The public justification given for naming Liberal unbeliever David Emerson (Vancouver) and the unelected Michael Fortier (Montreal) Ministers of the Crown was to make the Conservative Cabinet “representative of the major interests of the country.” That is, the decisions may have been undemocratic and contemptuous of the local will but Harper was “standing up for Canada.” As the prime minister moved the furniture around in his mind, the new feng shui design said: “Good government not only justifies these moves, it requires them.”

In backrooms, Harper and his mandarins no doubt delighted in their “gotcha” putsch—Emerson for Belinda Stronach; Fortier for a Pierre Pettigrew or a Stéphane Dion—but in the foreground, as Parliament reconvenes, Canadians are facing a brave new political world: a world where two wrongs make a right; where political parties do not have to content themselves with the will of the governed; and where a pogg prime minister presides over not a country but a concept.

trangely, national defence and foreign affairs seem to be where Harper’s continental neighbour, US President George Bush, also likes to hang his hat. Bush too cleaves to a rather literalist translation of America’s founding document. Long attracted to the immediate fixes of empire and to a Straussian rejection of participatory democracy, could it be that Harper is actually taking his cue from the US administration There, the contempt for due process is bordering on the absurd. While Jon Stewart treated the administration with kid gloves on Oscar night, that morning President Bush arrived home from a whirlwind tour through South Asia. While in India, flouting domestic law and international obligations, Bush signed a nuclear co-operation pact with a country that has consistently refused to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. (The pact, if ratified by the Senate, would subject India’s civilian reactors to the strictures of the International Atomic Energy Agency, but also allow it to keep two reactors geared toward India’s nuclear-weapons program beyond international observation.)

Then, like a cowboy on ecstasy, Bush saddled up and headed off to Pakistan, India’s chief competitor in the region, and, like Iran, a country with nuclear ambitions of its own. Saying “No” to Pakistan’s desire for nuclear expansion, after saying “Not in my lifetime” to Iran’s nuclear requests, has left the impression that what is good for India’s Hindus is not good for the region’s Muslim countries. In summing up his “historic” visit, Bush said, “I explained that Pakistan and India are different countries with different needs and different histories.” Well, pardner, you might have added, “I simply prefer the blue God of the Hindus, the funny one with many arms and hands upturned, to that Allah figure y’all get excited about.”

Bush’s reckless internationalism is framed by the twin slogans, “You’re either with us or against us” and “Might is right.” Before these, “Stand Up for Canada” appears benign. The US president may yet create a clash of civilizations—somewhere, sometime, because the fireworks will be splendid—or he may, more prosaically, just end history, but in the meantime small fish love to play in big ponds, and Harper might launch an experiment of his own. (This is a man, after all, who has never run a business and who is thus not wholly inoculated against the power of big ideas, who is not comfortable—unless scripted to be—in café society, and whose adult life has been spent in the arena of policy wonkdom.)

arper is now charge and therefore more alone, more vulnerable. And just in case a Red Tory (say, a Peter MacKay) were to gain his ear and lead him astray, or just in case, on a strange whim discordant with his hard-wiring, Harper gets any bright ideas about honouring his pledge to “Stand Up for Canada,” of putting meat and bones on “peace, order, and good government” by telling the provinces how to behave, predictable players have lined up to ensure that their man remains their man.

For transparent reasons, separatist Quebecer Gilles Duceppe—he who, due to some strange conflation of Canadian values, sits in the federal Parliament only to fracture it—said that he would support Harper’s minority government. Alberta’s Ralph Klein floated the trial balloon of putting health care delivery in private hands...just to see how Harper as prime minister would react compared with Harper as co-author of the Alberta “firewall” letter. Less transparently, on February 21, 2006, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (ccce) released “From Bronze to Gold: A Blueprint for Canadian Leadership in a Transforming World.”

Like Harper’s campaign, the essay is masterfully scripted. Calm, fluid, moderate in presentation, and, at first blush, moderate in its prescriptions, “From Bronze to Gold” begins seductively with pleasing bromides: “We believe in Canada;” “Canada has many strengths;” “Canada must build on its success.” The imperative “must” is mitigated by language evocative of primary-school report cards and by praise for “the hard choices made by Canadians during the 1990s [which] have produced real dividends,” and “[Canada’s] economic growth has been the best in the G7 over the past five years, driving the unemployment rate to its lowest levels since the 1970s....” So all is well, according to the who’s who of corporate Canada Read on, Macduff.

he ccce admits that the federation has been a success story and that Canada has reached the podium, if only to win Olympic bronze. And so, here and there and off and on, the praise and positive reinforcement reappear. But there are ominous storm clouds forming—China, India, terrorism, rampant global competition—and by the mid-point of “From Bronze to Gold” the imperatives become more insistent. The ccce has done a credible job of embedding research into a narrative, but ultimately the executives are not novelists happy with the lilt and rhythm of description, character, and scene-setting; they are doctors with prescriptions to fill.

The ccce has learned to bow before the oracle of Brian Mulroney—the last successful Conservative politician—and to listen to his mantra: pacify, placate, work the room (and the room is 6,000 kilometres wide), leave all meaningful material to fine print or to back pages. Indeed, while the press rightly focused on the essay’s immediately arresting prescriptions (and those that appear relatively early)—the elimination of federal social transfers, scrapping the goods and services tax, and shifting “tax room” to the provinces; the further devolution of Ottawa’s role to exclusive jurisdiction over foreign affairs and national defence, and to a mere enabler in such areas as postsecondary education, the environment, and health—it is not until right near the end that “From Bronze to Gold” provides the ultimate revelation.