No aspect of responsible government is more fundamental than having the trust of citizens. Canadians’ faith in the institutions and practices of government has been eroded. This new government trusts in the Canadian people, and its goal is that Canadians will once again trust in their government. It is time for accountability.
—SPEECH FROM THE THRONE, 2006
Harper’s critics say he has eagerly adopted the Alberta provincial tradition of attacking enemies with torches and pitchforks. The Wild Rose province does have quite a history: the tradition builds on the foundation laid by Bible Bill Aberhart, a schoolteacher and amateur preacher who went into politics during the Great Depression. He became convinced that a quack economic theory—based on inflation and fiat currency—could solve Alberta’s and Canada’s economic problems. Social Credit offered free money, printed by the provinces, as a sort of dividend that would stimulate the economy. As a theory, it was harmless enough and might have even done some good, but in practice, it was illegal. Only the national government can print money. Aberhart’s government went after Ottawa and the big eastern banks, along with Toronto- and Montreal-based corporations, framing them as the enemies of Albertans. They were “rats, sons of Satan, liars, fornicators,” according to the premier.
Aberhart was years ahead of his time in his dealings with the media. His government passed a law forcing the province’s papers to print government press releases and giving the government wide censorship powers. This law was needed, he said, because the media was “the mouthpiece of financiers” that printed “their spurious articles” from their “mad dog operations” to promote “privilege, lawlessness and gangsterdom.” The Supreme Court and the Judicial Committee of Britain’s Privy Council threw out that law, and Alberta weeklies and dailies collectively became the only Canadian newspaper to win a Pulitzer Prize for political writing.1
Alberta has, through much of its history, been dominated by conservative parties. Some, like Peter Lougheed’s 1970s government—which launched the current Alberta Progressive Conservative dynasty—have imitated the middle-of-the-road managerial system that worked so well for Liberal and Tory politicians in Ontario, at both the federal and provincial levels. However, Alberta politicians have tended to latch on to the more aggressive tendencies of the American right. The confrontational styles of Newt Gingrich and the Tea Partiers are now embedded in Alberta conservatism as it sidesteps from the centrist politics of the Progressive Conservatives to the populism and corporatism of the Wildrose movement.
Harper adopted the Alberta way of politics with the enthusiasm of a convert. He had started off as an Ontario kid who admired Pierre Trudeau, but, by the 1990s, became convinced, as had Aberhart, that Eastern Canada was out to pluck the West. Had Harper never been elected prime minister, he might have been remembered as an advocate for a “firewall” around Alberta, and for spouting off about the Maritimes’ supposed “culture of defeat.”
Alberta’s us-and-them political culture is well suited to people who don’t like other people. Harper’s mentor, Tom Flanagan, a far more personable man than his most famous student, says Harper has a “Nixonian” view of politics. Harper “believes in playing politics right up to the edge of the rules, which inevitably means some team members will step across ethical or legal lines in their desire to win for the Boss.”2
Alberta-style politics does not fit the rest of Canada. To tailor the approach to the political cultures of British Columbia and Eastern Canada, neo-conservatives had to use U.S.-style think tanks, political action groups and grant-giving foundations to put some intellectual clothes on it. And once they led the way, left-wing Canadians copied the template, so now the country is awash in people professing economic, environmental and social justice expertise working for important-sounding organizations that are often no more than shells.
Tasha Kheiriddin and Adam Daifallah, two bright and personable neo-conservative easterners who helped redefine Canadian conservatism in the early years of this century, were loud proponents of the think tank system that has existed in the States since the 1960s. The think tanks don’t just do research of varying levels of quality and objectivity, they also provide stables of quotable “experts” to the media. Some of these experts become pundits in their own right. They, through their access to the media and the cachet that’s given to their expertise, can change the language of politics, and, in doing so, the way people think. Kheiriddin, a lawyer, gave them some suggestions: “For the Liberal terms ‘medicare’ and ‘public health care’, substitute ‘state health care monopoly’; for the Liberal ‘social services,’ substitute ‘government programs’; for the Liberal ‘investing tax dollars,’ substitute ‘spending taxpayers’ money’; for the Liberal ‘budget surplus,’ substitute ‘amount Canadians were over-taxed.’”3
The Fraser Institute has arisen as one of the country’s most successful think tanks, and its research—often of inconsistent quality, and almost always agenda-driven—is used without much questioning by most of the Canadian media. The Fraser Institute has copied Florida businessman Dallas Hostetler’s Tax Freedom Day and picked up many other American crusades. At the same time, it has attacked the Canadian medicare system for its wait times, with the suggestion that a mixed or, even better, private health care system would be more effective. The Fraser Institute has also pressured the provinces to return to back-to-basics education, using headline-grabbing school rankings.
