Party of One (2 page)

The governor general, who read the 2011 Speech from the Throne, would one day soon see his constitutional duties usurped by Stephen Harper when the prime minister, not the commander-in-chief, received the last flag that had flown in Afghanistan. Few knew that as Harper received that flag, he had ordered government lawyers to oppose the claim by Afghanistan veterans that the government had a social contract to take care of wounded soldiers returning from the wars.

The Privy Council Office would continue to see its duties to the country’s public service abandoned by a near-total submission to the political demands of the Prime Minister’s Office. It had already stood idly by while the careers of top bureaucrats such as Linda Keen were unjustly destroyed, and there were more victims to come—public servants such as Kevin Page and Munir Sheikh. And when things went wrong, as they would in the looming Senate expenses scandal, it would be the PCO that would take the blame for missing documents.

The Senate itself, which felt violated by Brigette DePape’s symbolic intervention in the high affairs of state, would be undermined by the PMO in the matter of an independent Senate audit and the approaching Wright/Duffy scandal. The prime minister’s chief of staff and a dozen others in the PMO would do to the
Senate what they had already done to the PCO—bend it to the will of the highest political office in the land.

Harper cabinet ministers, who traduced Brigette DePape on that June day when they assumed control of Canada, were quickly reduced to puppets reacting to every pull on the strings from the prime minister. They did not speak for themselves and their departments, but relayed the speaking points sent their way from the PMO. Nattering among themselves as they rode the green shuttle buses on Parliament Hill, they referred to Harper as the “Chairman.” Majority government notwithstanding, their muzzles were tightened rather than removed.

The leaders of the opposition, who stood on the side of decorum in their denunciation of Brigette DePape, quickly came to see the point she was trying to make. After Jack Layton’s untimely death, Thomas Mulcair spoke for the NDP, and his words actually supported the point of DePape’s protest. “The Tories are smug, smart-ass and full of half lies,” he told me. “Harper has no confidence in the process. The contempt of parliament finding led to absolutely no changes in his approach. Harper didn’t do anything.” Despite disapproving of DePape’s actions, the then interim Liberal leader, Bob Rae, came to this conclusion about Stephen Harper a year after his majority government took office: “He can be nasty, cynical and has a deep authoritarian streak. If there is something these guys don’t like, they must pass a law to stop it. He destroys the freedom people should have to express themselves.”

As for ordinary MPs, who had been upset that a mere page had spoiled the ceremonies of power that day in the Senate, they would see their own roles reduced to mere shadows on the backbench. Committee meetings were moved behind closed doors, Tory MPs’ mouths were wired shut, and government MPs soon found themselves in a battle with the PMO and their own House Leader over their right to even ask questions in the House of Commons.

The one group represented in the Senate chamber that day that might well have been most offended by DePape’s unorthodox action were the justices of the Supreme Court of Canada— resplendent in their red gowns with white ermine trim. After all, theirs was the deepest commitment in the land to the law and the constitution, to propriety and process. But Harper’s actions would prove even more unorthodox and disruptive. After the Supreme Court ruled against Stephen Harper’s choice to fill a vacant Quebec seat on the high court, the prime minister would publicly attack Canada’s first female chief justice with a vengeance. Harper accused Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin of acting in a way that was “inadvisable and inappropriate” when she contacted his office in an attempt to advise the government about eligibility requirements before filling the Quebec vacancy on the Supreme Court.

The PMO even attempted to retroactively amend the Supreme Court Act in an omnibus budget bill to make the appointment of Marc Nadon legitimate. Legal scholars immediately saw this as an attempt to override the fundamental supremacy of the Canadian constitution and Quebec’s unique place in the country. The response from 650 lawyers and law professors was like the blowback from a blast furnace. They wrote an open letter to Stephen Harper deploring his unprecedented attack on the chief justice. A group of blue-ribbon academics even asked the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) in Geneva to investigate. They alleged that Harper was attacking the independence of the high court, and that his remarks could be construed as intimidation. The international jurists agreed. It is interesting to note that most of the ICJ’s investigations are in Africa, Asia, and Russia.
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Even retired Quebec Superior Court judge John Gomery added his criticism to the torrent of reaction triggered by the prime minister’s smear of Justice McLachlin. The comments were ironic coming from him, since his inquiry into the Liberal
sponsorship scandal had figured prominently in Stephen Harper’s rise to power: “I think it’s appalling that the judiciary should be used for political purposes in this way and I’m puzzled as to the motivation of the prime minister and his office as to why they would take on the chief justice.”

