The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  More experienced ministers were certain Harper could not win later if he let himself lose now. In varying assortments through the day, they visited his office, or buttonholed him in the government lobby just outside the Commons chamber, and told him he needed to fight. Lawrence Cannon, the foreign affairs minister, and Tony Clement from Industry, told him he must get the governor general to prorogue Parliament. Then the current session of Parliament, barely begun, would be cancelled and Harper could prepare a new session. The claptrap opposition cabal would fall apart. As a student at the University of Toronto, Clement had seen the provincial Liberals and New Democrats unite to form a government after the Ontario Progressive Conservatives won a plurality of seats in 1985. As a result, the PCs languished for a decade before they could get back into power, Clement told Harper.

  Harper wasn’t feeling it. He could do the math: the other guys had his side outnumbered. When MPs filed into the Commons for Question Period at two p.m., he watched glumly as Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc MPs stood to give Stéphane Dion a long standing ovation.

  “Instead of introducing an economic stimulus package in his fiscal update last week, the prime minister decided to play politics,” Dion said, “ignoring difficult economic times Canadians are facing. Does the prime minister still believe that he enjoys the confidence of this House?”

  Harper delivered a disjointed, weirdly nonchalant answer, reading from notes. “Mr. Speaker, in the fiscal and economic update, the minister of finance announced, among other things, the fact that he would be providing EDC and BDC additional money to extend to manufacturing and auto sectors, that there would be special help for retirees who are dealing with problems of losses in the stock market. He announced the fact that there would be numerous measures to strengthen our financial system. And Mr. Speaker, of course …” He checked his notes again, pausing for quite a while.

  In their usual place behind Harper and a little to his right, so they would line up properly in the shot from the fixed Commons television camera, sat three senior female caucus members, Helena Guergis, Diane Ablonczy, Lisa Raitt. They sat bolt upright, staring at his back, waiting for an applause line. None was forthcoming. Guergis had nodded tentatively at the news about help for retirees.

  Harper found his place in his notes: “… he announced that we would be doubling infrastructure spending over the next year to a record high. Um.” Guergis began to clap. Ablonczy and Raitt weren’t ready to do that yet. “Mr. Speaker, when the honourable, uh, gentleman speaks about playing politics, I think he’s about to play the biggest game in Canadian history.” Now the Conservatives stood as Harper sat, but they applauded without particular enthusiasm. Their leader had given a lousy answer. It acknowledged that the game was Dion’s to play. It defended without attacking. And the basis of the defence was a fall update the government’s own supporters found deeply unimpressive. If this was the best Harper could do, it was game over.

  It seemed to be the best he could do. In French, after Dion’s second question, Harper found himself asking for the population’s indulgence and the population’s patience. His party had governed for three years, he said, “even though it may not have been perfect.” As for what came next: “My personal opinion is that they should at least wait for the budget to determine the future of a government recently elected by the citizens of Canada.” His personal opinion. But you know, to each his own. He switched back into English and his mouth turned to soup. “Mr. Speaker, let me say quite simply in terms of what we all, uh, know the honourable Leader of the Opposition is up to,” he said, staring at the floor. “And I understand he, uh, wants to be prime minister. It’s a great honour. A great experience, but I can just tell you, Mr. Prime Minister—” Wait, that wasn’t right. “Or Mr. President.” That neither. The Speaker is called “le président” in French, but right now Harper was speaking English, sort of. The other side started to chortle. “Oh, grow up!” Helena Guergis shouted across the aisle.

  Harper tried one more time. “I can just tell you, Mr. Speaker, I would certainly not want to find myself governing this economy today, and in this position, under a situation where I was required to follow social—socialist economics and to be at the behold—and be at the behest of the veto of the separatists.” The rest of the Conservative caucus rose, unsteadily, to applaud whatever the hell Harper had said as he collapsed back into his seat.

  Harper slouched and mumbled his way through another half-hour of this mess, then retreated upstairs to his office. It was at that very moment that the gods of political opportunity decided to smile on him.

