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Too much anger to succeed
After 23 years in politics, Stephen Harper still has a penchant for marginalizing moderates within his Conservative caucus, ridiculing the patriotism of Liberal voters and working out his anger issues in public
DAVID OLIVE
Look at that face, that hateful face.
-Sam Rayburn, Democratic speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, watching a televised address by Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon somehow made it to the top of the greasy pole. It's helpful to take that view of history in trying to imagine Stephen Harper as the man who can lead a united right to the New Jerusalem.
As dysfunctional in his own way as the dethroned Stockwell Day, Harper has twice squandered the chance effortlessly gained by the sponsorship scandal to form a government. He is, Tory insiders began saying last week, girding for a third try this fall, hoping the potency of the Grewal tapes matches that of the Gomery revelations.
It, too, will likely fail.
In a nation that favours public figures who project a sunny optimism, Harper traffics more heavily in bile than any major political party leader since John Diefenbaker.
Harper regards Liberals of every description as "corrupt," and their precarious government, in all its grand and sundry aspects, "morally reprehensible." Those who fail to align with Harper's worldview he labels monsters, harlots and underworld figures.
Danny Williams, premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, learned his hard lesson last month. Williams might have anticipated a little gratitude for joining with his fellow (Tory) Atlantic Canada premiers in taking the risky step of endorsing the Harper Tories on the eve of the last election. Instead, Williams was treated to a sputum eruption.
Harper was outraged last month that Williams was pressuring Tory MPs on the Rock not to defeat the Martin government, in order to preserve the recent hard-won pact between St. John's and Ottawa on resource-revenue sharing.
"What's the next thing?" Harper exploded. "We're going to have a bunch of Mafia people working for the government because it might give Danny Williams money a week earlier?"
Who are these organized crime figures on the public payroll? Carolyn Bennett? Ken Dryden? Right-to-lifer Roger Gallaway?
A few weeks back, Harper had a message for the five million Canadians who voted Liberal last June. Their patriotism is suspect. Anyone casting a ballot for the Liberals, the Tory leader said in his Calgary redoubt, is "quite frankly imperilling the future of the country."
It's a rule in politics that few voters take kindly to being told they were duped. Some can't quite accept that the country, typically among the U.N.'s top five best places in which to live, has been governed these past dozen years entirely by refugees from the sewers.
Yet Harper presses on; he is smarter than the untutored masses. Polls be damned, he just knew this spring that Canadians were in immediate need of a second election in less than a year.
Harper also knows better than his own caucus, which last Wednesday heaped scorn on Gurmant Grewal, surreptitious recorder of conversations with high-level Grits, who has been excoriated by caucus colleagues — according to Canadian Press reports — for conducting himself dishonestly and robbing his party of the ethical high ground.
Oblivious to the mood in the room, Harper emerged from that session to defend Grewal's behaviour as his "legal right" — rather missing the point, as sometime Tory sympathizer John Ibbitson noted in The Globe and Mail, that the Grewal tapes "make the Tories look every bit as sleazy, dishonest, unethical, conniving, mendacious and just plain rotten as the Liberals."
But Harper, who appears at times to be channelling the New Testament, deals in absolutes.
Harper is no less certain of Grewal's good faith, in advance of probes into his conduct by the RCMP and Parliament's ethics commissioner, than he is of Grit perfidy despite the incomplete status of Justice Gomery's work.
"Gurmant had no intention of being bought," Harper declared last Wednesday — an assertion not supported by any portion of Grewal's tapes that that Tories have so far seen fit to release.
How much more dignified it would be for a leader of the Official Opposition to let lessers handle the scut work of character assassination — and there's no shortage of volunteers. Let Tory MP Jason Kenney accuse Martin of perjuring himself at the Gomery inquiry, for instance, and NDP backbencher Pat Martin describe the Liberals, in Commons debate last month, as "institutionally psychopathic."
But Harper insists on working out his anger issues in public, whether it's kicking chairs backstage at Tory events or shoving photographers out of camera range. Or labelling NDP Leader Jack Layton a slut for backing a slightly amended budget that increases spending by less than 1 per cent.