When Canwest bought the former Southam papers (large dailies in Montreal, Hamilton, Windsor, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver, among others) from Conrad Black in 2000, Izzy Asper, the company’s president, was a member of the board of the Fraser Institute. Fraser Institute alumni working in the media include Fazil Mihlar at the Vancouver Sun; Danielle Smith, a columnist at the Calgary Herald before becoming leader of the right-wing provincial Wildrose Party in Alberta; and John Robson at Sun Media and CFRA radio in Ottawa. Other conservative organizations, such as the Donner Foundation, have worked to remake the Canadian political landscape and change the way Canadians see their own country. The Donner Foundation spent $2 million a year from its $200 million endowment to start and support right-wing think tanks.4 It also covers the cost of one of the country’s richest non-fiction book prizes.
The oil industry and the Harper government set up and paid for the Canadian School of Energy and Environment at the University of Calgary and a think tank called the Energy Policy Institute of Canada. The emphasis of the University of Calgary school was much more on energy than on environment. And the industry/government choice of manager and founder of the two bodies was interesting. Bruce Carson was a disbarred Ontario lawyer who had served two short stretches in provincial jails for fraud. He had also been bankrupt and, for some time, had been living with a young Ottawa woman who’d previously made her living as an escort and now ran a business selling clean water technology to Aboriginal reserves. Carson was a former senior policy adviser to Harper who had somehow cleared the security checks that are normally done on senior staffers. After he left government in 2009 to start and run the Calgary think tanks, Carson was a frequent visitor to Ottawa. It was there, in 2012, that he was charged with influence peddling and illegal lobbying on behalf of his girlfriend’s water treatment technology business.5 Two years later, he was charged again, this time with illegal lobbying and influence peddling on behalf of the oil and gas industry.6
Much of the lobbying and shilling is done on behalf of the oil industry. And in the oilsands, one of the largest foreign investors is the conglomerate owned by the Koch brothers, who are big financers of opponents of scientists who believe the climate is being changed by carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. In Canada, the oil lobby is headed by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, which has paid for pro-oilsands advertising campaigns and has hired mainstream journalists like Peter Mansbridge and Rex Murphy, at hefty speaking fees, to address its conventions and conferences.
But the biggest group of petroleum lobbyists sits on the government side of the House of Commons. A strong case can be made that Canadian oil is more ethical, at least from a human rights point of view. That argument, though, is used to push away legitimate environmental fears. As we have seen, the Harper government has effectively gutted environmental assessment of pipeline and other oil infrastructure projects. It has turned the intelligence agencies of Canada against environmentalists and First Nations that have gotten in the way, and has hammered its enemies in conservative media like Sun News and on the often vicious Tory blogs.
PETRO-STATES have one thing in common: they’re undemocratic. The fast, vast profits from oil seem to have a corrupting influence on countries that rely on them. In Canada, we’re seeing that corrosion in Alberta, where political discussion is limited to right and centre right, the media is weak, and all political and media leaders circle the wagons when outsiders like Neil Young and Bishop Desmond Tutu say the oilsands are an ecologic disaster.
Taken to the extreme, the Harper government has built a system of attack ads and personal slurs in Parliament against anyone who threatens the regime and its backers in Alberta. The boundary between personal and political lives has been broken down, and anyone is fair game to be insulted, humiliated or branded a thief or a traitor, no matter how much they love the country and how hard they have worked to serve it.
This system exists to crush anyone who emerges as a threat to the neo-conservative vision of Canada. It has been used to destroy Paul Martin, Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, and has been turned loose on Justin Trudeau. In 2013, retired Canadian Gen. Andrew Leslie, who went to work for the federal Liberals, felt its sting for billing the government to move him into a new home in Ottawa. Leslie had used a perk that’s offered to all military personnel. Members of the Canadian Forces are allowed the full cost of one last household move. Usually, the move gets soldiers, sailors and air force members out of isolated places like Cold Lake, Alberta, and Gagetown, New Brunswick. It was seen by Forces personnel as a sort of bonus and thanks to military families for years of putting up with frequent moves.
