Party of One (54 page)

But after winning his majority, Harper did succeed in making a major change to the role of the auditor general that diminished
the office and reinforced the government’s chokehold on public information. In the previous Conservative minority governments, the auditor general had been actively engaged with parliamentary committees—in particular, the Public Accounts Committee. After the 2011 election, Fraser made written offers to continue the practice but was greeted with a terse “No thanks.” As the committee system and the bureaucracy became steadily more politicized, Fraser thought that her independent input was needed more than ever. Invited or not, she decided to do something about it, especially when politicized bureaucrats began stretching the truth. “There were a number of committee meetings where deputy ministers were called in but not the auditor general,” Fraser told me. “I would have to put up my hand as an observer to ‘clarify’ what the deputy ministers were claiming as fact.”

If Sheila Fraser was becoming skeptical of the Harper government’s commitment to openness and transparency, the list of reasons was long and growing. She had watched as colleagues such as the information commissioner tussled with the Treasury Board over budget requests. Fraser herself was turned down when she wanted to do a major audit across the entire government. “No one in government wants a ‘systemic audit across government,’ which would reveal how the broader system is working and what best practices might be,” she commented. “You can’t pick them up with a transactional audit. But the government refused funding.”

As her experience with the Harper government accumulated, Fraser became increasingly aware of a much graver development— the breakdown in parliamentary traditions and safeguards. It was evident in things both large and small. At the Public Accounts Committee, the practice had always been for the Opposition to ask the first question. That privilege was usurped by the government. The Harper government also worked assiduously to shut down debate as quickly as possible. It moved committee proceedings
behind closed doors, where members could not talk about the content of the in-camera sessions. The intention was information control, and the first casualty was public debate. And another big blanket was used to suffocate the free flow of information: the shadow of the PM’s department, the Privy Council Office, fell across every decision. In Stephen Harper’s Ottawa, all roads led back to the prime minister. Those who worked most closely in the system, including Sheila Fraser, were appalled. “This government has the worst record on time allocation issues
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of any government I have seen. It is becoming a charade,” Fraser told me. Time allocation, limiting debate to a specific period of time, reduces the role of the opposition in debate and puts more power in the hands of senior management in the PMO. The executive gains more control at the expense of parliamentary debate. Even government members are silenced if they have questions about a particular measure.

The Harper PCO also vets all government decisions, even ones that were once made by individual government departments. Fraser said, “There are very few things where a decision gets made without vetting by the Privy Council Office. There was a time when individual departments could decide certain matters on their own. The Harper government has replaced that with a system where everything must now be vetted by the PCO.”

Nor had Sheila Fraser ever seen an administration so willing to use the crushing power of incumbency against individual civil servants who traditionally operated at arm’s length from government. Distinguished public servants, from former Statistics Canada chief Munir Sheikh, to former parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page, had felt the lash of the government’s public displeasure after speaking out to oppose certain measures. And other victims had been on the receiving end of the government’s political wrath. Fraser knew the backstory of what really happened to the former chair of the Nuclear Safety Commission, and was alarmed at how
Linda Keen, an exceptionally able public servant, had been driven out of office in January 2008. “What happened to Linda Keen put a chill through the federal system. This was not about Chalk River. This was about a government flexing its muscles at the ‘independent’ head of an agency,” she said.

Beyond individual cases of abuse, Fraser was concerned about the clear and present danger that the Harper government’s legislative approach represented to Canada’s democracy. A striking assault was being mounted on the traditions of Parliament, which was actually paralyzing the institutions by which Canadians were governed. Though Fraser had seen many improvements in the AG’s situation over her career—including increased powers, better audit personnel, and personal immunity from lawsuits—the authoritarian reflex of the Harper government was as unmistakable as the deliberate suppression of public information. “Parliament has become so undermined it is almost unable to do the job that people expect of it,” Fraser asserted. “A glaring example is the budget bill, where there was no thoughtful debate or scrutiny of the legislation. And the legislation was massive, much of it with little to do with the budget.”

