Come again? Does Mulroney have the card he needs to participate in party activities? No, Plett said. “But if he wanted to, he would simply purchase a membership. I, for one, as president of the party, certainly consider him a Conservative for life. But that doesn’t mean he has a party membership.”
Clear as mud. What remains, as so often these days, is a set of questions about Stephen Harper’s political judgment.
It is worth emphasizing that he used to keep people on the payroll to question his judgment. Sources say that the voices that could most reliably be heard at Monday senior staff meetings questioning the boss’s decisions belonged to a cluster of, well, senior staffers: Ian Brodie, Sandra Buckler, Bruce Carson and Keith Beardsley. Only Brodie came from the Reform/Alliance wing of the party; the others were old Progressive Conservative hands. In the past year, all have been replaced.
One former PMO staffer calls the replacements—Giorno, Teneycke, Byrne—“cheerleaders” for Harper. Giorno, an Ontario strategist who became Mike Harris’s chief of staff after Harris had won his last election as premier, joined Harper with a mandate to make everything “more political.” He has certainly done that.
And with what results? In September Harper let slip a majority because his tone-deaf staff had misunderstood the reaction in Quebec to cuts in arts funding. In November Harper introduced an economic update that led, via a hair-raising parliamentary crisis, to the uncontested installation of Michael Ignatieff as Liberal leader. Now Harper has managed to split his own party. The man who won his job by uniting friends and dividing foes has now spent a calendar year doing the opposite. There is one man in Canada who knows better than any why that’s dumb. But Stephen Harper no longer takes his calls.
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