A few years after a twenty-two-year-old Senate page held up a sign in front of the cameras imploring Canadians to “Stop Harper,” the very people who had denounced her would feel the sting of Stephen Harper’s contempt for the Canadian system of government. The question wasn’t whether the country had a rogue page. The question was whether it had a rogue prime minister. The beginnings of an answer to that question were buried in the silt of Stephen Harper’s political past.

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THE GENESIS OF STEVE

W
hile some Canadian political careers have ended in snowstorms, Stephen Harper’s began in one. Harper and his best friend, John Weissenberger, jumped into a Volkswagen Jetta and headed to the founding convention of the Reform Party in Winnipeg on Halloween 1987. The early storm slowed but did not stop the excited, young politicos.

Harper had worked hard for a year in federal politics as legislative assistant to Alberta MP Jim Hawkes, the PC party whip. But, lonely and out of place in Brian Mulroney’s Ottawa, he moved back to Alberta in 1986. Both Harper and Weissenberger resigned from the Progressive Conservative Party in the summer of 1987. They were appalled by Prime Minister Mulroney’s unwillingness to tackle the deficit, and by what they saw as the federal government’s shameless pandering to ethnic nationalism in Quebec.

The last straw was Mulroney’s decision to award the maintenance contract for Canada’s fleet of 138 CF-18 fighter jets to Canadair in Montreal, even though Bristol Aerospace in Winnipeg had the superior bid. It was time to reclaim the conservative brand
that Mulroney had besmirched. They wanted to be there when the new party that proposed to do just that announced its name, defined a set of principles, and chose a leader. Harper had another reason to attend. He had met Preston Manning earlier that summer and the two men had hit it off. Manning had asked the bright young man to address the convention.

At lunch on Saturday, October 31, Harper and his friend sat at a table with David Somerville, president of the National Citizens Coalition (NCC) and former
Toronto Sun
reporter. Somerville polled the table and discovered that all eight people sitting there were members of the NCC. The right-wing advocacy group would be profoundly important throughout Harper’s political career. It gave him a place to work between elected offices, an opportunity to hone his political marketing skills, and a ready-made agenda. The NCC was anti–public health insurance, anti-union, anti–Wheat Board, and pro–corporate governance and control.
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The coalition’s favourite weapon was advertising, and its advertisement of choice, the attack ad. (Sooner than he could have known, Stephen Harper would be meeting the man who perfected the attack ad and helped send Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and both Bushes to the White House.)

Like the right-wing Fraser Institute, the NCC was founded in 1974, just after the October 1973 oil crisis. Oil rose from $3 to $12 per barrel overnight, doubling gasoline prices. Governments around the world made draconian adjustments to this unforeseen disaster. Downing Street asked Britons to heat only one room in their homes over the winter. The state of Oregon banned Christmas lights. Most shocking of all, the nation famous for seeing the “USA in their Chevrolets”
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drove into service stations that had run out gas. Financial markets were rattled by a series of recessions and high inflation. Within months of the oil price shock, the US government took action. On February 11, 1974, the then US
secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, unveiled Project Independence, a plan to make the US self-supporting in the energy sector. It was like divine intervention, conferring as it did a golden future on Alberta.

