The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  The most resounding rebuttal to the Conservatives’ Quebec optimism came first, not from the Bloc or the Liberals, but from Jack Layton’s NDP. The party went into the campaign with something it had never had before in a general election, an NDP incumbent in a Quebec riding. Thomas Mulcair was a former Quebec environment minister who had left Jean Charest’s cabinet rather than accept a new post he perceived as a demotion. After flirting with other federal parties, including the Conservatives, Mulcair had thrown in his lot with Jack Layton and defeated Dion’s hapless candidate in the 2007 by-election in Outremont.

  Only once before had a New Democrat won in a Quebec riding: Phil Edmonston in Chambly in 1990. But Edmonston was a prickly fellow who did not get on well with his colleagues, and he had decided not to run for re-election in 1993. Without him the NDP had promptly lost his riding. So Mulcair, smart, urbane and hot-tempered, looked more like Quebec momentum than anything the party had ever seen. Step one in consolidating that momentum, the New Democrats decided, was to drive up the number of undecided voters by carpet-bombing the Conservatives. The result was the most starkly terrifying broadcast ad in the history of Canadian political campaigning.

  Shot in black-and-white, the French-language ad featured a nightmarish surge of dissonant music in the background and a montage of animated and archival images. “A vote for the Conservatives …” a woman’s voice, barely a whisper, intones. The screen goes blank for an instant before words rush toward the camera: “RETROGRADE

  IDEOLOGY AUTHORITARIAN INTOLERANT.” The narrator finishes her thought: “… is voting for narrow thinking.” A featureless cartoon father and child hurtle toward the viewer in silhouette. Suddenly the child’s head disintegrates, then its shoulders, thorax and abdomen. Perhaps it is because of radiation from the nuclear power plant now rushing at the camera behind the dissolving child. “For cuts to culture,” the woman says. “It’s voting against Kyoto.” While the voice-over is saying this, cloudy newsreel footage of Harper’s face runs on the left side of the screen, while footage of George W. Bush runs on the right. “It’s a pro-war vote that makes us the slaves of the oilmen.” Animated black-clad armies fill the screen as two arms, encased in chains, bisect the screen.

  Suddenly, sunlight. Orange-tinted sunlight. A balding man with a moustache appears. Jack Layton! “A single act and all that can stop,” he says in pretty good French. “Join us! Vote NDP.”

  At the end of the 2006 campaign Paul Martin’s Liberals had produced ads warning that a vote for Harper was a vote for armies in the streets. The Liberals had backed down from broadcasting such dark messages, or thought they had: a copy of an ad leaked and became a symbol of Liberal panic. But the Liberal spot was a walk in the park next to these new NDP ads.

  Conservative pollsters followed their impact over the next several days. They found that the ads had accomplished only half their purpose. They drove voters away from the Conservatives. But not toward the New Democrats. These were not ads that put voters in a mood to take a flyer on something new. Wherever they aired, support for the most familiar choice, the Bloc Québécois, went up.

  From Quebec City Harper flew to Vancouver for a night’s rest at an airport hotel and an early morning breakfast-table chat with the Huang family in suburban Richmond. The Huangs—Edwin, Fei, their toddlers Renée and Eric—didn’t say much, but they should have been flattered. The prime minister of Canada had flown across the Rockies for a photo opportunity with them. He would fly back over the Rockies without speaking to anyone else.

  At the time it looked like an exquisitely calibrated message: send leader to Quebec City, slingshot him back over half a continent and insert him into an appropriately multiethnic breakfast nook, evacuate. In retrospect it would not look so clever. It’s a lasting anachronism of the modern campaign that it actually does matter which cities and towns party leaders visit. You would think the multimedia modern world would make the leader’s physical presence obsolete, but it doesn’t. There is no substitute for the local coverage an aspiring prime minister draws. It ratchets attention up and, normally, translates into significantly improved polling performance for the local candidate. But to make that effect last, a leader needs to stay in the area for a while. Harper’s toe-touches in Quebec and British Columbia were his last visits to either province for more than a week. In the end the Conservatives would post unimpressive results in British Columbia, and worse in Quebec. (For the 2011 campaign there would be adjustments.)

