by Conrad Black
All nations have fluctuations of fortunes and quality of governance, and the United States, having seen off its last rivals, at least for a considerable time – Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and, in industrial terms, cartelized Japan – took a good time to rest on its oars. For all its history, Canada had been intimidated by the fact that, no matter how well it did, it was always in the shadow of its overpowering neighbour, always overlooked by the world and taken more or less amiably for granted, by the Americans, the British, and, when they condescended to notice at all, even the French, although Canada, never under threat itself, had given its all in solidarity with all of those countries throughout the twentieth century. This sudden plunge of the American superpower into the tenebrous nether region of misgovernment and national absurdity shifted the basis of Canadian national self-esteem from the confected self-consciousness of caring, sharing social programs and moralizing (whether “arm-flapping,” in Dean Acheson’s phrase, or otherwise), to the higher ground of recognition that it was a better-governed country and a better-functioning society, with less debt and, in many respects, lower taxes than the United States. This fact, and the defeat of the separatists in Quebec, emancipated Canada from much of the diffidence that had hobbled it for all of its history, and, being Canada, this emancipation came slowly and quietly and was not translated into braggadocio or impetuosity, just a more secure national consciousness.
Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty observed the deepening economic crisis – from which the strengths of the system they directed, and the talent of Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien, were largely responsible for delivering the country – as an opportunity for a lunge for the political jugular. Since Chrétien’s time, official federal parties received $1.95 for every vote they gained in the previous general election, to pay their operating costs and reduce their dependence on private and special interest funding. Harper and Flaherty conceived the plan to include in an economic update for November 27, 2008, a number of belt-tightening measures, including freezes on MPs’ pay and expenses and the abolition of this political party funding method. Doing this would cost the Conservatives $10 million, or 37 per cent of their income, but it would cost the Liberals $7.7 million (63 per cent), the Bloc Québécois $2.6 million (86 per cent), and the NDP $4.9 million (57 per cent). Harper calculated that this would put immense heat on the Bloc and facilitate a division of its position between the NDP and the Liberals, who would thus be consoled by their own inconveniences, and that it would enable the Conservatives to exploit their advantages in funding. Flaherty’s document was rather complacent in tone and implied that the government had already acted preveniently to mitigate the recession, cutting two points off the GST and increasing infrastructure expenses in 2006 and 2007, and that nothing more was required at this point. The budget would remain balanced, but Flaherty prepared opinion for deficit financing should it become necessary because of the extent of the international vulnerability to the errors of other countries. This was not as pompous as it may seem, and Canada was entitled to pat itself on the back a little, though it should have been more bipartisan.
All three parties said they would vote against Flaherty’s plan, and the implications of this were immediately obvious. The three opposition party leaders had already started discussion of a coalition between them. Harper’s caucus was soon telling him that reaction from the party faithful to Flaherty’s message was hostile, not because of the political subsidy’s promised demise, but because of its smugness, given the decline of the automobile industry and other consumer spending and the 30 to 40 per cent crack in the stock market, and that Canada should not pretend to be quite so isolated from worldwide trends. The opposition parties would have their first opportunity to vote down the government on December 1, on a supply motion. Harper began to manoeuvre (unlike Clark in 1979) and said the political subsidy would not be in the measure voted on, but the opposition parties could smell blood and said they would vote against the government whatever was at issue. Harper deferred the December vote for a week, promised that there would be a more comprehensive economic package soon, made the usual references to the inappropriateness of another election, and opened fire on the coalition idea as an unholy alliance to usurp the Conservatives and deliver decisive influence to the separatist enemies of Canada in its Parliament. He gathered polemical strength quickly with talk of “backroom deals” conducted by a defeated leader who had already thrown in the towel (as had Trudeau in 1979, but he had led the popular vote, where Dion had been bombed). He concluded: “The opposition has every right to defeat the government, but Stéphane Dion does not have the right to take power without an election.”8 The Conservatives effectively abandoned Flaherty’s entire supplementary budget message, and had fortuitously been advised of the dial-in number for a Jack Layton conference call with his NDP caucus on Saturday, November 28. The Conservatives recorded the call and released, almost at once, comments of Layton’s that made it clear that discussion of a coalition had begun before Flaherty’s message was released, and that Layton was fairly blasé about making common cause with the separatists. Harper was suffering from an acute influenza infection (contracted at an Asian-Pacific meeting in Lima a few days before) and was not impressive in his comments to the House on November 30.
