The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  This, CTV decided, would be way more fun to cover than the budget. So the next day a CTV reporter phoned Michael Wilson, the former Mulroney-era finance minister who was serving as Canada’s ambassador in Washington. What was Brodie on about when he said the Clinton campaign spoke with forked tongue on NAFTA? the reporter asked.

  Here things get a little muddled and silly. Wilson hadn’t heard any such thing from the Clinton campaign. But he had seen a report from the Canadian consul general in Chicago, who’d been chatting with Austan Goolsbee, an Obama economic advisor. Goolsbee, the report said, “cautioned” the Canadians that all Obama’s anti-NAFTA talk “should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.” The report added that “going forward”—diplomat-speak for “in what we hope will be a nice change from the gong show of recent days”—“the Obama camp was going to be careful to send the appropriate message without coming off as too protectionist.” The Chicago report was classified and should not normally have been fodder for chats with reporters. Wilson wouldn’t normally have mentioned it to CTV, but he thought they were on the wrong trail asking about Clinton.

  By now the whole business was looking like a typical iteration of the children’s campfire game Telephone, and it was ending the way it usually does. Goolsbee said something to a Canadian in Chicago, who sent a memo to Washington, where somebody gossiped with Brodie, who chatted with CTV, who broke the story in mutually contradictory dribs and drabs over the next several days. Inevitably the next step was an attack ad. The Clinton radio ad in Ohio was designed to sound like a news story, which it really wasn’t:

  “This is an election news update with a major news story reported by the AP. While Senator Obama has crisscrossed Ohio giving speeches attacking NAFTA, his top economic advisor was telling the Canadians that was all just political maneuvering.… How will Ohioans decide whether they can believe Senator Obama’s words? We’ll find that out on election day. Paid for by Hillary Clinton for President.”

  Clinton wound up winning the Democratic primary in Ohio. Exit polls showed she was the overwhelming choice of late-deciding voters. The whole business about the Goolsbee memo and the prime minister’s chief of staff leaking misleading stories to TV, the whole indigestible mess, received blanket news coverage in the United States, where Clinton vs. Obama was the season’s best political story. Suddenly, just about the only thing millions of Americans knew about the Canadian prime minister was that his minions were meddling in a U.S. election. And it wasn’t even true.

  Harper went out to do damage control. He called the original stories about Obama’s apparent NAFTA double-talk “blatantly unfair” to the Illinois senator. “There was no intention to convey, in any way, that Senator Obama and his campaign team were taking a different position in public from views expressed in private, including about NAFTA,” he said. He appointed his most senior bureaucrat, Privy Council Clerk Kevin Lynch, to figure out what the hell had happened. Lynch reported at the end of May. “There is no evidence that Mr. Brodie disclosed any classified information,” Lynch wrote. Brodie hadn’t heard about the Chicago report on Goolsbee until he had gotten the whole story rolling with his budget lock-up chat with the CTV reporter. He’d just been spitballing, is all.

  To Harper that must have seemed even worse. His chief of staff, the architect and feared enforcer of Conservative message discipline, had locked himself up with a roomful of bored reporters and flapped his jaw to spout fresh gossip on a story that had nothing to do with the news the government was trying to make. Five weeks after Lynch filed his report on the mess, a new chief of staff showed up for work at the Langevin Block.

  The new guy was Guy Giorno. He had held the same post for Mike Harris in the late days of Progressive Conservative government in Ontario. Like Harris and a substantial number of Ontario Conservatives, he had supported Belinda Stronach in the 2004 Conservative leadership race, preferring a photogenic Ontarian to yet another Calgarian. But Giorno surprised Harper with an extraordinary article he wrote for the National Post in March 2005. The article delivered flattery when Harper was short on flatterers. And it also showed that Giorno’s analysis of the Conservatives’ situation was close to Harper’s own.

  At that point, midway between elections, Harper had been leader long enough to draw public criticism. Giorno wrote to tell his fellow Conservatives to knock it off. His text showed the sometimes obsessive attention to details and numbers that would be a hallmark of his political career. It was the Liberals who should be ashamed, he wrote, while the Conservatives had formed “the sixth-largest Official Opposition caucus in history.” He accused Harper’s detractors of making “five strategic errors.”

