Oliver's Twist (38 page)

The Chrétien way was to blindside an opponent into the boards. This was not Ignatieff 's style, or at least not yet. In Question Period, he preferred statesmanship over feigned outrage. In policy discussions, he seemed at sea, waffling on his former hawkishness in security and foreign affairs, yet uncomfortable grasping the nettle of left-leaning Liberal social policy. Friends felt Ignatieff had reached a low point by year's end, when he and his wife took a Caribbean vacation and he wondered aloud to a colleague, “Why did I ever take this goddamn job?”

Ignatieff was not the only one asking that question. The old lion Jean Chrétien was restlessly pacing his cage at home in Ottawa. Chrétien murmured darkly to friends that he might have to pull a Trudeau and return to office to save the party. Fearing the Liberals might be headed for a serious collapse, Chrétien encouraged a move to get merger talks underway with the NDP and drew their former leader Ed Broadbent into the plot. The scheme blew up in their faces when some of Chrétien's former Cabinet members who were loyal to Ignatieff leaked it to me and other reporters. After that, Chrétien kept his doubts to himself but never stopped nursing his grievances over the party's failure to choose Bob Rae, the brother of his oldest political friend, John Rae.

Peter Donolo, who had served Chrétien faithfully for years, was embittered by his former boss's machinations, but remained undeterred. His idea for a turnaround was one of the oldest in the political playbook and fitted the moment perfectly. In the spring of 2010, Michael Ignatieff and his wife headed out on a nationwide bus tour. It amounted to a campaign rehearsal and a way of convincing the nervous Nellies in the Liberal caucus that
Ignatieff had the mental and physical stamina to lead them into the next election.

In visiting every corner of the country, Ignatieff discovered a Canada he had not really known, and equally important, he found his voice. As one of his travelling companions noted, the collective voice of the hundreds of Canadians Ignatieff met described the gap between their needs and the Conservative government's policies. The trip provided what Ignatieff had been missing: a way to articulate a clear distinction between Liberal and Conservative visions of the country. Someone who spent a few hours with Ignatieff that Christmas found him very different from the year before. He was serene, prepared to fight, and, if necessary, lose an election on his revivified perception of Canada and the role of its government.

Once he found himself comfortable on the centre left, Ignatieff also found the natural eloquence that had impressed his early admirers. For the first time he spoke with passion about the Canada that was being lost, and he began to sound and look like the leader the Liberals had sought years before. Sadly, however, Ignatieff had come too late to the party.

Everyone in the Conservative Party seems to know someone who was in the room when Harper told his strategy meeting before his first election win in 2006 that he needed three elections to finish off the Liberal Party for a generation. Before I am done, he is reported to have said, the country will be unrecognizable. In truth the Liberal Party's national profile had been shrinking before Harper pledged to destroy it. The old consortium of big
business and intellectual and cultural elites tied together by jobs and money and enjoying a docile press may have been fatally weakened even then, but did not recognize its own vulnerability. Harper saw it for what it was: an empty shell.

For the prime minister, however, timing was critical to the achievement of his dream. In late February 2011, Harper met with the NDP leader, Jack Layton, in his office across from Parliament Hill. The topic of conversation was the forthcoming budget, the terms of which could determine the fate of Harper's minority government. Threatened by widening Opposition accusations of dishonesty, the Conservatives did not want an election. Their strategy was to play for time while the economy improved and the parliamentary mood lightened, hoping to face a less combative Commons in the fall.

Harper and the team close to him, including Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, Chief of Staff Nigel Wright, and House Leader John Baird, were convinced that Layton did not want an election either. After all, he was recovering from both prostate cancer and surgery for a fractured hip. The session with Layton was amiable, reinforcing their impression that he was ready to deal, and they hurriedly designed a budget that included the concessions they believed would secure the NDP's support. Those measures, costed out at a billion dollars, embraced enhancements to both the Canada Pension Plan and the Guaranteed Income Supplement, and reintroduced a home renovation tax break. The Canadian Labour Congress urged Layton to take the deal. The Harperites felt confident. Asked whether he expected an election, John Baird surprised me with his certainty that there would be no spring campaign. “Layton really, really doesn't want one,” he assured me.

But when Layton saw an advance copy of the budget on March 22, he felt the government had come up short; in his view, the necessary programs were underfunded. It appeared the two men had been talking past one another. Layton announced his decision to defeat the budget, leaving Harper not only surprised but angry. With the Conservatives immersed in a tawdry scandal involving a former close aide to the prime minister, with senior party members facing charges of election fraud, and with his government about to become the first ever to be found in contempt of Parliament, the timing of the election could not be worse.

Ignatieff had been the target of the Conservatives' personal attack ads for two years and at last decided to seize the moment. He took great satisfaction in heading off the budget vote, defeating the government instead with a Liberal non-confidence motion denouncing its treatment of Parliament. Shortly after the government fell, Ignatieff, in a rather unstatesmanlike but feisty remark, observed to a friend, “They really are assholes.” Liberal strategists hoped they could turn the character of the Harper government into what pundits term a ballot question. If the election could be fought on the Conservatives' contempt for democracy and all that goes with it—lack of openness, divisive practices, and bullying tactics—the Liberals could move their numbers into minority-government territory at least.

The first weeks of the campaign were listless and largely uneventful, with the media's serious attention focused on Harper and Ignatieff. Layton aroused sympathy for the state of his health; expectations were adjusted accordingly.

