"This was supposed to be ‘The summer of George’! The summer of George!"
George Costanza, Seinfeld
"My wife said to me recently, ‘You need to have more fun.’"
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
A year ago this week, Stephen Harper led his newly reunited Conservative party into battle against the incumbent Liberals under Paul Martin. The signs were promising.
Martin’s very haste in calling an election so soon after taking command of the government, and a mere three years into a five-year mandate, suggested that he viewed Harper as a genuine electoral threat. Better not to allow him time to raise finances and organize support….
And the Liberals themselves were ailing – a litany of broken election promises stretching back to 1993; a growing tsunami of scandal, corruption and abuse of public office; and a chance for voters to make Martin pay for the arrogance of Emperor Chrétien’s dying days. This bode well for Harper’s prospects in the summer of 2004.
It wasn’t to be, of course. Winning just 135 seats, the Liberals lost their claim to majority rule, but could take solace in the fact that no plausible combination of opposition votes was able to form a workable government either. And so for the past year, Martin has manoeuvred his non-governing government from crisis to crisis, more or less arguing that even bad as they were, the Liberals were preferable to the Conservatives under Harper.
The simmering conflict in Parliament came to the boil last month, when the Conservatives announced their intention to bring down the government on the vote over the budget. Only the 11th-hour defection of Belinda Stronach to the Liberals saved Martin on this occasion. For Harper, Stronach’s departure was doubly damaging – she made it clear that it was precisely his leadership and his views on issues such as gay marriage that had precipitated her decision, and the Conservatives had now lost their Ontario-friendly poster girl of moderation.
Last week, Harper rallied his troops for another shot at the government. Martin had earlier served notice that he intended to extend the current House of Commons session in order to pass both the same-sex marriage bill and budget legislation. The latter offered another chance for the Conservatives to mount a no-confidence vote and so topple the government.
But then last Thursday, with a number of Tories absent from the House, the Liberals – with tacit support from the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois – invoked a rarely used procedural measure to force an early vote on the budget, which they won by 152 votes to 147. Suddenly, with the road cleared for a same-sex vote on Monday, there was no longer any need to extend Parliament and Harper’s hopes for a summer election were finally dashed.
"Diabolical, sneaky and treacherous" was how Conservative deputy leader Peter MacKay described the move. Yet at the same time, he confessed that it was largely a self-inflicted defeat. Criticizing fellow Tory John Reynolds, who earlier had publicly boasted that his party would force and win a vote of no-confidence, MacKay admitted, "My preference would be to do the strategy, don’t talk about it. If you give the other team your playbook, it’s pretty clear what will happen. They’ll come up with better plays."
And so to the "Summer of Stephen." Denied the prospect of an election, Harper has committed himself instead to a nationwide jaunt designed to improve his public image. Or rather, to improve the public’s perception of his image, for this is not about reinventing who or what Stephen Harper is. "I don’t intend to change myself," he told a Vancouver radio station last week. "I’ve watched politicians who tried to be something they’re not and tried to have all these different incarnations. I think it just comes across as phony. I am who I am."
This is fair and admirable, but it does rather throw into question the whole purpose of the summer tour. Harper is clearly not a man at ease in the routine world of political photo-ops, and his appearances at barbecues, parades, festivals, garden fêtes, garage sales and whatever else over the coming weeks is only likely to accentuate, not lessen, that sense of discomfort.
More important, and contrary to popular wisdom, Harper’s image (or lack thereof) is not the Conservatives’ real problem at the moment. As recent months have shown, the Conservatives have ceased to think, plan and plot as a political animal. They’ve made a virtue out of being consistent, principled and even moral in their conduct, but this achievement has only dumped them firmly in the opposition benches for the foreseeable future. Unless they start to think and act less like a boy-scout troop and more like a party that wants to form the government (and that means getting dirty), they should resign themselves to this fate.
So Stephen, do your tour, but do yourself a favour. Show us all what a low, conniving and deceitful s.o.b. you really can be. |
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