Genevieve Simms
How’s Harper’s record so far?
Is Stephen Harper Canada’s worst ever prime minister?
Even to ask such a question of course assumes that some criteria exist by which to answer it. Otherwise it amounts to little more than a game of personal or partisan preference.
Fortunately at the end of the last century various Canadian historians and writers sought to set out the relative merits and achievements of the nation’s prime ministers. Right Honourable Men by Michael Bliss and Prime Ministers by J.L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer offered a professional assessment of our leaders while George Bowering’s Egotists and Autocrats and Will Ferguson’s Boneheads and Bastards provided more colourful report cards.
Looking back at these works two things stand out.
First the passage of time itself lends certainty to judgment. The reputations of Sir John A. Macdonald Wilfrid Laurier and William Lyon Mackenzie King have ridden out their critics over the years and now seem unassailable. No surprise then that they’re the only three leaders to rank as “greats” in Granatstein and Hillmer’s survey.
By the same token perhaps it’s no coincidence that Canada’s post-1945 leaders fare less well. Only Louis St. Laurent Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Trudeau rate better than average; John Diefenbaker Joe Clark John Turner Brian Mulroney Kim Campbell and Jean Chrétien fall within the categories “average” “low-average” or “failure.”
Second there is no real agreement as to how these rankings should be made. Ferguson’s and Bowering’s respective divisions into boneheads/bastards and egotists/autocrats may be provocative but are hardly exhaustive. Few prime ministers fit exclusively into any single characterization.
For their book Granatstein and Hillmer polled the opinions of two dozen other historians and suggested general considerations such as “electoral success national unity success in achieving domestic or foreign policy goals and leadership in cabinet party and country.” On this basis however those prime ministers who served only one term inevitably placed lower than those with longer records
Nevertheless it does provide a basis for comparison. With that back to Stephen Harper.
Harper has now been prime minister of Canada for 20 months — longer than many of his predecessors — and on that basis it’s fair to include him among the judged. Will he go down as one of the “also-rans” of Canadian history or will he overcome the millstone of leading a minority government and carve out a lasting legacy?
Here’s an interim assessment.
1. Electoral success. Harper once argued that the Liberal Party retained power only through a dysfunctional political system and a divided opposition. That’s clearly also true of his own Conservative government elected in 2006 with 36 per cent of the popular vote and just 124 of 308 parliamentary seats. Yet the fact remains that Harper has done little to persuade Canadians that his party — crudely vilified by Paul Martin’s Liberals in the last election — deserves to be trusted with any sort of majority. Even Harper himself just last week warned that an election right now would almost certainly result in another minority government.
2. Domestic policy. The primary purpose of governments is to pass legislation. Minority governments unless they form a working coalition find it difficult to do so. One way around this difficulty is to secure issue-by-issue support from opposition parties but the patchwork of legislation that results invariably satisfies no one not least those who voted for the government party in the first place.
Harper’s record of domestic legislation is meagre combining a few crumbs to reassure his own bedrock of support (opposition to same-sex marriage a proposal to raise the age of sexual consent scrapping plans to decriminalize marijuana use etc.) with a handful of measures to appease opponents (reaffirming the Kyoto protocol recognizing Quebec nationhood refusing to reopen the debate over abortion etc.).
Frustrated by this legislative deadlock Harper last week declared that if opposition parties vote in favour of the upcoming throne speech on October 16 they should also support any individual legislation that it proposes. “We must be able to govern” he told reporters. “It’s only a reasonable request.”
Harper is probably safe in calling this bluff as no federal government has ever been defeated over a throne speech. But at the same time his comments throw new light on his understanding of democracy not as an unfolding process in which the loyal opposition has not only the right but also the responsibility to hold governments to account at every stage but as a once-and-for-all victory. Following Harper’s own argument there really is no need for Parliament to reconvene at all.
3. Foreign policy. Fairly or not this can be reduced to one word: Afghanistan. Harper may have inherited the current mission from the outgoing Liberals in 2006 but he has made a dogged dedication to the cause all his own.
The dangers of this narrow-minded vision are obvious. If Canada’s presence in Afghanistan is right and necessary then the proposed withdrawal of troops in February 2009 — whether or not Afghanistan has been “stabilized” by then — is wrong. At the same time if international altruism is our guiding principle then there are numerous other countries we should be sending troops into right now. Zimbabwe Sudan Nigeria and Burma come readily to mind but I’m sure there are many more.
In short Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan is not the outcome of any “foreign policy” at all it’s just something we happen to be doing.
To sum up whether in terms of legislative achievement operation of a parliamentary minority or dedication to the ideal of democracy Harper can be viewed as one of the worst prime ministers in Canadian history.
Of course should he win the next election this verdict may fairly be discarded as so much rubbish. But for now there’s little to reason to imagine that the name of Stephen Harper will trouble future historians for more than a paragraph or two.
