Oliver's Twist

by Craig Oliver

  Under Harper, the Conservatives mastered the technique of absolute deniability, the flat assertion of supposed fact about which no doubt could be expressed. Before he became prime minister, Stephen Harper said he would not appoint senators or allow any but balanced budgets. He promised to institute fixed election dates. And he attempted to strike a coalition of opposition parties to defeat Paul Martin’s minority government. The reversal of these and other positions was never spoken of or acknowledged by Harper or his ministers. When the media raised inconsistencies or outright hypocrisies, they were simply dismissed.

  In his first two years as party leader, Michael Ignatieff endured a steep climb. His critics, including many in his own caucus, worried that he was all resumé and no charisma. The remnants of Dion’s team harboured resentment that Ignatieff had played a role in ousting their man, thereby repeating the Liberals’ self-destructive practice of tribal warfare between succeeding factions.

  Ignatieff pulled together a staff of long-time friends led by Ian Davey, a savvy if politically inexperienced lone wolf who established himself as the sole conduit to the leader. Complaints about access and lack of communication came to a head in mid-2009 at a summer caucus meeting in Sudbury. Ignatieff made a blustery speech in which he boasted, “Your time is up, Mr. Harper.” It was an empty and embarrassing display of bravado that utterly failed to rally his parliamentary colleagues.

  Ignatieff continued to drift, talking in high-table platitudes while his support in the polls dropped to near-unprecedented lows. The Conservative attack ads that accused him of “just visiting” with no good reason for coming back to Canada took their toll. The central question was why he was in the fray, and he had no answer.

  Finally in the fall, Ignatieff gathered the courage to do what leaders must when things are going badly. He fired his old friend Ian, along with an assistant who was Ian’s girlfriend and some others. Rocked by the experience, Ignatieff told a visitor to Stornoway at Halloween that “there was blood on the walls” and “he had learned the hard lesson that one should not hire close friends as subordinates.” The party’s old guard persuaded him to bring in the smoothly Machiavellian Peter Donolo, a veteran of the Chrétien years who wasted no time in putting a sharp edge on the operation.

  The Chrétien way was to blindside an opponent into the boards. This was not Ignatieff ’s style, or at least not yet. In Question Period, he preferred statesmanship over feigned outrage. In policy discussions, he seemed at sea, waffling on his former hawkishness in security and foreign affairs, yet uncomfortable grasping the nettle of left-leaning Liberal social policy. Friends felt Ignatieff had reached a low point by year’s end, when he and his wife took a Caribbean vacation and he wondered aloud to a colleague, “Why did I ever take this goddamn job?”

  Ignatieff was not the only one asking that question. The old lion Jean Chrétien was restlessly pacing his cage at home in Ottawa. Chrétien murmured darkly to friends that he might have to pull a Trudeau and return to office to save the party. Fearing the Liberals might be headed for a serious collapse, Chrétien encouraged a move to get merger talks underway with the NDP and drew their former leader Ed Broadbent into the plot. The scheme blew up in their faces when some of Chrétien’s former Cabinet members who were loyal to Ignatieff leaked it to me and other reporters. After that, Chrétien kept his doubts to himself but never stopped nursing his grievances over the party’s failure to choose Bob Rae, the brother of his oldest political friend, John Rae.

  Peter Donolo, who had served Chrétien faithfully for years, was embittered by his former boss’s machinations, but remained undeterred. His idea for a turnaround was one of the oldest in the political playbook and fitted the moment perfectly. In the spring of 2010, Michael Ignatieff and his wife headed out on a nationwide bus tour. It amounted to a campaign rehearsal and a way of convincing the nervous Nellies in the Liberal caucus that Ignatieff had the mental and physical stamina to lead them into the next election.