The government had pushed through omnibus budget bills containing non-budgetary measures such as overhauls to employment insurance, old age security, food safety, immigration, fisheries, and environmental assessment laws with little or no scrutiny or debate. Many people saw this as dismantling the progressive state and social safety net that had been built over the last forty years. Bill C-38, introduced in March 2012, amended sixty different laws, repealed six, and added three more, including a rewritten Environmental Assessment Act. It drew protests even in Calgary.

The government used the bill to cut the budget to Environment Canada and gutted the regulations. The Navigable Waters Protection Act (NWPA) of 1882, considered Canada’s first
environmental law, was changed to the Navigation Protection Act (NPA). The focus now is to protect navigation rather than navigable waters. Under NWPA, roughly thirty-two thousand lakes were protected. Under the new NPA, just ninety-seven lakes are protected, most of them in Conservative ridings. (Sixty-two rivers and three oceans are also protected under the NPA.) The rest of the waterways, an estimated 98 percent of the rivers and lakes in Canada, no longer have federal protection.
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Under the new act, construction of dams, bridges, and other projects would be permitted on unprotected waterways without prior environmental approval. The National Energy Board is now responsible for the oversight of navigable waters and fish related to pipeline and international power line crossings. Grassroots Conservatives at the riding association level wrote letters of concern to their members. The list of protected species was shortened, and the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act was abolished. Parliament in effect rubber-stamped the Harper government agenda by passing the 425-page bill after a marathon session on June 13, 2012. Bill C-45, introduced in the fall, was more of the same.

The former farm girl from Dundee was not the only parliamentary insider who was beginning to worry about the direction Canada’s democracy was taking.

A
S
IDYLLIC
RETREATS
go, Peter Milliken’s cottage on Hurds Lake is something special. The lake itself is deep, spring-fed, and crystal clear. The cottages that dot the heavily wooded shoreline are well spaced and private, but the one belonging to the longest-serving Speaker in the House of Commons history is splendidly aloof. A fifteen-minute boat ride gets you from the mainland to Milliken’s Island, where the owner is the lone human inhabitant. All along the route, Milliken relatives wave from their docks, tanned and relaxed as characters from an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

The vintage cottage in the heart of Greater Madawaska near Renfrew is a transplant. Set back from its wooden wharf, encircled by trees, it was “pulled over the ice” from its original location 2.5 kilometres down the lake after Milliken bought it in 1971. Milliken asks me to carry a box of wine to the cottage. A quick peek at the labels makes me choose my steps very carefully—any one of the bottles could have caused excitement at Sotheby’s. Inside the building is an enamel and stainless steel woodstove that vents through the roof. The musk of family history is as strong as the old-wood smell of the cottage itself.

The walls are festooned with Milliken’s grandmother’s oil paintings, many of them depicting Peter frozen in the childhood of long-gone summer days. While my host gets me a beer, I stop for a moment in front of one painting where he is again the subject—a cosseted boy of seven or eight lounging in bright blue pajamas. Resting in the rafters is a gleaming red canoe—symbol of Milliken’s lifelong passion for extended paddling expeditions in Canada’s Far North. Outside, down a path through the woods, is the privy—on its door, a hand-carved sign that always wins a smile from visitors: “The Leaker of the House.”

Like Sheila Fraser, Peter Milliken came from a large family— the eldest of seven siblings. His father was a doctor in Kingston, and the family had roots going back to the United Empire Loyalists. From the beginning, politics intrigued him. At sixteen, he was already a subscriber to the official record of the House of Commons, Hansard. His route to public life followed a rigorous path of higher education, with stops at Queen’s, Oxford, and Dalhousie Universities. While at Queen’s, there were intimations of his future: he served as Speaker of the Student Government’s Assembly. In 1973, he was called to the bar and eventually became a partner in the well-known Kingston law firm Cunningham Swan Carty Little & Bonham.

The Liberal Party could not have found a better candidate to run against Progressive Conservative legend Flora MacDonald in the 1988 “free trade” election. Milliken’s community credentials were blue-chip—respected lawyer, trustee in his church, a governor at Kingston General Hospital, and member on the board of the Kingston Symphony. Although the Mulroney Conservatives won a majority that year against John Turner’s Liberals, Milliken bested MacDonald by nearly three thousand votes and became his party’s critic for electoral reform.