On December 1, the three opposition leaders met the press together and confirmed their intention to form a coalition government in which all three parties would contribute ministers, under Dion as prime minister. Conservative attacks on reliance on separatists to govern federally in a way that caused Layton and Dion to have misrepresented themselves in the recent election started to take hold and echo in the ears of the MPs of the three federalist parties. On December 2, Harper, recovering and revitalized, told the House of Commons that the coalition deal was “a betrayal of the voters of this country.” He attacked the three leaders personally and pointed out that when they signed their corrupt and implicitly treasonable arrangement, they could not have the Canadian flag behind them “because one of them does not believe in this country.” (In fact, there were Canadian and provincial flags behind them, but that wasn’t the point.) The tide was turning. Harper secured from the governor general a prorogation of Parliament until January 26, and the incipient coalition collapsed under the weight of public denigration. Harper had gone into a self-made trap insouciantly, but had recovered well and again profited from the amateurism of his opponents. Of the three opposition leaders, the only one who recognized that the Bloc’s presence in a coalition could be a show-stopper was the Bloc leader himself, Gilles Duceppe.
On December 8, Dion announced that he would resign as soon as the Liberal caucus chose his successor, and two days later Michael Ignatieff was chosen as interim leader, a decision that was later ratified, but with less formality than usual in the Liberal Party. Stéphane Dion thus passed into the footnotes of Canadian history as the first federal Liberal leader not to be prime minister since Edward Blake, who had taken his leave 121 years before. Harper clung thereafter to the position that what was available on the political menu was a Conservative minority or a shabby and cynical coalition of his opponents. Having survived narrowly, he gained strength and stature and was more formidable than ever, as was the country he led, as most other advanced countries wallowed in what was called the Great Recession.
Flaherty’s next attempt at a budget, for 2009, forecast $60 billion of deficit over two years and essentially contained all that the NDP and Liberals had been claiming to miss in his ill-fated supplementary budget of a few weeks earlier. There were modest tax cuts and a good dollop of stimulus spending. Ignatieff announced the Liberals would support it if the government explained every three months how the money was actually being distributed to the people. The government jubilantly accepted this as facilitating its propaganda effort to demonstrate its munificence in the guise of satisfying the official Opposition’s demands. At the end of March 2009, Ignatieff was rubber-stamped as permanent leader by the Liberals in Vancouver, in a convention h
ighlighted by a very lengthy and soporific farewell to and by Stéphane Dion. The Conservatives greeted the new leader with the now traditional attack ads on television: “He’s not in it for Canada. He’s just in it for himself.… Michael Ignatieff: just visiting.” Ignatieff’s vague manner of developing issues, throwing out striking positions and then retreating from them and nibbling around the edges, created an air of fecklessness, of dilettantism.
Harper had realized that successful Conservatives usually hold the nationalist card (Disraeli, Macdonald, Salisbury, Churchill, Nixon, Thatcher, Reagan), and he had noticed that while Brian Mulroney increased Canada’s influence in the world with his intimacy with President Reagan and the senior President Bush, it had not gone down well with the Canadian voters. Steeped in the self-consciousness of the unequal continental relationship, Canadians had resented what they took as Mulroney’s subordinacy, if not (very unjustly) servility, to the American leader. Harper could also not have failed to notice the nosedive in America’s status in the world since the time of President Clinton. He was happy enough not to be cordially called by George W. Bush on the day before Bush handed over to Obama, unlike many other leaders favoured with such a call, and he made no effort to make anything very noteworthy out of President Obama’s visit to him in March 2009.