  As reporters arrived in the Railway Committee Room for a 4:30 p.m. press conference announced by the leaders of the opposition parties, they saw that three chairs and microphones had been laid out. For whom? Dion, Layton and Duceppe, MPs gathering for the event said. A few reporters thought this odd. Surely Duceppe, who was pledging only to support the coalition government, not to contribute MPs to serve as ministers, was not being presented as an equal party to this coalition? It turned out that indeed he was. Martha Hall Findlay, a Liberal MP, rolled her eyes when reporters suggested this might be a very bad idea. The Bloc’s been around here for ages, Hall Findlay said. We’re past that old paranoia.

  In his book, Topp says the only person on the coalition side who said out loud that it might be a bad idea to give Gilles Duceppe equal presence was Gilles Duceppe. To his credit, Topp notes that nobody, including himself, gave the matter any thought. It was not until the three leaders came in together, signed the accord together, gave opening statements in turn and took questions as a team that the impact of what was happening began to register. Their words were confident and offered no hope of appeal.

  “Prime Minister, your government has lost the confidence of the House and it is going to be defeated at the earliest opportunity,” Layton said, speaking to the cameras as if directly to Harper. “I urge you to accept this gracefully.” Harper was indeed watching, one floor up in his Centre Block office. But as he took in the words, he also began to parse the damning imagery of his adversaries sitting together as equals.

  Still, it took time to sink in. Harper was still unsure of his course when Prentice, Hill and Moore trooped into his office minutes after the Ops meeting ended. When Moore and Prentice left Harper’s office to provide some comment for waiting reporters in the Commons foyer downstairs, they had no idea what conclusions Harper would draw from their conversation, so the two ministers said as little as possible to the media. All options were on the table, Prentice said. Whatever that meant.

  Something was happening in the land. “The day the coalition thing was signed, I remember it was eerie,” the Ontario Conservative MP said. “I called my staff because I was constantly asking my correspondence lady, ‘What are we getting? What are people saying? Who’s writing? Where do they fall in our databases of supporters?’ And they said, ‘We’re not getting anything.’ The mail just stopped. And the phone calls just stopped. I think folks were just confused.”

  Much later, Topp would admit what the Conservatives had realized before him: Duceppe’s presence was the key. As soon as trouble started brewing, Patrick Muttart, now Harper’s deputy chief of staff, had started polling. He didn’t have time to design and field his own poll, so he reached out to Conservative-connected professionals in the market-research community who were already in the field. They may have been polling about consumer preferences on corn syrup. Whatever. The Conservatives had the pollsters add a few incongruous questions about the coalition. Muttart had reported his findings at the Monday morning senior staff meeting.

  “He said three things that were interesting,” someone who was there recalled. One, the angle that Jack Layton and the NDP would impose socialist economics in a time of crisis didn’t matter to people. They weren’t afraid of Jack Layton. I guess we should have taken that as a sign.” (Of the moment nearly three years later when Layton would become the biggest surprise in Canadian politics.) “Second thing was that people d
id not like the idea of a Prime Minister Stéphane Dion—but that was not the thing that worried them the most. Overwhelmingly, and across political affiliation in English Canada, the thing that shocked everyone was the notion that somehow the Bloc Québécois would be part of the government.”

  For the umpteenth time, Muttart had given the Harper Conservatives the words. It fell to Stockwell Day, the international trade minister, to add music. The clumsy former Canadian Alliance leader had handed Harper a Canadian Alliance that badly needed saving in 2002, but Day still had clout with social Conservatives and the party’s base in Alberta and British Columbia. For seven or eight minutes, he spoke with genuine emotion about the need for a patriotic, anti-separatist message to rally the country, or most of it, against the coalition. Day’s speech, an observer said, crystallized the message from Muttart’s polling data.