Soon afterwards, Milliken was named to the parliamentary committee that dealt with elections, privileges, procedures, and private member’s business. He came into public life with an extensive knowledge about parliamentary procedure dating back to his boyhood fascination with Parliament; after just a few years as an MP, he became a formidable expert. In January 2001, after five gruelling ballots, Milliken was elected Speaker of the House by a vote of all MPs. It was the beginning of a remarkable four terms in the Speaker’s chair. On October 12, 2009, he officially set the record for the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Commons in Canadian history.

From their first meeting, Milliken found Stephen Harper to be distant and taciturn, traits the Reform MP shared to a degree with Pierre Trudeau but without the Liberal icon’s engaging intellect. “Harper wasn’t a big personality and didn’t make much of an impression,” Milliken told me. “The truth is I can’t remember him very well. He was not a friendly guy, he was standoffish and aloof. He was not one of those guys who wanted to be friends.” Even after Harper became prime minister, Milliken observed that he was almost never seen outside the House of Commons: “You rarely see him at parties. He doesn’t drink and that may be part of it.” In Milliken’s experience, about the only place you might “run into Harper” was at state functions—Rideau Hall, military
awards, or foreign receptions. When Milliken was sworn in as a privy councillor, the prime minister and the deputy clerk of the PCO showed up. It was something of a Quaker meeting. No personal conversation took place and no congratulations were offered. “I had good office-to-office relations with him,” Milliken recalled, “but no personal relationship. Zero.”

There was another oddity. As Speaker of the House of Commons, Milliken had become concerned over the bitter atmosphere in Parliament. In an effort to temper the often crude political jousting, Milliken thought it would be a good idea to provide a forum where the contact between MPs could occasionally be social rather than political and adversarial. So every Tuesday evening in the Speaker’s dining room, Room 216, Peter Milliken hosted get-togethers. “I held Speaker’s dinners for all MPs and leaders,” Milliken told me. “The idea was to get people to know each other, to not be so partisan. . . . The tenor in the House of Commons today is more caustic than it has ever been in my experience. . . . Harper never accepted one of those invitations.”

The prime minister was no better at extending invitations than he was at accepting them. The Speaker of the House of Commons is the fifth-highest officer in Canada’s parliamentary pecking order, yet when Prime Minister Harper entertained at home, Peter Milliken was never among his guests. “As Speaker, I was never invited once to a reception at 24 Sussex. In fact, there are not many parties at this PM’s house. That’s a real departure from Chrétien and Mulroney. Once or twice a year, they did major entertaining at the PM’s residence.”

One of the things that Speaker Milliken had become famous for was hosting lunches at Foreign Affairs whenever a departing ambassador was in need of an official farewell. His speeches were erudite, his toasts witty, and the man who could also sing like an angel from years in two choirs in Kingston was much sought after
in the diplomatic community—at least until Stephen Harper moved into 24 Sussex. Milliken found it “amazing” that the prime minister showed no interest in diplomatic matters, an aversion he expressed by sending junior officials to host those lunches on the upper floor of the Pearson Building. Milliken observed that Harper’s comfort levels were highest with people who often had the least experience and the least to offer: “I find it shocking these people have been at times so inexperienced and incompetent, but seem to enjoy telling seasoned public servants with decades of experience what to do.”

In a career full of drama and history-making events, including casting more tie-breaking votes in Parliament than any other Speaker (five of the ten such votes since Confederation were his), Peter Milliken will go down in history for a series of rulings he made that went to the heart of the powers of Parliament and so to the heart of Canadian democracy. Yet remarkably it was met with public indifference. In the first one, rendered on April 27, 2010, he addressed a point of privilege, having to rule whether Parliament had the right to send for persons, papers, and uncensored records, and whether government had the obligation to provide them. The Opposition had demanded documents on the transfer of Afghan detainees into the hands of local authorities who may have tortured them; the government had stonewalled. Milliken decided that parliamentary privileges had been breached.