Stephen Harper’s confession
By Paul Wells - Friday, February 3, 2012 - 0 Comments
Paul Wells on why Harper’s warning was really an admission— the Tories behaved like trust fund babies
Fred Chartrand/CP
The priorities and planning committee of cabinet—Stephen Harper in the chair, Marjory LeBreton vice-chair, with members including ministers Jim Flaherty, Peter MacKay, Tony Clement, Jason Kenney, John Baird and Diane Finley—met at the Willson House conference centre at Meech Lake on Jan. 20 and 21.
Several other ministers were brought in to join what was, for this cabinet, an unusually detailed and freewheeling conversation. Agenda topics included energy, trade, and the report on subsidies for industrial innovation that Open Text chairman Tom Jenkins handed to the government last October. All of those items made it into the Prime Minister’s speech at Davos five days after the committee retreat ended.
Harper’s vague mention of changes to public pensions will get most of the attention. But I was struck by a few paragraphs higher up in the speech. The part where he lectures his peers—or, more gently, shares lessons learned—on the virtues of a virtuous government.
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Stephen Harper’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-him approach
By Paul Wells - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 7:30 AM - 0 Comments
Paul Wells on why Harper works harder than any prime minister in his lifetime to take himself out of the picture
Adrian Wyld/CP
On the eve of his meeting with national Aboriginal chiefs, Stephen Harper sat down with a Radio-Canada reporter to talk about some other stuff. She asked him why he doesn’t get along with Quebec voters. The federal Conservatives’ boosting of the royals, their nomination of a unilingual auditor general, their tough-on-crime bills don’t go down well with Montreal commentators.
As any of his predecessors would, Harper disputed the question. Quebecers like our sensible policies just fine, he said in effect, and we like Quebecers too. Then he made a bold claim: “I think our approach to federalism truly weakened the Bloc Québécois,” he said, “and we saw the downfall of the Bloc.”
Really? When I posted that excerpt on my blog, a lot of readers made fun of it. If Harper did chop down the mighty oak that Lucien Bouchard and Gilles Duceppe built, it fell in an odd direction: toward Jack Layton’s NDP, which won 59 seats in Quebec. The Conservatives won five. Even the Liberals, with seven Quebec seats, did better there.
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Harper’s slow boat to China sets sail
By Paul Wells - Friday, January 13, 2012 at 7:40 AM - 0 Comments
Now that relations with the U.S. are strained, Harper has warmed up to China
Adrian Wyld/CP
The question before us is how Stephen Harper, of all people, came to give up on the United States and embrace Red China. It’s been a long time coming. Let’s have a look.
Here’s the Prime Minister more than four years ago, complaining to our John Geddes in a pre-Christmas 2007 interview about the deterioration in Canada’s relations with the United States:
“We continue to see what we call the thickening of the border. The building up of more regulations, new agricultural fees. And to be blunt with you, this has happened despite a good working relationship between my government and the American administration. I’m not optimistic this trend will be reversed. In fact, I’m certain this trend will not be reversed in the lifetime of the current American administration.”
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Harper’s sleepy majority
By Paul Wells - Friday, January 6, 2012 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments
Will Prime Minister Stephen Harper proceed with promised ‘major’ reforms in 2012?
Jason Lee/Reuters
What does Stephen Harper want to do with his parliamentary majority? “I want to make sure that we use it,” he told CTV’s Lisa LaFlamme in a year-end interview. “You know, I’ve seen too many majority governments, the bureaucracy talks them into going to sleep for three years, and then they all of a sudden realize they’re close to an election.”
Let’s see what the Prime Minister meant, if he meant much. Harper was born while John Diefenbaker was prime minister. He saw eight majority governments elected between that one and his own. History does not record much napping.
Pierre Trudeau introduced official bilingualism and multiculturalism during his first mandate, and invoked the War Measures Act to stop the October Crisis in Quebec. In his second majority, from 1974 to 1979, he introduced wage and price controls and joined the G7. During his third he won the 1980 Quebec referendum, repatriated the Constitution with a Charter of Rights, and introduced the National Energy Program.
