Todd Korol/Reuters
2. TAKING ON OTTAWA: The secret to moving the country right
Someone who was there paraphrased Harper’s message to his ministers at his first cabinet meeting in 2006: “I am the kingpin. So whatever you do around me, you have to know that I am sacrosanct.” Harper was telling his ministers that they were expendable but that he wasn’t. If they had to go so that his credibility and his ability to get things done were protected, so be it.
“It wasn’t personal,” this source said. “It was his office.” The office was fragile. Harper limped into the PMO with 124 seats out of 308, 31 short of a majority. The Liberals had kept 103 seats. The gap between the two was 15 seats narrower than it had been, in the Liberals’ favour, after the 2004 election. The Liberals still outnumbered the Conservatives in Ontario. Harper’s party had been shut out of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.
“He believed it would be a much shorter term of government than it actually ended up being,” this insider from the early days said. “That had everything to do with the design of his of?ce and the government. Everything was about control over message, delivering the five priorities, and writing the mandate letters so they would be specific.”
Harper brought in Derek Burney, a former chief of staff to Brian Mulroney, to run the transition. Burney had been involved in throwing together a hectic last-minute transition plan in 2004, when the Conservatives were amazed to discover they had a long shot at winning. They didn’t, but Harper read the package Burney, Hugh Segal and others had prepared, and asked Burney to lead the exercise if it was ever needed again.
By 2006, Burney still didn’t know Harper well. He says his marching orders were clear: “Keep it simple, keep it focused.” With a small team composed mostly of veterans from the Mulroney years, they designed a plan for a smaller cabinet than Martin’s, with far fewer cabinet committees. “The PCO”—the Privy Council Office, the bureaucracy’s central organizing hub—“had become a mammoth operation under Martin,” Burney said. “It was more than three times the size that it had been in my time, in the late ’80s.”
A trimmer organization would permit the government to focus. “I know it sounds silly to say it now,” Burney says, “but it was also intended, indirectly, to get more power back into the hands of the major departments and less at the centre. I mean, that was the plan.”
But that plan often conflicted with another plan: ensuring that Harper wasn’t blindsided by his rookie ministers. He kept them on a short leash. Ministers traditionally receive “mandate letters,” prepared by the bureaucracy and political staff and signed by the PM, telling them what’s expected of them over the medium term. The tasks they set out usually cover a year or more. Harper’s covered only six months.
“He actually went over them line by line with me, and in a very meticulous fashion,” Burney said. “There was not a lot of chit-chat. This was not a Rotarian kind of guy.” If something in one of the mandate letters conflicted with language in the Conservative election platform, Harper would spot it and give Burney the wording for a correction. “It was very different from what I was used to,” Burney says. “Mulroney would have said, ‘Well, what do these letters say, Derek?’ And you’d explain them for five seconds and he’d sign them, or not.”
The whole operation was designed, ?rst of all, to deliver the “five priorities” Harper had used to get elected. Badly outnumbered in the Commons, he expected he would have to go back to voters soon. He would need to show them clear results.
WATCH COYNE V. WELLS ON FIVE YEARS OF HARPER (VIDEO)
“The first four of the five things I’ve talked about are things that, quite frankly, we can do fairly quickly,” he’d told reporters three weeks before the election. And indeed, soon enough he cut the GST, introduced an Accountability Act to disinfect Ottawa’s culture of easy money, started mailing cheques to parents of young children, and introduced the first of many tough-on-crime initiatives. The fifth priority, a health care wait-times guarantee, would be a tougher nut to crack. Five years later Harper still hasn’t made serious progress on it.
But go back to those first four. During the campaign Harper didn’t only say they were cinches to accomplish. “They will have longer-term impacts,” he added. “The country will be different because of them.”
That’s the game. Harper wanted to lock in change quickly so the country would be more clement for conservatives, even if he was swept away. Economists will tell you the GST cut is bad economics. But it is very good at reducing federal revenues—and hard to ratchet back up without a fight. Similarly, try telling working mothers they won’t be getting their child care cheques any more.
This business of changing the culture of the country obsesses the group around Harper. It crystallized in March 2002, when an article by Kevin Michael Grace appeared in the money-losing little magazine The Report (formerly Alberta Report). The article carried the headline “A self-hating nation.” But it was mostly about the perception that Canadian conservatives didn’t care whether the country flourished or disappeared. “A reliable source claims that a famous right-wing pundit, a star of the National Post, was heard to say, ‘The Post has a problem. It was started to save Canada, but Canada isn’t worth saving.’ ”
This raises a question, Grace wrote. “Does the right hate Canada?”
While the article was on the newsstands, Stephen Harper became leader of the Canadian Alliance. Of course not a lot of people were reading The Report, but many who did were on Harper’s staff. They were badly rattled by its implications.
