The Longer I'm Prime Minister

by Paul Wells

  What, indeed. Harper’s other big year-end interview was with the Chinese-language Fairchild chain of stations. “What can we do to make some major transformations so we can bring more capital into this country?” he asked himself. He promised “major reforms” in “a whole range of areas” to “secure the sustainability of our key programs … for a generation to come.” He called Obama’s indecision on Keystone “a wake-up call … that we’ve simply got to broaden our markets.”

  By now Harper was evolving a two-track strategy. One track led to these as-yet-undefined “major transformations” in the economy. The other consisted of badmouthing opponents of resource development. Each track was receiving roughly equal attention from the Langevin Block minions. On January 9, an open letter was released over the signature of Joe Oliver, the natural resources minister. Oliver, an investment banker who had knocked off the veteran Liberal Joe Volpe in the Toronto riding of Eglinton-Lawrence to join the rookie Conservative class of 2011, had made barely a peep until now. Suddenly he experienced a major transformation of his own, revealing fangs.

  “We must expand our trade with the fast growing Asian economies,” Oliver wrote. “Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade. Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth.” These groups wanted to “hijack our regulatory system” in the service of a “radical political agenda” so they could “kill good projects.” Using “funding from foreign special-interest groups,” they “attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources.” And if all their other tactics didn’t work, the radical groups would twirl their moustaches and “take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone.” Repairing this state of affairs, the minister wrote, “is an urgent matter of Canada’s national interest.”

  When Oliver’s letter appeared, I assumed he was the front for a piece of writing concocted by Harper’s staff, if not by Harper himself. Conservatives later told me it did in fact contain Oliver’s own writing as well as that of PMO worker bees, and that it reflected Oliver’s preferred mode of operation, which was full-tilt, head down and roaring like a bull elk in full rut. In any case, Harper surely knew about the letter and approved it. Two days after the letter’s release, Harper welcomed the Chinese ambassador, Zhang Junsai, to his office to announce that he would visit China in February. Oliver’s language about jet-set celebrities with their fancy lawsuits and their ripped jeans was so eye-catching it might lead a reader to overlook the significance of the letter’s last line. Governments do not lightly identify something as an urgent matter in the national interest. In less blessed lands, that kind of freighted language sometimes precedes a declaration of war.

  Oliver’s letter had two effects, one surely intended, the other perhaps accidental. It demonstrated that nothing was more important for the government than speeding the approval process for natural-resources projects, even if it meant rolling right over any group that tried to slow those projects down. And it implied that, if Harper did not succeed in getting that oil to market quickly, he would have failed to safeguard the national interest according to a yardstick of his own choosing.

  It quickly became apparent that Oliver’s salvo was only part of an effort that extended across government and even outside. On January 2 a new website was launched called ourdecision.ca. “Countless … foreigners from Europe to South America and a long list of foreign-funded lobbyists,” it said, were “hiring front groups to swamp the hearings to block the Northern Gateway pipeline project.” The site included a “donate” button so right-thinking Canadians could help “ban foreigners and their local puppets from appearing before the pipeline review panel.”

  Ourdecision.ca was built and maintained by Go NewClear Productions, a small ad firm run by a quiet young man named Hamish Marshall, who used to work in a junior capacity in Harper’s PMO. Go NewClear ran websites for several Conservative MPs. Its own website proclaimed the firm was “experienced in the development of both conventional and unconventional online weaponry” to “blow away your competition.” Its ads had aired “in both Canada and Australia,” and it had deployed its “expertise on social networking in Russia and Iran.”

  Marshall’s wife was Kathryn Marshall, a law student and former political staffer who was working as a spokesperson for Ethical Oil, an organization launched in defence of an argument: that whatever the flaws of northern Alberta’s oil industry, the region was a bastion of democracy and environmental responsibility compared with petro-states such as Iran and Venezuela. Hamish Marshall ran the Ethical Oil website along with Our Decision and the others. The idea of “ethical oil” began life as a book of the same name by Ezra Levant, the Calgary lawyer and former Reform political staffer who would go on to host a nightly program on Sun News Channel. Levant’s cheeky argument—that the oil sands had nothing to apologize for and should instead inspire Canadian pride—quickly found sympathetic ears in Harper’s government. Four months after the book was published in September 2010, Harper’s environment minister, Peter Kent, started using the term “ethical oil” to describe Canada’s petroleum exports.

  But Ethical Oil might have been nothing more than a book if Levant hadn’t won the National Business Book Award just days after Harper won the 2011 election. The award was bestowed by a jury that included CBC News chief correspondent Peter Mansbridge, and it came with a $20,000 prize. That money caught the eye of Alykhan Velshi, a Toronto-born lawyer in his twenties who was coming off four years as a spokesperson for Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and two months as a strategist in the Conservatives’ election war room. Velshi believed he’d had enough of government, though not of politics. He told Levant that, in return for the $20,000 prize money, he would launch an Ethical Oil blog that would form the basis for a political movement.