In 1974, seven of the top fifteen Fortune 500 companies were oil companies. Having experienced the deprivation of the Middle East’s vast supply of cheap, light sweet crude, the companies aggressively pursued new ways to develop oil that, although dirtier and more expensive, was closer to home. Blessed with the world’s third-largest reserves of alternative oil, Alberta was about to be transformed into the richest—and most aggrieved—province in Canada. The only thing heavier than the oil beneath Alberta’s prairie was the hand of Ottawa trying to control and capitalize on it. The creation of Petro-Canada and the National Energy Program infuriated the West.

Next to money, the mother’s milk of politics, anger is the most important resource of political parties, especially an opposition party, let alone a protest party like Reform. The West had always resented freight rates that were 20 percent higher for them than for eastern Canadians. Now, in a country where the provinces own natural resources under the constitution, oil-rich Alberta saw the federal government conniving ways to horn in on its staggering prosperity.

Although he was a transplanted Easterner, Harper quickly grafted Alberta’s sense of grievance to his own restless search for identity. After dropping out of the University of Toronto just two months into his studies, the young Harper headed west, taking a job at Imperial Oil. He liked the place and stayed. His father had worked for the firm as an accountant in Toronto, and in 1958 led the team that assembled one of the first commercial mainframes in North America. Later, while a student at the University of Calgary, Harper became a devotee of the “Calgary School” of
economics, which argued that Ottawa and Liberal elites had discriminated against Alberta.

At the founding convention of the Reform Party, Harper skilfully tapped into the sense of Western alienation that would quickly make the new party a serious force in Canadian politics. Titling his speech “Achieving Economic Justice in Confederation,” the expatriate Ontarian began with a quote from an unnamed “Western Canadian”: “I am not advocating separation, but if we were separate, I would not advocate joining.” It was red meat for lions, and Harper kept serving it up. “In fact, a lot of economic evidence, including the MacDonald Royal Commission, suggests that the West would be better off outside of Canada,” he said. It was a typical and telling analysis. For Harper, only one measure of being “better off ” mattered, and that was economic. To him, that meant corporate balance sheets and the GDP, not the day-to-day situation of average people. There was no concept of social security, no passion for equalization of the country’s unevenly divided treasure, and no doubt that anything governments could do, private enterprise could do better—including delivering health care. It was a philosophical tunnel vision Harper would never lose.

The study that he mentioned, ponderously christened the MacDonald Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada, had in fact recommended in 1985 that Canada take “a leap of faith” and enter a free trade agreement with the United States, a move that was certainly in the interests of the West. Harper’s speech was detailed, well-written, and consistently critical of what he called the “welfare state” that had sprung up in Canada run by powerful and distant federal bureaucrats. Funding for that welfare state, he claimed, had come from tax grabs, the windfall profits of Western resource industries, particularly oil. As for Atlantic Canada, Harper declared that it had been reduced to a state of permanent dependency by transfer
payments. It was grandiosity as only a young man can be grandiose. In one fell swoop, a man not yet thirty ascribed a loser mentality to an entire region of the country he knew little or nothing about, beyond what his father had told him. Harper’s father, Joseph, had grown up in New Brunswick and moved to Toronto in 1951 after qualifying as a chartered accountant.

After ridiculing Pierre Trudeau’s “Just Society,” Harper ended his speech with Reform’s vision for Canada: “What Canada really requires is the sweeping winds of change. For the vested interests of the National Policy, the Welfare State, and the Quebec question, this will be a challenge they will resist.” The country could “no longer be built on the economic exploitation and political disenfranchisement of Western Canada,” he declared. “In the meantime, we require a political party to put the pursuit of the West’s agenda at the top of its list.” It was the first open declaration of Harper’s long-term intentions: the reverse takeover of a country from the home base of a province that looked south for its prosperity and inspiration.

The speech also marked Harper’s first public success with exploiting a grievance for political gain. When he finished speaking, the audience gave the twenty-eight-year-old a standing ovation, the reward for both championing their cause and identifying the culprit who was keeping the West down: Central Canada and the Eastern Establishment. Although Preston Manning, the soft-spoken, professorial man who had studied physics in university, became the party’s first leader,
Alberta Report
called Harper’s speech the “highlight” of the Convention.