He was the most pro-Israeli prime minister in Canadian history, or at least since John Diefenbaker, whose government was in office when all the Western powers were pro-Israel, before Anwar Sadat made the Arabs more popular and while King Hussein still represented the Palestinians (despite being a Bedouin that most Palestinians viewed with respectful suspicion). In Harper’s case, his stance may have had the benefit of taking the electoral, media, and financial support of Canada’s Jewish community away from the Liberals, but there is no reason to doubt that it has been a sincere expression of Harper’s view and that of his about-to-be foreign minister (the External Affairs Department was finally changed to the Foreign Ministry), John Baird. Essentially, the Government of Canada’s view is that the bar to peace is the refusal of the Palestinians and their sponsors to admit the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, and that if this were addressed it would be simple to establish a Palestinian state. The Canadians and the Czechs are effectively the only countries who join Israel in this view, as even the United States has signed on to a version of the need for Israel to stop completely any construction of West Bank settlements to make peace possible. Although Israel made it clear in Sinai and Gaza that it would uproot settlers if it was part of a real peace, the Israelis became understandably tired of land-for-peace scams in which they would trade territory conquered in wars the Arabs had started and lost, in exchange for cease-fires that would not be observed by the other side.
This stance caused Canada to be blocked in its quest for a seat on the United Nations Security Council in 2010, and Ignatieff, as the son and political heir of the Liberal Pearsonian tradition of enthusiasm for international organizations (his father was a distinguished foreign service officer), took issue with this. But Ignatieff was unambiguously rebuffed by Harper, who dug in on the issue and disparaged the United Nations as a centre of hypocrisy and Third World mockery of the West, which founded and maintained the UN. Harper had also been pretty solid on Afghanistan. It was Chrétien who originated Canada’s commitment to the war in Afghanistan, and Martin had held it, even after the United States largely decamped to Iraq and left its UN and NATO allies in a severely undermanned position, trying to maintain an imposed peace in the warlord-riven country while the Bush doctrine of democratization was imperfectly implemented by a corrupt, despotic, and ungrateful regime. Canada was left with responsibility for securing Kandahar, a province of over a million people, with a force of one thousand, about six hundred trigger-pullers. Kandahar was the birthplace of the fundamentalist and terrorist Taliban, and it was a wonder, and a testament to its professionalism, that the Canadian contingent wasn’t massacred. Obama increased the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan and the Canadians stayed to the end of the allied commitment in 2014. Whatever the succeeding condition of the country, and despite a controversy about detainees, Canada did its part. It was the largest Canadian military mission since Korea, more than fifty years before, and at time of writing, 158 Canadians had died there.
Harper had kept the spectre of coalition government involving separatist collaboration alive since his brush with catastrophe at the end of 2008. One of the areas where he replicated Mackenzie King was in his solitary, obscure tenacity on points that he detected would be durably useful. There is no reason to believe that Stephen Harper is as sanctimonious or mystical as King – and he has a very attractive and vivacious wife and two children, and they appear to be a typical family, and he is an ardent hockey fan – but he is a remote figure who believes in a modern conservative position of limited government as ardently as King believed in his reconciliation of industry and humanity, and who is as determined as King to take decisions of long-term implications when he can and manage political tactics with an almost imperceptible patience and cunning. He is a more media-presentable person, more photogenic and given to more sharply formulated sentences, not as apparently deliberate and indecisive as King. Unlike King, Harper has never been defeated personally and is bilingual. He did not gain the leadership of the Opposition by representing himself (with questionable accuracy as King did) as the rightful successor to a revered leader, but rather had to toil in the coils of internecine opposition politics, with all its frustrations and antagonisms, to weld two fractious parties together, sell a political perspective to the right of Canadian tradition, and endure five years of minority government against leaders who, however unsuccessful, were more accessible to voter affection than were the leaders King mainly faced, the very accomplished but bombastic and infelicitous Arthur Meighen and R.B. Bennett.