  In visiting every corner of the country, Ignatieff discovered a Canada he had not really known, and equally important, he found his voice. As one of his travelling companions noted, the collective voice of the hundreds of Canadians Ignatieff met described the gap between their needs and the Conservative government’s policies. The trip provided what Ignatieff had been missing: a way to articulate a clear distinction between Liberal and Conservative visions of the country. Someone who spent a few hours with Ignatieff that Christmas found him very different from the year before. He was serene, prepared to fight, and, if necessary, lose an election on his revivified perception of Canada and the role of its government.

  Once he found himself comfortable on the centre left, Ignatieff also found the natural eloquence that had impressed his early admirers. For the first time he spoke with passion about the Canada that was being lost, and he began to sound and look like the leader the Liberals had sought years before. Sadly, however, Ignatieff had come too late to the party.

  Everyone in the Conservative Party seems to know someone who was in the room when Harper told his strategy meeting before his first election win in 2006 that he needed three elections to finish off the Liberal Party for a generation. Before I am done, he is reported to have said, the country will be unrecognizable. In truth the Liberal Party’s national profile had been shrinking before Harper pledged to destroy it. The old consortium of big business and intellectual and cultural elites tied together by jobs and money and enjoying a docile press may have been fatally weakened even then, but did not recognize its own vulnerability. Harper saw it for what it was: an empty shell.

  For the prime minister, however, timing was critical to the achievement of his dream. In late February 2011, Harper met with the NDP leader, Jack Layton, in his office across from Parliament Hill. The topic of conversation was the forthcoming budget, the terms of which could determine the fate of Harper’s minority government. Threatened by widening Opposition accusations of dishonesty, the Conservatives did not want an election. Their strategy was to play for time while the economy improved and the parliamentary mood lightened, hoping to face a less combative Commons in the fall.

  Harper and the team close to him, including Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, Chief of Staff Nigel Wright, and House Leader John Baird, were convinced that Layton did not want an election either. After all, he was recovering from both prostate cancer and surgery for a fractured hip. The session with Layton was amiable, reinforcing their impression that he was ready to deal, and they hurriedly designed a budget that included the concessions they believed would secure the NDP’s support. Those measures, costed out at a billion dollars, embraced enhancements to both the Canada Pension Plan and the Guaranteed Income Supplement, and reintroduced a home renovation tax break. The Canadian Labour Congress urged Layton to take the deal. The Harperites felt confident. Asked whether he expected an election, John Baird surprised me with his certainty that there would be no spring campaign. “Layton really, really doesn’t want one,” he assured me.

  But when Layton saw an advance copy of the budget on March 22, he felt the government had come up short; in his view, the necessary programs were underfunded. It appeared the two men had been talking past one another. Layton announced his decision to defeat the budget, leaving Harper not only surprised but angry. With the Conservatives immersed in a tawdry scandal involving a former close aide to the prime minister, with senior party members facing charges of election fraud, and with his government about to become the first ever to be found in contempt of Parliament, the timing of the election could not be worse.

  Ignatieff had been the target of the Conservatives’ personal attack ads for two years and at last decided to seize the moment. He took great satisfaction in heading off the budget vote, defeating the government instead with a Liberal non-confidence motion denouncing its treatment of Parliament. Shortly after the government fell, Ignatieff, in a rather unstatesmanlike but feisty remark, observed to a friend, “They really are assholes.” Liberal strategists hoped
they could turn the character of the Harper government into what pundits term a ballot question. If the election could be fought on the Conservatives’ contempt for democracy and all that goes with it—lack of openness, divisive practices, and bullying tactics—the Liberals could move their numbers into minority-government territory at least.

  The first weeks of the campaign were listless and largely uneventful, with the media’s serious attention focused on Harper and Ignatieff. Layton aroused sympathy for the state of his health; expectations were adjusted accordingly.