Leslie lived in Ottawa when he retired. His children had grown up and moved out, and he wanted to downsize. So he took advantage of the benefit, using it to cover the cost of selling his old house in Ottawa and moving a few blocks to a home that suited his needs. Legally, he was solid. Politically, it left him in the crosshairs of members of a government that had never, until that point, gone after soldiers who had asked for their moves to be paid. Tory Defence Minister Rob Nicholson was just settling into the job when he launched his attack on Leslie, who had suddenly morphed from a respected general to a Liberal political hack in Torytalk.
“Expense claims for Liberal Defence Advisor Andrew Leslie’s in-city move appear grossly excessive. As such, I will be asking the Department of National Defence to examine how an in-city move could possibly total over $72,000. In the meantime, it is important for Andrew Leslie to explain why he believes this is a reasonable expense for hard working Canadians to absorb,” Nicholson said in a statement. “This is a matter of judgment and the responsible use of taxpayer dollars.”
Leslie fired back: “I knew when I signed on to be an advisor to Justin Trudeau that I would be subject to partisan attacks and scrutiny very different than other retired soldiers. I can take it. I have been shot at by real bullets. What is disappointing is that this particular attack may raise questions over a military retirement benefit and I do not think veterans deserve to have another measure called into question.”
Generals can usually stand up to this kind of smear. It’s more difficult for ordinary people who are targeted for joining a cause and speaking out against Tory government policies. Conservatives tried to crush Native activist Cindy Blackstock. She was the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, hardly the sort of thing most governments would find particularly threatening. Blackstock was surprised and perplexed when she was told that officials would cancel a 2009 Parliament Hill meeting on Aboriginal child welfare if she was in the room. Ontario First Nations chiefs wanted her at the meeting because she is an expert in child advocacy. Blackstock filed a request under the Privacy Act and received 2,500 pages telling her what the Harper government knew about, and thought about, her.
Bureaucrats in the Justice and Aboriginal Affairs departments knew a lot about her professional and personal life. They had been following her Facebook and Twitter accounts. And they seemed to have a fine time using that information to mock her in emails that circulated among publicly paid officials. “Our girl’s on a roll,” one bureaucrat wrote in an email. Another talked about “our dearest friend Cindy Blackstock …”
Nothing about Blackstock, a member of the Gitksan First Nation in British Columbia, seemed too insignificant for officials in the two departments. They even passed around and commented on recipes Blackstock had posted on Facebook. Ten public servants shared an email about Blackstock’s appearance at a public event that included the smarmy comment: “Day One opened with the Cindy Blackstock show, a tour de force that seems to fire up a ready-to-be impressed audience … after this clever argument she rattled through some general statistics (or gave the impression of doing so) and was whisked away to the airport.”
Twice, federal bureaucrats applied for and received Blackstock’s Indian status information. They made a copy of a post on her Facebook page written by a twelve-year-old Aboriginal child and commented among each other about an event Blackstock went to in the Australian desert. Digging through the stack of emails, Blackstock found that 189 senior officials from the Justice and Aboriginal Affairs ministries gathered information about her and shared comments about her life. She told the Toronto Star she was “shocked by the level of sarcasm and the nasty tone about me by people I’ve never met. These are officials employed by the government acting in the context of their official duties,” she said.
“It was so negative and deeply personal—and nobody ever appeared to ask if it was appropriate.” Blackstock believes she hit the Harper government’s radar when her child advocacy organization and the Assembly of First Nations filed a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in 2007. The group argues Aboriginal children across Canada get less money for education and social programs than non-Native kids.7
In 2012, she amended the Human Rights complaint to include the information about the government’s stalking and mocking, saying she would donate any penalty payment to charity. And the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network promised to broadcast any Human Rights Tribunal hearings that may be held to adjudicate Blackstock’s complaint. The government’s decision to harass a critic who advocated for more federal money for Aboriginal schools seems petty and mean. The way it carried out its invasion of privacy and shared her personal information in juvenile emails can hardly be considered a great moment in reconciliation between the Government of Canada and the First Nations.8
BLACKSTOCK IS NOT ALONE. The Harper government also tracks many other Canadians’ social media comments on sites like Facebook and Twitter, YouTube, chat rooms, message boards and blogs in both English and French. The Public Works Department pays for round-the-clock, “real-time analysis of social media content,” with the ability to “target key influencers found in blog commentary and social conversations,” and includes analysis of the “sentiment or tone of posts,” according to contract bid documents released in the fall of 2013 by the government.9 The government tracks the posts of top influencers at blogs and chat rooms and the comments sections of online publications. Public Works Canada also has an Electronic Media Monitoring Program that tracks mainstream broadcasters and print media for other government departments.
