He Who Pays the Harper Picks the Tune

Stephen Harper has resigned from his Conservative Party post in order to fight against Jean Charest getting the Conservative leadership.

And if Harper does not like Charest, it seems unlikely that MacKay would be his choice either. Both are “Red Tories.”

Tom Mulcair brings up another rap against MacKay. Rona Ambrose is sitting out it seems in part because her French is weak. She caught flak for that during her interim leadership. But MacKay’s French is weaker still.

Which, Tom Mulcair points out, raises an interesting possibility. What happens if no one else looks like they can beat Charest? Might Harper himself run?

In a Black Mood

Baron Black of Crossharbour's mug shot.

In his latest piece, Conrad Black is shockingly severe on Stephen Harper, calling him a “sociopath” and a “sadist.” Lord Black calls for the election of Trudeau.

Where is this coming from? Black is ideologically on the right; he was the founder of the National Post, and he founded it to be Canada’s conservative voice.

It sounds like a personal animus against Harper.

I’m guessing that’s what it is. It was under Stephen Harper’s authority that Black was thrown off the Privy Council. His Order of Canada was revoked on the same day. In 2012, Black told Peter Mansbridge that he intended to reapply for his Canadian citizenship “in a year or two.” This has not happened. Black, as a convicted felon, would have needed his application to be approved by the federal cabinet. Presumably he expected this to happen, and was turned down. By Harper.

One can understand, then, why Black would feel personally ill-treated. He, after all, had a lot to do, as he points out in the present column, with the resurrection and reunification of the Conservative Party of Canada, and with creating the media climate for its success.

Black might also be looking wistfully at Donald Trump’s signal success in the US Republican stakes right now. If there were a Canadian figure who could pull the same trick north of 49, Black is the name that naturally comes up. And it is just the sort of thing he might be interested in. He is a political animal. He has already made his mark in finance, in journalism, and in scholarship. Isn’t this the very new world to conquer? Win or lose—most likely lose, according to the last polls—Harper is likely to step down soon. It could have been Black’s moment.

Except that, as a non-citizen, he is a non-starter.

The frustration must be immense.

But here’s a thought: run Barbara Amiel. Think Carly Fiorina.

Stephen Harper Meets Pope Francis

This is the official picture everyone is featuring. It will not be suitable, I expect, for CPC campaign materials.

It seems obvious to me that Stephen Harper received the diplomatic cold shoulder in his recent visit to the Vatican.

When it comes to diplomacy, little things mean a lot. Harper got only ten minutes with the pope: “unusually brief.” Given the time taken for photo op, and the issue of translation, they must have barely had time to speak. Harper was hustled in and hustled out, the minimum that could be done short of the diplomatic scandal of standing him up.

And that photo op? It shows this perennially smiling pope scowling; while Harper's smile looks plastered on. If the pope's scowl were inadvertent, a momentary thing, there would presumably have been a second shot taken without it, and that would be the picture distributed. It seems that the pope's scowl was a consistent feature of the meeting, and reflects its tone.

This was no doubt because Harper was expected to be delivering the demand from the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission that the pope apologize for the Church's supposed mistreatment of Canadian native people, do it within one year, and do it on Canadian soil. Harper was in an awkward situation: if he did not do this, the opposition parties back home would make hay with the claim that he cared nothing for native people.

But, for the sake of Canadian domestic politics, it put the Vatican in a yet more awkward position. To say yes was unthinkable; to say no suggested a breach with Canada.

Prediction: Harper Stays

The press continues to speculate that Stephen Harper will step down as Conservative leader.

I feel confident in predicting this is not going to happen. As I wrote before, Hillary Clinton will not be the Democratic nominee in 2016; Chris Christie will not be the Republican nominee; the Republicans will win the midterms this year; and Stephen Harper will fight another election.

First, Harper has earned the right to stay Conservative leader if he wants, by his record of success so far. The Conservatives have an unhappy history of turning on their leader, but I think they have learned this does not pay. I think Justin Trudeau's current support will fade soon. I think the Senate scandal is inherently small and tangential to the Prime Minister. That mud won't stick for long.

I think Harper's bland persona is a recipe for longevity in Canadian politics. Canadians are a low-key, taking care of business people, and they feel comfortable with low-key leaders: Mackenzie King, Louis St. Laurent, Bill Davis.

And I think Harper wants it. I think he is a political animal.

Anyway, I don't think Rob Ford is quite ready yet to take over the reins.

The Case for Canadian Conservatism

The turnout in the last Canadian election was the lowest ever, under 60%.

I did not bother to vote myself—although I could have, by absentee ballot. Who cares? It seems to matter so little who wins, in Canada—the policies are the same regardless.

This suggests that Stephen Harper's main strategy, as leader of the Conservatives, is wrong.

Harper, following conventional Canadian wisdom, has been tacking to the centre, serene in the knowledge that there is nobody to his right to split the small-c conservative vote.

Mistake. As Karl Rove showed in George Bush's two election victories, and John McCain demonstrated by losing this year, when turnout is a major factor, covering the centre ground is not the best strategy. Often, the better idea is to fire up your own base. If you can get your supporters more motivated to come to the polls that the other side, you win.

This, surely, would have been the case this election year. With such low turnout, and Stephane Dion failing to light fires among his Liberal colleagues, had Harper been significantly better at inspiring small-c conservatives, he probably could have snagged his majority.