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Amid an emergency in Attawapiskat—a strategy
By Paul Wells - Friday, December 9, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments
WELLS: Short attention spans will get the focus off Attawapiskat. Fixing the actual problem will take longer.
Oakland Ross/Toronto Star
The Prime Minister’s Office distributes a daily “media barometer” that lists the stories getting the widest coverage and generating the most buzz on blogs and talk radio. Last week the public relations crisis at Attawapiskat First Nation entered its second week. The humanitarian crisis has been going on for longer. For the first time since the Harper government was elected in 2006, a story on Aboriginal affairs made it to the top of the PMO barometer.
Standard PMO procedure is to do what it takes to get a story off the top of the barometer. That’ll be easy enough for news of the appalling living conditions at Attawapiskat. Short attention spans will do the job without any help from the Langevin Block. Fixing the actual problem will take longer.
On Nov. 29, Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan met until 10 p.m. with the cabinet subcommittee in charge of the strategic and operating review. He had prepared for his appearance for days. Every minister has to go through this. Their task is to explain how they will cut 10 per cent of their department’s spending, if needed.
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Belarus: Europe’s ugly little dictatorship
By Paul Wells - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments
Paul Wells on Alexander Lukashenko’s violent, corrupt, economically and morally bankrupt government
Viktor Drachev/AFP/Getty Images
For the longest time, the ruling regime in Belarus permitted Ales Michalevic to practise politics almost as he might if he were living in a democracy. The soft-spoken lawyer from Minsk, now 36, ran as a candidate in last December’s presidential election. He travelled widely, held rallies, met local officials and delivered a centrist message that sought to peel votes away from the country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, by offering only muted criticism of Lukashenko’s violent, corrupt, economically and morally bankrupt government.
And Michalevic was permitted to go about his political business, as were more than a half-dozen other opposition candidates, right up until the election returns came in on Dec. 19. Then the news anchors announced that Lukashenko had won almost 80 per cent of the vote. His nearest rival, Andrei Sannikaü, had won less than three per cent. Michalevic scored even lower. Many Belarusians sensed a gap between the official result and the message of their own hearts. Thousands spilled into the streets to protest. Black-clad thugs showed up to beat them senseless.
The police arrested perhaps 800 people overnight, including seven presidential candidates. The KGB—Belarus is the last country in the world to keep the Soviet-era name for its secret police—came for Michalevic at 4 a.m., while he sat drinking cognac with his campaign staff.
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These days, no news is good. Period.
By Paul Wells - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 7:30 AM - 0 Comments
Paul Wells on how everywhere the news is the same: bad
Tara Todras-Whitehill/AP
The other day, Martin Scorsese screened his new 3-D children’s movie, Hugo, for his daughter Francesca, who was turning 12, and 50 of her friends. Two thoughts occur:
It’s probably a good thing Scorsese didn’t have a daughter turning 12 the year he made Taxi Driver.
It’s official: you’re an inadequate parent.
“What? A pinata?! Daddy, I wanted 3-D Jude Law! Francesca’s dad gave her 3-D Jude Law!”
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A troubled EU is nothing to snicker at
By Paul Wells - Friday, November 18, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments
WELLS: Rather than point fingers, European leaders should fix the pathologies that have crept into the system
Christian Hartmann/Reuters
The good news is that when the cover of Canadian Business magazine says “Europe’s Still Doomed,” they don’t actually mean tens of millions of Europeans are about to die a horrible death. For centuries that was the standard for measuring a bad day in Europe.
France lost more of her citizens in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, about 139,000, than Canada lost in the First and Second World Wars combined, and it was barely getting warmed up. Next came 1.7 million French deaths in the First World War, then another half-million in the Second World War. Maybe seven million Germans died in the latter war, and nearly six million Poles. Belarus, at the time a Soviet republic, lost a quarter of its population. It’s easy for us to be glib about these things. They remain present and felt in Europe.
