Harper far from worst of his kind
Polls come and polls go, but one thing remains a constant: the government of Stephen Harper is among the most polarizing in our history.
That Ekos poll over the weekend putting the Tories 12 points back of the Liberals, 38 to 26, may be an outlier. But the more striking finding in the poll, one that shows up consistently in Ekos’s research, lies in the respondents’ second choices. The Liberals were the second choice of 18% of other parties’ supporters, the NDP 28%. The Tories? Just 8%.
But it’s when you ask Conservative supporters who their second choice would be that you really get a picture of how things are. According to Ekos, more than 40% of them refused to name a second choice: wouldn’t, or couldn’t. For them, it’s the Tories or nothing. Twothirds of the public would not even consider voting Conservative as a second choice. A quarter literally can’t conceive of another party governing us. That’s polarization.
That same phenomenon is evident in the writing about Harper, and his party, particularly on the left, where the range of opinion runs from hysterical to unhinged. Marci McDonald’s treatise of a few years back, in The Armageddon Factor, that the Harper government was made up of crazed evangelicals bent on imposing a form of theocracy in Canada, looks positively restrained compared to some of the current discussion.
I haven’t yet read Michael Harris’s book, Party of One: Stephen Harper and Canada’s Radical Makeover, so I’ll withhold judgment, but if it’s anything like his columns on iPolitics.ca it will be an unrelenting spleen-burst, rooted in the conviction that “Steve” is a matchless tyrant, without a single redeeming quality — or as he quotes Farley Mowat in the book, “Stephen Harper is probably the most dangerous human being ever elevated to power in Canada.”
Meanwhile, Donald Gutstein’s book, Harperism: How Stephen Harper and His Think Tank Colleagues Have Transformed Canada, places Harper in the context of a vast network of free-market policy shops (I make an appearance, for sitting on the board of a foundation that gives grants to some of them). The dullest commonplaces of mainstream economics are here transformed into a strange and threatening “neoliberal” conspiracy, while pimply economists in threadbare offices are endowed with an occult power they never knew they possessed.
In the fever swamps online, things have been carried even further. Once, it was sufficient to trade manufactured Harper quotes or fearful reminders of his origins among the “Straussians” at the “Calgary School” to get your hit of illicit Harperangst, but by now its users have moved on to harder stuff. In the last couple of weeks it has been the fashion among the more daring to discuss, in all apparent seriousness, whether we are now living under fascism.
Well. There is certainly plenty that is objectionable, even disturbing about this government: the unceasing partisanship, the peculiar nastiness, the crudeness, the expediency, the chronic secrecy and dishon- esty. It picks fights needlessly, sees enemies everywhere, casts aside ancient parliamentary prerogatives as lightly as it does its own convictions, all in the single-minded, indeed obsessive pursuit of power. It is hardly unprecedented in this regard — have we forgotten the long series of abuses that marked the Chretien years? — but it has taken every malign trend in Canadian politics and driven it to its ugliest conclusion.
But, well, that’s not all it’s done. Not every act of this government is to be despised, nor is every difference of opinion over policy to be categorized in the same light as an overt abuse of power, in support of an all-explanatory thesis of baleful Harperism. The Harper government has been less corrupt than most I can recall, more competent than many, with some modest policy successes to its name and relatively few disasters.
The one thing it has not been is radical or transformative. If the nastiness of its politics is the dominant impression of this government, it is in part for lack of anything else to identify it. It seems so pointless, all this poisonous effort for so little actual accomplishment, until you realize that is the point: the partisanship is in place of the policy, not in pursuit of it. The end is only power, and power is, with few exceptions, the only thing of consequence this government has achieved.
That is what makes these left critiques so puzzling. It would be one thing if the government really had pursued a “neo-liberal” agenda: if it had cut spending instead of increasing it; reduced the debt instead of adding to it; curbed its regulatory ambitions instead of inventing new ones; ended corporate welfare instead of bragging daily of each new grant or subsidy it has added to the hundreds of thousands already on the public books. But as things are it is difficult to see what all the fuss is about.
It is the belief in this government’s consequentiality that, oddly, unites its critics and its friends. Much of that, I think, is bound up in the prime minister’s persona. Foes see a ruthless revolutionary; fans, a sober-sided, get ‘ er done chief executive, capable of making, as a Globe story put it recently, the “tough decisions.” He seems a formidable character, for good or ill: it is hard to believe that all that intelligence and self-discipline could not be in the service of some larger purpose, or at least some grander strategic design. Even dispassionate observers like Maclean’s magazine’s Paul Wells, in The Longer I’m Prime Minister, attribute to him a vast, if incremental, efficacy: so incremental it eludes the naked eye.
I grant that this government has done some things another government wouldn’t, and not done some things another would. But in the broad strokes? Has it taken a much different course on the big issues than, say, its predecessors would have, in the same situation? Does the government of Canada look all that different, almost nine years later, than it did when it took office? Tough decisions? Which ones?
Myself, I take him at his word. When he said, in the quote from which Wells drew the title of his book — “the longer I’m prime minister … the longer I’m prime minister” — that’s about the size of it.