  Since the beginning of 2012, thanks to donations from individuals and organizations that Ethical Oil, because it’s not a charity, has never been required by law to divulge, the organization has run radio and newspaper ad campaigns and spawned the Our Decision sub-campaign. As for Velshi, he had handed day-to-day operation of the organization off to Kathryn Marshall because he was back in government—in Harper’s PMO as director of planning, a rough equivalent to the job Patrick Muttart had in the government’s early days.

  None of the above describes a conspiracy. It was more like a community of interest and style, a network of like-minded friends and associates extending through the government and beyond, defined by a few ideas: that Canada’s resource wealth was a source of its prosperity; that the environmental movement, to the extent it opposed the exploitation of the oil sands, had declared itself an enemy of Canada; and that there was no need to be genteel in fighting back. And if there was something triumphalist and a bit over-the-top about it all, well, it was the times.

  Harper had a lot of justification for feeling that the resource-producing West was rising in Canada and could not be flouted. In October 2011, his minister for democratic reform, Tim Uppal, had revealed plans for an expanded House of Commons to reflect regions of growing population. Ontario would get fifteen more seats, Alberta and British Columbia six each, Quebec three. That last number, decided by Harper himself, was a fig leaf designed to cover a substantial net shift of political clout to the West.

  By some estimates, the Conservatives should expect to win twenty-four of those thirty new seats if the distribution of votes among parties in 2015 resembles that in 2011. That shift in political power followed a shift in populations: in February 2012 Statistics Canada released figures showing that, between 2006 and 2011, the five slowest-growing provincial populations had been those of Quebec and the Atlantic provinces. The fastest population growth had been in Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan. The populations, in turn, were following money. Some estimates put the total value of Canada’s
natural resource reserves at $1.16 trillion, and of that, the value of the bitumen in the oil sands alone accounted for nearly half: $460 billion.

  And if the Yankees were dumb enough to turn up their pointy Harvard noses at that kind of bounty, well, you know what? To hell with them. Over the ocean was a new Eldorado, a land where business was business and goods found a buyer. In 2008 Harper had skipped the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. He had put up with no end of grief from Grits who lectured him on letting the world pass him buy. Michael Ignatieff had used Harper’s failure to visit India and China to chide him on his inability to grasp the greatness of great nations, until Harper had finally thrown up his hands and visited China just to get there before Ignatieff could. But that 2009 trip was nearly a guerrilla mission—just Harper and Laureen and six others.

  But at some point Harper realized it made less and less sense for him to hold China’s Communist ideology and human rights record against it; the country’s economic growth had become the kind of phenomenon you’d have to be blind to miss. Canadian pork exports to China had tripled in one year, from 2010 to 2011. Lumber exports doubled in 2010, then doubled again in 2011 to $1.5 billion. Chinese investment in Canada had in turn tripled between 2008 and 2010, to $14.1 billion. Harper’s central bank governor was telling him China was the future. The oil patch was telling him to get over his China aversion. Chinese communities in British Columbia and Ontario were key growth markets for the Conservative vote, and while their relationship with the Beijing regime was sometimes complicated, none of those voters wanted Harper to shun China. And now Barack Obama was letting Daryl Hannah tell him how to run oil imports. So Harper landed in Beijing on February 7, 2012, with Laureen, Joe Oliver, thirty business executives, two dozen members of Canada’s Chinese community, and a full contingent of scribes from the press gallery.

  During several days of visits in three cities, Harper presided over mass signings of business agreements, business round tables, and a steady stream of photo ops. He peered at a Giant panda bear cub sitting on Laureen’s lap in Chongqing while camera shutters clicked madly, before announcing that two of the bamboo-munching superstars would soon take up residence at Canadian zoos. “He has come at an important moment when both sides feel an increasing need to bring bilateral ties to a new level,” the semi-official China Daily wrote in a warm editorial.

  But when Harper returned to Canada, evidence began to accumulate that the world does not change just because a prime minister decides he has come up with an agenda.

  In a speech to the Calgary Chamber of Commerce on March 1, Shawn Atleo, the soft-spoken grand chief of the Assembly of First Nations, reminded everyone that it was a bad idea to take Canada’s Aboriginal populations for granted. “The pattern of unilateral application of business practices and of laws and regulation in our territories is a practice that has to stop,” he said.

  In June the message would be echoed by Jim Prentice, Harper’s former environment minister. “The absence of private and public sector leadership,” Prentice wrote in the Vancouver Sun, is “a serious impediment” to getting Alberta bitumen to market. And where did most of the blame lie? Prentice was not coy. “The constitutional obligation to consult with first nations is not a corporate obligation. It is the federal government’s responsibility.” Same with “the obligation to define an ocean management regime for terminals and shipping on the west coast.… It is the federal government’s responsibility.”

  Atleo and Prentice were pleading for a simple recognition that varying points of view were legitimate and that some measure of agreement among diverse interests was not merely a nice idea, it was a prerequisite for getting anything done. “These issues cannot be resolved by regulatory fiat,” Prentice wrote. “They require negotiation. The real risk is not regulatory rejection but regulatory approval, undermined by subsequent legal challenges and the absence of ‘social license’ to operate.” Translation: Enbridge might get the pipeline approved by a process jiggered to suit Harper’s idea of fair play. But frustrated citizens could still bury it under a mountain of lawsuits.