As they say, the fish rots from the head. Within a few days, John Reynolds, Tory campaign manager and prominent B.C. MP, was saying all Liberals "are whores. I don't like to call them that, because there are probably some whores who are nice people."
In the last election Harper let stand a Tory press release that called Paul Martin a supporter of child pornography.
No surprise, then, that Harper has not rebuked Saskatoon Tory MP Maurice Vellacott's description of turncoat Belinda Stronach. ("Some people prostitute themselves for different costs or different prices. She sold out for a cabinet position.")
`In a nation that favours public figures who project a sunny optimism, Harper traffics more heavily in bile than any major political party leader since John Diefenbaker.'
Harper is not in tune with his caucus, having marginalized moderates like Stronach and Peter MacKay, who went public with his own misgivings about an early election the same day, May 4, as his then-girlfriend did. Not one but three erstwhile contenders for the Alliance or Conservative leadership — Keith Martin, Scott Brison and Stronach — have been driven into the Grit fold.
"Join your own team, Stephen!" exhorts full-time Tory apologist Don Martin.
But after 23 years in politics, Harper is not a work in progress.
Harper still is in thrall to the armchair ideologues at the University of Calgary with whom he first fell in as a student there, a group currently headed by Tory chief strategist Tom Flanagan.
From the comfort of that ivory tower, history professor David Bercuson recently despaired of Central Canadian Tories who lacked the "blood lust" for an early election; while his colleague Barry Cooper dismissed Harper's supposed policy shift to the centre.
"I don't think he's changed his views," Cooper told Maclean's. "It's really a matter of packaging so you can be acceptable to people in Ontario who have a problem with Westerners."
Harper has flitted among five political parties (he was a Trudeau Liberal in his teens), and has flip-flopped on so many unpopular stands — from the Kyoto accord to the Iraq war — that the Grits and Tories are now scarcely distinguishable on policy. Harper is authentic, however, in his contempt for a centralized federalism that actually has worked pretty well for 138 years. After his electoral setback last summer, Harper wallowed in regional victimhood.
"The philosophy of the Liberal party is get the rest, screw the West," he complained last July.
"Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country," Harper wrote in December 2000. In a little-noticed addendum to his widely criticized 2002 observation that Atlantic Canada tolerates "a culture of defeat," Harper also observed that "in parts of the Prairies" there is evidence of "the kind of can't-do attitude (that) is a problem in this country."
Just three years after counselling Ralph Klein in 2001 to mount a staged withdrawal from Confederation, Harper was still so obsessed with loosening the ties that bind the nation that he mused that Canada might benefit from emulating the chronically disputatious factions of the Belgian federation and the strife-torn Basque and Catalan regions of Spain.
That Harper's more recent project to topple Martin allied him with a Commons rump that advocates an extreme form of regional autonomy is hardly out of character — either for Harper or the Tories, who with disastrous results cohabitated with Quebec nationalists in the 1980s.
Correspondent Clifford Krauss of The New York Times last month recorded the unwitting irony of Paul Martin's timing in celebrating the narrow survival of his government on May 19 with a renewed vow to "set the standard by which other nations judge themselves."
As it happens, though, only the Prime Minister was attempting that night to address both a scandal and other matters of import, in his speech about the Gomery inquiry and his plans for job creation, aboriginal justice and advances in child care, urban renewal and the environment, among other issues.
Harper spoke that night only of scandal, and of his impatience to inflict more wounds on the Grits.
Martin was speaking to the nation, Harper to his strategists.
Accordingly, the latest polls find Tory support at 27 per cent nationally, below the party's 29.6 per cent showing in the last election — itself the Tories' worst performance since R.B. Bennett's drubbing in the Depression year of 1935.
Alarmed by the positive poll readings Martin garnered recently from his encounters with pre-voting-age Canadians who appear to enjoy the Prime Minister's company, Harper's handlers arranged a photo-op of their own at a Wallaceburg, Ont., rehab centre for children.
But the Tory leader was miscast for the assignment. He watched silently, not knowing what to say to these kids. Until, that is, one of the finger-painting toddlers leaned toward his tailored suit.
"Don't touch me," Harper said.
Okay. So what are you doing here?