But the really big guns are saved for institutions, because the only way the Harper regime will make lasting changes to this country is by destroying the reputations of organizations, agencies and government departments that act on behalf of Canadians. In 2008, Ezra Levant was brutally frank with his blog readers when he told them to “denormalize human rights commissions in the court of public opinion.” Levant was complaining about the hate speech laws enforced by provincial and federal human rights commissions, saying that investigations and hearings into complaints against him, Maclean’s magazine and author Mark Steyn were punishment-by-process and attacks on free speech.
It was clear Levant wanted the commissions gone for good. He hoped the publicity from his fight with the Alberta Human Rights Commission and his defence of a libel suit filed by former Canadian Human Rights Commission lawyer Richard Warman would “ensure that the excesses of the commissions are in the news every day for years, showing them to be the un-Canadian institutions they have become.”10
This type of recasting of institutions into villains has been fairly successful. Conservatives across Canada accept the idea that somehow human rights commissions are out of control and should be abolished, despite the fact that the cases against Levant and Steyn were thrown out by provincial human rights commissions, and the federal body refused to investigate the complaints at all. It would have been interesting to see Levant’s reaction if he had lost.11
Hate speech complaints make up a minuscule number of cases dealt with by the federal and provincial human rights commissions. Most of their work involves people who have been hurt by discrimination based on colour, religion, gender, disability or country of origin, but it would be hard to convince Canadians that, say, nannies from the Philippines should no longer have government protection. Better to cast a lawyer or a magazine as victims, and Muslim activists as bullies, in league with rogue bureaucrats to muzzle Canadian conservatives.
In this bizarre world of attack politics and delegitimization of opponents, enemies lurk everywhere. Before the 2013 cabinet shuffle, Erica Furtado, one of the prime minister’s advisers responsible for issues management, sent a memo to political staffers in ministers’ offices telling them to make lists of troublesome bureaucrats and “enemy” stakeholders. The checklist of ten items included “bureaucrats that can’t take no (or yes) for an answer,” and “friend and enemy stakeholders.” The lists were put into the binders that were distributed to new ministers and members of cabinet who changed jobs.
Someone in a minister’s office leaked a Prime Minister’s Office order to make the lists, which were essentially a blacklist of public servants and stakeholders, sending it out to several Parliament Hill reporters. When staffers in one minister’s office objected to the exercise, they were labelled “politically unreliable” and cut off from further communications on the matter, one of the “unreliable” staff told Global TV news reporters. The network’s source said the stakeholder enemies included environmental groups, non-profits, and civic and industry associations who didn’t agree with the Conservative agenda. Staffers were also supposed to come up with an enemies list of reporters, but the PMO decided to drop the idea, much to the chagrin of reporters who hoped to be on it.
“I think it’s a little bit of paranoia at play,” said Megan Leslie, deputy leader of the NDP. “But really it is about control. It’s about making sure there is an absolute strangle-hold on these ministers, that they are not developing their own relationships, that they’re not working with groups or individuals that the government sees as enemies.”12
During the scandal over Bev Oda’s supposed doctoring of a government document to cut off aid to KAIROS, the religious group that opposed some aspects of Harper’s foreign policy, interim Liberal leader Bob Rae accused Harper of using unqualified young “jihadis” in his office to enforce the prime minister’s will throughout the federal government. The prime minister’s spinners turned the tables and accused Rae of being soft on terrorism and callous to the suffering of its victims. Rae stuck to his guns.
