It may not be politically or personally possible for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to open up to the media in a relaxed and informal fashion, writes Michael Den Tandt. Photo: Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press Can Stephen Harper change? Should he?
Since as early as 2007 this question has been a perennial favourite among political observers. Commentators, me included, have often suggested that the Harper government could be more successful than it is if this prime minister only tried harder to be nice. He could begin, we often say grumpily while covering his trips (during which access to the man is parcelled out like very, very small candies at Halloween), by being friendlier with the media.
But that may be all wrong. Harper’s mania for message and image control may be the only reason he has survived as long as he has. If that’s true, he certainly knows it, and is unlikely to meddle with the recipe. Maclean’s magazine’s Paul Wells argues this, essentially, in his fine 2013 book, The Longer I’m Prime Minister. Though grudgingly and with occasional relapses, I have come around to Wells’ view.
What, then, to make of the extraordinary recent interviews given by former prime minister Brian Mulroney, timed to the 30th anniversary of his 1984 landslide victory, in which he lists various ways in which Harper could freshen and broaden his appeal and, implicitly, bolster the Tories’ chances of re-election next year?
The most striking thing about these chats, both on CTV with Don Martin and on CBC Radio with Evan Solomon, was their frank, critical tone. On a succession of big, important files – from climate change, to the PMO’s relations with the Supreme Court, to engagement with the United States, to the refusal to convene an inquiry into murdered and missing aboriginal women – Mulroney offered rebukes, all the more stinging because of the dulcet tones in which they were delivered. It was difficult not to see in this an element of payback, for the way in which Harper set Mulroney on an ice floe in 2007, as the Karlheinz Schreiber affair blew up, and gently shoved him out to sea.
Mulroney’s analysis will ring true for many of Harper’s critics, though, precisely because it bolsters the old opposition narrative: that Harper’s foreign policy is too stridently pro-Israel; that his government’s handling of climate change has been inexplicably inept; that his engagements with the media are needlessly contentious; that he is a control freak; that he is vindictive, contemptuous of institutions other than his own office, and doesn’t like people much. Whether by design or not, Mulroney has given Harper’s detractors a vivifying jolt of new material.
But there’s another side, which is simply this: The Prime Minister may be doing the best he can with the tools he has, and given the political context in which he’s operating. It may not be politically or personally possible for him to open up, engage routinely and in relaxed fashion with reporters, or set a bold new course on the environment. It may not even be possible for him to stop picking losing battles with institutions such as Elections Canada or the Supreme Court. If that’s true – and I suspect it might be – then we are in for more of the same as Parliament resumes, as opposed to any kind of new approach.
With respect to message control, as Wells points out in his book, Harper’s method grew out of painful experience, during which his plans were repeatedly foiled because of bozo eruptions by members of his caucus. In the Reform and Canadian Alliance years, reporting these became a kind of sport for the gallery. And, at the least misstep or unusual beat, it still is. It is all but miraculous that the PMO managed last year to contain the anti-abortion revolt within the Tory caucus, and prevent open warfare between the party’s social conservatives and libertarians. That could not have been done without message discipline.
Harper personally, meantime, is simply not comfortable in informal engagements with reporters, both because he’s afraid of having an idle remark blow up in his face and because casual banter is not his forte. His recent Arctic tour was a case in point; the informal portion of the agenda was restricted to five minutes on the aft deck of a Canadian navy ship, on one day. Had Harper felt able to do more, without risk, one has to believe he would have.
With respect to the environment, as I wrote during the tour, the Harper Tories are behaving in the Arctic as a government would if it believed carbon emissions were warming the planet. But they may not be in a position politically to say so out of deference to their donor base, which is sharply right-of-centre and, probably, climate-skeptical. By the same token, every seemingly pointless battle between Conservatives and the media, or academics, or democratic institutions, is fodder for a fundraising mail-out. Populist politics, or more precisely populist, small-sum, broad-based fundraising such as we now have in Canada, feeds on partisan brush wars.
The upshot? Observers, including pundits, editorial boards and former Conservative prime ministers, can say all they like that Harper should change his ways. Did Mulroney change, in year nine? Did Jean Chretien, or Pierre Trudeau? There are reasons why they don’t. The most important may be that they can’t.
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