Canadians who chuckle at Eurocrats and Brussels bean-counters don’t pay enough attention to what those tweedy legions of paper-pushers have replaced. They’ve replaced hell. That doesn’t mean they’ve brought heaven, far from it, but the distance travelled is worth remembering. Germany and France work far more closely together than Canada and the U.S. do. Europe’s attractive power has pulled a dozen countries away from Russia’s grasp and closer to prosperity. The European Union’s eastern border, even with quasi-failed states like Belarus, is at least peaceful.
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Getting inside Harper’s headspace
By Paul Wells - Friday, November 11, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments
‘Everybody knows final decisions are made by the PM’
Sean Kilpatrick/CP
The Cabinet committee on priorities and planning meets on Tuesdays, usually with Stephen Harper as chairman. He calls a lot of decisions on the spot. But not all. Sometimes decision is reserved pending the Prime Minister’s private decision.
When it came time to decide how many seats each province would get in an enlarged House of Commons, a senior source close to the government says, the Prime Minister took the briefing books and spreadsheets and sat alone for hours, juggling options, weighing the political fallout from every scenario.
Three days before Minister of State for Democratic Reform Tim Uppal announced the new numbers—15 new seats for Ontario, six each for Alberta and British Columbia, three for Quebec—Conservative MPs were called to a rare Monday caucus meeting so the plan could be run by them. Harper has his control-freak moments, but he prefers to hear complaints from his MPs quietly, before an announcement, rather than loudly after it.
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How to get the Liberals and NDP off each other’s shoes
By Paul Wells - Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments
NDP leadership candidate Nathan Cullen on how cooperation is key to punting the Tories
“Everyone’s interpreting May 2 differently,” Nathan Cullen told me the other day over lunch at a reliably secluded Ottawa spot. May 2, you’ll recall, is the day we had a federal election. Stephen Harper won his majority. The New Democratic Party won 103 seats.Nathan Cullen is a New Democrat. “There’s a lot of people in our party who are interpreting this incorrectly. They think we’re predestined to win power the next time. I take the other view.”
Which is? “We should co-operate.”
“We” here is the NDP and the Liberals. And maybe the Greens. Or not. Cullen isn’t nailed down on the details. Those would be settled through discussion and negotiation before the next election. The goal for that election would be to have a single candidate, Liberal or New Democrat (or Green) (or not) (to be confirmed) running against the Conservative incumbent in those ridings the Conservatives now hold.
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What Brazil knows that we don’t
By Paul Wells - Friday, October 28, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments
Other countries are doing serious work to attract international students, but not us
Pedro Ladeira/Agencia Estado/Keystone Press Agency
This week we are wondering whether the government of Canada thinks it’s more important to talk or to act.
Every now and then, Stephen Harper’s government phones up some experts and asks them to lead a panel and come up with smart advice. Then it ignores the advice. In 2008 it asked a businessman named Red Wilson for advice on making Canada more competitive. Wilson offered 65 recommendations. Most were never implemented. This fall there are new reports, from businessman Tom Jenkins on corporate R&D, and from career soldier Andrew Leslie on the structure of the military. We’ll see whether they do better.
Meanwhile, every week brings a new panel. In October, Ed Fast, the trade minister, was in China announcing a panel to come up with advice on “an international education strategy.”
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A kind of chaos that is always with us
By Paul Wells - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 8:40 AM - 5 Comments
A new book shows Sir John A. Macdonald’s politics were much like ours
National Archives of Canada/CP
History never feels like history while it’s happening. It usually feels like chaos. Like this:
“Throughout the greater part of May 1870, the Ottawa Times kept a six-column obituary of Macdonald set in type so it could be used at any time,” Richard Gwyn writes in Nation Maker, the thumping second volume of his biography of Sir John A. Macdonald. In May 1870, the new Confederation was not yet three years old. Sir John had passed a gallstone of epic proportions and he was drinking too much anyway, and the combination of the two nearly took him to his maker.