“If the 25-year-old jihadis in the prime minister’s office can’t control it, it doesn’t happen,” Rae explained. “That’s the pathology that affects everything that moves in this government. It’s a pathology. It’s terrible. This is a disease, this excess of control. This is a bunch. It’s a culture of people who are ideologically attuned in one area, who are fanatically loyal to what the prime minister is trying to do, and who are given responsibility far above their abilities.” Harper’s spokesperson Dimitri Soudas called Rae’s remarks “extreme comments that are insulting to victims of terrorism and jihadism.”13
EAGER STAFFERS exist in many governments, and they are always willing to do the bidding of this prime minister, just as some were willing to attack people who got in the way of Jean Chrétien.14 Young, bright, ambitious people are drawn to Parliament Hill, and many of them will do whatever it takes to stay there and move up the political food chain.
When Justin Trudeau held an open-air news conference near the Centennial Flame on the lawn of Parliament Hill in June 2013, just as the Senate expense scandal revelations were leading the news, Conservative Party interns and young staffers working in the Prime Minister’s Office, pretending to be ordinary tourists and voters, gathered around the Liberal leader to disrupt the event. The PMO gathered the interns and gave them protest signs quoting Conservative attack ad slogans, after getting a tip-off on Twitter that Trudeau would hold the news conference, where he announced several policies that would, he said, increase transparency in the House of Commons. The young Conservatives stood behind Trudeau as he read a statement on live TV. They left when the RCMP reminded them that they had no permit to protest or picket and told them how to apply for one. After reporters and Liberal researchers were able to identify six of the protesters as Tory interns, Jenni Byrne, the Conservative Party’s director of political operations (she would become deputy chief of staff in the fall of 2013), instructed the young people not to speak to the media.15
And it was likely a summer intern in Justice Minister Peter MacKay’s office who posed as a Liberal at a rural riding association meeting in May 2014 and taped Liberal MP John McKay talking about a potential Justin Trudeau “bozo eruption.” The Liberals had gathered to hear McKay talk about water quality, but an eager young man pulled McKay aside and chatted him up about Trudeau’s recent remarks about sex-selective abortions. McKay thought he was talking privately, but a recording of the conversation was handed over to CTV News.16
These jihadis have real power. In 2008, the limousine of Paul Dubois, Canada’s ambassador to Germany, was navigating the streets of Berlin, on its way to the radio studios of a big public broadcaster, when Dubois got a text message from Ottawa. The career diplomat, who had been in the German capital for four years, was en route to do a media interview about Canada’s relatively strong economy and its vibrant society. But the text, from the Prime Minister’s Office, told him to cancel the interview. There was no explanation. “Hell, we’re doing this interview,” Dubois later told the Toronto Star’s Rick Westhead. “It’s ridiculous. Most ambassadors cave in and just say no to speaking invitations now. It’s insulting to have to check your speeches with some 23-year-old kid in the Prime Minister’s Office. As a result, fewer people around the world know about Canada and Canadian values. Public engagement is so important.”17
Dubois was able to talk, but a report by the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute said Canadian diplomats are being forced by the activists in the Harper government to let the social media revolution roll past them. They can’t use Twitter or Facebook to explain what they do for Canadians.
The practice of international diplomacy is undergoing a revolution. As activists, private and public organizations, political leaders and mass publics embrace Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social media, foreign ministries have come under increasing pressure to update their operating methods. Many countries, including the U.S. and Britain, are now encouraging their diplomats to use social media as a regular part of their job—not simply as a virtual “listening post” to monitor political discussions, nor merely as a megaphone for broadcasting press releases, but as a forum for participating directly in these discussions. Foreign ministries that fail to adapt to the social media revolution will lose influence over time: they will forgo opportunities to shape public discussions that are increasingly channeled through social media, to correct errors of fact or interpretation in real-time, and to build networks of interlocutors and followers.
