White Paper: Assessing the Harper Government
Stephen Harper came to power in 2006 promising more open, transparent, and accountable government. By 2010 the head of the parliamentary press gallery and eight other Canadian journalism associations criticized the prime minister and his government for lack of openness and for highly partisan message control.
“We’re saying this is similar to propaganda,” press gallery president Hélène Bertuzzi said to The Hill Times on June 21, 2010. “Propaganda,” she continued, “is all about not providing information, just providing messaging so people have no choice but to believe you. And that’s currently what the Conservative government is doing. They’re blocking information and therefore people cannot make their own judgement call on policies. That’s very stressing for democracy.”
Bertuzzi and other media critics such as Jeffrey Simpson, Jim Travers, and Lawrence Martin amassed a long list of grievances they saw as indicative of a hyperpartisan and overly controlling prime minister: cabinet scrums rarely happened; cabinet ministers rarely did in-person interviews; government backbenchers were tightly scripted over what they could say to the media, if they were allowed to say anything at all; all media requests for information had to be vetted by the PMO; all government announcements came to be subject to “Message Event Proposal” scrutiny, whereby the PMO screened and controled them for maximum political advantage; access by MPs to government documents relating to the Afghanistan mission was tightly controlled, leading to a ruling by the speaker of the House of Commons that the government was in contempt of parliament; and public servants acting as whistleblowers found their professional integrity attacked by ministers.
Jonathan Rose, a political scientist at Queen’s University, referred to Harper as the prime minister with the tightest control over information of the last decade or more (The Hill Times, June 21, 2010, 4), and Green Party leader Elizabeth May asserted as early as 2007 that “this is the most secretive, top-down government we’ve ever seen” (Toronto Star, July 31, 2007).
These points have been echoed by pollster Nik Nanos: “Some Prime Ministers naturally allow and enable others to have profile and to exercise decision-making, and others tend to be tighter on that. I think it would be fair to say that the Prime Minister is frugal in terms of sharing the levers in the decision-making process.... What’s clear is that although the Conservatives might have won the election with the intent of being more transparent and open, the necessities of governing and trying to stay in power have forced them to exercise a level of control that I’m sure on some days they’re even uncomfortable with. But it’s the reality of trying to stay in power and the reality of trying to manage political risk” (The Hill Times, June 21, 2010, 4). Even Conservative Party historian Bob Plamondon, in the same Hill Times feature, highlighted Stephen Harper’s darker side: “I think his personality, relative to other leaders and his predecessors, is to be somewhat more authoritarian.”
Commenting on Stephen Harper’s leadership style as of July 31, 2007, Les Whittington wrote in the Toronto Star, “The Prime Minister continues to be the government’s spokesperson on most issues. As they have for a year and a half, cabinet ministers remain largely in the background, forced to clear all important announcements with the PMO. To limit unscripted comments to the media, cabinet meetings are kept secret so that ministers are not tempted to even talk to reporters afterwards. And behind closed doors, there’s little difference. Harper holds court and ministers are wary of saying anything that might challenge his point of view, say government officials who have attended the sessions.”
And Kevin Libin, assessing Harper’s leadership traits for the National Post on June 10, 2010, noted similar dynamics: “If the prime minister seems to you like a ‘control freak’ as he’s been lately called, if the entire Conservative party of Canada appears to be, as some say, ‘undemocratic,’ there is an awfully good reason for it: it works.” Libin proceeded to report the ideas of Tom Flanagan, a University of Calgary political scientist and a close confidant of Stephen Harper. “Tales of hyper-prime ministerial control,” Libin wrote, “like those this week about Message Event Proposals (MEPs) that show the Prime Minister’s Office to be obsessively in command of nearly every word produced by every minister, backbencher, bureaucrat and diplomat, may offend some Canadians’ sense of democracy. At that, Mr. Flanagan offers the dispassionate shrug of an academic: politics has never been perfect; this is how successful parties do it these days.... ‘It’s all part of the cost of election readiness’, says Mr. Flanagan. He calls the Conservatives a ‘garrison party’, comparing it to Israel: always on high alert, the government and military shoulder to shoulder. ‘You’re constantly under threat, you have to be ready to defend yourself by military means at any time.... The party and the campaign team become virtually synonymous, the party’s function becomes to support campaigns. Which means getting volunteers and raising money and supporting local candidates, but doesn’t leave much time for other stuff that parties used to do’—namely, developing policies.”
While the language here is a bit extreme, the point that the Harper government in its first five years was in permanent partisan campaign mode—led by a prime minister who insisted on tight control of both major and minor details of policies, programs, and communications emanating from his government—resonates with most journalistic and academic assessments of his style of government, both in these early years as well as during the time of his single majority government from 2011 to 2015.
Was he defeated in 2015 more because of his conservative policies or his commandeering style? Or both?
