HARPER’S UNEXPECTED LEGACY
He was PM for a decade, but his Conservative party never forgot how to be an effective Opposition.
Next week, the federal Conservatives will mark an anniversary they would probably rather not celebrate — a year out of power.
In many ways, the Conservative party of 2016 looks a lot like the Liberal party of a decade ago: an interim leader in place, but in the midst of a leadership contest that has too many candidates and no real heir apparent waiting in the wings. A poll this week in the Star showed that the race is still “wide open.” That’s good news for the would-be leaders, but evidence that this contest has yet to fire up the troops — except, perhaps, when the candidates are tussling about “Canadian values” or social conservatism.
Former cabinet minister Tony Clement, who ran against Stephen Harper for the party leadership in 2004, pulled out of the current race this week, citing a lack of enthusiasm for his ambitions among partisans and would-be donors. It all must sound very familiar to Liberals, who were beginning to realize a decade ago that they would be spending some extended time in the opposition wilderness.
Ten years ago this very weekend, Liberals were holding a leadership debate in Toronto that would turn out to haunt them in negative ads for years to come. It was the one in which Michael Ignatieff famously said “we didn’t get it done” on meeting climate-change targets and Stéphane Dion said, also famously: “Do you think it’s easy to make priorities?”
At that same debate, Dion, who would become the next leader, declared: “Liberals, we need to get back in power as soon as possible.” Well, we know how that turned out — all around.
There’s one important difference between Conservatives in 2016 and the 2006 Liberals, though. The Conservatives are demonstrably better in opposition than the Liberals were. Some of the blows that have landed with the most force against Justin Trudeau’s one-year-old government have come from busy Conservative researchers — most successfully on housing expenses for Trudeau’s senior staffers.
Many political observers have been saying that the Conservatives are adept in opposition because 10 years in government gave them the inside track on where to go to stir up trouble. I think there may be another explanation: in their decade in power, they never forgot how to be in opposition.
For all those years, Conservatives in power treated question period in the Commons, for instance, as a 45-minute, daily opportunity to embarrass the Liberals or New Democrats, turning questions around into attacks on the questioners.
In government, the Conservatives would taunt the opposition with shouts of “job-killing carbon tax” every time the subject of climate change came up in the House. In opposition, they’re still chanting it, at least a dozen times since the Commons resumed business this fall, by my count. Same job, different seats.
Liberals, by contrast, took a long time to adjust to opposition. I remember going to interview Dion, not long after he became leader, to ask him about a foreign policy matter in which Harper was taking a position at sharp odds with the old Liberal government.
He opened the interview with: “I understand why he’s doing that,” and then went on to give me a minilecture on how foreign policy is a nuanced, everchanging subject for governments to handle. In other words, just as Conservatives never really left opposition, Liberals always had a hard time embracing it. That sums up a lot of the political dynamic of the past 10 years: the old “natural governing party,” as Liberals liked to call themselves, against the “natural opposing party” of the Conservatives.
This coming week, nicely timed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the election, a new book is being released on Harper’s legacy. It’s called The Harper Factor: Assessing a Prime Minister’s Policy Legacy and was pulled together over the past year by editors Graham Fox and Jennifer Ditchburn at the Institute for Research on Public Policy.
Overall, Fox and Ditchburn say the book shows that Harper was not a transformational leader — a finding that they warn “is sure to surprise his most loyal supporters and ardent detractors alike.”
I should note that I am one of the contributors to this book, asked last year to write a chapter on how political conduct changed in the Harper decade. For what it’s worth, I give Harper credit for some of the innovations Canada has seen in political marketing and branding tactics, and the launch of what came to be known as the “permanent campaign.”
Harper kept his Conservatives on a war footing, never forgetting how to wound the Liberals. If his party is doing a good job in opposition in year one, even now that he is gone, we could call that part of his legacy too. sdelacourt@bell.net
Despite being in power for a decade, the Tories never lost their fight