HARPER’S TORY LEGACY. COYNE,
If his followers couldn’t make the case for his significance as prime minister, Stephen Harper wasn’t about to try.
Since his party’s defeat in the past election — the first majority government to be driven from power with unemployment at or below seven per cent since 1957 — Harper has kept a low profile. His acolytes, however, have been busy asserting a far-reaching legacy for his government, claiming to detect in his record a consistent philosophy of “ordered liberty.”
There isn’t much to this argument, frankly. Any honest examination of Harper’s nine-odd years in office would find a government that wandered all over the intellectual map, boasting of its commitment to balanced budgets while adding $150 billion to the national debt, talking of its respect for free markets while launching 1970s-style industrial-subsidy programs, praising the military while denying it adequate equipment, and so on.
Its defenders point to all the things other governments might have done — a national daycare program, say — that Harper’s didn’t. But we could as well list all of the conservative policies it failed to enact, from privatization to deregulation to reform of social programs. We might talk of how the party’s social conservatives were gagged, or how the party of democratic conservatism became the party of one-man rule.
There was much that it did that it shouldn’t have — a long list that would include abusing the prerogatives of Parliament, packing the Senate with spendthrifts and cronies, and attempting to skew elections via the Fair Elections Act — and much else that it tried to do but failed, from reforming the Senate to building pipelines.
And whatever it did do, for good or ill, is rapidly being undone, either by the courts or by the government that succeeded it: not only egregious nonsense such as the corruption of the longform census or all those unconstitutional crime bills, but real accomplishments such as pushing back OAS eligibility or income-splitting for couples with children. About all that remains are the free trade agreements it signed (good) and the GST cuts (ill).
So when it came time, in his speech to the Conservative convention, for the former prime minister to review his record, it was more by way of stances than achievements: standing up for “principled positions in a dangerous world,” say, or standing watch over a period of relative prosperity and national unity. It’s not nothing. There were some important reforms of campaign finances, some useful tax changes. But as legacies go, it’s pretty thin.
That’s if you consider his legacy in government. But the real and lasting legacy of Harper may be less as prime minister than as the modern Conservative party’s first leader.
To be sure, even in partisan terms, the record is mixed. He lost an election he could have won in 2004 and turned an expected majority into a minority in 2006, only finally winning a majority in 2011 against a rookie Liberal leader who had been out of the country for 30 years. And then he squandered that historic breakthrough, in four feckless, high-handed, unrelentingly nasty years.
But when you consider what went before him, not only the wilderness years after the crackup of the old Conservative party in 1993 but the century of futility that preceded it, Harper starts to look pretty good. It isn’t just his part in reuniting the parties of the right, the former Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservatives, striking a deal with Peter MacKay after each had won the leadership of his party on a pledge of opposition to such a merger. It is that, even in defeat, the Conservative party remains well placed to contend for power — as Harper put it, “the one and only opposition party positioned to take government the next time round.”
That wasn’t always the case. In its historic role as the spare tire of Canadian politics, the Conservative party would periodically be called upon to replace the Liberals when the latter’s arrogance and sense of entitlement had become too much to bear, only to obligingly self-destruct shortly thereafter. The Diefenbaker sweep in 1958 was reduced to a minority in just four years. The Mulroney sweep in 1984, likewise, carried within it the seeds of its later demise. Both were too sudden to last.
Perhaps because it was so long in coming, Harper’s success may prove more enduring: the foundations were more carefully laid. The results of the past election, defeat though it was, are suggestive. Though they were swept in Atlantic Canada, the Conservatives maintained a healthy contingent of MPs from Ontario, and increased their seat count in Quebec, to go with their decades-long dominance of the West.
The party has a strong organization and, even in opposition, continues to raise more funds than its rivals. There are no signs of a return to its ancient divisions, nor yet the kind of tribal warlordism that went on between supporters of Brian Mulroney and Joe Clark. And Harper, by staying on as leader through the election but leaving soon after, takes much of the sins of his government with him, giving his successor a free hand to shape the party in his or her own image.
Harper’s ambition for the Conservatives, it was sometimes said, was to replace the Liberals as the country’s “natural governing party.” He may not have succeeded in that. But he can fairly claim to have left them, as no Conservative prime minister since Macdonald has, with a decent shot at governing again.
HARPER ... TAKES MUCH OF THE SINS OF HIS GOVERNMENT WITH HIM, GIVING HIS SUCCESSOR A FREE HAND TO SHAPE THE PARTY. — COLUMNIST ANDREW COYNE