Have we had enough?
PM must decide whether to stay for 2015 election
Stephen Harper’s uncertain future will dominate all political calculations this year
OTTAWA— One question will dominate the Canadian political scene this year: Will he stay or will he go? Stephen Harper’s future will be analyzed, all actions and pronouncements mined for signals, every move by anyone who may one day succeed him will take on oversized importance.
And there won’t be a thing Harper can do about it.
He will continue to insist he will lead the Conservatives into the 2015 election but he can answer no other way. So the speculation will continue.
This is a product of his longevity and the recent best-before dates of Canadian politicians, but it is also a product of a very tough 2013 that does not look immediately sunnier as he peers into 2014.
The biggest threat to Harper and his government comes not from Liberal Justin Trudeau or New Democrat Tom Mulcair, but the RCMP ITOs — Information to Obtain a production order — in the PMO-Senate scandal, which has been imprisoning the prime minister for more than seven months.
The past year was one of drip, drip, drip for Harper and that will continue.
On that horizon, possible revelations from the emails of the lawyer for Harper’s office, Benjamin Perrin, and the emails between key senators Marjory LeBreton, David Tkachuk, Carolyn Stewart Olsen and Mike Duffy.
Duffy and his fellow miscreants Pamela Wallin, Mac Harb and Patrick Brazeau are all under police investigation, along with Harper’s former chief of staff Nigel Wright.
Harper appointed them all except Harb.
Beyond another flurry of court documents looms possible charges, then trials.
There will be an audit of all Senate spending coming from Auditor-General Michael Ferguson, to be delivered in separate tranches, just in case the ongoing Senate debacle slows down.
And it is all out of the control of Harper’s office, although as the revelations of 2013 showed, efforts by that office to contain the damage only gave the story more oxygen.
Speculation about Harper’s future was going to be inevitable in 2014 regardless of his current travails.
For reasons of voter fatigue and renewal alone, speculation would have been building in the first half of the year.
In early February, he passes eight years as prime minister. If he stays, he will be asking Canadians for another four-year mandate after nine years in office.
A restive backbench and a rejuvenated Liberal party are merely joining the Senate spending scandal to bring the question into sharper focus.
Will he step down by late spring, call a leadership convention for the autumn and give his successor a year in the job before the scheduled October 2015 vote?
If he toughs it out, he will be trying to push through the decade wall in power, a best-before date which has, in recent history, taken its toll on the likes of Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien, Jean Charest and Dalton McGuinty.
Harper has three electoral wins, including the elusive majority, has reworked environmental law, health care transfers, employment insurance and moved Canada away from the boy scout role on the international stage, making it the muscular ally of Israel (which he visits for the first time early in the year), the outlier on Iran and a country that often thumbs its nose at the United Nations.
Liberals may be coming back He has killed the gun registry and the Wheat Board, will continue to trim the public service, has his signature trade deal with the European Union in place and has moved the age at which Canadians are eligible for old age security.
He will not only balance the budget as promised, but have a surplus to play with before 2015, when he can lure voters back into the fold with promised middleclass-friendly tax breaks.
But he has not killed off the hated Liberals who, while staggering badly under Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, appear to be staging a comeback under Trudeau.
The fundamentals can easily fall into place for another Conservative victory in 2015, but it is much more difficult seeing that happen with Harper dragging the Senate elephant around with him into an election year.
It could take another leader who can say he or she had nothing to do with a PMO that looks increasingly bullying, brash and corrupt.
Employment Minister Jason Kenney, who fronts everyone’s list as a potential successor to Harper, has long been off the prime minister’s leash. But he has particularly distinguished himself from his leader on such matters as Harper’s former chief of staff Nigel Wright (who Kenney praised while Harper was busy trashing him) and Rob Ford, who Kenney called to resign and stop embarrassing public office while the prime minister was being much more circumspect.
Kenney’s clash with Finance Minister Jim Flaherty over the Ford rebuke is something that will play out with different characters and different subjects in 2014, as potential Harper successors start edging toward the spotlight by differentiating themselves from the prime ministerial consensus.
Beyond Kenney, keep an eye on Industry Minister James Moore, Justice Minister Peter MacKay and Transport Minister Lisa Raitt. Watch for any policy speeches by Jim Prentice, a former Harper cabinet minister who is now senior executive vice-president and vice-chairman of CIBC.
Or save some time and just watch Kenney. Any road to the Conservative leadership goes through the jobs minister.
But there will be other major political stories in 2014.
One of them is Trudeau. If he can remain aloft and voters appear to begin to coalesce around his Liberals as a middleclass alternative to the Conservatives, that could also expedite Harper’s exit.
Don’t rule out Mulcair
But Trudeau often flies a bit close to the sun and he has so far managed to stay aloft by . . . well, being Justin.
With the ascendancy of Trudeau and the attention paid him by Harper’s Conservatives, it has become fashionable here to write off Mulcair and his New Democrats. Fashionable, but foolhardy.
In his first full year as NDP leader, Mulcair almost single-handedly returned question period to relevance and continually poked holes in the Harper Senate narrative.
It was not a good year at the polls — his party lost government in Nova Scotia and squandered almost certain victory in British Columbia — but Muclair has proven himself single-minded in preparing the NDP as the alternative to old-line parties in 2015 and has had precious few missteps in the job.
He will not fade away in 2014 and those us of watching closely can make a better case for the strangely buoyant Trudeau as the one who will fade in the coming year. A year from now, we could be in a very tight three-way race heading into an election year.
There appear to be provincial elections looming in the country’s two most populous provinces as the Liberal minority at Queen’s Park and the Parti Québécois minority in Quebec City try for majorities.
Pipeline politics flowing
Another tough byelection in Toronto also looms if, as expected, New Democrat Olivia Chow resigns her seat to challenge Ford in Toronto’s mayoral election. Another prominent Torontoarea politician, Flaherty, could also gracefully exit if he so chooses, with his promised balanced budget at hand.
Speculation about the next finance minister is popular cocktail hour fodder in Ottawa.
The coming year will also again be dominated by big oil, debate over Harper’s lip service to climate change and pipeline politics.
At best, Harper is looking at mixed results. At worst, he is looking at two major defeats.
The giant $7.9 billion Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, which would take bitumen from Alberta to Kitimat on the west coast, has won regulatory approval with 209 conditions. But Harper still faces legal challenges from First Nations communities and significant opposition from British Columbia voters.
“Northern Gateway is never going to get built,’’ flatly says Mulcair.
The Keystone XL pipeline, which crosses the border on its way from Alberta to the Gulf Coast, is in the hands of U.S. President Barack Obama, who could finally and firmly write its obituary.
Another troubling sign for Harper — who infamously told a New York audience he will not take “no” for an answer on Keystone — was the move to Obama’s office of John Podesta, a strong critic of the Canadian tar sands and a man who has said that if the U.S. does not curb its dependence on fossil fuels, the result will be a rise of sea levels, extreme weather and “tremendous human suffering and conflict.’’
All signs do indeed point to another rough year — assuming Harper does tough it out through 2014.