  Two months before the government’s defeat, I’d met with Brad Lavigne, the NDP’s national campaign director. He tried to convince me that this time would be different for Layton, claiming that the party’s private polls were showing the NDP had captured the allegiance of over 20 percent of voters in Quebec. Indeed, our contacts in Quebec had been reporting voter fatigue with the separatist Bloc Québécois for months. Those voters, said Lavigne, identified with the left-of-centre NDP issues, especially on Afghanistan, the environment, and social issues.

  In 2008, the NDP had made the mistake in Quebec of running too hard against Harper. Quebecers wanted to defeat the Conservatives, but they didn’t believe the NDP would have the national clout to do it. They turned once again to the Bloc. In 2011, the NDP strategy was to court provincial sentiments by persuading Quebecers that their best hopes for a comfortable berth within federalism lay with the NDP. The party ran a television ad featuring a frantic hamster on a wheel and a voice-over declaration that the separatist party was getting them nowhere in Ottawa. Other ads appealed to soft nationalists and played up Layton’s roots in the province.

  Layton’s own efforts to modernize the party, jettisoning both its lofty intellectual and militant labour images, had started to show results. One staffer recalled asking Layton about a new gizmo he brought into a meeting shortly after becoming leader in 2003; soon they all carried BlackBerry devices. And no matter how often he was told it was a waste of time and money, Layton never neglected Quebec. The crowds in 2011 were modest at first, but there was a noticeable friendliness toward him that organizers could not miss. The party was helped too by a popular champion in the province, Thomas Mulcair, a former cabinet minister in the provincial Liberal government of Jean Charest. Running for the NDP in September 2007, Mulcair won a by-election in the federal riding of Outremont, long a Liberal seat.

  My own assignment was the prime minister’s campaign tour, which I joined in early May. Members of his travelling press entourage were already grumbling; an incident from the week before especially rankled. Harper’s campaign plane had departed for a trip to British Columbia on Easter Sunday, cutting into family plans for the holiday weekend. One of the correspondents asked a press aide if the prime minister could at least come to the back of the aircraft and say hello. He never came. Harper and his handlers were running a campaign that allowed for no unscripted moments with reporters or with the public.

  Severe limitations were imposed on reporters’ questions so as to avoid any distraction from the party’s “economy and stability” message. Harper relied on a teleprompter to keep him resolutely on message, and his events were held before handpicked crowds of party loyalists. Attendees’ identities were checked at the door lest ordinary members of the public try to sneak in, a procedure that was modified only slightly after the Mounties expelled two young women and an armed forces veteran under suspicion of having sympathies for other political parties.

  The campaign’s many facets had been organized as a seamless whole, with the candidate, the message, and the ads all tested and approved by focus groups and market research. The result was deliberately flat and uninspiring, totally devoid of spontaneity and paralyzing in its monotony. Columnists, editorialists, and reporters were almost unanimous in their judgment that the campaign’s failure to connect with voters other than hard-core supporters would leave Harper short of his majority.

  The Liberal plane, by contrast, offered a lively and entertaining scene. Ignatieff did his Jerry Springer open mike routine every night to enthusiastic crowds. Shirt sleeves rolled up, mike in hand, he took questions on every conceivable subject for an hour or more. Too many questions, perhaps, and too many answers. By the end of a town hall blitz, reporters did not know what to write as a lead story. The message was mushy.

  The Liberal leader was impressive by every standard, and his basic platform was credible; his promises of social programs, education, and pensions were viable and appeared to be fiscally sound. However, if it was such an impressive showing, why was Ignatieff not breaking through with Canadians? In an effort to rouse the voters from their torpor, he took a page from the Obama presidential campaign and its thematic chant, “Yes we can.”

  “Rise up,” Ignatieff exhorted Canadians. His team could not understand why the public failed to respond to the charge that Harper was a threat to democracy. Yet it’s hard to make an argument that democracy is at risk during an election campaign, which in itself is what democracy is all about. Nothing could be more democratic.