  First, they hadn’t learned from the 2004 defeat, when Conservatives lost in the home stretch because “they became the issue instead of the Liberals.” Second, they were showing a lack of discipline. (There has never been a time when Harper did not welcome hearing from somebody who wants Conservatives to show more discipline.) Third, Harper’s detractors would, if they succeeded in turfing the leader, simply reward Liberals for sowing doubt about Harper. “It is foolish to believe that changing the truth of one’s positions will stop others from lying about them,” Giorno wrote. “Opponents will find new policies to twist, while the public will be confused by inconsistency.” Fourth, the naysayers were letting themselves get rattled by a few bad polls. “Even a championship sports team will lose some games during the regular season. Imagine the folly of rewriting the playbook after a single loss. The result would be chaos, and many more losses.”

  But it was Giorno’s final argument that revealed him to Harper as a potential asset for the future, not just a defender in a rough moment. “The fifth mistake,” Giorno wrote, “is buying into Liberal stereotypes. I refer to the error of assuming that voters think the way Liberals and the media say they think.”

  This showed that, even though he had supported the most Liberal-friendly candidate in 2004 (Stronach would, in fact, leave the Conservatives to join the Liberals two months after Giorno wrote his op-ed), Giorno understood that Harper was seeking to build a new Conservatism on a different client base from the one the Liberals had built and Mulroney had sought to appropriate.

  “It has become fashionable to dismiss Mr. Harper for failing to understand the ‘urban vote’ and ‘ethnic vote’—as if those groups are monolithic and true to stereotype,” Giorno wrote. “Ethnic voters and urban voters (I fit both categories) have their own minds, thank you very much, and don’t take direction from the Toronto Star. What is disrespectful of these communities is to assume a Liberal party monopoly over them.”

  On the strength of that op-ed, Harper had brought Giorno in as a member of the 2006 campaign staff. Now, he promoted this advocate of discipline and consistency to be his most senior lieutenant.

  Giorno wanted a new communications voice. Sandra Buckler had mastered a defensive game that consisted mostly of fending off reporters’ queries. Her tight-lipped approach kept Conservatives from shooting themselves in the foot, but it had limited their ability to get their message out. They were like a hockey team with nothing but goalies. On Giorno’s counsel, Harper replaced her with Teneycke, who had worked with Giorno in Ontario politics. Teneycke was tall, slim, blond, a former campus Progressive Conservative who had quit his party for Reform in the late 1990s, long before such defections became fashionable.

  When he moved into his new office in the Langevin Block, Teneycke decorated the walls with three laminated posters. One was a Ronald Reagan “Morning in America” re-election poster from 1984. The second was a Preston Manning poster from Manning’s doomed attempt to fend off Stockwell Day for the leadership of the then-new Canadian Alliance in 2000. The third was most illustrative. It was a reproduction of a Canadian morale poster from the Second World War. It showed a soldier with a machine gun, a factory worker with a rivet gun and a female farmer brandishing a hoe, all in profile wearing the same
expression of grim determination. “ATTACK,” the poster said, “ON ALL FRONTS.”

  That slogan offered the best available summary of Giorno and Teneycke’s operating philosophy. As in a game of chess, Giorno and Teneycke would try to attack with every move. They would use all the tools at a modern government’s disposal. This included communication. Teneycke was less prone than his predecessor to play the defensive game of withholding information. He preferred to push it out, leavened with substantial doses of pro-Conservative spin. Giorno told senior staff the Conservatives had spent enough time demonstrating their competence at delivering dispassionate governance. Now they should leave most routine decisions to the public service. The Conservatives’ job was to be Conservatives, and to win the coming election. Let the permanent government run the permanent government.

  One other appointment in early 2008 had helped Harper plan for growth in the Conservative vote in the election. He put Jason Kenney, the young Calgary MP, in charge of outreach to ethnic communities. It was a long play. The Liberals had spent decades courting ethnic voters, so Kenney often met polite indifference or worse. But Kenney was patient and diligent, and Harper trusted him. He scored an early victory with the immigrant constituency when he persuaded Harper to abandon visa requirements for visitors from several ex-Communist countries in the European Union.