  Meanwhile it was on to Saskatchewan and the gleaming, unscuffed farm of Kevin and Kenda Eberle, a short drive outside Regina. Here again Harper did his new come-all-ye-bold-Canadians thing. It was starting to freak out the reporters on the campaign plane a bit.

  “Now let me just end with this, my friends,” he said at the end of a speech that had been mostly devoted to complaining about Dion’s carbon tax. “It has been an unbelievable experience, the experience of a lifetime, to be your prime minister. You get to see this country in a way no one else gets to see it. You get to travel across the country, to see the true breadth of our country, you get to meet people in every corner and from every background in this great country. And you get to travel the world. And you get to see other people and the situations they live in, and the difference and the advantages that we have here.

  “When I come to Saskatchewan, even on a beautiful day like this, I never cease to be amazed. To look out and to think—especially as that cold wind whistles across the prairie in the wintertime—to think how tough the people who came here had it. To break the land and to build everything that we have today. How tough it must have been for the Aboriginal people before that, to live in that environment.

  “But I also never forget this: there are very few places in the world where you can look out as far as the eye can see and see land that is rich, land you can grow things on, land you can build your families on, land that is full of potential. That’s what people see in this country when they come from every corner of the earth. They see opportunity as limitless as the horizon of Saskatchewan. That’s what we’re building here.”

  For two and a half years, just about all the nightly news from Ottawa had told the Eberles’ neighbours that this fellow Harper was a pure son of a bitch. And now here he was among them, and those who hadn’t come to the farm—because of course only loyal Conservatives had been told to show up—would see him on their news, and what they would see was that the prime minister of Canada suddenly sounded like a touring production of The Vinyl Café.

  In Winnipeg he had a photo op and a morning press conference in a frigid warehouse where vegetables were stored waiting for trucks to take them to market. Diesel trucks. Harper announced he would cut the excise tax on diesel fuel. The cut would “benefit consumers who buy virtually anything that moves by truck, train, ship or plane,” he said.

  What it would also do, of course, was sharpen the contrast with Dion’s Green Shift, which sought to pay for income-tax cuts by imposing a carbon tax. Dion, the Conservative lore said, would make life more expensive. Well, Harper would make it cheaper. As a sort of bonus, his diesel-tax cut drove economists batty. “This is unfathomably stupid,” economist Stephen Gordon wrote on his blog. “In one stroke, it takes two serious and pressing problems—the deteriorating fiscal situation and greenhouse gas emissions—and makes them both worse.”

  The diesel-tax cut was also a returned favour to Canada’s trucking associations, which had done yeoman work whipping up antipathy to Dion’s proposed Green Shift. On doorsteps across Canada, Conservative campaign workers were dropping off flyers that featured the local Conservative candidate’s name next to a photo of Stéphane Dion shrugging. The largest words on the flyer were “THIS MAN WILL COST YOU MONEY.” A handy arrow pointed to Dion, so you wouldn’t think it was the Conservative candidate who would cost you money. Dion was carrying a sack of groceries with the words “PLEASE PAY MORE” crudely Photoshopped onto the bag. But it was the fine print that completed the sale. “As a result of [Di
on’s] carbon taxes, prices of consumer goods and food would rise,” the flyer quoted Peter A. Nelson, executive director of the Atlantic Provinces Trucking Association, opining. “The average consumer would see this rise in the form of paying $8 for a head of lettuce at your local grocery store.”

  Yikes! Eight-dollar lettuce. This would mean the price of lettuce had quadrupled. The arithmetic on this was not obvious. Dion was proposing a $10 tax per tonne of carbon emissions. It was hard to imagine the truck that would belch out 0.6 tonnes of hydrocarbon waste for every head of lettuce it carted unless the truck was built and operated by Druids with torches. I could also point out that Dion’s plan did not call for any tax on gasoline until the third year of a by-now highly hypothetical Liberal government—but now we are getting lost in a level of detail the Conservative flyer was not made to convey.

