LAMENT FOR A POLITICAL OUTSIDER
Conservative leader is an outsider who rejected the country’s governing class
The story I like best in John Ibbitson’s great new book about Stephen Harper — though it’s both awful and sad — dates to shortly after the 2006 election, before he was sworn in as prime minister.
I like it because it’s so revealing — not about Harper, but rather about the world in which we live.
Harper was walking his kids, Ben and Rachel, to school, which he did as leader of the opposition and wanted to do as often as he could as prime minister. The media had been invited to watch the PM- to- be being a normal dad.
“Though Harper knew the press would be there,” Ibbitson writes, “the situation threw him. Impulsively, he reached out to Ben and shook his hand, something he would never have done otherwise.
“That was enough for bloggers and commentators to conclude that Stephen Harper was an emotionally sterile father ( and human being) who couldn’t even muster sufficient intimacy to hug his son.”
I remember the moment vividly, and the absolutely savage beating Harper took for it. I even presumed to identify with him because I recognized something of myself in how he acted.
Unlike the more modern mortal, who can take selfies of herself with fish lips without a trace of self- consciousness, I also tend to act unnaturally, to freeze up and get all weird, before a camera or a certain kind of crowd. I know a fellow traveller when I see one, and in that awkward man and that awkward handshake, I saw one.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say Harper was misunderstood, nor do I think Ibbitson says that in the book.
But those who claimed to get a read on the former PM from that incident, and a bunch of other incidents that followed, did not; they just thought they did.
And if that supposed knowingness didn’t set the tone of the relationship between Harper and the press, it helped cement it, and meant that where any genuine Conservative would have had a tough time getting their message past the filters — Conservatives really are the un- natural governing party in this country and many of the people in my business really are small- L liberals who speak with the uni- voice of conventional Canada — Harper had a particularly rough road.
It was never a plot or a conspiracy against Harper or the Conservatives. It never needed to be that.
The fact is, Harper is an outsider who rejected what Ibbitson calls the Laurentian elites, that small permanent governing class made up of professional politicians, bureaucrats, academics and journalists from the same central Canadian cities near or by the St. Lawrence River, who share the same values, and, worse in my view, the sure conviction that they’re the only values worth holding.
( As Ibbitson wrote in another section of the book, "truth be told, the Toronto Star does detest this government stem to stern, and the CBC’s Laurentian world view is so deeply entrenched that those who work there don’t even know it exists.”)
Harper probably could have belonged to the club, but from the moment he walked away from Trinity College at the University of Toronto, he rejected those people, and they rejected him right back.
The good news about this election is that more people seemed genuinely engaged in it.
In the week leading up to Oct. 19, you couldn’t go anywhere, at least in downtown Toronto, without being actively hectored to vote by baristas, store clerks, passersby and posters, and usually by someone also actively telling you how to vote — anybody but the Conservatives, as former Newfoundland premier Danny Williams famously said.
The ugly aspect of it was the visceral loathing for Harper.
In my life, the only time I remember anything close to it was the anti- Mike Harris feeling that still pervades much of the city more than a decade after the former Ontario premier left power. The woman in the liquor store Monday who, when asked by the clerk if she’d voted yet, said she was on her way to do so and added, unbidden, “Harper has to go; fascist.”
He was nothing of the sort. Ibbitson carves a new one for pretentious gits like John Ralston Saul, the intellectual and spouse of former governor general Adrienne Clarkson, who once wrote that “Napoleon would have approved” of Harper’s omnibus bills and that “Mussolini would have been jealous.”
Harper was far from perfect, and lest I give the impression that Ibbitson gives him a sycophantic ride, he does not, but he is fair and mature. In my particular sphere of law and order, I thought Harper’s specific policies were sometimes boneheaded and facile. He often seemed petty. He was a control freak. He couldn’t pick a decent Conservative senator or judge to save his life; he had trouble even recognizing who actually was a Conservative.
But really, his chief sin was that he didn’t believe in all those things that make so many Canadian hearts beat faster — bigger and more intrusive government, obeisance to the bureaucracy, peacekeeping over soldiering, moral equivalence in foreign policy.
As Ibbitson concludes, “He made the government mean less in your life. That’s all he really wanted to do.”
That is not an ignoble goal, and it was enough for me.
He made the government mean less in your life. That’s all he really wanted to do.