Harper ends year on a jovial note — for him
OTTAWA – Stephen Harper, we hardly know you.
Almost seven years after Harper led his Conservatives to office and ended more than a decade of uninterrupted Liberal power, the prime minister remains a polarizing figure who inspires a bewildering array of reactions.
Steely ideologue, pragmatic centrist, unprincipled partisan: Harper’s political management has inspired all these descriptions — sometimes on the same file or issue.
With political 2012 now in the books, Harper has finally completed his first full, unfettered year with a majority mandate. Are Canadians any wiser about the man and his Conservative party that are leading the country?
“If success is measured by getting your agenda accomplished, I think for the most part they have. They’re making strides,” said Alex Marland, a political scientist at Memorial University in St. John’s, N.L., who specializes in political messaging. “In some ways you could make the argument that they’ve been quite successful, and yet for some reason in the public opinion polls, they just can’t seem to move. That’s the disconnect that I find interesting.”
The prime minister dished up a textbook example to close out a year of mixed government signals and muddling along.
Harper permitted a Chinese state-owned company to buy up a significant Canadianowned player in the Alberta oilpatch, but in so doing, he effectively barred further such ownership bids.
The Solomonic decision managed to inflame equally strident — and contradictory — opinions from around the dial.
Harper also attempted to turn the page on a multi-year propaganda exercise designed to sell Canadians on the F-35 stealth fighter. Government stonewalling over the ballooning cost of the developmental jet helped spark the 2011 election, when Conservatives said it was the only option and vowed to complete the purchase.
The government announced on Dec. 12 that it was “hitting the reset button” — a term heard so often that day, it was surely tested extensively with focus groups — on the F-35 procurement.
Conservatives took a pounding on the F-35 file for a variety of sins, from mismanagement to deceit — “incompetence tainted by arrogance,” in the words of NDP Leader Tom Mulcair — but ultimately made the right call.
Perhaps that was why Harper, usually an efficient but dour performer in the Commons, appeared uncommonly jovial in the final sitting days, unburdened at last of weighty decisions on foreign investment and military procurement.