Party of One (5 page)

He then gave a shorthand civics lesson about governance in Canada, in which his disdain for parliamentary institutions was stunning: “Our executive is the Queen, who doesn’t live here. Her representative is the Governor-General, who is an appointed buddy of the Prime Minister. Of our two legislative houses, the
Senate, our upper House, is also appointed, also by the Prime Minister, where he puts his buddies, fundraisers and the like. So the Senate is not very important in our political system. And we have a Supreme Court, like yours, which, since we put a Charter of Rights in our Constitution in 1982, is becoming increasingly arbitrary and important. It is also appointed by the Prime Minister. Unlike your Supreme Court, we have no ratification process.” Stephen Harper was essentially describing the Canadian system of government as a dictatorship run by the Prime Minister of Canada: “So if you sort of remove three of the four elements, what you see is a system that’s described as unpaid checks and political imbalances. The House of Commons, the bastion of the Prime Minister’s power, the body that selects the prime minister, is an elected body.”

But Harper warned his audience not to be fooled. Even though voters selected the members of the House of Commons, it was not like the US House of Representatives. What was it like, then? Harper asked his audience to think of the Commons in terms of the US Electoral College. In the United States, the Electoral College chooses the president and then disappears. But the Commons continues sitting for the next four years, having the power to vote on every issue. To Stephen Harper, Canadian parliamentary democracy was the political version of the movie
Groundhog Day
. It was an extraordinary description. Harper reduced the work of Parliament to being simply a rubber stamp of the prime minister’s legislative agenda: “The important thing to know is that this is how it will be until the Prime Minister calls the next election. The same majority vote on every issue. So if you ask me ‘What’s the vote going to be on gun control?’ or on the budget, we know that already.”

In strikingly simple words, Stephen Harper again declared to his American audience his personal view of Canadian governance.
Between elections, the House of Commons was the property of the prime minister. If you were a member of the opposition, your business was restricted to going through a token exercise of voting on outcomes that were inevitable—the government always winning, the opposition always losing. Missing from his analysis was the opposition’s role in bringing out public information in Question Period, and the work of all-party committees in amending legislation and holding the government to account when it breaks its promises or misleads the people.

If Harper’s view of how Canada’s parliamentary system works was inept, his view of the country’s other political parties was grossly dismissive. He described the NDP as a socialist party, “proof that the Devil lives and interferes in the affairs of men.” It was only partly an attempt at humour. He was hitting the perfect tone with his audience, just as he had done ten years earlier at the Reform Party’s founding convention. He articulated what they despised. The NDP, in effect, represented the opposite of what everyone in the room believed with regard to social value issues. Having dismissed the NDP with the perfect Finkelstein word “socialist,” Harper added the other hot-button epithet of abuse—“radical.” The NDP was a branch of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), which was “explicitly radical.”

His description of the Liberal Party was carefully designed to stir just as much revulsion in his audience but in a different way. To Christian-right American conservatives, Bill Clinton, the sexual libertine and great deceiver, was the devil incarnate. So when Harper described Canadian Liberals as a type of “Clinton pragmatic Democrat,” it was the end of the conversation: the Liberals were a degenerate political party, full stop.

That left just two other parties to describe. Harper damned the Progressive Conservatives by calling them “liberal” Republicans, which meant to this audience that they weren’t Republican at all.
Only the Reformers qualified as conservative Republicans. Preston Manning was populist in the same, leader-driven way that Ross Perot had been. And then Harper’s final sales pitch on behalf of Reform: “It’s the closest thing we have to a neo-conservative party.”

Harper could not finish his Montreal speech without offering his audience a précis of the Quebec separatist movement, and what he called “the appeasement of ethnic nationalism.” For a moment, he was back in that Volkswagen ten years earlier heading for Winnipeg, full of anger at Brian Mulroney’s catering to Quebec. In making a passing reference to the referendum that included distinct society status for Quebec, he frightened his audience by talking about other changes on the table that “would just horrify you,” such as “putting universal Medicare in our Constitution, and feminist rights and a whole bunch of other things.” Harper ended by telling his American audience that the trouble with Canada was political, not social. Arthur Finkelstein had taught the NCC the value of humour in spreading one’s message, and Harper ended with a very clever line, especially given that the audience was the inner sanctum of the Christian right: “As long as there are exams, there will always be prayer in schools.”

