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5. MIND GAMES: What Harper really thinks
When Stephen Harper had been prime minister for only a few months, a visitor to his office asked what he had learned so far on the job. Harper considered the question briefly. “I just wish I’d been tougher,” he said.
Tougher how? On which files? Against whom?
“Just…tougher,” Harper said, before ushering his visitor out of his Centre Block office.
Most voters supported somebody else’s party over his. On any day of the week, his opponents could try again what they tried to do in 2008. He is persuaded they will try again after the next election, should the Conservatives get another minority. In the meanwhile he sees them scheming against him, ganging up in committees, sucking up to reporters. If he is not tough they will cut him down.
But then toughness is a relative thing, isn’t it? A member of his government notes that Harper’s cabinet has grown steadily, due partly to his aversion to firing anyone. Max Bernier had to go because of the documents at the girlfriend’s house. Helena Guergis had to go because of all the icky claims against her. Lawrence Cannon is fine. Bev Oda is fine. Diane Ablonczy was too quick to lecture young Stephen when they were both rookie Reform MPs, so he has made sure she rises very slowly indeed. But she rises.
So he’s a pussycat? That may be overstating things. But Harper’s bark is so fierce that few have ever bothered to test his bite. It’s easy in Ottawa to find prematurely retired bureaucrats who decry Harper’s management style. But just try to get one of them to detail their complaints for the public record. Even when they’re off the public payroll, they would rather avoid the trouble. You will already have noticed that close collaborators of Harper prefer not to speak for the record—even when they’re saying nice things about him.
It all baffles Derek Burney, who has been a public servant and a political staffer and who marvels at how cowed the bureaucracy, and Harper’s own ministers, are. “If you joust with these guys, you just might win a few,” he said.
For now almost nobody is in a mood to joust with Harper. The opposition parties deny they are plotting to form a coalition to replace him. And you know what? They are not plotting to form a coalition. But neither are they performing the day-to-day consultation and collaboration opposition parties always do to clip a government’s wings, because they are too afraid of looking like the coalition he warns against. They have had him outnumbered for five years. For a week in 2008 they acted like it. Now he will not stop using that week as a stick to beat them with.
It is a cliché to say somebody is his own worst critic. In Harper’s case it is true in two ways. First, he has not exactly surrounded himself with the kind of person who is fearless about speaking truth to power. “Stephen Harper is always at his best when there are people who say, ‘What the f— are you doing?’ ” says a former staffer from his first years in office. “But he organized his life so that nobody was saying that to him.”
This produces nasty surprises. He was amazed at the political turmoil that followed when he had Linda Keen, head of the Nuclear Safety Commission, fired for refusing to run the Chalk River reactor, and then called her a Liberal plant with a mandate to safeguard the Liberals’ legacy “from the grave.” He’d managed to make Keen a martyr. “Why did nobody tell me that?” he asked later when an acquaintance told him what he’d managed to do.
But the “own worst critic” label also really does mean he is often harshly self-critical. As a result, he goes through a conscious and intense process of preparation—before every public appearance—to convey an aura of unflappable certitude.
“It’s not like people who have to go and check their hair or tie,” says one Conservative insider who has worked closely with the Prime Minister. “To prepare for making sure that every word that he plans to say is delivered correctly, and that he’s leaving the right emphasis, and he’s not going to be caught out by questions that he’s not going to want to answer, and he’s going to limit how he reacts—does he want to be angry? Does he want to be more placid?—this doesn’t come naturally to him. His own personal emotional preparation for a press scrum takes up a lot of energy.”
His aim is to avoid the sorts of blunt, impolitic assertions that plagued him before he took office—like his reference to the “culture of defeatism” in Atlantic Canada. Mistakes from others are easy enough to correct. Harper simply shuts them out, denies them plum posts, ignores their counsel. He did it to Scott Reid, the eastern Ontario MP who used to be one of his closest advisers, after Reid made comments about bilingualism in 2004 that gave Harper a rough couple of days on the campaign trail.
