit in war crimes. Gordon O’Connor, the veteran soldier who was Harper’s first defence minister, had been shuffled out of the job in August 2007, five months after he had to apologize to the House for inconsistent and misleading answers about the Red Cross’s role in ensuring detainees’ proper treatment. Since then the military complaints commission had been pecking away at the story. All along, Harper had hoped a lid could be kept on the allegations. Colvin’s affidavit put an end to that hope.

  And the magnitude of the government’s effort to stonewall became part of the story. On the same October day that he unsealed Colvin’s affidavit, Peter Tinsley, the commission’s chairman, announced he was suspending hearings indefinitely. The government had already lost a court challenge to shut the commission down, and since March had consistently refused to hand over a single document the commission had requested. The commission wasn’t digging into this out of idle curiosity: military police implicated by allegations of abuse needed the documentation to organize their defence.

  “This is how we find ourselves where we are today,” Tinsley said, “forced to adjourn the proceedings out of fairness to the subjects, since obviously they should not be the ones to suffer because of the government’s conduct.”

  But there is more than one way to put a microphone in front of a diplomat who wants to talk. The opposition still had a majority on a special Commons committee examining Canada’s role in Afghanistan. On November 18, Colvin testified in front of the committee, live on television.

  “As I learned more about our detainee practices, I came to the conclusion that they were contrary to Canada’s values, contrary to Canada’s interests, contrary to Canada’s official policies and also contrary to international law. That is, they were un-Canadian, counterproductive, and probably illegal,” he said. A committee member asked how widespread was the practice. “According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured,” Colvin responded. “For interrogators in Kandahar, it was standard operating procedure.”

  Weeks of turmoil ensued. Good reporters at a dozen news organizations produced a gusher of stories that dominated the nightly news and the newspapers, using documents they had obtained through leaks or through access to information, testimony from secret sources or public comments from Colvin and others. Hardly a day went by without fresh revelations. Harper and his defence minister, Peter MacKay, were taking questions on the allegations almost daily in the House of Commons.

  Questions about detainee abuse had dogged Harper for almost as long as he had been prime minister. It had already cost him one minister he liked, O’Connor, and there was no guarantee that on any given day it wouldn’t swallow up another. “We were always fighting ghosts,” a trusted Harper advisor said later. “There was a lot of friction internally on how to handle this issue, as to whether it was an inside-the-beltway press-gallery-type issue, or whether it was something that was resonating with Canadians.”

  That distinction is always crucial with Harper. He survives politically in large part because he is uninterested in debates that are of concern only to people who live within ten kilometres of Parliament’s Peace Tower. He doesn’t always guess right about which issues those are, but his instincts have consistently topped his opponents’. On detainees, he made one early decision, then issued a directive straight from him: nobody in the government was to refer to the possible victims of abuse as “Afghan detainees.” They were to be called “Taliban prisoners.” Ministers who slipped into language that might suggest, or permit, sympathy for the detainees would get a testy call from the PMO. The sentiment among Conservatives was that they were on the soldiers’ side and that critics of government policy were therefore critics of Canada’s troops.

  The feeling ran deep. O’Connor was a former army general; Harper had insisted that the opposition had no right to question his judgment, right up to the moment he took O’Connor out of the defence portfolio. In conversation with me at the end of 2009, Teneycke referred derisively to Graeme Smith, a Globe and Mail reporter who had spent more time on the ground in Afghanistan than almost any other Canadian journalist, as “a guy whose sources are the Taliban.” This was true, or part of the truth: Smith talked to Taliban fighters among many other sources in an infernally complex theatre. But this was hardly the only instance where the Canadian soldiers themselves seemed more open-minded about things than Harper’s circle. On a trip I took to Afghanistan in December 2009, I received a briefing from a Canadian Forces officer who used a map of Kandahar that Smith had published in the Globe. “This is Graeme Smith’s map, not ours,” the officer said. “Ours are classified, and Graeme’s is pretty good.”

  But regardless of how the detainee issue was playing across the land, the Harper advisor told me, the government took no joy from trying to handle it. “Every day there was a sense among some of us that we were going out and not having all our ducks lined up.” This was a simple function of the nature of war. It is chaotic, the stakes are as high as they can be, and information is always partial and contradictory.

  Few soldiers had a better view of the chaos through more of Canada’s combat deployment than Lt.-Gen. (ret’d) Andrew Leslie. He was deputy commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul in 2003. By the spring of 2006 he was chief of the Land Staff. The promotion came just as Canadian soldiers completed the move from Kabul, a relatively secure assignment in an urban setting where the burden was shared with troops from dozens of countries, to the wild, open Pashtun desert of Kandahar. As the brutal luck of war would have it, the Taliban picked that spring to dramatically increase the intensity of their military activity. The nature of the conflict changed from mopping up sparse resistance and helping restore civilian authority to full-bore and non-stop combat. Canadians weren’t the only foreigners taken by surprise. Every country with skin in the game was rocked by the ferocity of the new combat environment. The consequences were deeply unsettling, especially in the south. From the beginning in 2002 through the end of 2005, eight Canadians had died in Afghanistan. Thirty-six more died in 2006 alone. The pace of the fatalities would be slow, but by mid-2013, the total Canadian death toll would stand at a hundred and fifty-eight. Harper telephoned the family of every soldier who fell. He was making far more calls than he would have anticipated.

  In an interview in 2013, Leslie told me that back then, in 2006, Canadian forces were feeling their
way: “We had almost no experience in actually handling detainees, and didn’t have processes set up. We didn’t have the attention to detail that comes with many years of experience of scooping up people who have been trying to kill us, and trying to figure out, at what point do you turn them over to the local authorities?”

  For most of the time Canadians were operating in Kandahar, from 2006 at least until Obama sent serious U.S. reinforcements to southern Afghanistan in the second half of 2009, the Canadian numbers were badly insufficient for the task. In some ways the hopelessness of the task wasn’t obvious. In any direct confrontation, Canadians defeated the Taliban and other enemy fighters handily. “The enemy were never more than 5 to 6 percent of our size,” Leslie says. But winning firefights was only a small piece of a larger goal, which was to safeguard an environment of general calm so that everyday life could establish itself for ordinary Afghans, without constant insurgent harassment. That would have taken far more troops.

  In 2008 John Manley, the former Chrétien-era Liberal cabinet minister, produced a report for Harper calling for an additional battalion, about a thousand troops, in Kandahar. The Americans pretty quickly provided that battalion. The problem was that a battalion was a teardrop in the desert. “I’m not sure where Mr. Manley got that number,” Leslie said, “because a battalion disappears into three villages. What was needed was three brigades”—closer to thirty thousand troops. “Whoever told John Manley that a battalion was needed should be taken out and spanked.” After his 2009 inauguration, Obama sent three brigades and more into the Kandahar desert. The scale of the transformation, by the time I went there for the last time in 2010, was vast. It probably came too late to save the country. It certainly came after more than three years in which Canadian soldiers and civilian development officials were barely hanging on in one of the deadliest parts of Afghanistan.