Stephen Harper’s not-so-hidden agenda
For seven years, the prime minister’s critics have claimed he has a secret plan to reinvent Canada as a bastion of social conservatism. PETER LOEWEN is not convinced. He thinks Harper’s strategy is purely political: the permanent weakening of the Liberals, and the Tories’ entrenchment as Canada’s natural governing party.
By PETER LOEWEN, Ottawa Citizen
December 28, 2012
About 34 months, just under three years, remain in the current mandate of Stephen Harper’s majority government. A week may be long time in politics, but it is also true that years quickly pass for governments. The period before the next election affords time for just three budgets and perhaps one more Speech from the Throne.
What does this time hold for Stephen Harper?
There is a single, basic fact that should guide any speculation about the positions and priorities of the prime minister over the next three years: He should be regarded as a long-term politician, one who is interested in governing for an extended period and who is willing to stay with incremental change and managed political risk and avoid grand bargains and game-changing policy.
Critics often mistake his short-term moves and occasional missteps as the totality of his strategy, as if his only goal is short-term political advantage and another majority.
Of course, Harper wants to keep his majority in the next election. But the odds of that happening are already reasonably high. The House of Commons will have an additional 30 seats in the next Parliament, all but three of which will be in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta. Simple math suggests the Conservatives will win far more than half of these and Harper will keep his hold on the House.
But his goals are much grander than just another majority. First, he wants to bring about the permanent weakening — though perhaps not the complete collapse — of the Liberal party. Second, he wishes to establish the Conservatives as “the natural governing party,” for much of the 20th century the descriptive given to the Liberals.
Odds are longer that he will achieve both. But the odds are not small.
Harper’s hope to permanently weaken the Liberals is helped in large part by the Liberals’ own myths and misconceptions about the reasons for their success. Principal among these is the party’s mistaken beliefs that it is a party of the centre and that this is an electoral virtue.
On the first score, the Liberals have only been a party of the centre by a mistake of aggregation. Inside Quebec, the federal version of the party has typically stood on one side of the federalist-sovereigntist dimension, with the other parties crowding each other on the other side. Outside Quebec, the party has stood more strongly for the accommodation of ethnic and linguistic minorities than either of the other two major federal parties.
But neither inside nor outside Quebec were the Liberals the party of the centre. In each case, the Liberals benefitted from a crowding of the other two parties.
The strategy space has now changed. The principal dimension of Canadian political competition is now economic, as it is in nearly every other long-standing democracy. As a result, the Liberals’ position between the Conservatives and the New Democrats has become a liability rather than an advantage, in no small part because Harper and NDP leader Thomas Mulcair share the goal of a weakened Liberal party.
The logic of this is easily demonstrated by the debate over the Keystone XL Pipeline. The economic benefits of the pipeline are clear, being as it is a near perfect example of comparative advantage. On the political side, the issue works directly to the prime minister’s advantage, and to a lesser extent to the advantage of the NDP.
Opposing the pipeline is an easy decision for Thomas Mulcair. There is little potential upside for his party in Alberta. To the extent that he can link it to the Northern Gateway pipeline project in British Columbia, he gains traction in that province. And it allows him to continue to portray Harper as a leader captured by the oilsands, a man obsessed with Western development at expense of the manufacturing sectors of Ontario and some who is careless with the environment.
Mulcair need not convince everyone of the merit of these arguments. The prime minister will have his own retorts. The catch is that these arguments will be bundled together in a way that will make it very difficult to take a middle position. Harper is willing to gamble that he is on the correct side of the majority on this issue. Mulcair is willing to take the same gamble.
Who loses? The Liberals, as they will be forced to take a position on one side or the other. Taking a middle position is not an advantage in this case.
(It is worth noting as well that the likely approval and eventual construction of the Keystone pipeline will give Harper licence to cancel Northern Gateway if the temperature gets too hot on that project.)
The Liberal party’s mistaken apparent centrism was an advantage when the country’s main dimension of competition was social. It is no more.
Two other factors contributed to the Liberals’ long-term success, and both are now exhausted.
The first was the near-constant division and infighting of the Conservatives. This was just as often a fact of its uneasy coalition of westerners and Quebec nationalists as it was some deep, underlying psychosis manifested in its leaders.
Either way, the “Tory Syndrome” is unlikely to return. On the one hand, the party’s coalition no longer comprises Quebec and the West with an undergirding of support from Ontario. Instead, Ontario has replaced Quebec in the making of Harper’s majority. The regional interests of Ontario and the West are occasionally in conflict, but not so much as to be irresolvable — and not least because it is a conflict of economic rather than social issues. Money can be transferred, while disagreements over the nature of the country are harder to resolve. In sum, Harper commands a coalition more stable than that of his Conservative predecessors.
The final factor of success for the Liberals was a belief among a wide swath of voters that they had no choice but to support the party. Their hearts might have rested with the New Democrats, but their heads directed them toward the Liberals.
This worked as long as the NDP was not a contender. That changed in the last election, essentially overnight. Appealing for the grudging support of people of the left used to work for the Liberals, but it will work no longer. Any leftward lurch for support will leave voters on their right flank for the Conservatives.
So, the fundamentals are not on the side of the Liberals, and Harper will use every opportunity to accelerate their demise. In doing so, he will continue his quest to establish the Conservatives as Canada’s natural governing party.
The great irony in all of this, of course, is that Harper will borrow the tactics of the very same Liberal party he wishes to supplant.
The strategy is threefold. First, Harper will continue the appropriation of national symbols. Second, he will further establish his base of support among Canada’s immigrant communities. Third, he will remain focused on delivering a managerially competent, slow moving federal government.
On the first score, one needs to look no further than the government’s continued efforts to bolster Canada’s military in both its current and past engagements. There is little need for a strong connection between the actual facts of military endeavours and their glorification. If there were, our national image of an actively engaged peacekeeping force would have ceased by the 1980s.
The government’s celebration of the British triumph in the War of 1812 and its slow and dignified drawdown of troops in Afghanistan are both part and parcel of a re-establishment of military endeavour as central to Canadian identity. What is the response of the Liberal and New Democratic parties to this? Not much, except objections over the cost of fighter jets.
On the second score, the strategy to win the support of immigrants, the government has both demographics and electoral savvy on its side. The composition of Canada’s immigrant communities, their average levels of wealth, their mean social values, all of these tip them toward the Conservatives. This combines neatly with the entrance of more than two million immigrants into Canada since the Conservatives took power in 2006. Add in the Tories’ regular courting of these communities and you have a recipe for continued and growing success among a group composing an ever-larger portion of the population.
Finally, Harper will likely eschew grand bargains in exchange for managerial, deliberate government. There is no apparent need for a deal to reconcile Quebec to the constitution, in large measure because of the low odds of a referendum ever being held again.
There is also no need to fundamentally change the constitutionally mandated fiscal structure of the country. Harper can merely back farther away from meddling in provincial jurisdictions. He has something of partner in this in Mulcair, as it happens. And he can likely dispense of what seem like major problems — the aforementioned procurement of fighter jets and the ongoing investigation over electoral manipulation — through changes in personnel. It is not apparent that other scandals abound.
None of this is to suggest that Harper agenda is either good or bad. That’s a question best left to voters. It is to say, however, that understanding his moves today cannot be done with an eye only to the next few months, or even the next election.
The prime minster has been playing a long game since his return to politics in 2002. He has no intention of stopping.
Peter Loewen is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. His specialties are Canadian politics and political behaviour.
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