Party of One (6 page)

One of the reasons Stephen Harper was able to wipe out his opposition on the first ballot in the Conservative Party leadership, gaining nearly 70 percent of the vote, was that he had made himself into a thoroughly modern, professional politician. His years at the NCC had taught him that polling, marketing, and money were the holy trinity of the new politics.
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Seeking power was no longer a matter of debating with honourable gentlemen over great issues, but a gruesome fight to the finish with no holds barred. Ross Perot made an observation that nicely captured Stephen Harper’s quest for power in the new techno-democracy the Republicans had forged, and which Harper embraced: war has rules, mud-wrestling has rules, but politics has no rules.

One of the problems conservatives have always complained about in Canada is the media. Whether it was the Progressive Conservatives, Reform, or the Canadian Alliance, they all believed that there was a left-wing bias in the news. Reflective conservatives such as Preston Manning thought it through more carefully. Manning concluded that the bias wasn’t just in the media but in
other major institutions in society like the university. Small “l” liberalism permeated society, from the politics of professors, to the interpretations of Canadian history, to the image of the military. If conservatives wanted to operate on a level playing field, they would have to come up with a way to institutionalize their own message the way liberals had so successfully done.

In the United States, think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute performed that function for the Republican Party. They began by offering counter-facts to the ones presented in the “liberal” news, which then became news. They created the impression that journalism was as partisan as politics. Such institutes could be just as potent in Canada, and nobody knew that better than Stephen Harper. These organizations take in approximately $26 million per year in Canada, with the Fraser Institute—a Harper favourite—commanding roughly a third of the market. Think-tanks here receive 30 percent of their income from corporations. By comparison, their counterparts in the United States draw just 10 percent of their budget from that source.

It is the ultimate “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” relationship. The corporations donate money in the expectation that their interests will be promoted. The “think-tanks” are set up as non-profit “research institutes” with no obligation to publish their list of donors or members. The US-based Donner Foundation gives money to the Macdonald-Laurier, Fraser, and C.D. Howe institutes in Canada, as well as to a group called the Frontier Centre. The Montreal Economics Institute, which pushed to make unions open their books to the public, receives 42 percent of its income from businesses. When the reports and studies of these think-tanks are made public, news organizations such as Sun Media,
The Globe and Mail
, and CanWest featured their work as hard news. It is a little like Noam Chomsky’s notion of manufacturing consent.
The stories go mainstream, but the institutions remain hidden behind their undisclosed donor lists.

Both the Fraser and C.D. Howe institutes have campaigned against the Canada Health Act, which was music to Stephen Harper’s ears. (In 2001, he had proposed to Alberta’s premier Ralph Klein that he get rid of medicare, the RCMP, and the Canada Pension Plan.) Almost all of these think-tanks on the right stand broadly for the same things: unencumbered operation of free markets, lower taxes on corporations, and privatized health care. Many of their donors are Canadian—people such as gold entrepreneur Peter Munk and the Weston family. But they are not the only source of corporate money.

The Fraser Institute also receives money from the ultra-right-wing Koch brothers of Wichita, Kansas, who run the secondlargest private company in the United States, with annual revenues of over $100 billion.
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The Kochs and their Conservative friends spent more than $383 million in the run-up to the 2012 US election. Non-profit organizations set up as trusts reduce public reporting requirements and disguise the flow of money from one group to another, creating layers of anonymity. These entities operate without the public knowing who is actually in charge. All told, the Fraser Institute has received over $600,000 from these politically active American neo-conservatives. Despite the source of their donations, all of these institutes don the same camouflage— the cloak of fierce independence.

The fountainhead of Canada’s right-leaning think-tanks (which also have their progressive equivalents now) was the fertile brain of Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian free-market thinker who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1974. Hayek came up with the idea of setting up organizations like the Fraser Institute to supply a steady stream of studies to demonstrate the superiority of free markets over governments when it comes to solving society’s problems.
Despite the fact that these organizations inspired by Hayek often serve the interests of business people and political parties, they register as charities and are permitted tax-free fundraising.

Stephen Harper addressed the thirtieth anniversary celebration of the Fraser Institute in 2004, sporting his silk Adam Smith tie. He liked the organization and came by his enthusiasm honestly. At the University of Calgary, he had studied the free-market philosophy of Hayek, the man widely credited with weaving economic and social conservatism together. Like Margaret Thatcher, Harper was a follower of Hayek and the Austrian school of economics—the supply side rules, interest rates have to be high enough to control the money supply, and debt is death. Hayek opposed the planned economy, both as a threat to freedom and an unworkable proposition.

Any attempt by the Canadian government to plan the economy was doomed to failure according to Hayek’s followers. Pierre Trudeau had created the Foreign Investment Review Agency, established Petro-Canada, and attempted to fix the price of oil with the National Energy Program. The result, Harper believed, had been stagflation and 20 percent interest rates. (Less ideological analysts might also have included in the list of causes a severe recession that hit the United States in the summer of 1981, provoked by the Federal Reserve’s restriction of the money supply to combat inflation, sending shock waves around the world.)

With no other rival for power inside the party, Stephen Harper began the work of transforming the Conservative Party of Canada into his own image, just as he had done with the National Citizens Coalition. In a speech to Civitas, a collection of conservative journalists, politicians, and intellectuals that was created after the 1996 Winds of Change conference in Calgary, he outlined how he would forge a new coalition of social and economic Conservatives:

Rebalancing the conservative agenda will require careful political judgment. First, the issues must be chosen carefully. For example, the social conservative issues we choose should not be denominational, but should unite social conservatives of different denominations and even different faiths. It also helps when social conservative concerns overlap those of people with a more libertarian orientation. . . . We must realize that real gains are inevitably incremental. This, in my experience, is harder for social conservatives than for economic conservatives. The explicitly moral orientation of social conservatives makes it difficult for many to accept the incremental approach. Yet, in democratic politics, any other approach will certainly fail.