In the end he had another 21 years in him, but even if the gallstone had finished him on the spot he’d still be remembered as a veteran of countless glorious battles. Building this new country in the middle of nowhere was never an easy task. The ship of state started springing leaks almost as soon as it was launched.
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Freedom to fail is what made Steve Jobs
By Paul Wells - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 7:50 AM - 20 Comments
Let us now argue about how to create the next Jobs
David Paul Morris/Getty Images
Having paid Steve Jobs the full measure of our devotion, let us now argue about how to create the next Steve Jobs. Which choices can governments and educators make that will encourage the next miraculous hybrid of gearhead, design genius, marketing whiz and change catalyst?
It’s fair to answer, “Give up. It’s impossible.” The rise of Jobs 1.0 looks more like a happy accident than anything else. He dropped out of a liberal-arts college in Portland and then stuck around to audit the calligraphy course. And yet I’m pretty sure that if everyone in Canada were required to take calligraphy without credit, it wouldn’t spark a new renaissance. To be fair, probably people would send more and nicer thank-you notes.
But still. It’s worth spending a little time to ask what was germane and broadly applicable in Jobs’s life. After all, no matter what governments do, it won’t be long before they’re claiming to be producing a new generation of Jobses.
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Harper swings and misses on Insite
By Paul Wells - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 86 Comments
The PM came close to shutting down Insite, only to be reminded there are still some limits to his reach
Andy Clark/Reuters
The limits of Stephen Harper’s power are becoming as interesting as the extent of it. Most days, life looks pretty good. His MPs form a comfortable majority in the Commons. Three of the caucuses he faces have no leader. The leader of the fourth, Elizabeth May, has no caucus. He inherited and did not ruin a well-performing economy. Even Americans envy Canada’s fortune.
But there is a clinic in Vancouver the Prime Minister cannot shut down by the hair of his chinny chin chin. The clinic is called Insite, and every morning drug addicts line up waiting for it to open. They keep it full until evening, injecting their veins full of heroin and other drugs. This just seems wrong to the Prime Minister. Three times he has sent federal government lawyers to court to say so. Each time they come up snake eyes.
Last week it was the Supreme Court of Canada. Two justices Harper named joined the unanimous decision against his lawyers’ arguments. Insite will stay open. Other supervised-injection sites may follow. (That last part isn’t clear. We’ll walk you through it in a minute.)
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A no-name race to replace Jack Layton
By Paul Wells - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 15 Comments
Most Canadians couldn’t pick Thomas Mulcair or Brian Topp out of a police lineup
Jacques Boissinot/CP
These days, after question period, Thomas Mulcair gives a little nothing-has-changed statement, through teeth clenched into an approximation of a cheerful smile, before he comments to reporters on the issues of the day. What hasn’t changed is Mulcair’s indecision over whether he’ll run for the leadership of the New Democratic Party. He is widely assumed to be a candidate. He isn’t a candidate yet. He’ll get back to us.
So will Niki Ashton, Paul Dewar, Peter Julian, Robert Chisholm and maybe more. Decent people, maybe more than that. But not really names to set the heart pounding. “There’s no excitement about this race,” a veteran New Democrat told me. “People aren’t excited about this. But it makes sense that they wouldn’t be. Their guy just died.”
Indeed. Jack Layton is gone barely five weeks. The NDP leadership convention isn’t until March 23. There’s half a year between the party’s last leader and its next. The hesitation of potential candidates is natural. The breakthrough party of 2011 is heading into a world of uncertainty.