  All the while, Harper was hammering home a single credo. He repeated the need for a “strong, stable majority government” so relentlessly that reporters took to chanting it to each other in unison. Canadians knew instinctively that the outlook for the global economy was murky, and Harper was saying, in effect, trust me because I am the only one offering safe harbour in troubled waters.

  By mid-campaign, the Liberals knew their last hope lay in the national televised leaders’ debates set for April 12 and 13. Ignatieff had to win them unequivocally. But over-rehearsed and ill-served by memorized ripostes, he simply froze when Layton delivered a barb about his poor Commons attendance. On the national news that night, I judged that Harper had won the English debate by not losing it. He was steely calm, gathered within himself, and he refused to be drawn away from his standard economic speech by his tormentors. Jack Layton, having scored effectively in the English-language contest, was smiling and affable in the French debate the following night. Huge numbers of Quebecers were taken with his confidence, his car-mechanic French, even his personal courage, as many saw it, in campaigning with the support of a cane. The NDP was getting respect—and everyone’s attention—at last.

  Quebec was the catalyst for the final sprint to the finish. On the Friday night before election Monday, the private polls consulted by Conservative campaign chair Guy Giorno suggested his party was five seats short of a majority. The NDP was enjoying a dizzying surge in Quebec, raising the prospect of a slightly different coalition than the one Conservatives had railed against: an NDP-led minority government supported by a Liberal rump.

  On the following afternoon, news crews from nine of the most influential local and network stations in Ontario were positioned in assembly-line style on the shop floor of a steel manufacturing plant in Brampton. Stephen Harper worked his way down the queue from one interviewer to the next, declaring that an NDP government would be a disaster for the economy of the nation’s most populous province and rekindling memories of the ill-fated NDP provincial government under Bob Rae.

  These interviews, which blanketed the province, were a bold and direct appeal to wavering Liberals. For those in Southern Ontario who could occasionally wear Conservative colours, including many who were at the throttle of the country’s economic engine, an NDP government was anathema. In the hours before the polls closed, these “blue” Liberals threw their support behind the Conservatives in a bid to stop the NDP. Many, such as my former boss Ivan Fecan, will likely stay with the Conservatives if Harper tacks to the centre of the political spectrum in the years ahead.

  For the Liberals and for Michael Ignatieff, the campaign was a debacle. In its aftermath, former party president Stephen LeDrew reflected that the losses were not due to the poor generalship of Michael Ignatieff. He did not let the party down, LeDrew observed, but rather “the party failed him.” Whatever the verdict, the Liberals face the future without their one-time dream candidate and with B
ob Rae as interim leader.

  The sweep of Quebec by the New Democrats notwithstanding, the capture of Ontario by the Conservatives may be the most enduringly significant event of the 2011 election. Ontario, with its banking, investment, and entrepreneurial power tied to the commodity and energy resources of the West, had been the source of Liberal hegemony for generations.

  The flip side, however, is that Harper has formed the first majority government without significant representation from Quebec. This will be a serious challenge for him when, as most believe, the separatist Parti Québécois wins the provincial election. To prepare “winning conditions” for a referendum on independence, a separatist provincial government will attempt to provoke Ottawa with demands no national government could accept. Since Harper will need the backing of the fifty-nine NDP MPs from Quebec to keep the federalist forces united, he will have to handle his relationship with the NDP carefully.

  Fifty years after it was founded, the NDP had been placed in a position where it could realistically expect to form a national government. But the man who put the party there, Jack Layton, would never have the chance to live that dream. His untimely death on August 22, 2011, robbed the party of its best asset and threw our national politics into disarray, leaving Stephen Harper the only full-time national leader in Parliament. The NDP will struggle to find a leader with the prestige and authority to hold together its disparate parts as a historically English-speaking party now dominated by Quebecers. Moreover, that new party chief will have to emerge from the long shadow cast by the individual who, more than anyone since Tommy Douglas, personified what the party stands for. Perhaps the moderate progressive NDP ground Layton staked out can be protected from claim jumpers, but it will not be easy.