Harper noted that changes to the conservative coalition risked the loss of some Red Tories, such as David Orchard or Joe Clark, but that it really didn’t matter: “This is not all bad. A more coherent coalition can take strong positions it wouldn’t otherwise be able to make—as the Alliance alone was able to do during the Iraq War. More important, a new approach can draw in new people. Many traditional Liberal voters, especially those from key ethnic and immigrant communities, will be attracted to a party with strong traditional views of values and family. This is similar to the phenomenon of the ‘Reagan democrats’ in the United States, who were so important in the development of that conservative coalition.” Family, crime, defence, even foreign policy driven by religious conviction were all theo-con weapons Harper would store in his arsenal for the looming battle to dislodge the Liberal hegemony. He was playing to the suburbs around big cities such as Toronto and Vancouver, which he believed were full of people whose social values made them natural Conservatives: Chinese, Koreans, Jews, Italians, Vietnamese, and Somalis.

Harper was set to recalibrate the conservative movement with a direct voter campaign that, if successful, would replace the Liberals as the voice of these ethnic communities, particularly around the Greater Toronto Area. His general in this critical battle was Jason Kenney, who, like Harper, had been president of a third-party lobby group—the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Kenney backed the Iraq War and once compared Hezbollah to the Nazi Party. Harper’s most important focus, lifted directly from the Republican playbook of President George W. Bush, was on forming an alliance between Canada’s Jewish community and the country’s 3.5 million evangelical Christians. A strange alliance indeed, because evangelicals believe that only those who have accepted Christ will be raptured up in the Second Coming, which, unless they convert, does not include Jews.

After taking over the Canadian Alliance, Harper’s views were reportedly influenced by neo-conservatives such as David Frum, then a speech writer for President Bush. Born Canadian, Frum emigrated to the United States and became a naturalized citizen. He was a member of the Canada Israel Committee and a board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition. Frum, like Harper, was a staunch supporter of the Iraq War, and believed with Donald Rumsfeld that the invading Americans would be welcomed by the Iraqis as liberators. He was a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute from 2003 to 2010. He co-authored a book with neo-conservative Richard Perle,
An End to Evil
, in which the authors defended the Iraq War and argued for similar attacks on Iran, Syria, and North Korea. They also wanted to completely abandon the Israeli–Palestinian peace process and have all Americans carry biometric identity cards.

When Harper went looking for help in writing his speech for the first Conservative Party of Canada convention on March 17, 2005, he called on David Frum. The carefully crafted speech was
a hit. Although Harper promised not to bring in legislation on abortion if elected, he added a crucial qualifier for the party’s social conservatives: “I will always allow all your MPs to vote freely on matters of conscience.” He denied Joe Clark’s statement that the Harpercons had a hidden agenda, and used humour, short sentences, and a teleprompter to get his points across smoothly. Arthur Finkelstein would have approved.

As foreign affairs critic, the born-again Christian Stockwell Day played a crucial role for the new party in building the relationship between the Christian and Jewish vote. Just as Reverend Tim LaHaye had helped Republicans, Charles McVety, the president of the Canadian Christian College, assisted the Conservative Party. Also linked with Frank Dimant, the executive vice-president of B’nai Brith Canada, Stephen Harper had two solid power bases for money, votes, and workers. Churchgoers were the strongest supporters of Israel. The Conservative Party caucus boasted a healthy contingent of evangelical Christians, including Stephen Harper, who is a member of East Gate Alliance Church.

Harper’s Republican-style coalition building began to bear fruit. Billionaire Gerald Schwartz, a respected leader in the Jewish community, shifted his allegiance from the Liberals to the new Conservatives. Schwartz had previously been an important advisor of Paul Martin, and a valuable fundraiser. In exchange for Harper’s unqualified support for Israel, a number of high-powered members of the Jewish community followed Schwartz’s lead, including his wife, Heather Reisman, and legendary film producer Robert Lantos.

Finally, in 2006, it all came together for Harper. Though personally above reproach, Liberal Paul Martin was caught in the undertow of the sponsorship scandal and the inquiry he had called to get to the bottom of it. Stephen Harper won a minority government with his new coalition. According to an Ipsos Reid poll done in April 2006, 64 percent of Protestant churchgoers, the majority
of them evangelical, voted Conservative in the January federal election of that year. It was a 24 percent jump over the numbers from 2004, when Paul Martin had eked out a minority government.

The Conservative victory was in every way a remarkable turn of events, not the least of which was the NDP’s joining with Harper to bring down the Martin government on a budget with much social spending in it. Until that moment, Canada had been a secular and progressive nation that believed in transfer payments to better distribute the country’s wealth, the Westminster model of governance, a national medicare program, a peacekeeping role for the armed forces, an arm’s-length public service, the separation of church and state, and solid support for the United Nations. Stephen Harper believed in none of these things.

Using Republican policies and strategies, and taking his advice from American super-consultants like Arthur Finkelstein and policy advisors such as transplanted American Tom Flanagan, Harper managed to ride to power on a base that he himself had earlier told
The Globe and Mail
was “similar to what George Bush has tapped.” Harper had shed his skin three times politically: Progressive Conservative to Reform, Reform to Canadian Alliance, and Canadian Alliance to Conservative Party of Canada. He had made clear along the way that he didn’t much like the Canada built by generations of politicians and public servants before him. In particular, he had no time for the country’s parliamentary democracy, much preferring the US system.

This perspective didn’t take long to show. On the day his government was sworn in, Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed Michael Fortier, who did not even run in the 2006 election, to his cabinet—just the way a US president does in the American system Harper so admired.