“We didn’t have a competing narrative,” one of them says now. “What are the symbols people talk about when they talk about Canada? Health care. The Charter. Peacekeeping. The United Nations. The CBC. Almost every single example was a Liberal achievement or a Liberal policy.
“We had gotten to a point in Canada where the conservative side of politics had been marginalized—where we weren’t even recognized as legitimately Canadian.”
That’s what you get when the Liberals run the country for most of a century: a party that starts further back in the public debate than any opposition party anywhere else. “Nobody believes that the Democratic party in the U.S. is not an American party. In Australia, both of the major parties are recognized as legitimate parts of the debate.”
In Canada, Harper had to carve out a patriotic vocabulary that was different from the Liberals’. “We didn’t have any illusions about displacing the Liberal vision and the Liberal narrative of Canada,” the strategist says. “But we needed to give the conservative side something to rally around.” So almost from the beginning, Harper started building a distinct right-of-centre, patriotic new vocabulary. “It’s the Arctic,” this strategist said. “It’s the military. It’s the RCMP. It’s the embrace of hockey and lacrosse and curling.” In policy terms, it included the child care cheques and the accompanying rhetoric of families able to make their own choices.
Some internal debates over this clash of visions were almost surreal. It galled some within the Canadian Alliance, and later the Conservatives, that the only colours on the national flag were red and white, and the Liberals had a monopoly on red. They even considered adopting red and white as the official colours of the Canadian Alliance before deciding to fight their battles on other terrain.
But in these early debates we see the impulses Harper has brought to so many of his decisions, long past the six-month window after January 2006. A few issues with a lot of emotional significance get way more attention from Harper’s office and from senior ministers than others. An issue gets special attention if it has the potential to shift the national debate onto terms favourable to Conservatives. “We’ve implemented a series of shifts,” the strategist said. “On foreign policy. On defence. On criminal justice. On federalism. On the tax system, especially as it affects families.”
The result was on display on Jan. 23 at an Ottawa-area rally to celebrate Harper’s five years in office. A central theme of Harper’s remarks was patriotism and love of country. This helps explain why Conservatives are so pleased to face a Liberal leader like Michael Ignatieff, whose many years living abroad make him vulnerable to attack on the very ground where Harper used to play defence.
And Ignatieff has had to laboriously learn his party’s ancient rules and culture. Harper built his party from scratch to do what he wants it to do. The Conservative Party of Canada has existed for only a few months longer than he has led it. Which helps explain the seamless connections between the government, the party’s campaign team and its fundraising shop.
“It’s not the old Progressive Conservatives, it’s not the old Reform-Alliance party,” says Peter Harder, who served as deputy minister of foreign affairs during Harper’s first year in office. “It’s a party that was formed so recently before coming into power that this focusing on the party is logical.”
Harder contends that the Harper team’s constant attention to the party’s political fortunes has made Ottawa feel more like Washington. “It’s an Americanization of our political culture. It’s more a White House operation than a parliamentary, prime ministerial operation.”
One measure of the heavy emphasis on strategy is who matters most in the PMO, and who is missed when they leave. One of Harper’s close collaborators says the biggest change in the PMO over Harper’s years was not the exit of two chiefs of staff, Ian Brodie and Guy Giorno. It wasn’t the departure of two clerks of the Privy Council, Alex Himelfarb and Kevin Lynch. No, the hole Harper has been unable to fill was left when electoral strategist Patrick Muttart left in 2009 to work in the United States.
“The one difference with big structural implications is when Patrick left,” this senior Conservative says. “To call him the marketing strategist is an under-pitching of his role. He has a whole discipline and methodology for keeping track of today but keeping an eye on the big picture. I still don’t think they’ve replaced him in the organization.”
Through it all, Harper has been able to count on far greater caucus solidarity than other recent prime ministers did. It’s a mystery to outsiders, but it’s very real. It took time to build, and it was greatly bolstered by a departure from his caucus.
First came Belinda Stronach’s spectacular defection to Paul Martin’s government in 2005. “That had reverberations for years,” one long-time Harper adviser recalls. “The revulsion at her. At that moment, a whole slew of people who were kind of dancing around, not sure if they were in the pool or out of the pool, were in the pool.”
That kind of marquee defection can destroy a party leader. In fact they often have. Mulroney’s career never recovered from the departure of Lucien Bouchard to form the Bloc Québécois. Paul Martin’s revolt ruined Jean Chrétien. But it wasn’t just the leader. A whole party was shaken to its foundation in both cases.
Harper notices these things. In office he has never let a minister rise high enough to form an independent power base. The Harper operation is built for survival, armoured against threat from the inside and out, designed to protect the one component its leader believes is indispensable: himself.
Next page: TAKING ON THE WORLD
