Tories court the loathe factor
Failure to own PBO could be undoing
After serving five years as official goad and perpetual thorn in the Conservative government’s side, parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page is preparing to hand over his abacus and magnifying glass to a successor — or he would be, if he had a successor. So far, though only a month remains in Page’s term, none has been appointed.
It’s almost as though the Harper government doesn’t much care who replaces the doggedly independent-minded Page, or if he’s replaced at all.
“In due course following a thorough process,” says Treasury Board President Tony Clement.
Senior ministers have long made no secret of their disdain for Page and his analyses: Last year the finance minister himself dismissed one of the PBO’s more controversial reports, on the sustainability of Canada’s old age income security system, as “unbelievable, unreliable and incredible.”
Here’s what’s odd about this: Consistently — whether on the true cost of the Afghan mission, on the state of the federal deficit or on the F-35 jet procurement project — Page’s cost projections have turned out to be right, whereas the government’s have turned out to be wrong. He has more than proven the value of the office to taxpayers, in other words. The Conservatives created the PBO as part of their 2006 Federal Accountability Act. Page’s success, though it has stung them politically, is therefore their success. Yet they refuse to own it. How can they be so short-sighted?
The authors of The Big Shift, Ipsos pollster Darryl Bricker and Ottawa journal- ist John Ibbitson, posit a Conservative 21st Century, founded on an epochal power shift away from “Laurentian” Quebec-Ontario elites, toward a new axis founded on Alberta and suburban Ontario. Their notion that this Conservative party has a lock on power for the foreseeable future seems to me to be fundamentally flawed, for the simple reason that political parties are not static. They can evolve, borrow and steal ideas, and do so all the time, as the Chrétien Liberals showed in the mid1990s when they “stole” fiscal rigour from Preston Manning’s Reform Party.
But in one sense at least, it seems to me, Bricker and Ibbitson are incontrovertibly right: These Conservatives have tapped into the demographic and electoral power of suburban Ontario allied to Alberta, which is growing, and developed a way to evolve economically moderate “small-c” conservative policy, based on extensive internal polling, that they know will appeal to key voting blocks in these areas. They have also learned to avoid the potentially devastating “hidden agenda” narrative by jettisoning any trace of state-sanctioned social conservatism from their policy kit. That was politically ruthless of them and cannot have been easy, internally. But it has worked.
Likewise, the continuing division of the centre-left opposition into New Democrats, Liberals and Greens makes it possible for Conservatives to win majorities with less than 40 per cent of the popular vote, just as the Chrétien Liberals did in the 1990s when the centre-right was divided. In a first-past-the-post system, this is simple arithmetic.
So Conservatives have a policy process that follows, rather than leads public opinion — cowardly perhaps, but a de facto inoculation against grand policy initiatives that put them offside of voters. And they face a divided opposition, with no end in sight. For Harper and his successors, as Bricker and Ibbitson conclude, this is a situation made in heaven.
Except for one factor, which should never be discounted: The loathe effect. This is what overtakes a government that becomes popularly despised, because of a common perception of entitlement, arrogance, duplicity, profligacy, waste — you get the picture. It is not then about policy, or even about a perception of administrative incompetence: It is about popular aversion to the visible, antidemocratic tendencies that progressively corrupt individuals who hold power.
All governments fall prey to the loathe factor eventually. No one should understand this better than the Conservatives, who watched the Chrétien Liberals in their latter days devolve into what journalist Jeffrey Simpson called “the friendly dictatorship.” And let’s not discuss Kim Campbell, and the 1993 election.
The remedy — the vaccine, if you will — against political gangrene, is a regular volley of thunderbolts fired at a governing system broadside by independent watchdogs with the full weight of the people at their back. These include the auditor general, and the PBO. It is a democracy’s selfcorrecting mechanism — one that is routinely painful, but keeps the larger organism healthy.
If the Harper Conservatives are already so far along in their life cycle that they lack the perspective to see this, and the related need for a strong PBO, then they are already succumbing to the diseases of power, and vulnerable to the loathe effect. And that puts Election 2015 up for grabs, regardless of how tidily the table is laid.