Canada is lagging far behind the U.S. and Britain in digital diplomacy. Aside from a few recent experiments, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) has largely sat on the sidelines of this revolution. DFAIT operates few social media channels and these channels tend to have few followers, compared to our two closest allies. Further, the Conservative government’s centralized control of public communications makes it virtually impossible for Canadian diplomats to engage in real-time substantive exchanges, which is the currency of the medium. Unless DFAIT joins its American and British counterparts in embracing new channels and methods of diplomacy, Canada’s voice will progressively fade in international affairs.18
When reality isn’t good enough, Harper’s jihadis have not been too proud to engage in fakery. Just days before the May 2011 election, a senior strategist offered Sun News a bombshell. And there was just enough truth in the back story to make it believable. Michael Ignatieff was a Harvard professor when the Iraq war was launched in 2003, and he had publicly supported the Bush administration’s reasons for invading Iraq. Five years later, when no weapons of mass destruction were found, Ignatieff joined the large number of politicians and intellectuals who said they had been duped. Harper, as leader of the official Opposition, had in fact also supported the invasion of Iraq, and demanded the Chrétien government back the American coalition. He even took that message to the United States.
Sun News’s vice-president, Kory Teneycke, was contacted by Patrick Muttart, the former deputy chief of staff to Harper. Muttart claimed to have damning information showing that Michael Ignatieff was a key player in the Bush administration’s planning of the invasion of Iraq. He had “proof” that the Liberal leader had worked at a U.S. forward military base in Kuwait helping State Department officials and American military officers plan the air and ground attack strategy for the invasion. Muttart also offered the biggest prize of all: a picture of Ignatieff in combat fatigues, brandishing an assault rifle, and posing with American soldiers, supposedly taken at Christmas 2002.
The man in the image looked like Ignatieff, but it was a low-resolution shot, and Teneycke needed a better-quality picture for the newspapers. He also wanted proof that the picture was taken when the Tory source said: December 2002. Finally, Teneycke received the higher-resolution picture. It had, indeed, been taken in December 2002, but it was also obvious that the man in the picture was not Ignatieff. Teneycke killed the use of the photograph, rather than go with an obvious error. Still, Sun News ran two stories. One, by Brian Lilley, repeated Muttart’s claim that Ignatieff had been very active in planning the Iraq war. The other, written by Sun’s owner, Pierre Karl Péladeau, was about Tory dirty tricks, including the bogus picture. In that opinion piece, Péladeau explained what happened:
Bad information is an occupational hazard in this business, and fortunately our in-house protocols prevented the unthinkable. But it is the ultimate source of this material that is profoundly troubling to me, my colleagues and, I think, should be of concern to all Canadians. It is my belief that this planted information was intended to first and foremost seriously damage Michael Ignatieff’s campaign but in the process to damage the integrity and credibility of Sun Media and, more pointedly, that of our new television operation, Sun News.19
The rest of the media picked up on the second story, and Muttart was dropped from the campaign.
In June 2013, PMO communications officer Erica Meekes sent the Barrie Advance newspaper details of a 2007 speaking engagement that had netted Justin Trudeau a $10,000 fee, but left Georgian College with a $4,118 shortfall. Trudeau had given the talk at the college before he was elected to the House of Commons.
The paper was told to quote a “source,” rather than the Prime Minister’s Office, when it used the material: “As a follow-up to the growing controversy over the weekend on Justin Trudeau charging charities for his speaking services, I have enclosed further materials that demonstrate the scope of this practice, cost on the organizations, and in many cases, poor outcomes and large deficits as a result of his speaking tour,” the email stated. “As discussed, these materials are provided to you on background, and should be attributed to a ‘source.’” Harper’s staff gave the small newspaper invoices, a poster for the Georgian College session, and a receipt for Trudeau’s stay at the Four Seasons hotel in Toronto.
Meekes, who would later become a spokesperson for Indian Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt, wrote to the Advance, “To be fair, there is an in-house yoga studio at the Four Seasons!” A reporter at the Barrie newspaper called the Prime Minister’s Office to ask why it had been sent the Trudeau documents; Meekes replied that it’s normal for the PMO to reach out to the media. She also suggested the Advance call local Tory MP Patrick Brown for on-the-record comment. When the paper contacted Brown, he said Trudeau shouldn’t get a free pass for Georgian College’s financial loss, despite the fact that it was the college, not Trudeau, that had arranged the event. “I don’t know why he wouldn’t do it for free even before he was an MP. He didn’t charge the Liberals to do speeches at their partisan events,” said Brown. “Why charge charities and not-for-profits, especially when they are losing money, based on his professional ability to draw crowds?”20
In 2009, Harper suspended Communications Director Ryan Sparrow and forced him to apologize for taking on Jim Davis, the father of a Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan. Sparrow claimed the grieving man’s criticism of the government’s Afghanistan policy, which he called “irresponsible,” may have been politically motivated. Sparrow had sent an email to Jenna Fyfe, a CTV News producer, saying Davis was a supporter of Liberal deputy leader Michael Ignatieff during the Liberal leadership race. Campaigning in the Montreal-area town of Saint-Eustache, Harper said, “I have set a tone and expectation for this campaign and I am going to make sure that it is followed all the way to victory.” Harper had previously apologized for Tory Internet ads engineered by Sparrow showing a puffin pooping on Stéphane Dion’s head—Dion had said the Liberals were hard-working, like the puffin—and another that showed Dion surrounded by bullet holes. Sparrow would go on to become a conservative media dial-a-quote and a lobbyist.
