PM seemed blindsided by Baird’s exit
For his first day as Canada’s interim minister of foreign affairs on Tuesday, Ed Fast wisely took a pass at the five questions the opposition sent his way.
Fast, whose day job is that of minister of international trade, was sent into the large breach created by John Baird’s resignation at little more than a moment’s notice and no one should reasonably expect him to do double duty on the international front for very long.
His interim assignment mainly shows that there was no plan in place for a seamless transition from Baird to a permanent successor as minister of foreign affairs.
Contrast that with the orderly departure last year of Jim Flaherty. The then-finance minister first put the 2014 budget to bed. Within less than 24 hours of his resignation, Joe Oliver was in place.
Or contrast Baird’s exit with the less recent but no less significant departure of Jim Prentice in 2010.
Minutes before the then-minister of environment resigned in the House of Commons, his close associates hit the phones to dispel the notion that he and Harper had had a falling out.
Flaherty gave Harper enough notice to figure out the succession and left long before the next budget deadline. Prentice took steps to diminish the potential damage of his departure on the government.
By comparison Harper seemed blindsided by Baird’s exit.
That may explain why the opposition parties were more effusive in their praise of the departing minister in the House on Tuesday than was the statement issued by the Prime Minister’s Office.
Baird is one of the most accomplished political operators in the House of Commons.
He is or at least was an influential member of the prime minister’s inner circle. He was long known as a rare minister who had regular social contact with the Harpers.
But little in the manner of his departure this week reflected either of those features.
The prime minister is said to have first heard of the imminent resignation of one of the few political heavyweights left at his cabinet table through media reports on Monday evening.
It is true that a leak forced Baird to move his announcement forward. His initial plan was to resign on Thursday. But even under that scenario he would still have given Harper little more than a day or two’s notice about a move he says he had been considering for months. (That’s only a bit more of a heads-up than Lucien Bouchard gave Brian Mulroney before storming out of the latter’s government in 1990.)
And then there is the awkward timing of the exit and the predictable pre-election complications that attend to it.
Baird’s resignation comes at a time when the Conservatives are trying to capitalize on some recently earned momentum to convince Canadians that they have the stamina for a fourth mandate. Losing a proven talent at this juncture could break that momentum.
It comes too early for Harper to dispense with a permanent replacement for the foreign affairs portfolio until after the election but too late for the prime minister to rebuild his cabinet from top to bottom and expect it to perform at maximum efficiency between now and the campaign. An in-between fix of some sort will have to be found.
In an open letter published by the Globe and Mail on Tuesday, Baird expanded on his record and his sense that he had accomplished his political mission. It did not mention Harper by name and the word Conservative was absent from the text.
Reading between the lines one could conclude that the letter was written with an imminent nonpartisan future in mind rather than with a thought for his party’s upcoming electoral battle.
Baird might have a private sector offer too good to pass up on his desk. Some prestigious international organization may be in the process of headhunting him.
But even if that is the case it is hard to think of an employer that would not have wanted to do the prime minister the favour of waiting for Baird for the few more months it would have taken to tide his frontline department over until this House rises one last time in June. Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.