  Now if there is a lesson Stephen Harper would not normally be expected to forget, it’s the value of moderation. He had built the body of a winner around his radical’s heart by feasting, for a decade, on a strict diet of half loaves. He had reached out to Joe Clark in his first weeks as Canadian Alliance leader and did not give up, his associates say, until many months after the 2006 election victory, despite his personal low regard for Clark and the way Clark always took pains to make it clear that the sentiment was mutual. He had made peace with Quebec nationalists and still maintained the courtship of Quebec long after it had stopped paying electoral dividends. He had taken over the operation of regional development agencies he used to mock, blocked foreign investment he had urged earlier governments to welcome, embraced official bilingualism and, with Barack Obama, bailed out General Motors.

  And if any man in Canada knew that the Ezra Levant playbook of derision and polarization is of limited use to anyone who actually wants to win something, it should have been Harper. When he returned to lead the Alliance in 2002 after five years away from Parliament, Harper needed a seat to represent in Parliament. Preston Manning’s old Calgary Southwest riding looked pretty good. Unfortunately, as Flanagan wrote in his book Harper’s Team, Levant had already wrapped up the Alliance nomination there before Manning’s resignation as an MP took effect. Soon Levant “was putting up billboards and running radio and TV ads slagging Joe Clark as ‘Kyoto Joe,’ ” Flanagan wrote. “We grew increasingly concerned.… Polls suggested that Ezra’s takeover of Calgary Southwest, far from securing the riding as an Alliance bastion, had put it up for grabs to the PCs and Liberals.” It took a lot of pressure from a lot of people to get Levant to step aside. In the end, the weeks of spectacle had a predictable effect: Harper was elected with 71.7 percent of the vote, a “minimally satisfactory” result given that no Liberal or Progressive Conservative had run against him.

  But something made Harper decide to spend the fall and winter of 2011–12 aligning his analysis and rhetoric with those of Levant’s favourite advocacy organization. More likely a bunch of somethings:

  Pride: he had built the Conservative Party and grown it, through four elections, to a majority that must have felt like vindication.

  Embarrassment: only six months after that election, he had begun to provoke questions about whether he actually had anything in particular he wanted to do with that historic mandate.

  Anger: Barack Obama, of all people, had delayed a pipeline, the sort of policy decision Harper had viewed as “almost designed to do damage to Western Canada” when the NDP and Liberals had proposed that sort of thing. (Recall that Harper receives much of his U.S. news from Fox, which is almost never inclined to give the president much benefit of the doubt.)

  And finally, perhaps, fatigue: He had been so nice to everyone for so long. Sure, he had called Stéphane Dion a terrorist sympathizer, questioned Michael Ignatieff’s loyalty to Canada, fired the nuclear safety lady for worrying about nuclear safety, and stacked the Rights and Democracy board with clowns from a Shriner circus, but by and large he had put the long game ahead of the instinct to scratch whatever itched. But come on, after a while a lion’s got to roar. The Obama snub had made the noise burst forth from the back of Harper’s throat.

  But in making oil-sands oil a big issue and declaring his willingness to fight a big fight, Harper had made precisely the same mistake he had privately claimed Mulroney had made with Meech and free trade. He had led with his chin. He had told his opponents what to oppose. He had forced people who would not normally have expressed any position to get off the fence. One of those people was the premier of British Columbia. By midsummer 2012 Christy Clark had announced a set of financial and environmental conditions for accepting Northern Gateway that made the pipeline unlikely ever to get built. And no wonder: an Abacus poll in late August showed that British Columbians strongly opposed Gateway, just as Al
bertans strongly supported it. The notion of a shift in power or clout to “the West” is coherent only if the West is. On pipelines, Abacus found the residents of the two largest Western provinces “more divided than ever before.”

  Much later, a senior Harper advisor admitted there had been “a lot of overreach” in the approach to pipeline politics at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012. “We knew that these hearings were going to take place and that they would be ugly,” the advisor said, referring to Enbridge’s Gateway hearings. “We knew environmentalists were going to take over. We needed a message that would help pre-but—rebut them prematurely—before they happened.” Tying the environmental movement to foreign funding, as Joe Oliver’s open letter had done, “seemed like a logical argument that we could make” but “with the benefit of hindsight it was a bad move.” Why? “It is a problem when the PM is seen as vindictive. This is not something we seek to cultivate. And I would say the attack on environmentalists, to the extent that we feel it was unwise, was unwise because it shows that we’re vindictive towards our political opponents, we have a sort of take-no-prisoners approach.”

  The government began throttling its rhetoric. The budget Flaherty tabled on March 29, 2012, was a much more low-key document than the broadsides from Oliver. “The reforms we present today are substantial, responsible, and necessary,” Flaherty said. “We will maintain our consistent, pragmatic, and responsible approach to the economy.” The word “transformation” did not appear in the budget document. This was no accident. “Some of the stuff that’s been out there about ‘major transformations’ may have been a bit off,” a Flaherty advisor told me in the hours before the minister tabled the budget.