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Harper’s single white males
By Paul Wells - Monday, September 12, 2011 at 10:05 AM - 126 Comments
Paul Wells takes an inside look at where the power really lies in Ottawa
Sean Kilpatrick/CP
For a loner, Stephen Harper works surprisingly well with others. The Prime Minister won his job by earning the loyalty of the old Reform party even though he used to be Preston Manning’s most persistent internal critic. He ended a decade’s rivalry with the Progressive Conservatives after doing more than almost anyone to fuel the rivalry.
He has wooed former Liberals into his caucus, sent New Democrat Gary Doer to Washington as Canada’s ambassador, and even put the occasional former Bloc Québécois member on the government payroll. No premier except Newfoundland’s now-retired Danny Williams has seen any political profit in antagonizing him. Harper drives his political opponents so crazy that it’s less frequently noticed how often he makes allies.
But the flip side of that coin is that his alliances rarely last. He hardly talks to former advisers like Tom Flanagan. He is on his fourth chief of staff, sixth communications director, and fifth foreign minister since he became Prime Minister. Jean Chrétien kept Eddie Goldenberg at his side for nearly 40 years. Paul Martin kept his 1990 Liberal leadership team around him until the day he retired. Harper’s team is like George Washington’s axe in the old joke, its blade replaced three times and its handle 26. All that remains is the ability to chop down opponents.
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The war on terror 10 years on
By Andrew Coyne and Paul Wells - Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 12 Comments
Andrew Coyne and Paul Wells debate the successes and failures of the world’s response after 9/11 and how safe we are today
AFP/Getty Images
ANDREW COYNE: Perhaps the best way to think about the legacy of Sept. 11 is to think of all the things that haven’t happened. Most obviously, there has been no successful terrorist attack on American soil since then—nor any attempted attack originating from Canadian soil. Neither have there been any of the consequences that might well have followed from a second, possibly worse attack, or in some cases were predicted to follow from the first: no wholesale victimization of Muslims, no long, black night of repression of dissent, no cataclysmic clash of civilizations, and so on.
This is of more than theoretical interest. If, 10 years later, al-Qaeda seems a depleted force, there was no guarantee things would turn out that way, nor did it seem likely at the time. Reviewing television footage from the day, what is striking is the sense of bewilderment in the voices of the normally phlegmatic anchormen, as the planes keep dropping out of the sky. Who could blame them? As of about noon that day, you could have told me California had fallen into the sea and I’d have believed you.
The audacity of attacking the world’s most powerful nation in such spectacular, head-on fashion still has the power to shock. More than anything else, Sept. 11 was a show of strength: look what we can do to you, it announced. And there is nothing you can do to stop it.
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Jason Kenney strikes back
By Paul Wells - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 73 Comments
Paul Wells on why the immigration minister waded into a fight with Amnesty over war criminals, and was in the right
Reuters/Chris Wattie
Some stories are so odd nobody knows how to handle them. I don’t know how else to explain why Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s extraordinary public feud with Amnesty International has attracted so little coverage.
Here’s a senior Conservative minister departing from the Conservatives’ normal bland talking points and unleashing a written broadside against a critic. And Kenney’s sparring partner wasn’t a predictable target. It was the Canadian branch of Amnesty, one of the most revered human rights organizations in the world. But that didn’t stop the minister from calling Amnesty’s concerns “poppycock,” “sloppy and irresponsible” and “self-congratulatory moral preening.”
Here’s what the fuss was about: last month, Kenney and Public Safety Minister Vic Toews released the names and photos of 30 fugitives who’d evaded immigration authorities since being found inadmissible because they’re believed to be complicit in genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. In short, the ministers were asking the public to help track down fleeing war crimes suspects. The public has stepped up: since the ministers’ announcements, six of the 30 men have been apprehended and three of those six deported.
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Inside Harper’s big blue tent
By Paul Wells - Friday, August 12, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 56 Comments
Canada’s conservatives are more united than ever
Adrian Wyld/CP
They are incorrigible, these Harper Conservatives. Sooner or later, they’ll wind up right in your own backyard.
