PM’s affection for North gets lost in the spin
Sojourn a chance for Harper to let his hair down, but he still won’t
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has a good story to tell up here on the vast, perma-frozen frontier. Honestly, he does. How very odd — surreal, at times — that he is constantly, seemingly reflexively, thrusting himself in the path of his own narrative, though it be crafted with great forethought and a violin-maker’s attention to detail.
A senior Conservative campaign operative once told me that the alpha to omega in Harper’s war room is, very simply, visual framing. The goal is to set him within imagery that beams overt, unsubtle, unmistakable messages about the essential goodness of his character, his aims and his program. The vehicles for such imagery are television and video. All else is extraneous.
So in that sense, the entire northern expanse, from Whitehorse across Nunavut to the most remote northern tip of Quebec, is an unbeatable backdrop, politically speaking. It is the soul of bootstrap, rural values. It reinforces the Conservatives’ outsider status, vis-avis the so-called urban elites. Most of all, it braces the idea that, in engaging northerners and being engaged by them, this prime minister is “just folks” — an ordinary, hardworking hockey dad who happens to run the country.
Lest anything in this delicate construction be left to chance, each event of this year’s Arctic swing thus far has featured a visual backdrop of tractors, heavy equipment, hay bales and/or massive Canadian flags.
Cynics will scoff, of course. But there is no reason to believe Harper’s affection for the North is not genuine. He comes here year in, year out, election or no election. The speeches of welcome appear heartfelt. In the past three days I’ve heard several unbidden expressions of support for Harper from ordinary Yukoners, about town. At least he’s coming up here, they say.
Moreover, the Conservatives’ northern strategy legitimately dovetails into their overarching vision of resource development, and relatedly, skills training. Again Monday, in re-announcing $5.6 million in 2013 budget funding for a new Yukon College Centre for Northern Innovation in Mining, Harper fielded a question about unaddressed social ills in the Yukon. He linked skills development to jobs and thus social progress. The best social program, as Conservatives are fond of saying, is a job. They’re not wrong.
So, to be fair, this is not a bad strategy. Say what one might about the delays and false starts that have hampered the government’s grander northern plans, particularly when it comes to putting armed boats in the Northwest Passage, since they took power in 2006. They’re trying. They’ve ventured more here than either the Jean Chrétien or Paul Martin Liberals did before them. When Harper chooses to articulate his northern strategy, as he did Monday, he does so persuasively. When he chooses to answer unscripted questions — as he also did Monday, in the process confirming the pending prorogation of Parliament, and that he will run again in 2015 — he does so deftly, for the most part.
But set against all this is the excessive control; the ultra-managed topspin on every image; the entrenched separation between him, his entourage, the media, and by extension anyone who is not an avowed, card-carrying Conservative. All that, too, is in plain view on this tour. Sunday night in Whitehorse, its inaugural event, was an opportunity for the prime minister to explain with passion and detail the reasons why he values the North, why the North is an integral part of Canada, and what his government intends to do to help northern people in future.
Instead, he delivered a warmed up re-hash of 2011 campaign rhetoric, laced with harsh attacks on the opposition that were, in this setting, discordant. The intended subtext of the tour appears to be that Conservatives care about ordinary, grassroots folk, and not “political games” in Ottawa. Yet what is harsh partisanship ever, but a game?
No one believes, as Harper charged Sunday, that the opposition’s instincts are “all bad” — or for that matter that he bears no responsibility for the mess that is the Senate, as he sought to suggest again Monday. What, really, is the point of pretending?
Some will say that hard-charging rhetoric reassures “the base.” But the base is not another population on another planet. These are the same people who gave Alberta Premier Alison Redford, a Red Tory, a comfortable majority in the last Alberta provincial election. Could it be that “the base” deserve more credit for moderation than this government gives them?
Years ago, then-prime minister Jean Chretien was beset by criticisms that he had allowed his advisers to package him to death. His response? “Let Chretien be Chretien.”
Stephen Harper has a similar problem now — except that he himself is the Svengali crafting that package. This annual northern sojourn is his opportunity to “let his hair down” in a congenial setting, we are told, and “be himself.” At this writing, count me among those still waiting. Onward to the Northwest Territories.