  Sick, embarrassed, outnumbered and rocked back on his heels in a way he had never known since he had become prime minister, Harper took nearly a day to digest the messages from his helpers and ministers. When he went home to 24 Sussex that night to prepare for the Conservatives’ annual Christmas party, he was still visibly morose. When he and Laureen showed up together at the Westin Hotel, he didn’t seem to have changed his mood. In a kitchen off the main event hall, with a few staffers listening in, Laureen told him the party needed their leader to lead. Now more than ever. Harper took her words in silently, then took to the podium.

  “He got up,” says one party-goer. “He was meek. He was exhausted. And he got this, like, ten-minute standing ovation. And it entirely changed his psyche.”

  Harper had brought a prepared text. While he usually stays close to his scripts, weaving in an extra sentence or sharpening a phrase on the spot, that night he simply ignored what his staff had written and delivered a kind of defiant roar. “I mean, the PM does not give barnburners,” said another observer. “It’s a shame that this one was to a private-party-only audience, because it was really one of the most extraordinary performances he’s ever had. Everyone sort of went out of there pumped up, you know … ‘We’re going to fight.’ I think at that point, it became obvious that the PM was going to prorogue. There was continued discussion about prorogation versus other options, but at that point that was the default option.”

  Tuesday, December 2. Topp’s meticulous hour-by-hour account of that astonishing week contains no mention about the previous day’s Question Period, which had nearly finished Harper off, and no hint that the coalition partners gave a second’s thought to how they would handle Question Period now, after they had announced to the world that they were taking over. It would prove to be a fatal oversight.

  They could have simply skipped QP, for instance. The daily question session is an occasion for the opposition to beg for scraps from the government. The government routinely refuses to hand those scraps over and mocks the little guys for asking. In every detail—the thirty-five-second countdown clock for each question and answer; the way the government always speaks last—the ludicrous little ceremony is rigged in the government’s favour. A creative, agile, cohesive new parliamentary coalition simply could have decided not to lower itself by showing up for such a debasement of its new role. This lot was none of those things.

  So they all filed into the Commons and waited their turn, and Stéphane Dion stood up and put on his tiny perfect Stéphane Dion scowl, and asked his defiant Stéphane Dion question. He read from an old quote about how “the whole principle of our democracy is the government is supposed to be able to face the House of Commons any day on a vote.” Failing to face a confidence test, he said, still reading the old blind quote, was “a violation of the fundamental constitutional principles of our democracy.” And here came his question:

  “Can the prime minister inform the House who said these words?”

  Oooh, let me guess. It was Stephen Harper, right? Here was a favourite Dion tactic. Put your opponent’s words to him. Make him face his contradictions. It was neat and clever and about five times too subtle for the moment at hand, because what Harper did was pull himself up to his full height, button his suit jacket, lean forward across the aisle of the Commons, and bite Dion’s head clean off.

  “Mr. Speaker, the highest principle of Canadian democracy is that if you want to be prime minister, you get your mandate from the Canadian people, not from Quebec separatists.” This time Ablonczy and Guergis and Raitt behind him knew what to do, as did the rest of the Conservative caucus. They leapt to their feet as if prompted by cattle prods. A guttural roar went up from the applauding Conservatives. Lawrence Cannon, standing next to Harper, shouted a word that was probably supposed to be “Oui” but came out as if he’d suffered a back-alley appendectomy. “WAAAAAAAAEERRGH!”

  Harper wasn’t done. “Mr. Speaker, this deal that the leader of the Liberal Party has made with the separatists is a betrayal of the voters of this country.” His index finger jabbed downward. “A betrayal of the best interests of our economy.” Another jab. “A betrayal of the best interests of our country. And we will fight it with every means that we have.”

  The end of his response was drowned in another roar as the Conservatives jumped back to their feet. Over the next half-hour they would spend about half their time on their feet, bellowing their defiance of their tormentors.

  The roar from not quite half of the throats in the House of Commons, every time, was a physical thing. People in the visitors’ gallery above felt the wood furniture shake in sympathetic vibration. Dion squeaked out one more question, took another thumping, sat blinking as Harper rounded on Layton and then on Duceppe in turn. Finally, near the end of the session, Dion stood to ask another set of questions. He might as well have saved his breath.