Mr. Robert Ford, of the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke, Ont., made that startling discovery on Aug. 2, when 700 federal Conservatives showed up for a garden party on his mother’s property. To Ford’s apparent surprise, one of his guests was Stephen Harper.
Ford recovered quickly, for he is the mayor of Toronto and these folks were, in fact, his invited guests. “My new fishing buddy,” Ford called Harper. They swapped tales about Ford’s prowess in landing a 39-cm smallmouth bass. Harper took the microphone and spoke briefly. He said Ford didn’t live up to his reputation because he refused to kill and eat the fish, although, to be honest, Ford never really struck me as a seafood lover. Harper said Ford did “something very important” by “cleaning up the NDP mess here in Toronto.” Since Harper is, by his account, cleaning up “the left-wing mess federally,” it was up to Ontarians to “complete the hat trick” by electing Conservative Tim Hudak as the province’s new premier this fall.
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What about the whole Communist thing?
By Paul Wells - Friday, July 22, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 36 Comments
Paul Wells on the Conservatives’ turnaround on China
Sean Kilpatrick/CP
So John Baird went to China and everybody wrung their hands. What about human rights, minister? What about the Chinese people under the Communist jackboot?
“No more Stephen Harper vowing not to sell out human rights for ‘the almighty dollar,’ ” Rod Mickleburgh wrote in the Globe and Mail. “No more Jason Kenney lavishing praise on the Dalai Lama and private meetings between His Holiness and Mr. Harper.”
No indeed. Baird, Harper’s new foreign minister, tipped his hand in a Toronto speech before his three-day trip to China. “China is incredibly important to our future prosperity,” he said. “My government gets it and as Canada’s new minister of foreign affairs, I get it.”
Ah. And what about the whole Communist thing? “Even the best of friends can have legitimate differences of opinion,” the minister said.
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Why Harper wants to take on the world
By Paul Wells - Friday, July 15, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 234 Comments
Why is the PM preoccupied with external threats?
SEAN KILPATRICK/CP
“When I have something to say, I’ll tell you,” Stephen Harper said at one of his first news conferences as Prime Minister in 2006. Very well then. What has he been telling us since he won a majority on May 2?
In two important speeches and an interview with my boss at this magazine, Harper has given important hints, and left open important questions, about his plans for the country. A surprising amount of what he’s said has to do with foreign policy.
I don’t want to overstate this. In two speeches to Conservative partisans, at the party’s Ottawa convention on June 10, and again at the Calgary Stampede on July 9, Harper spoke first about more familiar subjects: his party’s electoral success and the economy. But Canada’s place in the world has grown as a theme until these days foreign policy is one of Harper’s big applause lines. He clearly sees it as a way to sharpen the contrast between his party and its opponents, to Conservatives’ advantage.
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Entertaining Will and Kate
By Paul Wells - Friday, July 8, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 16 Comments
WELLS: Picking the Canada Day lineup was a delicate task
Sean Kilpatrick/CP
From 2003 to 2006, Fox Television carried a strange TV comedy called Arrested Development. It featured a story arc involving a failed actor named Tobias Fünke who auditions for the theatre troupe Blue Man Group because he thinks it’s a support group for depressed men. For several episodes, Fünke wears blue body paint, which comes in handy when he realizes he can blend in with the blue parts of outdoor billboards, allowing him to spy on the rest of his family.
For a while, on July 1, I wondered whether Kate Middleton was inspired by Tobias Fünke when she decided to show up at the big Canada Day celebration on Parliament Hill dressed as a Canadian flag.
In a release to the Ottawa press rabble, “the Press Secretary to TRH the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge” described Kate’s outfit as “a cream dress by Reiss, with The Queen’s Maple Leaf brooch and a hat by Sylvia Fletcher at Lock and Co.” From any distance, however, the most striking thing about Kate’s outfit was that it was red at both ends—hat and pumps—and whitish through the middle, except for the reddish purse where the maple leaf would be if she were flapping sideways from a mast, not that I would ever advocate such a course of action.
