That was a Thursday. On Friday, the Liberals put out a news release saying he’d take the weekend before saying anything. On Monday, he had that weird news conference, a mix of bluster and pleading. He didn’t want an election. But if Harper wanted to avoid one, he needed to give Ignatieff more information on four key questions. Ignatieff wanted a more generous EI system; he wanted to know how much of the stimulus money was spent, not promised; he wanted to know how Harper planned to get out of the huge deficits he had dug at the opposition’s demand; and he wanted to know how the government would replace medical isotopes the abandoned Chalk River reactor will no longer produce. Four questions. So he was demanding answers? “I don’t need to have all the answers this week.” Huh?
With that, he headed into question period. Harper almost never attends the daily circus on Monday, but today he did. Much of his staff was in the gallery above, watching. Ignatieff amazed them by neglecting to ask whether Harper would meet his demands. “I don’t know what he wants,” Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe said to reporters afterward.
Harper held an impromptu news conference to answer the questions he hadn’t had from Ignatieff. He said he had either already answered Ignatieff’s demands or that he couldn’t. Ignatieff gave a string of TV interviews, each markedly less bellicose than the last. It was like watching the air go out of a balloon.
The Conservative and Liberal press offices sent word out: the two leaders would spend Tuesday meeting. On Wednesday they announced a deal. It was a pretty minimal deal. On isotopes: nothing. On climbing out of deficit: nothing. On the precise amount of stimulus spending: nothing. On EI: a two-party committee would report in September. Ignatieff was batting maybe one-half for four. He’d take it. The Liberals would continue to support the government. “Do I look steamrolled?” he asked reporters wanly, looking steamrolled.
Only Harper, Ignatieff and their top advisers, Conservative Guy Giorno and Liberal Ian Davey, were in the room when they met. None of the principals is talking. “I just think Harper got a sense that Ignatieff really didn’t want a campaign,” said a Conservative who talked to Maclean’s and had been briefed on the meetings. “So [he said] ‘Here’s our response; find a way to sell it.’ ”
So a show of strength had become a moment of vagueness for Ignatieff. He has the summer to reorganize, rest and, perhaps most important, think a bit so he can do better in the autumn. But so does Harper. And Harper doesn’t normally waste his summers. He won in 2006 because he changed his team and strategy over the summer of 2005. He used the summer of 2008 to change chiefs of staff. His critics have called his new right-hand man, Guy Giorno, a source of the past half-year’s missteps. Harper’s admirers have an entirely different read.
Two MPs said Giorno, who once held the same job for former Ontario premier Mike Harris, is seen by the Conservative caucus to be more attentive to their concerns than Ian Brodie, the former political science prof Giorno replaced. “Phone calls get returned promptly,” one said. “Problems that keep local members awake at night get resolved.” Brodie was seen to be enforcing discipline on the Conservative caucus and political staff while giving the civil service a free rein. With Giorno, that’s turned around. Partisans have more latitude. It’s the bureaucracy whose wings have been clipped.
But what about the missteps? The fall update and the fight with Mulroney? Not Giorno’s fault, insiders say. “The crimes of Giorno are actually the crimes of Harper,” a cabinet minister said. “Every one of them. Every one.”
The change at Harper’s right hand probably contributed to another major change, the departure of Kevin Lynch as clerk of the Privy Council. Lynch had a direct pipeline to Harper. His memos could go straight to the Prime Minister’s desk, in many cases without Brodie seeing them and appending a political memo first. Giorno ended that practice—simply restoring balance between politics and the bureaucracy, Harper’s side says, but “for Kevin it was a radical change.”
Lynch has retired, to be replaced by former Treasury Board deputy minister Wayne Wouters. Wouters is highly regarded but seen as temperamentally less likely than the firebrand Lynch to challenge the fundamentally political cast of a Giorno-led PMO. “Kevin had to win every day,” said a career civil servant who knows both men well. “Wayne won once, on the day he was appointed clerk.”
