Here’s how bad things have got for Stephen Harper: people are taking Garth Turner seriously. The former journalist, former Conservative, former MP’s gossipy tell-all of his time in Parliament, Sheeple: Caucus Confidential in Stephen Harper’s Ottawa, with its lengthy, verbatim quotes from private conversations with the Prime Minister, has attracted the sort of respectful attention usually reserved for more substantial works. And far from being dismissed as the sour grapes of a perpetual grandstander, his tales of ill use at the hands of Harper and his aides have raised only rueful clucks of “sounds about right.” Among Conservatives, I mean.
It’s been like that lately for the Prime Minister. His party is rapidly losing what meagre altitude it had gained in the polls; tensions are high between its Progressive Conservative and Reform factions; and the bizarre, self-inflicted crisis over Brian Mulroney’s party membership was resolved only after some small but striking displays of defiance by caucus members. Little wonder that speculation among the political class has grown: that Harper’s grip on power is slipping, that he might leave or even be forced out before the next election.
It’s not going to happen. Whatever Harper’s mistakes of judgment, however grating voters may find his personality, there is no obvious alternative to him as party leader, nor is one likely to emerge in time for an election. Bloodied as he may be, diminished as his reputation surely is, he’s not going anywhere: not of his own volition, and certainly not against it.
That isn’t to understate the Conservatives’ present distress. From a six-point lead in the polls, on average, in January, the Conservatives have drifted to a two-point deficit in April. Support is falling everywhere: they are in a three-way dogfight in B.C., have fallen eight points back of the Liberals in Ontario, and in Quebec—oh God. At 35 per cent in a Léger poll last September, the Tories are now hovering around 10 per cent. In some polls, they’re trailing the NDP.
The odd thing is that the public gives the government pretty good marks, all in all, for its handling of the economy—remarkably so, at a time of rising unemployment, falling output and exploding deficits. Six in 10 respondents to a recent Ipsos Reid poll rated the government’s economic performance at C or better. An Ekos poll finds nearly half of Canadians believe the country “is on the right track,” a question that is usually strongly correlated with support for the party in power.
Yet just as many respondents said the government was “on the wrong track.” Those polled described the Harper government as cautious, rather than visionary, though their own preferences leaned distinctly to the latter side. It’s hard not to interpret these results as a referendum on leadership. It is surely no coincidence that the Liberal surge began more or less the day Michael Ignatieff replaced Stéphane Dion as leader. More tellingly, the Tory slide has been accompanied by a significant increase in public disenchantment with Harper: Ekos finds 54 per cent disapproval of Harper’s performance, nearly twice as high as for Ignatieff.
On the other hand, polls still show Harper leading or level with Ignatieff on a range of traditional leadership questions: “best prime minister,” “strong and decisive,” and so forth. Understandably so. No one doubts Harper’s abilities. He is easily the most impressive political leader of his generation. It’s his style, the way he does politics—the chippiness, the intolerance of dissent, the relentless partisanship—that puts people off. Once, people would have described him as dull but decent; a bit of an ideologue, but a straight arrow; principled, consistent, ethical to a fault. Now, the word that more usually comes to mind is Machiavellian.
Yet even his reputation as a strategist has been tarnished. The leader who was once known for playing “the long game,” preferring to build his political capital rather than take short-term political profits, has succumbed, under the pressures of minority government, to the temptations of tactical advantage. For a time, against Dion’s uncertain opposition, it seemed to work. The Tories ran the table with the Liberal leader, emerging triumphant in a series of parliamentary tests of will that were the basis of Harper’s alpha-male reputation as a “strong leader.”
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