It is conventional wisdom that Canada is not a conservative country, that it is instinctively centre-left. If so, by being clear and conservative, Harper might have inspired two liberal voters to come out and vote against him for every one conservative he drew to the polls. But is that really true?

The West, we know, is perfectly amenable to “conservative” doctrines; Reform showed that, even if Diefenbaker didn't. But Ontario, supposedly the Liberal heartland, can also respond to a clear, consistent conservative message. Mike Harris proved that. Ernie Eves and John Tory, trying triangulation instead, have in fact done less well. This is “Tory Blue” Ontario we're talking about: home of the thirty-year provincial Conservative hegemony, not so long ago.

The Maritimes may have become addicted to Liberal equalization payments; but they are at heart deeply socially conservative. They are Canada's “Bible belt.” They ought to be reliably conservative in just the same way as the US South. Like the Atlantic provinces, the South bought the dole for a while, under the New Deal. But they have grown out of it. So could Halifax and St. John's.

This leaves Quebec. In Quebec, in recent history, ideology simply has not mattered—it has been overshadowed by the question of sovereignty. But, once a tipping point is reached, the Conservatives can represent that option just as well as the Liberals. The relative success of the ADQ in the last provincial election suggests there is some real appetite for a straight conservative option. On a full-blooded conservative platform, ADQ took 31% of the vote. Last federal election, in Quebec, the CPC took 21.7%. They are running well behind the conservative ideology per se.

Who does that leave? Nunavut?

All that is required, I suspect, is a leader who is a leader: who does not follow the present opinion polls, but seeks to change them. That's what Margaret Thatcher did, in Britain, that's what Churchill did, and that's what Ronald Reagan did in the US. That's what Mike Harris and Ralph Klein did in Ontario and Alberta. A similar leader really could do the same in Canada as a whole.

The Canadian Leaders' Debate

Through the magic of the Internet, I have been able to view the English-language Canadian leaders' debate.

By conventional measures, Liz May won: she made her points most effectively. She's a good lawyer; the others are not lawyers by training.

This does not matter; she cannot win the election. May's strong showing, instead, should help Stephen Harper, by further splitting the left-wing vote. In electoral terms, it was Harper who won.

He was, to my ear, second only to May in selling his viewpoint. When he said, repeatedly, of the demands of others, “we'd like to, but we can't afford it,” that sounded very much like common sense. He seemed to be the only one truly aware that we are currently facing serious economic uncertainty. That alone should win him the election hands down. And his calm demeanor, I think, hit just the right note in such times: a steady voice implies a steady hand.

The debate also helped Harper in another way. Last post or so, I mentioned the value to American politicians of conforming to the American lietmotif of the frontier. It is similarly valuable, although less so, for Canadian politicians to embody the national myth of the survivor: an ordinary person meeting and overcoming adversity through calm, dogged determination. Showing him holding his cool while four others attacked him was a good way to cast Stephen Harper in that role in the public mind, just before an election.

A few notes on details: when Elizabeth May insisted, “families need jobs in the communities where they live,” my immediate response was, “like hell they do.”

Anyone who is not prepared to move for the sake of a job does not deserve to be a Canadian. We are a nation of immigrants. What would Canada be had our ancestors been so helpless and so unmotivated?

Similarly, Layton's concern about conditions on the reserves overlooked an obvious solution available to all native people: leave them.

Gilles Duceppe seemed to think he had a winning issue in demanding that Harper agree to a “reimbursable tax credit” for failing corporations, on the grounds that, if they were not making a profit, an ordinary tax credit was no use to them. But why, I wonder, is it a good thing to take money from ordinary taxpayers and give it to corporations in the first place? Surely only for the opportunity to create jobs, and more tax revenue in future. But this proposal would be a lousy way to do that. Failing businesses tend to be failing for a reason; a sudden government grant is not going to change the economic fundamentals. It is just a matter of throwing taxpayers' money away.

Harper did not say this; perhaps the idea plays well in Quebec.

Like Duceppe, Jack Layton showed that the NDP's instinct too is always to take from the poor and give to the rich. He wants to forgive the student loans of graduating MDs—a handout to anyone entering Canada's wealthiest profession. Liz May quickly agreed. She'd probably extend it to lawyers too.

Layton insists that wood should be used in Canadian manufacture rather than being shipped overseas, saying “they can't make anything with that wood in Asia that we can't make here.”

That's pure jingoism, and obviously untrue. The lefties love to play the nationalism card, to criticise anything foreign (and especially anything from the US). Are we, say, going to build Buddhist temples in Canada and then ship them overseas? How about printing Japanese daily papers in Canada? How's the distribution going to work on that?

In general, Layton strikes me as the least sincere of the leaders. Liz May has an excuse—she seems honourably deranged. Dion is sincere. Layton seems more calculating about his views. You see in his eyes he doesn't believe a word of it. He also kept interrupting Stephane Dion; which may have grated on others as much as it did on me. The same style hurt Al Gore in the US, and politeness is supposed to matter more to Canadians.

On the arts, Layton managed to accuse Stephen Harper of censorship for not funding dissenting voices with taxpayers' money. It is all very well to say that governments should fund the arts; but it is only too obvious that government funding in the past has hopelessly politicised the arts in Canada, so that now to be an artist—or more precisely, to succeed as an artist—requires a political view in conformity with the Liberal party or the NDP.

We are not funding many real artists; we are funding poseurs and party hacks, and calling them artists. And the bad is driving out the good. The arts matter far less to the average Canadian, I think, than they did fifty years ago.