Party of One (56 page)

After becoming prime minister, Stephen Harper continued to court Robert Marleau. The approaches were deft, discreet, and persistent. The first came in the summer of 2006, when senior personnel from the PCO informally asked Marleau if he would participate in an open competition for the job of information commissioner. Marleau respectfully declined. A few weeks later, Marleau received a phone call from Margaret Bloodworth in the cabinet office. She extended a breakfast invitation. Bloodworth explained that she was calling at the prime minister’s request. The offer was straightforward. Harper wanted Marleau to become interim information commissioner for a six-month term under the statute. Administrative “renewal” in the office was needed, along the lines of what Marleau had already brought about as privacy commissioner

It was a tricky matter. Marleau knew better than most that reform was needed in the government’s Access to Information office: he had faced similar issues as privacy commissioner. But he also knew that six months was not enough time, as he put it, “to change anything.” Once other public servants learned of the term of his proposed posting, they would simply wait him out. Marleau was also concerned about Stephen Harper and his relationship with the institutions of government. He remembered how Harper had made clear that he believed the system was against him: a Liberal Senate that would limit his actions as PM, an interventionist Supreme Court that would challenge his policies, and a Liberal-appointed public service that would only reluctantly implement his plans.

In the end, Marleau signed on for a seven-year term with a mandate to deliver a legislative renewal package for Canada’s Access to Information office. To clean house and come up with something better was no mean task, not with more than five thousand information requests in arrears to work through the system. But the experienced public servant set clear conditions on the deal, some of which were not public at the time. His appointment was to have the unanimous support of the House of Commons and the Senate. It was also agreed in advance that he would not complete a full seven-year term—a detail known to both the prime minister and the PCO. Instead, after putting a legislative proposal to Parliament and arranging a succession plan for a new commissioner that the government “could not easily manipulate,” Marleau would be free to leave whenever he wished: “I always leave posts at the time of my own choosing. . . . Saw too many egos go bust on the steps of the Centre Block.”
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Robert Marleau had many reasons for serving only two years of a seven-year appointment—the principal one being that a partial term had been the plan from the beginning. But other
considerations contributed to hastening his departure. Because of the resistance he felt from the Harper government to the kind of change he thought was needed, Marleau came to the conclusion that the remaining years of his seven-year appointment would be “given over to advocacy at a disputatious level, rather than doing the main job.” So what might be in dispute? Playing well with others. Marleau thought “relationships” were needed to improve information flow, including the kind of partnerships he proposed before committee, which I asked him about. “When you mention my committee hearing comments on the need for government to have relationships with Parliament, the public and the media, I have to say there is no relationship under this government. All of those relationships have regressed. House committees are prevented from travelling the country; witness selection for committee appearances is done behind closed doors in in-camera meetings.”

The feeling in the air was that Stephen Harper did not much care for Parliament. As Marleau put it, “When his government was found in contempt, Harper treated it like a minor, partisan irritation. Parliament is now a minor process obstacle.” For a lot of Ottawa’s most experienced deputy ministers, a malaise had set in; it was so intense that many of the most senior public servants opted for early retirement. This was not because of the government’s policies, which they were prepared to implement as professional public servants. It was because of the way the prime minister related to parliamentary institutions. A circling of the wagons had occurred in Harper’s Ottawa that left the impression you had to be onside to be on the inside. Paranoia, not the promised perestroika, ruled.

Remarkably, the very man Stephen Harper courted to become his information commissioner arrived at the conclusion that the prime minister had “done nothing to improve transparency and information flow.” Not that the Liberals had done much better when they were in office, but the Conservatives’ Accountability
Act promised better days for access, starting with the duty it created for deputy ministers to “assist” information seekers in their access to information applications. The new rule was supposed to have been “when in doubt, give the requester the benefit and disclose the information.” With few exceptions (the Department of Justice under Deputy Minister John Simms had a five-star access rating), it just didn’t happen.

This was partly because deputy ministers were “very unhappy” with their statutory duty to assist. They feared that if things went south on a request, that part of the legislation would expose them to blame. But the greater reason was that the public service had seen that the Harper government not only lacked a commitment to greater access to information, it was in fact the most secretive information regime the country had ever known. Silence was not just golden; it was Stephen Harper’s platinum standard. Harper said all the right words, but that was where his commitment to making information available came to an end. “It is no longer a trickle of information coming down from the top; it’s shut off,” Marleau noted. “In 2006, it was at first a fog over information in Ottawa, a fog over communications. Now, in 2013, there is a fear over information release and a black hole over communication. A foggy night in Newfoundland has turned into a dark night in Nunavut.”

What troubles Marleau most about the suppression of information under Stephen Harper comes down to four simple words: “Government spending goes unverified”—a stiletto through the heart of Canada’s parliamentary democracy. The Harper government creates new programs but suppresses their costs. It makes substantial cuts at the departmental level, but the details of what services are affected are kept secret. It proclaims policy without white papers or a word of debate. The late finance minister Jim Flaherty would bring in a budget but wouldn’t table the Planning
and Priorities report to show how the funds would be allocated. Not even Canada’s parliamentary budget officer can penetrate the darkness. “The Harper government botched the Parliamentary Budget Office by putting it in the [Parliamentary] Library and then not giving it the resources to do its job. In particular, the role of the PBO in the estimates process should have been spelled out clearly in the legislation,” Marleau told me.