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At least the Canada Post filibuster was exciting for the kids
By Paul Wells - Monday, July 4, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 2 Comments
Paul Wells on how the fate of first class letter delivery was binding up the House
Sean Kilpatrick/CPSean Kilpatrick/CP
It didn’t take long for this new Parliament’s odd character to assert itself. The NDP launched a filibuster to stall back-to-work legislation aimed at Canada Post employees. One NDP MP after another got up to hurl thunderbolts at the government and chew up time. Under Hansard’s rules, the clock accompanying the House of Commons’s workday stopped. The fourth Thursday in June lasted until Saturday night. The Prime Minister played host at a late-night hospitality suite for his MPs. The little dog laughed to see such sport, and the dish ran away with the spoon.
Let’s unpack all of this and see what we can learn from it. As soon as Jack Layton dropped his stalling tactics the NDP lost, which means postal-union employees lost too. Stephen Harper’s government legislated a smaller pay increase than Canada Post had proposed in its final offer. Jean Chrétien took his pound of flesh in precisely the same way when he legislated posties back to work, at a discount, in 1997.
So the NDP learned it’s unable to shout back the tide. In a way this reinforces Ottawa’s latest conventional wisdom. Layton, it is fashionable to say, has less influence with 103 MPs against a majority government than he used to have with 37. He can’t force an election. He can’t block legislation. What good is he?
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When Tories agree to disagree
By Paul Wells - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 42 Comments
Paul Wells on how Harper told his party that Canadians think like they do. The hubris was almost Liberal in its scope.
Fred Chartrand/CP
My Big Book of Columnists’ Clichés contains only two templates for covering a political party convention. That’s all we need, usually. The first carries the suggested headline, “Internal division splits a once-great party in two.” The second is headlined, “Party brass clamps down; well-oiled machine squeezes out dissent.” Just pick the form that fits, fill in a few blanks, and you can be at Hy’s by 5.
Unfortunately, last week’s Ottawa convention of the Conservative Party of Canada didn’t fit either of the Big Book templates. A few commentators tried to squeeze it in under Well-Oiled Machine, but it didn’t really fit.
Conservatives gathered for the first time since they met in Winnipeg in 2008. It was the party’s first important event since Stephen Harper won his majority on May 2. The PM was in a good mood. He spent a surprising amount of time onsite. On Friday night he skipped an NHL playoff game so he could party-hop. The delegates were in a good mood. Reporters were free to wander around the convention floor unhindered. Even Terry Milewski.
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The ego behind the exits at the PQ
By Paul Wells - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 99 Comments
Paul Wells on how Jacques Parizeau lives to undermine leaders who don’t share his reckless passion for sovereignty
Clement Allard/CP
Consider the curious case of Pauline Marois: intelligent, dedicated, elegant, prone to losing. In 1985, she ran for the Parti Québécois leadership and lost to Pierre-Marc Johnson, who would not last two years in the job. In 2005, she ran again and lost to André Boisclair, who would not last two years in the job. In 2007, she ran again, unopposed this time, and did not lose. She has kept the job for nearly four years. Her leadership even survived an election loss at the end of 2008. So that’s something.
In April, she won the most resounding vote of confidence of any leader in her party’s history, over 93 per cent. By that shaky measure she’s more popular among Péquistes than René Lévesque or Lucien Bouchard ever were. Most polls suggest she’ll beat the desperately unpopular Jean Charest in the next provincial election. And yet Marois’s PQ is falling apart.
On Monday, three members of her caucus resigned to sit as Independents. On Tuesday morning a fourth joined them. Each said she’s a great lady, while admitting she leads a party they can no longer support. Marois scrambled to contain the damage, or indeed simply to comprehend it. Well she might: no wily opponent brought her this low. It was all an accident. She was side-swiped by two of the biggest egos in the history of Quebec politics.
