Once Upon a Country

“If you want to know what Harper is going to do next week,” Scott Brison noted in a practised campaign sound bite, “just look at what George Bush did last week.” If Bush made poor decisions as president, he made a virtue of decisiveness itself and reminded people regularly that at least they knew where he stood. For most of his tenure, this single attribute was seen as more valuable than wisdom, compassion, an ability to negotiate, or even a clear grasp of the issues. He made the tough decisions. This was the spin. That others had made Bush’s decisions wasn’t important; it was the image of a tough-talking Texan that sold them. Harper is the opposite: an ambitious architect and awkward shill.

Harper has two narratives: one is ideological; the other is designed to retain and expand power, to make the Conservatives what the Liberals had been—the natural governing party. The Liberals, who have held power for 80 of the last 110 years, lost seats in 1997 and 2004, and the government in 2006. They are vulnerable. Harper approached the election with the military energy of Sun Tzu (“In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact”). He usurped Liberal symbols, and in seducing David Emerson and appointing Liberal MP Wajid Khan as his special adviser on South Asia and the Middle East, Harper co-opted actual Liberals. He offered a few crude gifts, notably the 1-percent cut in the gst, an economically woolly idea, though one with broad, simplistic appeal. Like many politicians, he found a flexible place within the triangle formed by principle, pragmatism, and opportunism. When Harper was granted only a few minutes with the Chinese president, he declared that the cause of human rights had triumphed over the “almighty dollar.”

At the Palais des congrès, there was talk about the conservative id, the Reform heart that still beat below the Conservative surface. But after a year in office, Harper looks if not entirely comfortable, then at least recognizable: a middle-aged man in khakis and a polo shirt, a little soft around the waist, a bit uncomfortable in groups, a church-going hockey fan. The Liberals are still hoping that Harper’s natural petulance will irk voters, that his fragile alliance will fray, that his evangelical roots will frighten, or that Maurice Vellacott will fall down on the floor of the House of Commons and speak in tongues. But Harper has developed the necessary cynicism to hold onto federal power. Perhaps his decisions have had Shakespearean consequences, the soul tortured by the actions of the man. Maybe Harper has spent nights rereading the Book of Matthew (“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”) and weeping tears of apostasy. But he is the equal of Jean Chrétien as a street fighter, which makes him dangerous and, on occasion, fascinating.

One of the most critical election issues, one upon which the Conservative and Liberal narratives will clash with the greatest noise, is the fundamental shape of the nation. Trudeau had wanted a strong federal government to prevent the country from becoming “a confederation of shopping centres.” Harper, in turn, described Trudeau’s federalism as “state corporatism” and has begun the process of decentralizing power, granting more money and autonomy to the provinces, re-sketching the lines of Confederation. In a 1994 speech, Harper said, “Whether Canada ends up as one national government or two national governments or several national governments or some other kind of arrangement is, quite frankly, secondary in my opinion.” If as a vote-getter the issue of national unity is the equivalent of a rotting fish sitting in the nation’s sock drawer, for Liberals it must nevertheless become, once again, the Big Issue.

Arthur Meighen, the articulate, unloved Conservative prime minister after World War I, concluded that Canada’s problem was essentially “spiritual,” the problem of “getting all our people to see that we have not a collection of unrelated sections.” Yet ninety years later, we appear to have a collection of unrelated sections. The Conservative narrative accepts this and lays out a program of efficient administration rather than a binding story. Harper’s five priorities (child care, hospital waiting lists, government accountability, tax relief, and strengthening the justice system) are pragmatic chores, concrete and measurable. His budget priorities are to lower taxes, pay down the debt, and appeal to the nation’s wallet. The Liberals, by contrast, are selling a larger picture, one that is abstract and less measurable. “The great function of political leadership,” Ignatieff said, “is to make people feel that great visceral feeling in your gut that we are a great people.” Dion said, “Above all, we need a Canada more united than ever.” The Liberals engage ancient metaphysical challenges: unity and citizenship. But is there still an audience for the Big Idea? Or is the country content to devolve into regional blocs, and conceivably, in the coming decades, into a handful of city states? The view that Canada is “a community of communities,” as Joe Clark modestly opined, will be tested in the next election. One reason for the Liberals’ dominance in federal politics is the successful marketing of a binding dream, but as the country evolves it isn’t clear that it wants or needs to dream.

A nation, Ignatieff has written, is an imagined community. In the aftermath of the election, Canada will be reimagined in ways it hasn’t been for more than a generation. When Ignatieff declared that Quebec was a nation, it raised the spectre of constitutional talks and sank the hearts of millions. Perhaps it was apathy as much as antipathy that was at play, the threat of climbing back into constitutional waters as appealing as putting on a wet bathing suit on a cold day. Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe took the opportunity to say that Quebec would be an independent country by 2015.

Harper’s statement that “the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada” (with the qualifier “united” suppling the escape clause the country seems to need) gave him an aura of decisiveness, and launched the familiar semantic parade. A Bloc MP brought three dictionaries—two French, one English—into the House and read out the definitions of “nation” with a discouraging sense of urgency. British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell argued for nation status for First Nations, and pundits pointed out that the Quebec National Assembly had recognized eleven separate aboriginal groups as “nations,” bringing the provincial total to twelve, with grumpy Montreal anglos lining up to be thirteenth. A few days after the convention, Ed Stelmach, a former farmer of Ukrainian extraction, now the unlikely premier of Alberta, started muttering about nation status for his province. The country’s narrative, which in recent years has slouched toward the Seinfeldian—if not about nothing, then about free health care, tolerance, and the promise of tax relief—presents fresh challenges.

In Montreal, an anticipated storm front arrived from Alberta, and it was suddenly cold. Amid the detritus of the recent Liberal legacy and Harper’s deft democratic vandalism could be felt the ghost of John A. Macdonald. In 1864, while hammering out the terms of Confederation, Macdonald argued eloquently for a strong central government and was found later that evening drunk in his room, wearing a nightshirt, a rug thrown around his shoulders as he recited Hamlet in front of a mirror. A few years later, he observed the new country’s disarray (as well as his own) and noted, “We are all miserable sinners.”

By Thursday night at the Liberal convention, the delegates had abandoned the soft sell—“Hi, Michael wanted me to ask you if there is anything you want to talk about, any questions you might have”—for a harder line: “Do you want to beat Harper?” After forty-eight hours of heartfelt platitudes, self-congratulation, and repeated calls for unity, weary delegates retreated to the salons of their respective candidates.

Dion’s party was at the Hotel Place d’Armes, where 150 people had wedged themselves into a meeting room off the lobby. It had the atmosphere of a smalltown wedding. Dion had raised the least amount of money among the front-runners, and his campaign was a clever, earnest shoestring operation. There was one free drink per person, and a woman marked every hand with a red felt pen to ensure no one got two. The deal with Kennedy was coming together: the fourth-place finisher would support the third. Dion’s campaign organizer for Ontario said some of Ignatieff’s ex officios were going to Dion after the first ballot. She said the Ignatieff people were drifting. Forty percent of the delegates still hadn’t committed to a second choice. Dion arrived to cheers and announced that their chances were good. “What do you think about that?” he asked, his schoolboy face beaming.