What does Harper think of Trudeau’s work?
How hard must it be for Stephen Harper to watch Justin Trudeau drive Canada back into the deficit ditch?
The question popped into my mind last week while watching the current prime minister talk up his economic plan to John Micklethwait, the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg, during an interview in Toronto.
It was the kind of event Harper loved. A serious crowd, a serious interviewer, on serious topics: the global flows of people and money. With Trudeau, however, it felt like I was watching the understudy perform the lead role.
There was a bit of talk about Trudeau’s plan to help Canada’s “middle-class” (hello, deficits!), but most of the talk centered, understandably, on the broader political forces buffeting western societies, namely angry surges of populism.
“I think Canadians have,” Trudeau at one point told Micklethwait, “understood that openness to the world, drawing in diversity, respecting each other’s rights, looking for ways to work together rather than to antagonize each other is what has made us successful and what has given us an incredibly stable society, stable economy, stable political situation.”
Message delivered. Boxes ticked. It’s not that Trudeau said anything demonstrably wrong in his answer, it just felt slogan-y and unserious, like Miss Universe preaching to a complicated world.
Would the prime minister be able to say the same thing with Germany’s borders and contiguity to Syria? We’d be having a very different conversation if hundreds of thousands of Syrians, Iraqis, Eritreans, Afghans and others showed up virtually overnight. And that wouldn’t be a slur on the people of Canada, only an acknowledgement of reality.
Let’s recall that Britons sloughed off Enoch Powell’s warnings of an immigrant surge in the 1960s (articulated in his famed “rivers of blood” speech), only to later succumb to it (hello, Brexit!) when a million Eastern Europeans showed up in short order after the ascension of former East Bloc countries into the European Union.
Many more showed up after the implosion of the Greek, Italian and Spanish economies.
It’s only now, with the election of Donald Trump, that Canada has, for perhaps the first time since the Cold War, had to consider the question of its geography and its potentially deleterious effects on our national well-being.
An understanding holds until it doesn’t; it’s not a given, or a stitch of a national fabric that couldn’t be unwound given different circumstances. Good fortune doesn’t necessarily imply good character.
I can only guess that Harper would disagree with Trudeau on this and many other questions. But the really wonderful thing is that I don’t know, because he hasn’t said. And that’s worth celebrating.
Harper’s silence is proof of two things: ease with his government’s record of accomplishment, and his acceptance that it’s now someone else’s turn, and that the dignity of the office is best preserved when its former occupants don’t Monday morning quarterback the current one.
This kind of discipline over legacy (and its destruction by the next lawfully elected government) isn’t a given; think of Paul Martin watching Stephen Harper rip up the Kelowna Accord. Think, for that matter, of Jean Chretien watching Paul Martin call Justice Gomery in over the sponsorship scandal.
Nor did Harper squawk when passed over for the recent 100th commemoration of Vimy Ridge, nor when given a late invitation to the speech of Malala Yousafzai to Parliament, courtesies that, had he failed to extend as prime minister would have been bigger news.
Harper’s silence is also golden when it comes to the ongoing Conservative leadership. Imagine the temptation to place his (still-considerable) thumb on the scales of that race? What, I wonder, does he make of Kevin O’Leary? Or Kellie Leitch’s “values” campaign?
Thankfully, we don’t know. Nor will we, as the last thing Harper will want to do to the party he built from scratch is taint the selection of his successor by playing a favourite.
Indeed, the only intervention I can find of Harper’s on the leadership is a solitary tweet indicating that a column by the Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson speculating on who Harper might prefer for leader was an “interesting analysis” that “in no way” reflected his views.
What have we seen or heard from Harper? In keeping with his governing form, very little. There have been no interviews, no attempts to frame his legacy.
There is the odd tweet here and there, including a recent announcement of a partnership with a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley to explore the application of technology to social problems. This follows last year’s establishment of his consulting firm, Harper & Associates, and its partnerships with Dentons and Colliers.
The surest sign that Harper is comfortable with this new life? The fact that he has so little to say about his old one. Andrew MacDougall is a Londonbased communications consultant and ex-director of communications to former prime minister Stephen Harper.