Though Harper had protested that he was happy to be free of the constraints of party politics, another possibility was more plausible. He simply wanted to be party leader—partly because he didn’t like having to live with other people’s compromises, as his former boss Jim Hawkes had noted. So when Jean Charest resigned the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party in the spring of 1998, Harper listened when he was approached by party members to run for the top job. He was young and spoke French, and since he had once been a member of the Progressive Conservatives, his bid could be presented as a homecoming of sorts.

Harper mentor Tom Flanagan told
The Globe and Mail
what he thought it would take to get the lapsed Reformer to run: “Harper
could be persuaded to run on a platform of bringing together under one umbrella, the two right-of-centre parties.” Interestingly, when that idea was floated at the Winds of Change conference in 1996, Harper himself thought it would never happen because of deepseated differences between Canada’s main strains of conservatism.

On April 7, 1998, Harper called Gerry Nicholls, a senior staffer at the NCC, to say he would be giving an important speech in Calgary to the Home and Mortgage Loan Association. Although he wanted a media advisory flagging the event, no interviews would be given until the speech was delivered. Senior CBC journalists including Don Newman, Jason Moscovitz, and Julie Van Dusen bombarded the NCC with calls, suspecting that Harper intended to use his Calgary speech to announce that he was running for the Tory leadership.

The day after the speech, Harper was featured in a front-page story in the
Globe
, in which he said that he would not be a candidate for the leadership because his candidacy “would burn bridges to those Reformers with whom I have worked for many years.” But just ten days later, Harper was back in Toronto planning to attend a very important meeting. A group of PC party activists was looking to Harper to become the Blue Tory candidate they wanted to run for the leadership against Red Tory Hugh Segal.

For a man who supposedly wanted to spend more time with his family and enjoyed the freedom of being a lobbyist for right-wing causes, Harper spent a lot of time politicking behind the scenes. He asked American pollster and political consultant John McLaughlin to attend the meeting with him. McLaughlin, who worked at the NCC, was one of Finkelstein’s “boys.” His clients included Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger; Iain Duncan Smith, the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK; multiple incumbent US senators and members of Congress; governors and mayors; and the Republican National Committee itself. Despite Harper’s
coy public denials, McLaughlin knew from previous conversations that Harper wanted to be prime minister.

The meeting took place on April 21, 1998, at the Toronto law office of Bob Dechert, who headed up the so-called “Blue Committee,” composed of Ontario backroom boys looking to make peace between Reform and the Progressive Conservatives so that the Liberals would not be in power forever. Conservative MP Jim Jones also attended. The committee laboured to convince Harper to enter the leadership race, impressed with his demeanour and his ability to speak French. McLaughlin was enthusiastic about the prospects of a Harper candidacy—Harper, less so. During the three-hour meeting, no one had asked him any questions about policy.

The team around Ontario premier Mike Harris was also talking to Harper, promising that the Harris machine would be there to help his campaign if he decided to run. But Harper knew that he couldn’t pull off the kind of victory he needed without the help of Reformers, who were now the Official Opposition nationally. Harper began to make discreet calls to members of Manning’s caucus, mindful of the fact that a lot of the financial support for the NCC came from Reformers. If Harper upset Manning any more than he already had by abandoning the party before the 1997 federal election, the NCC’s finances could take a hit. Manning might even undermine Harper with the NCC board.

One of the more startling revelations made by Gerry Nicholls about his NCC years with Harper was the way Stephen Harper’s political mind worked. Fearing that Manning might work against him, Harper decided to make a proactive strike. Nicholls was asked to write a memo to his boss, Harper, which would then be leaked, claiming that Manning was undermining Harper. Nicholls refused to take part in the subterfuge and came to the conclusion that the enmity Harper bore Manning was not just based on disagreement
over conservative principles. It was personal, as he recorded in his diary: “Captain Ahab hunting the white whale.”