It was a subject he had thought about. Marleau had drafted an ingenious system to improve the way agents of Parliament and the Treasury Board worked together. Under the old system, budget estimates went to the Treasury Board and it was “something like going into a black hole.” The estimates came out again as decisions, but the decisions were offered without explanation. Marleau worked out a “preview system” so that the Treasury Board’s agents and officers of the House of Commons could better discuss relevant issues. If the parties couldn’t agree in direct discussions, there was an all-party panel that acted as a kind of dispute-resolution body. Since neither party wanted to end up in front of the panel, the system worked “exceptionally well”—as long as the budgetary demands fit the government’s fiscal framework. Stephen Harper ended the practice. Marleau made a last-ditch attempt to brief the then Treasury Board president, Vic Toews, about the advantages of a better relationship between officers of Parliament and the Treasury Board, but “it went right over his head.”

In conjunction with another development under the Harper government—the clear politicization of the clerk of the Privy Council and the PCO—this lack of cooperation between officers of Parliament and the Treasury Board made for a deadly combination. Canada’s chief public servant, Wayne Wouters, told an officer of Parliament operating under his statute that he couldn’t have budgetary details required to support the work of parliamentarians. Now it was not secretive politicians saying no to a legitimate
request for public information; it was the top civil servant in the land. “When the clerk of the Privy Council says to a parliamentary officer, ‘You can’t have public information you need to do your job’ that is a political action,” Marleau told me.

Like his colleagues, Sheila Fraser and Peter Milliken, Robert Marleau sees a quiet and destructive revolution taking place under the nose of a country seemingly in a trance. “I see a government that is dismantling, piece by piece, a Canadian mosaic that in a small way a lot of us here helped to build. It is happening behind people’s consciousness of it, without the knowledge that it is happening. Canadians are sleepwalking through dramatic, social, economic, and political changes surreptitiously being implemented by a government abusing omnibus bills and stifling public and parliamentary debate. . . . We operate under Westminster rules—an honourable understanding that you will play within the rules and by the rules. Mr. Harper has not played within the rules. Having attained absolute power, he has absolutely abused that power to the maximum.”

eighteen

DELAY, DENY, AND DIE

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May 10, 2012, with the expansive lawns of Parliament Hill turning green under a warm spring sun behind him, renowned war artist Allan Harding MacKay tore up four original pieces of his art.
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A few days earlier, he had destroyed another piece of artwork on CBC TV’s
Power & Politics
. The artist, who has more than seventy works hanging in Canada’s war museum and other public collections, called it a “lone wolf ” protest against the treatment of veterans by the Harper government. “I absolutely feel vets have been abused,” he told me. “They are given a one-time paycheque to deal with a lifetime of injury.”

It didn’t seem possible that the Conservative government could ever be criticized for its treatment of the military. During the Afghanistan War, it had promoted the highly successful “Support Our Troops” campaigns, and many Canadians began wearing red on Fridays. Stephen Harper admired, and did not hesitate to deploy, Canada’s soldiers, sailors, and pilots. When he was a member of the Official Opposition, Harper had wanted Canada to go to war in Iraq, and had abjectly apologized to Americans
after Prime Minister Jean Chrétien refused to join in the invasion. As prime minister, Harper committed Canadian forces to topple Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in March 2011, and was proud of the fact that a Canadian led the NATO mission. The Harper government had spent $850,000 on a November 2011 flyover to mark the end of the Canadian mission in Libya, where the only casualties were Libyan. Retired general Lewis MacKenzie told me, “The trouble with that victory fly-past in Ottawa, which reminded me of Bush and the ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech, is we don’t really know who we ended up supporting in the end. Now the warring has started again between the Libyan factions.”

Stephen Harper had always been quick to turn to the military option with a less than perfect understanding of the issues. In the middle of peace negotiations by the major powers aimed at persuading Iran not to develop a nuclear weapon, Harper all but gave his approval for a military strike against Tehran—even withdrawing Canada’s ambassador. Most recently, while other countries struggled to find a diplomatic solution to the bloodletting in Ukraine, Stephen Harper dispatched six Canadian CF-18 fighter jets to bolster Western forces in the event of a shooting war with the Russians. He also sent a series of belligerent messages to Russia’s czar-like leader Vladimir Putin. Harper would rather join a NATO mission than a peace mission. Like the men and women of the military, he too was a man of action. At a Toronto fundraiser in late May 2014 for Tribute to Liberty, a monument to the “hundred million souls” who were victims of Communism, Harper criticized Putin’s expansionism and militarism that threatened global security. He repeated his support for Ukraine: “We feel this pain so acutely because nearly one quarter of all Canadians were either held captive by communism’s chains or are the sons and daughters of those who were.”
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The prime minister’s interest in all things military, especially the pomp and circumstance, is in part inherited. After he won the
leadership of the Conservative Party, Harper was asked by CBC’s Peter Mansbridge who had been the most influential person in his life. He answered without hesitation, “my dad.” His dad was in turn influenced by his father, Harris Harper. Harris was only twelve when the First World War began. But while attending normal school,
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he served in the militia as a sergeant in the Seventh Battalion Canadian Machine Gun Corps in Fredericton, New Brunswick. When he became principal at Prince Edward School in Moncton, he established a cadet corps and moulded the members into prizewinning marksmen. They practised their shooting in the basement of the school—on the girls’ side.

June LeBlanc, then June Thurber, was in Harris Harper’s gradeseven class. She told me he was a strict disciplinarian who once gave her the strap for talking in class: “Mr. Harper ran the school like the army. We marched into the building in pairs to the beating of drums. Twice a week, he drilled us around the schoolyard. If you got out of step, he’d tap you on the ankle with his baton. On the coldest winter days, he had the grade six and seven kids run the grade ones around the schoolyard.” But Harris Harper was not all marching and manliness. June remembered him teaching the girls Irish dancing and square dancing. And on bitterly cold days, he personally drove home all the youngest students from grades one to four. “I don’t know how he did it, he must have gotten home at 7 p.m.,” she told me. And she remembered one other thing about her teacher: “He was not a bad looking man. Looked like Diefenbaker.”