“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, summoning all the passion this was due, “I am pleased to formally announce today the creation of the Federal Economic Development Agency for southern Ontario.” He held for applause. “Or,” Stephen Harper continued, “as it will be known by its short title, FedDev Ontario.”
After a few more sentences on this bureaucratic achievement—of the sort that must feel unnatural to a man once so suspicious of government intervention—he reached for meaning with the aplomb of an inspirational office poster. “As Winston Churchill once noted,” the Prime Minister said, “ ‘Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.’ ”
This—on the occasion of an announcement in Kitchener, Ont., last week—was what may come to be recognized as vintage Harper. Simple and unexciting. A small, but relatively unimpeachable, response to a large problem. A blue back-drop behind him, a small white maple leaf and the words “Action Plan” in a large font on either side of his head.
With such stuff has Stephen Harper attempted, somewhat tardily, to master the primary difficulty of the past eight months. Indeed, with the worst economic calamity in a generation looking to be near an end, and after several notable missteps, the Prime Minister seems very nearly to have steadied himself again, no small accomplishment for a politician for whom steadiness is supposed to be a primary point of appeal.
“There isn’t this burning desire, at this point in time, to bring back the Liberals. Harper has the opportunity to win again,” says Tim Powers, the Ottawa political consultant who has worked with the Conservative side. “People were writing, prematurely, in the spring, his obituary. Well, now it’s a new game.”
Where once he seemed hopeless, Stephen Harper now appears steadfast. Or at least resilient, if not exactly ascendent. “He’s certainly in a far more attractive position today than he was in spring,” concurs Frank Graves, the veteran pollster of EKOS Research. “Looking at things today, it’s not like the Tories and Harper have improved that much. They’re, frankly, still sort of stuck in the same place, but the lustre appears to be off Mr. Ignatieff.”
And that too is no small feat. Especially for a Prime Minister who should, by various measures, be struggling to maintain any hold on power.
In victory, a mere 10 months ago, his government was emboldened and his primary opponent demoralized. But within weeks his government was struggling for survival after a nakedly partisan attempt to financially wound the competition inspired talk of a coalition. That turmoil expedited a change in the Liberal leadership, and soon enough Michael Ignatieff was boosting both Liberal poll numbers and fundraising totals. Meanwhile, a recession Harper promised would not come had arrived, necessitating a federal deficit he told voters he would never run.
Then it all changed again. In late June it was Ignatieff, faced with the choice of forcing an election or letting Harper’s government survive, who seemed at a loss. The Liberal leader made a number of public demands, most of which he then ignored. Ignatieff and Harper met privately and a bipartisan working group was struck to investigate improvements to Employment Insurance. Ignatieff claimed a kind of victory, but Harper seemed hardly bothered by the outcome.
The weeks since have been hot and humid and quiet. But in the absence of activity around Ottawa, the economy has seemed to stabilize. Though 45,000 more jobs were lost in July, the unemployment rate remains at 8.6 per cent, never having reached the double-digit peaks of the last recession in the early 1990s. Indeed, though Harper and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty were quick to counsel caution, the Bank of Canada went so far last month as to predict that an escape from recession was imminent.