But Harper cannot shut himself down after a gaffe. So he goes to extreme lengths to avoid making them.
Does all this effort and calculation, all these years of survival, add up to anything? Opinions on that question diverge so wildly that claiming Harper is a significant prime minister will not change the minds of anyone who thinks otherwise. At a minimum, he endures.
“I don’t think there’s a Harper conservatism in the sense of an easily identifiable ideology,” a member of his government says. “There’s an approach to government, which is informed by what some would call principled, others would call ideological conservatism. But it’s conditioned by the day-to-day requirements of running a government and maintaining a broad base of support.”
Yes, but again: does this add up to anything? This source decided to try explaining it a different way. “He has a clear set of principles, which he tries to implement in a responsible and prudent way. That may sound trite, but it’s actually, in the history of modern Canadian conservatism, almost revolutionary at the federal level. Previous conservative governments were simply brokerage parties, all about constant calculation of electoral advantage.”
Surely nobody would claim Harper is immune to the temptation to calculate electoral advantage. “The Mulroney refrain, when the base was complaining about that government’s profligacy…they would always say politics is the art of the possible,” this Conservative said. “Margaret Thatcher said, what is your sense of what’s possible?
WATCH COYNE V. WELLS ON FIVE YEARS OF HARPER (VIDEO)
“Stephen Harper has a much more expansive sense of what’s possible than his predecessors as national conservative leaders. That is understood implicitly in the party. That’s why the right wing of the party continues to support him, notwithstanding particular policies that bug them. They understand he’s more Thatcher than Mulroney.”
His first big decision in electoral politics was to abandon the Mulroney Progressive Conservatives in 1987 for an upstart movement that wasn’t even named the Reform party yet. He knows what a furious conservative base looks like. It looks like him. He pays it much closer heed than he does a bunch of Ottawa columnists. Why did he hold his ground on the long-form census, but abandon a Throne Speech promise to find gender-neutral lyrics for O Canada? “The census wasn’t burning up Lowell Green’s show,” says one former staffer, referring to a popular Ottawa talk-radio host. “But O Canada sure was.”
His national campaign director, Doug Finley, has been responsible for implementing Harper’s plans since 2004. Already they are well ahead of the schedule they imagined they would adhere to. “Certainly Stephen Harper’s first goal was to unite the parties,” Finley says. “Having done that, we felt at the time that it would take probably at least one full election cycle—by that I mean five years—to get us in a position where we could aspire to government.”
The sponsorship scandal and the Gomery inquiry sped everything up considerably. Where are they heading now? Finley is responsible for delivering a majority to Harper. He is realistic about the odds.
“The reality is, with four parties, each capable of getting around 40 seats, the continuing likelihood of minority governments is strong. And you would be a fool not to be ready for an election at any time. We’re now at a stage, I think, where our base is strong. We’ve shown five years of stable government. Our attention to our knitting, which is particularly the economy, job creation, tax reduction, is resonating well with the Canadian public.
“I believe we’re ready for a majority. Certainly the seats are there. Will the tactics change? No, not considerably.”
What’s the goal? A majority for what end? “I’ve heard people say that Stephen Harper’s number one goal in political life is to get rid of the Liberal party. I’ve never heard him say that. Obviously we’d like to beat them every time we run against them.”
All of which is fine enough, but it still doesn’t address what Harper would do with five more years if he had them. Probably it’s safest to say he will do more of the same: incremental changes that change the country in ways his opponents, when they finally do push Harper or his successors out of office, will have trouble ratcheting back. Money out of Ottawa. Ottawa out of the provinces’ business. An alternative narrative of Canadian patriotism that gives conservatives a flag to rally around.
“I’m pretty sure the Prime Minister has a pretty good idea where he’s going,” Doug Finley says. “He is, as many in the media have described, the prime strategist. He’s the leader in every sense of the word. He’s not the micromanager that people describe, or the sort of sour-faced bully or whatever. I’ve never seen that in the years that I’ve known him.
“But I know in his mind there are plans constantly forming.”