If Harper’s playing of the separatist card against the opposition in 2008 had been a little like King’s response to the Chanak affair in 1922, or even the Byng affair in 1926, in March 2011 he pulled from the hat a vintage Kingsian rabbit, like King acting on J.L. Ralston’s two-year-old letter of resignation in 1944. Jim Flaherty presented another budget on March 23, 2011, and on Harper’s orders included only about half of what Jack Layton had asked for as a condition of support for the budget, particularly restoration of the ecoEnergy home retrofit program, increases to the guaranteed income supplement and to the Canada Pension Plan, and to allocations for more doctors and nurses for the health-care system. Flaherty told the press and the House that he had accommodated the NDP, as agreed between Harper and Layton, as if to make sure that Layton noticed that he got less than he had been led to expect. (Harper and Flaherty gave him half what he expected for the home retrofits, less than he wanted for the income supplement, and nothing else.) Layton was fighting mad.
On March 25, 2011, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Procedure found that the government was in contempt of the committee because it had failed to answer with adequate precision opposition demands for estimates of the cost of overruns in the F-35 fighter plane program, corporate tax reductions, the G20 summit meeting Harper had hosted the previous year in and near Toronto, and Harper’s draconian crime bills. These last were proposed by his grim, oddly moustachioed, and reactionary public security minister, Vic Toews. They feature construction of new prisons and enforcement of more severe sentences and harsher imprisonment conditions despite a declining crime rate, on the theory of “build and they will come”; that is, be hunted out, convicted, and dragged to detention. They include mandatory sentences by which legislators usurp the role of judges, dispensing with any effort to rehabilitate wrongdoers, and treating families who are visiting inmates with gratuitous official pettifogging and segregation. It is contemptible, especially as the chief victims will be native people, most of whom should not be in the prison system.
Harper treated the complaint of contempt of the committee as just another manifestation of the opposition’s will to coalesce in mindless o
bstructionism. Ignatieff had taken the bait; Layton was furious at being short-changed by Flaherty; and Duceppe would not hang back. Harper and his senior colleagues unctuously masqueraded as diligent governors “trying to make minority government and Parliament work,” a Joe Clark phrase from the 1979 fiasco (Chapter 9).*
Harper hit the ground running for the May 2 election after Parliament voted the government in contempt of the committee. He claimed that it was a mere foretaste of the arrogance and irresponsibility of the “coalition” that he was facing, and that the country would have to choose between a Conservative government and a ramshackle and morally bankrupt league of tricksters dominated by separatists; that is, traitors. Harper ran a very controlled campaign, claiming to admit all comers to his meetings until stories came out that his security unit was evicting people for pretty spuriously based suspicions of possible troublemaking. Ignatieff didn’t click with the voters, proving testy and ineffectual in the debates; Duceppe was now a complete anachronism in Quebec, a Bouchardist heirloom in a post-separatist Quebec in a federal election. But Layton was making it in English and French Canada as the most personable of the leaders. Harper could hold his Conservative forces on an ideological leash, but Layton was making serious inroads against the other two opposition parties. All of the three national parties were giving similar messages about helping families; Harper was offering a less Pearsonian and UN-compliant foreign policy; and Layton started to play footsie with the Quebec nationalists as he smelt a breakthrough in that province, where his entirely bilingual persona of “le bon Jack” went over well. Provincial workplace laws oppressive to the non-French would, he said, be applied to federal employees in the province, a harbinger of NDP flim-flam to come. Ignatieff started shouting, “Rise up! Rise up, Canada!” at his audiences and in television advertising. This was a bit over the top for Canadians, no matter how bored they were with their politicians. While this was happening, the Bloc leader, Gilles Duceppe, feeling himself squeezed by Layton and the NDP, got closer to the Parti Québécois and called for solidarity from the sovereigntists to hang on to the PQ’s full share of the province’s vote (about a third, but not in a federal election, where many of the separatists wouldn’t bother voting).
