Harper has the means, but is he too mean?
Don Martin, National Post Published: Friday, December 21, 2007
OTTAWA -- Bored reporters sprawled across chairs inside the drafty 24 Sussex Drive solarium with only the family's attention-craving, aptly-named cat Fluffy for company.
Stephen Harper, his face coated with television makeup, was running more than an hour behind schedule in his parade of year-end interviews.
It's a pre-Christmas ritual between journalists scrambling to extract a news scoop during their ten minutes of face time and a prime minister equally determined to control his message. There will be many, many pages of Stephen Says journalism today as the embargo is lifted and "exclusive" stories from dozens of interviews pour into the news hole.
The notable exception will be CBC Radio, which was denied a chat with the Prime Minister because his office wouldn't approve Kathleen Petty, host of The House weekly politics show, as a worthy interviewer. Outrageous, if you ask me.
But the real story of a year in the life of this Prime Minister might be missing from the mass media coverage.
Why, we should be asking, is this man still struggling to win over voters after two years of scandal-free government against a whimpering Official Opposition during an economic boom and escalating fiscal surplus?
Mr. Harper's Conservatives are less popular today than they were on voting day 2006. After 22 months in power, poll after poll pegs them in a tie with Stéphane Dion's Liberals, if not inexplicably slipping behind.
The Prime Minister's short answer is to dismiss the numbers. "Those polls are being interpreted a certain way, but I'm not sure that's really the case. Not that I would call an election or seek one, but we're doing pretty well."
Yet it doesn't take a vivid imagination to see a plausible reason for Mr. Harper's public perception problem.
He's a born leader, but far too angrily partisan and prone to bully-boy antics to raise Canadian comfort with him as a majority government ruler.
The man himself insists he's no meanie. "I think I'm pretty gentle compared to my opponents," he says, with a straight face. Oh, really? Well, what about that unprovoked attack on Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission chair Linda Keen as a Liberal-appointed hack? It was a particularly egregious character assault when it turned out the Conservative's patronage pick for Atomic Energy Canada president, one Michael Burns, quit to become the fall guy in the Chalk River shutdown fiasco, a nuclear plant feeding medical isotopes to the world which was restarted by an emergency vote in Parliament last week.
"The reason I took the jab at the Opposition was that they were briefly thinking of blocking the (startup) measure," Mr. Harper says, suddenly sounding terse. "I was making it real clear that if you block this, you're going to wear it because we've got a medical catastrophe coming in this country."
That hardly explains his history of habitual cheap shots, but it doesn't pay to argue when Mr. Harper's in denial, particularly with clock-watching handlers making noises about terminating the interview. And besides, after effortlessly fending off all other topics -- dismissing Quebec's reasonable accommodation ethnic debate as overblown rhetoric, listing the many reasons why Albertans should love his government and correctly noting that few Canadians are passionate about the Schreiber-Mulroney affair -- Mr. Harper u-turned our chat back to his passion for partisan attacks.
Look at the Liberals, he sneers, they "have been utterly directionless" in trying to decide whether to force an election this year.
"Once we decided the time had come to take the (Liberal) government down, we spared no effort to bring the them down," Mr. Harper recalls. Yet the Liberals keep making empty threats to take down this government before abstaining on election-triggering votes.
"The most fascinating thing about the Throne Speech was how the Liberals said in August they were going to bring us down, but never at any point did they say what they expected to see in it," he says.
"Now it's happening again. They're apparently going to defeat us in February or March, but why? You can't pick a date. You have to pick a reason. And the reason isn't, as Stephane Dion seems to believe, that the public made a mistake last time. The public is always right. If the public chooses to defeat me in the next election, the public has made the right decision."
The blue-ice eyes narrow into that piercing look Harper gets when he's about to verbally machete an enemy. "But if this Opposition defeats us, I promise you we will be more ready for that election than they will."
It's a bang on assessment of why the Liberals are to be pitied as pathetic opponents, which only underlines the inexplicability of their strong poll positions.
Angrily partisan? Yup, that's Stephen Harper. Dangerously perceptive? Ditto.
He clearly has the means to land a majority. But you wonder still if he's not a bit too mean to win one.