  The eastern European diaspora in Canada contains millions of voters, Kenney told his boss in March. They would notice this gesture. “These visa restrictions are going to be dropped someday. The department wants us to do it after the Americans and after the election. Why not do it before the Americans—and before an election?”

  Harper liked the sound of that. A bureaucratic delegation from Foreign Affairs had toured Europe after Christmas and was months away from reporting. Harper didn’t bother waiting. He dropped the restrictions in the spring. After that, the website of the Canadian Polish Congress was sometimes so full of cabinet ministers’ photos it looked like the Conservative Party website. The head of the Polish association, Wladyslaw Lizon, would eventually run, in 2011, for the Conservatives.

  In May 2008 Canada became the first country to recognize the Soviet-inflicted Ukrainian famine of 1932–33 as a genocide. James Bezan, the Conservative MP for Selkirk-Interlake, introduced the bill. The opposition parties hurried to get behind it. It passed quickly and unanimously. But the idea and the initiative were the Conservatives’. It got noticed.

  The election player whose result was hardest to predict was Jack Layton. His ambitions were through the roof, but they weren’t baseless. He had posted steady progress in two previous elections. In 2000, under Alexa McDonough, the NDP had won just over a million votes. Under Layton that score had grown in 2004 and again, to 2.5 million, in 2006. When pollsters asked whom voters liked as prime minister, Layton kept coming in second, behind Harper—but ahead of Dion.

  At an NDP convention in Quebec City in the summer of 2006, Layton had told party members he intended to campaign for the job of prime minister at the next election. When he made the announcement, Layton’s caucus counted twenty-nine MPs. His vow to become prime minister received almost no coverage because the reporters there dismissed it as fantasy. Now he made every effort to act as if he was putting his promise into action. On August 31, when Harper invited him to 24 Sussex Drive in the long prelude to the election call, Layton had told reporters as he left the meeting that whenever Harper decided to “quit,” he would “apply for his job.” On the first day of the campaign, Layton flew, using the campaign plane he had managed to rent because he was not Stéphane Dion, straight to Harper’s Calgary riding.

  On Wednesday, September 17, Harper and Dion found their campaign itineraries bringing them close together, which made it easy to compare their styles. The battleground of the moment was southwestern Ontario, a Chrétien Liberal stronghold that veered sharply Conservative in 2006. Harper’s destination, Welland, was about 160 kilometres away from Dion’s event in London. The ideological and strategic differences on display were much further apart.

  Dion was at the University of Western Ontario to talk about universities. “Nothing could stop me from coming to Western,” he said. “I would have jogged here.” He proceeded to list a bunch of changes to student aid. A Liberal government would replace a range of student credits and benefits with an upfront education grant payable every three months. Dion would add 100,000 “access bursaries” for Aboriginals and other under-represented groups. He would increase funding for the indirect costs of university research by 60 percent. And he would borrow $25 billion to bankroll needs-based bursaries for two decades to come.

  Taken together, Dion’s promises on this one day of campaigning would tally perhaps $1 billion, in addition to the increase in federal debt that would pay for his bursary endowment. Eventually his proposals for student aid would earn the Liberals an A-minus from the Canadian Federation of Students. But good luck to any Liberal candidates trying to explain his plan at the doorstep. It was a morass of acronyms and program amendments. And Liberal candidates received no pedagogical material to make the plan more comprehensible to voters. They were on their own.

  Almost at the same instant, Harper stepped behind a podium at the Casa Dante restaurant in Welland and vowed to ban tobacco products that were flavoured to taste like bubble gum and cotton candy. “These products are packaged as candy, and that’s totally unacceptable,” he said. Clearly the products were marketed to children. “This can’t continue.” To top it off, he would ban sales of cigarillos in packages of fewer than twenty.