  Peter A. Nelson, incidentally, knew a good line when he saw it. As the blogger BigCityLib pointed out, Nelson had already announced the end of cheap lettuce twice before. When the State of Maine had considered a toll road to the New Brunswick border, Nelson had predicted $8 lettuce. When the Marine Atlantic ferry service mooted a fuel surcharge, Nelson’s prediction spiked to $10. God put Peter A. Nelson on this Earth so Peter A. Nelson could predict expensive lettuce. It is what Peter A. Nelson does. But BigCityLib’s blog has a few hundred readers. Peter A. Nelson’s prediction was on every doorstep in the nation.

  In the end, Harper’s diesel-tax cut would be poor payback for trucking services rendered. The Conservatives put the cost of the Winnipeg promise at $600 million a year. When, very late in the campaign, Harper finally released a platform, the diesel-tax cut accounted for fully half the dollar value of all Conservative spending promises. And after the Conservatives were re-elected, the diesel-tax cut was never heard of again. Not only was it never passed into law or regulation; it was simply never mentioned. The biggest promise Harper made in the campaign vanished without a trace afterward. Actually, there was a kind of poetic justice to this. Harper had fixed Peter A. Nelson’s imaginary lettuce tax with a make-believe diesel-tax cut.

  Yet in the moment, in that frigid Winnipeg warehouse, it was a pleasure to watch Harper defend his imaginary policy. Was he encouraging fuel use by making fuel cheaper? No, because fuel use is so crucial to the fabric of modern life it is impossible to encourage or discourage, he said. “The kinds of thing diesel is used for—which is primarily for commercial transportation—this has to be done. This has to be done. You know, my opponent says he wants to tax things that are bad. Heating your home: is that bad? Taking groceries to market: is that bad? Allowing airplane transportation, the shipping of goods across the continent and around the world. Business and passenger transportation. Are these bad things? No, these are essential things for the economy.”

  Meanwhile, the reporters on Dion’s bus had noticed they weren’t airborne yet. In the spring, NDP strategists had started a bidding war with the Liberals for the last available Air Canada charter plane. The Liberals, short on cash, pulled out and started casting about for an airplane they could rent on short notice. They finally found one, not exactly brand new, from Air Inuit, a northern Quebec company. But it wouldn’t be ready for days. In the National Post, Don Martin called the Liberal campaign “a funeral procession.”

  Later, a senior Conservative said his side was floored by the lack of focus in the Dion campaign. “They were going to ridings that were the safest Liberal ridings you can imagine. No campaign plane, no message. At the end of every speech you give in a campaign, you state the ballot question. I defy you to find a ballot question in anything Dion said in the first week. And I was watching, trying, but he didn’t make any sense.”

  It is worth emphasizing that this thing Dion was trying to do was always going to be difficult. Not just because he went about it badly, but because it was just an inherently unlikely task. Not once since Confederation had a newly selected opposition leader defeated a newly elected prime minister.

  Canadians tend to give their heads of government time and the benefit of the doubt. Since Confederation, only three elected prime ministers have been defeated after a single victory at the ballot box: Alexander Mackenzie, R.B. Bennett and Joe Clark. Each was defeated, not by a new opponent, but by the veteran he had beaten in the previous election. Sir John A. Macdonald beat Mackenzie. William Lyon Mackenzie King beat Bennett. And Pierre Trudeau came out of retirement to beat Joe Clark. It was far more common for a new prime minister to be re-elected.

