The thing about the fight that Stephen Harper has managed to pick with Brian Mulroney, the paradox that elevates it beyond a few days’ bad headlines into the sort of event that makes party members wonder about the boss’s judgment, is that Harper was only doing what he has always done to win.
For as long as he has been in politics, Harper has returned, at important moments, to a few favourite techniques to manage the public agenda. Selective leaks to reporters. Titillating stories custom-designed to distract the press and public from weightier events. Wedge issues chosen with care to turn ally against ally.
It’s what he does. Except he used to do it to his opponents.
This time he did it to Mulroney—the patriarch of one of Harper Conservatism’s constituent groups and a still-formidable political street fighter who, even now, probably has more real, call-him-up-on-his-birthday friends in the party Harper leads than Harper does.
It was Harper’s staff, acting on his behalf for days on end, who leaked word to reporters recently that Mulroney had cut his links to the party. With the Oliphant commission into Mulroney’s ties with Karlheinz Schreiber looming, it was a transparent bid to put space between this Prime Minister and his predecessor. Mulroney and his loyalists took the hint and the insult and pushed back—hard. Pretty soon, two decades’ worth of bad blood was on public display. And Harper, who could use some good luck these days, had some of the other kind on his hands.
Brian Mulroney was making people hurt for crossing him when Stephen Harper was still in short pants. So one question Ottawa Conservatives were asking, when the bizarre two-week debate over Mulroney’s membership status finally calmed down, was: what on earth got into Harper?
Robin Sears is no Conservative. He’s a long-time New Democrat who served as Bob Rae’s chief of staff when Rae was Ontario’s premier. But Sears does act as Mulroney’s paid spokesman, a position that has kept him busy while the Oliphant commission prepared to investigate Mulroney’s dealings with Schreiber. Here’s what Sears makes of the Mulroney membership kerfuffle. First, “what should have been a very positive week for the government,” because Harper was attending a bunch of blue-chip summits overseas, “hasn’t been.”
“Secondly, Mr. Mulroney’s mandate, legacy and record of achievement has been revived in a mostly positive manner, at a time when one couldn’t have anticipated that.
“From the perspective of the world beyond, it provides a rather unhelpful glimpse into how fragile the bonds of partisan loyalty remain within the Conservative party.”
When Canadian conservatives set aside their differences to build broad coalitions, they prosper and govern. One measure of the difficulty of that task is that they have so rarely governed. In the past half-century, only Harper, Mulroney and John Diefenbaker have won more than one national election. For much of that time Mulroney and Harper have incarnated, sometimes in the breach, the importance of conservative loyalty. When they were on the same side, Conservatives were in power. When they weren’t, they weren’t.
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