The seduction song to lure Stephen Harper back to the Progressive Conservative Party came to an end in Toronto on June 16, 1998. The formidable Arthur Finkelstein himself had been asked to conduct a special poll to assess Harper’s chances in such a race, and on that day he came to Toronto to deliver the results in person, as he almost always did. The ambitious politician must have been crestfallen. Finkelstein found that although Harper was a star in media and political circles, he had no name recognition with the vast majority of voters. Name recognition was critical to winning. The disappointing poll, combined with the lack of hoped-for support from Reform members, convinced Stephen Harper that this was not the time to run.

Instead, he took the NCC into his hands like a lump of clay and made a statue of himself. He
was
the NCC. From now on, there would be more policy delineation and more court battles, like the one to have spending limits for third parties during an election declared unconstitutional. He began criticizing the Canadian Wheat Board with even greater fervour than the NCC had shown before. As for Elections Canada, those “jackasses” were “out of control,” as Harper put it in an NCC fundraising letter. He continued to war with the media, particularly the CBC. NCC news releases were sent to select journalists only, and a trusted few would be contacted directly by Harper himself if he wanted to get a particular story out. As for the NCC itself, he wanted it leaner and meaner, even cancelling the Christmas bonus to set an example of frugality.

F
ROM
HIS
PERCH
at the NCC, Harper kept a watchful eye on the national conservative scene over the next two years. In July 2000, Stockwell Day bested Preston Manning as leader of the Canadian
Alliance, a new party made up of the old Reform Party and a few provincial PC organizations. By April 2001, Harper could see that Day was in trouble. Despite bursting onto the national scene in a wetsuit aboard a Sea-Doo, Day never did get his bat going in what Mike Duffy liked to call “the big leagues.” Day’s Christian fundamentalism was a problem, as was his awkward relationship with the media. Ottawa was foreign territory: the man who was a star as Alberta’s treasurer just wasn’t a movable feast.

Harper was furious when he learned that pollster and strategist Arthur Finkelstein was talking to Day about helping him, a move that Harper viewed as a betrayal. Finkelstein called his trusted acolyte at the NCC, Gerry Nicholls, and asked if he should go to work for Day. Nicholls responded that if the American became involved in the race, the Harper team would be overwhelmed. Finkelstein eventually declined Day’s offer, and Stephen Harper and his team, with the help of the NCC, went to war against Day.

In March 2002, Stephen Harper deposed Day and found himself astride a political party of his own at last. With a hostile Joe Clark still at the helm of the Progressive Conservative Party, it was not the united right that Harper had once held out for when the PCs came calling. But even if the Canadian Alliance was what Brian Mulroney said it was—“Reform in pantyhose,” it was bigger than Preston Manning’s old party. Better still, there was now just one obstacle to full unification: the party of John A. Macdonald. The consummate political tactician was a dangerous commodity once he had a clear target in his sights. As one-time mentor Tom Flanagan put it, Stephen Harper was a “predator.”

Canadian politics on the right was about to go through volcanic changes. As long as Joe Clark was in charge, his PCs would never join forces with the Canadian Alliance because the former prime minister thought it would pull his party too far to the right. But five months after Harper captured the Alliance leadership, opportunity
knocked. Joe Clark resigned. Tories chose popular Nova Scotia MP Peter MacKay to replace Clark on May 31, 2003. Alberta MP Jim Prentice finished second to MacKay on the last ballot, largely because of a backroom deal between MacKay and fellow leadership candidate David Orchard. In exchange for MacKay’s promise to review the North American Free Trade Agreement and not to merge the PCs with the Canadian Alliance, Orchard played the kingmaker and delivered his support to MacKay. Five months later, MacKay reneged on the deal. By the end of 2003, the merger with the Canadian Alliance was approved by Progressive Conservative Party members. A few months later, Stephen Harper easily dispatched Belinda Stronach and Tony Clement at the Conservative Party of Canada’s first leadership convention. MacKay got to date Stronach, but Stephen Harper got the party.