Two months before the government's defeat, I'd met with Brad Lavigne, the NDP's national campaign director. He tried
to convince me that this time would be different for Layton, claiming that the party's private polls were showing the NDP had captured the allegiance of over 20 percent of voters in Quebec. Indeed, our contacts in Quebec had been reporting voter fatigue with the separatist Bloc Québécois for months. Those voters, said Lavigne, identified with the left-of-centre NDP issues, especially on Afghanistan, the environment, and social issues.

In 2008, the NDP had made the mistake in Quebec of running too hard against Harper. Quebecers wanted to defeat the Conservatives, but they didn't believe the NDP would have the national clout to do it. They turned once again to the Bloc. In 2011, the NDP strategy was to court provincial sentiments by persuading Quebecers that their best hopes for a comfortable berth within federalism lay with the NDP. The party ran a television ad featuring a frantic hamster on a wheel and a voice-over declaration that the separatist party was getting them nowhere in Ottawa. Other ads appealed to soft nationalists and played up Layton's roots in the province.

Layton's own efforts to modernize the party, jettisoning both its lofty intellectual and militant labour images, had started to show results. One staffer recalled asking Layton about a new gizmo he brought into a meeting shortly after becoming leader in 2003; soon they all carried BlackBerry devices. And no matter how often he was told it was a waste of time and money, Layton never neglected Quebec. The crowds in 2011 were modest at first, but there was a noticeable friendliness toward him that organizers could not miss. The party was helped too by a popular champion in the province, Thomas Mulcair, a former cabinet minister in the provincial Liberal government of Jean Charest. Running for the NDP in September 2007, Mulcair
won a by-election in the federal riding of Outremont, long a Liberal seat.

My own assignment was the prime minister's campaign tour, which I joined in early May. Members of his travelling press entourage were already grumbling; an incident from the week before especially rankled. Harper's campaign plane had departed for a trip to British Columbia on Easter Sunday, cutting into family plans for the holiday weekend. One of the correspondents asked a press aide if the prime minister could at least come to the back of the aircraft and say hello. He never came. Harper and his handlers were running a campaign that allowed for no unscripted moments with reporters or with the public.

Severe limitations were imposed on reporters' questions so as to avoid any distraction from the party's “economy and stability” message. Harper relied on a teleprompter to keep him resolutely on message, and his events were held before handpicked crowds of party loyalists. Attendees' identities were checked at the door lest ordinary members of the public try to sneak in, a procedure that was modified only slightly after the Mounties expelled two young women and an armed forces veteran under suspicion of having sympathies for other political parties.

The campaign's many facets had been organized as a seamless whole, with the candidate, the message, and the ads all tested and approved by focus groups and market research. The result was deliberately flat and uninspiring, totally devoid of spontaneity and paralyzing in its monotony. Columnists, editorialists, and reporters were almost unanimous in their judgment that the campaign's failure to connect with voters other than hard-core supporters would leave Harper short of his majority.

The Liberal plane, by contrast, offered a lively and
entertaining scene. Ignatieff did his Jerry Springer open mike routine every night to enthusiastic crowds. Shirt sleeves rolled up, mike in hand, he took questions on every conceivable subject for an hour or more. Too many questions, perhaps, and too many answers. By the end of a town hall blitz, reporters did not know what to write as a lead story. The message was mushy.

The Liberal leader was impressive by every standard, and his basic platform was credible; his promises of social programs, education, and pensions were viable and appeared to be fiscally sound. However, if it was such an impressive showing, why was Ignatieff not breaking through with Canadians? In an effort to rouse the voters from their torpor, he took a page from the Obama presidential campaign and its thematic chant, “Yes we can.”

“Rise up,” Ignatieff exhorted Canadians. His team could not understand why the public failed to respond to the charge that Harper was a threat to democracy. Yet it's hard to make an argument that democracy is at risk during an election campaign, which in itself is what democracy is all about. Nothing could be more democratic.

All the while, Harper was hammering home a single credo. He repeated the need for a “strong, stable majority government” so relentlessly that reporters took to chanting it to each other in unison. Canadians knew instinctively that the outlook for the global economy was murky, and Harper was saying, in effect, trust me because I am the only one offering safe harbour in troubled waters.

By mid-campaign, the Liberals knew their last hope lay in the national televised leaders' debates set for April 12 and 13. Ignatieff had to win them unequivocally. But over-rehearsed
and ill-served by memorized ripostes, he simply froze when Layton delivered a barb about his poor Commons attendance. On the national news that night, I judged that Harper had won the English debate by not losing it. He was steely calm, gathered within himself, and he refused to be drawn away from his standard economic speech by his tormentors. Jack Layton, having scored effectively in the English-language contest, was smiling and affable in the French debate the following night. Huge numbers of Quebecers were taken with his confidence, his car-mechanic French, even his personal courage, as many saw it, in campaigning with the support of a cane. The NDP was getting respect—and everyone's attention—at last.

Quebec was the catalyst for the final sprint to the finish. On the Friday night before election Monday, the private polls consulted by Conservative campaign chair Guy Giorno suggested his party was five seats short of a majority. The NDP was enjoying a dizzying surge in Quebec, raising the prospect of a slightly different coalition than the one Conservatives had railed against: an NDP-led minority government supported by a Liberal rump.

On the following afternoon, news crews from nine of the most influential local and network stations in Ontario were positioned in assembly-line style on the shop floor of a steel manufacturing plant in Brampton. Stephen Harper worked his way down the queue from one interviewer to the next, declaring that an NDP government would be a disaster for the economy of the nation's most populous province and rekindling memories of the ill-fated NDP provincial government under Bob Rae.