  The show Harper put on was at times jaw-droppingly demagogic. He answered Layton by claiming that when the three opposition leaders had signed the deal a day earlier, “they would not even have the Canadian flag behind them. They had to be photographed without it. They had to be photographed without it because a member of their coalition does not even believe in the country.”

  This was not true. Baffled editors of news websites dug out day-old photos of Dion and the others in front of ten provincial flags and two maple-leafed Canadian flags and reposted them. But Harper was not interested in passing factual muster. He was here to do some walloping.

  “It wasn’t until Mr. Harper made indisputably false claims about the flag and Mr. Dion that the proceedings truly turned,” Aaron Wherry wrote on his Maclean’s blog that night. “At that point, for all intents and purposes, Question Period ceased, giving way to a remarkable clash between the two men who seek a claim to high office. Dion could barely maintain the control necessary to form words, screaming across the aisle at the Prime Minister. Harper challenged and goaded him on.”

  When it was over, the Conservatives trooped out to the government lobby, which is behind closed doors in the space just outside the Commons chamber. Royal Galipeau, the MP for Ottawa-Orleans, led MPs and staff in “O Canada.” The Ontario MP whose office had been deluged with criticism over the voter-subsidy stuff in the economic update checked in for the latest. “My correspondence lady said, ‘It’s all on your side now.’ Nobody even remembered the political-subsidy issue. It just vanished in twenty-four hours.”

  Another member of Harper’s government said, “There are moments when this government talks to the country, to our supporters and our networks. This wasn’t that. This was the country talking to us. Immediately after the [three-leader coalition] press conference it was a kind of electric shock. Every phone line, every e-mail, every blog, every radio commentary lit up like Vegas on jackpot day.”

  The ungainly creature the opposition had sewn together would continue to lurch forward for a few more days, but Harper had now wounded it beyond repair. Later, there would be learned political analysis from some quarters to the effect that Harper was peddling a set of fictions nestled each within the other. There had been a Canadian flag. The separatists were
n’t part of the coalition, they had merely promised to vote with it for a year and a half. A government doesn’t get its mandate from the Canadian people. It gets it from Parliament, and the confidence vote Harper wanted to avoid would be the right measure of Parliament’s judgment. In the heat of the moment, none of that mattered.

  After Harper got his prorogation and the coalition fell apart, after Michael Ignatieff became the new Liberal leader and took to threatening the Conservatives about what might happen later rather than making any attempt to take power from them now, it would become fashionable to criticize the Canadian people for letting Harper get away with a swindle against parliamentary convention. Peter Russell and Lorne Sossin, two constitutional scholars, wrote a book called Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis, in which all the right people lamented the decline of Canadian wisdom about the rightness of the Dion–Layton démarche. “Widespread public uncertainty and confusion about the principles of government evident during the crisis revealed a grave lack of understanding about the mechanics and legalities of parliamentary democracy on the part of Canadians,” they wrote.

  These analyses forgive nothing Harper did and everything his opponents had done. But the notion that democratic legitimacy boils down to an arithmetic majority in a vote in the Commons is pretty sterile. We have not often heard it argued since the 2008 confrontation; the Harper Conservatives have won dozens of confidence votes as a minority government and, since 2011, as a majority government. If Commons voting arithmetic is the only test of legitimacy in our democracy, then this will be a short book because, under this peculiar theory, no criticism of most of what Harper has done is possible. Nor was it a notion the coalition partners thought to share with voters during the 2008 campaign. Nobody, not even Layton, campaigned on a promise to form a government with other parties if they found their own party outnumbered. Dion explicitly rejected the idea three times: first, as a hypothetical question, when reporters put it to him on the campaign trail; second, on the phone with Layton once the results were in; and finally, when he announced he would resign from politics after winning the lowest share of the popular vote in Liberal Party history.