Neocon Canadian PM has turned himself into Brian Mulroney. EEK!

[Grimmlok]

Does all this remind you of anyone you know?

Fie on the voters is Harper's message

Feb. 11, 2006. 09:49 AM
THOMAS WALKOM


Stephen Harper must be grimly amused. For years, the know-it-alls have been telling him to jettison the ideological principles of his old Reform party and opt for pragmatism. But now that the new prime minister has revealed himself a pragmatist — in the Brian Mulroney sense — he's getting hammered for lacking principles.

That's just one of the rich ironies surrounding Harper's intriguing decision this week to appoint both a Liberal MP and an unelected political crony to his new Conservative cabinet.

"Superficial criticism," he sniffed when asked about the palpable anger among voters in the British Columbia riding of Vancouver Kingsway, who were reacting to news that David Emerson — the man they elected under the Liberal banner just 19 days ago — had defected to the Conservatives in order to get a plum cabinet job.

"I think I was clear what I did and why I did it," Harper said when asked about his equally controversial decision to appoint unelected Quebec Tory backroomer Michael Fortier to the Senate and make him public works minister. In Canada, public works is traditionally the major dispenser of pork-barrel contracts to ridings deemed worthy of government largesse.

Back in Alberta, the home of the Reform party that first brought Harper to national prominence, there is some dismay.

"I have misgivings about anyone who starts compromising principles on Day 1, especially to accommodate Quebec," said Link Byfield, former publisher of the now-defunct Alberta Report newsmagazine.

Byfield, a standard-bearer for Alberta's ultra-conservative right, is also a senator-in-waiting — one of four elected two years ago under a provincial law in the hope that a prime minister would eventually appoint them to the Senate.

To Harper's western supporters from the old Reform party, an elected Senate is the Holy Grail of Confederation — the only mechanism by which less-populous provinces like Alberta can counterbalance a House of Commons dominated by the much more numerous voters of Ontario and Quebec.

Until this week, it seemed that Harper shared this credo. Certainly, he's always espoused it — most recently in the just-completed election campaign when he promised to appoint to the Senate only those duly elected in their respective provinces.

With his Fortier decision, Harper did not just break this promise. He drove a stake into the heart of the Reform wing of his own party.

But then Harper was never much interested in the democratic and populist elements of Reform. As his biographer Bill Johnson points out, Harper viewed Reform primarily as a vehicle for introducing a Margaret-Thatcher style neo-conservative revolution to Canada.

Then, as now, he preferred the company of politicians who would do what he wanted done rather than those who simply reflected the wishes of their voters. To Harper, the voters are more often than not wrong. How else to explain their insistence on electing Liberal governments all these years?

So, for him, the decision to woo a freshly elected Liberal MP into his Conservative cabinet was a matter of common sense. He liked the cut of Emerson's big-business jib. He wanted someone who could settle the softwood lumber dispute with the U.S. in a way pleasing to the country's major forest companies. Who better than a former forest company CEO?

As for the voters of Vancouver Kingsway: Fie upon them and their superficial criticisms. They'll get over their anger — particularly when their newly minted Conservative minister starts to deliver lavish federal grants to Vancouver.

Perhaps Harper will be proved right in the end. Voters can have notoriously short memories. Vancouver's Board of Trade is already salivating at the prospect of one of its own in the new cabinet. Montreal's La Presse thinks it's just fine to have an unelected cabinet member ministering to the needs of the Quebec metropolis.

Indeed, Harper is following a grand Canadian tradition. This country's leaders have never been overly concerned with the niceties of democracy. Like so many of his predecessors, Harper is merely trying to put in place a coalition of convenience based on government patronage and privileged access to Ottawa's hefty bank accounts.

And this, surely, is the richest irony. In 1987, Stephen Harper broke away from the Conservative party because he viewed as both untenable and undesirable the coalition of convenience between the West and Quebec that had been put together by then-prime minister Brian Mulroney.

Now, 19 years later, Harper is busy recreating that same coalition. He not only uses Mulroney's strategies and Mulroney's advisers. He has become Brian Mulroney.

[pacific breeze]

Next thing you know he'll be affecting an Irish accent and singing "Danny Boy" with Dubya!