  Nor did Dion have a strong hold on his party’s leadership. On the first ballot in the Montreal convention in 2006, he won only 18 percent of the vote. Voting went to four ballots; Dion didn’t lead until the third. This was novel in an important way. The Liberals had been holding delegated leadership conventions since Mackenzie King won in 1919. And ever since then, every leader of the party had led the field on every ballot at every leadership convention. Dion was the first come-from-behind winner in the history of the party. It’s a compliment to him, but it meant he needed to consolidate his hold. He didn’t. He had fewer admirers within his own party than Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae did. Neither rival plotted behind his back, or not much. But it was an inherently destabilizing situation.

  Early in the campaign, as part of what might be called the Sweater-Vest Initiative, Harper let Teneycke talk him into sitting down for breakfast with travelling campaign reporters for an on-the-record session. Not just croissants and coffee, but cameras and boom microphones. When the meeting happened in an east-end Toronto hotel, reporters were so surprised to get this close to Harper that their questions were unaggressive. Harper was on his guard—he ate nothing and drank only water. Yet something about the unaccustomed setting made him open up. He wound up delivering detailed comments on strategy, his read of the electoral map, the flaws in the other parties’ game plans, and his own evolution as a politician.

  “Every campaign we’ve had, whether it was a leadership campaign or a national campaign, don’t kid yourself,” he said. “We might come out and say to you that everything went fine. But in private, we sit down every time and we go through what did we do right, and what did we do wrong. And we do it brutally, frankly. And every single time we’ve made changes in terms of strategy. We’ve made changes in terms of personnel. And I’ve tried to make changes in myself.”

  He had read somewhere that leaders keep making the same mistakes until, sooner or later, those mistakes catch up. He had decided he wouldn’t let that happen to him. “And what I’ve vowed to myself, at least in this position as leader of a national party, is that we will look at our mistakes and try to make sure we do it differently the next time.”

  Nothing was sacred. Everything was open to re-examination. Nobody was indispensable.

  Of course there was a measure of self-flattery about all this. Campaigns aren’t gearboxes that allow you to pop out a component and pop in a fresh one. They are more sociology than engineering, and in important ways a Harper campaign would always look like a Harper campaign. But with that caveat in mind, Harper often showed great flexibility in staffing and strategy.

  The summer of 2008 had provided another example. Ian Brodie, the soft-spoken but sometimes ruthless organizer who had seemed pivotal to the Harper operation, left on Canada Day. He probably took one big regret with him. If he had it to do over again, he would have been less chatty on budget day in February.

  The day before Jim Flaherty delivered the 2008 budget, Brodie had been in Washington discussing the extraordinarily entertaining Democratic presidential primary. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were going at each other hammer and tongs. Since much of their fight was in the declining industrial Midwest, they had taken turns criticizing NAFTA as a drain on U.S. manufacturing jobs, mostly south to Mexico. Might one of them reopen the trade deal if elected?

  At the Canadian embassy Brodie heard somebody say that wasn’t a real danger. “We have heard this from one of the campaigns,” the same somebody said. Brodie assumed it was the Cl
inton campaign that was claiming to hold different private and public opinions about NAFTA.

  The next day, February 26, Brodie was back in Ottawa for budget day. On such occasions, reporters enter a big room at the Government Conference Centre across Wellington Street from the Château Laurier Hotel, where they trade in their smartphones in return for copies of the budget. They get hours to read the documents and prepare their stories; in return, they don’t get to leave until the minister of finance rises in the house to begin talking.

  As a bonus, representatives of the government and bureaucracy are in the room to tell reporters how excellent the budget is. Brodie was one of these. Harper had a communications director, Sandra Buckler, who might normally have been expected to spin reporters. But both of their roles had evolved. Buckler was on poor terms with most of the press gallery and rarely had much to tell them. Brodie was on excellent terms with a few senior journalists, chosen more for how much fun he had talking to them than for any ideological compatibility; he took great pleasure debating politics with them. And so it came to pass that, while chatting with a CTV reporter about the budget, he had thrown in some fresh gossip from Washington to the effect that the Democrats’ rust-belt NAFTA trash talk should not be taken seriously.