  Taken together, the promises Harper announced on this day would cost little more than the price of the photo opportunity. Their effect on tobacco use among children would be hard to measure. And, a Conservative campaign official revealed much later, the tobacco promises were invented only a few days ahead of the Welland announcement because Harper’s staff decided he’d already gone too many days without a visually appealing photo op. To be fair, the re-elected Harper government actually did implement this ban on candy-flavoured tobacco. So the promise met a better fate than the diesel-tax cut did. But the candy-tobacco ban had little to do with a concerted strategy against tobacco. It was a bauble at a moment when the Harper campaign needed a bauble.

  “Dion was announcing $100 million a day. Harper was announcing $2 million a day. And on the evening news we would play them to a tie,” a Conservative campaign insider said.

  Periodically during the 2008 campaign, Dion would mention his bold new vision for Canada. When such remarks played on television, they invariably drew chuckles in the Conservative war room, the insider said. “We’re so cynical, we laugh at him. Like, internally. We’re so focused on small, limited, targeted initiatives that we say, ‘Well, that’s not gonna work.’ ”

  As part of their effort to get maximum pop from minimum campaigning, the Conservatives devoted far more of their ad budget than in 2006 to television with a large female audience, such as the Food Network, HGTV and the doctors-in-love drama Grey’s Anatomy. Several days into the campaign, a Harris Decima poll showed that 22 percent of respondents, both male and female, reported seeing “a great deal” of Conservative advertising. Only 8 percent said they’d seen a great deal of Liberal advertising; for the NDP the figure was 3 percent. The same firm’s polls showed the Conservatives opening an early lead over every party among rural women and those over the age of fifty. The Tories and Liberals would trade the lead among younger and urban women throughout the campaign, but simply being competitive in that market constituted a breakthrough for the Conservatives.

  Dion, meanwhile, was pushing back at every attempt by his staff to make either his policies or his discourse digestible or relevant to disengaged voters. At the heart of his problems was the Green Shift and its carbon tax. Brian Topp, an NDP strategist, called it a “very big anchor” for the Liberals.

  Michael Marzolini, the Liberals’ chief pollster, would not have used different language. In the spring he had tested every argument for a
nd against the Green Shift with focus groups. Some people say it’s an intrusive, big-government tax grab: what do you think? Some people say it’s our chance to do our bit for a twenty-first-century economy in a greener world: do you agree? Support for the arguments in favour was “fairly middling,” a Liberal familiar with the research said. Support for the arguments against the Green Shift was “incredibly strong.” Marzolini told Dion the policy would be electoral suicide. Weeks later it was the centrepiece of Dion’s election plan.

  Of course it is good to believe in things. But Dion’s campaign staff urged their leader to sugar the pill a bit, or at least to accompany the Green Shift with policies that might make environmentalism easier to understand and embrace. A ban on dumping sewage in waterways? Dion wasn’t interested. Plant trees at every stop? A gimmick, he said. Phase incandescent light bulbs out in favour of fluorescents? “We had that before John Baird did,” a Liberal source said, but it was Baird who announced the end of incandescents instead of Dion. (The shift to fluorescent bulbs, like most of the rest of the Conservatives’ environmental agenda, would be delayed repeatedly after it was announced.)

  By mid-campaign, the Liberal team was receiving frantic memos from all over about the leader’s performance. At his law office in Toronto, national campaign co-chairman Senator David Smith said that in less than an hour he’d received calls from two former cabinet ministers, Herb Dhaliwal and Anne McLellan, and from Heather Chiasson at the National Women’s Liberal Commission. Were they happy calls? Long pause. “Well … they’re happy in the sense that the family is there,” Smith said. “There’s some good positive ideas.” So no, they weren’t happy calls. One B.C. organizer said later he was drawing inspiration from the Jude Law war movie Enemy at the Gates. The harrowing battle sequence at the beginning of that film depicts Soviet Red Army regulars so desperately besieged that they don’t even have enough guns to fight off the German invaders at Stalingrad. An officer hands a rifle to every second grunt. “ ‘The one with the rifle shoots. The one without follows him,’ ” the organizer said, quoting the hopeless officer. “ ‘When the one with the rifle gets killed, the one who is following picks up the rifle and shoots.’ I say that every morning at the staff meeting.”