JUST WEEKS AFTER the 2011 election, people employed by a Toronto-based polling company run by Nick Kouvalis started calling voters in the Montreal riding of Mount Royal. Kouvalis is a controversial figure. He worked as Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s deputy campaign manager in 2010 and, later, as his chief of staff. During the 2014 Toronto mayoral campaign, he was John Tory’s chief strategist. Kouvalis was paid by the Conservatives to tell Montrealers that Irwin Cotler, a former justice minister, law professor and human rights activist, was planning to quit politics very soon.
In fact, Cotler wasn’t going anywhere. He was working hard to try to stop the Harper government from ramming through its tough-on-crime legislation. “The calls didn’t happen accidentally, they happened at a time when I was most engaged as an MP in matters that Conservatives most cared about, for example, the crime bill,” Cotler said. They were an attempt to draw him back to Montreal to protect his political base. When asked about the loaded poll meant to sway public opinion, called a push-poll, Kouvalis said, “We’re in the business of getting Conservatives elected and ending Liberal careers. We’re good at it.”21
Seven complaints of professional misconduct were launched against Campaign Research Inc., the company owned by Kouvalis. “The actions of Campaign Research have likely caused the Canadian public to lose confidence in marketing research and have tarnished the image of the marketing research profession,” a three-member panel of the Market Research and Intelligence Association said. They voted to censure the polling company.
Cotler rose in the House of Commons months later and asked Speaker Andy Scheer to rule that the fake polling was an attack on his ability do his job as an MP.22 Tory House leader Peter Van Loan called the Tories’ tactics freedom of speech. Cotler didn’t buy it. “This defence that it is somehow a matter of free speech, that to me was one of the more absurd attempts to defend this odious practice. We have laws in this country against lying in order to protect the right to a fair trial, we have laws in this country against misleading advertising in order to protect consumers, we have laws against defamation in order to protect people’s standing and reputation,” Cotler said.
The Conservatives admitted they were behind the calls. They owned up to hiring Campaign Research to “identify” possible Tory supporters, but they had told the call centre to say there were “rumours” but nothing more. Scheer ruled he was “entirely sympathetic” and there was “no doubt that he had been bombarded by telephone calls, emails and faxes from concerned and confused constituents,” but he didn’t believe that these “reprehensible” tactics caused Cotler “great difficulty” carrying out his duties.
“I am sure that all reasonable people would agree that attempting to sow confusion in the minds of voters as to whether or not their member is about to resign is a reprehensible tactic and that the member for Mount Royal has a legitimate grievance,” Scheer said. But, concluded the young Tory Speaker, “Canadians contacted this way should be more wary and judge more critically any information presented to them by unsolicited callers. After studying the precedents in these matters, I am not able on technical ground to find that a prima facie case of privilege exists in this case.”
Cotler told reporters outside the House of Commons that Scheer was wrong. “I think that the judgment, his judgment today, his ruling was mistaken, both in relation to the facts, in relation to the principles, in relation to the precedents, in relation to the law on breaches of privilege,” Cotler said, adding there was ample precedent for the Speaker to rule in his favour.23
Harper’s brain trust also hired former Montreal city councilor Saulie Zajdel to work for the prime minister and made him the Tories’ “shadow MP” in Cotler’s riding. He was advertised as the go-to person for people in Mount Royal who needed help with problems involving the federal government. In June 2013, Zajdel was charged, along with acting mayor Michael Applebaum, with bribery, breach of trust, fraud and corruption for offences allegedly committed while Zajdel was still on the Montreal council.24
The Tories have also gone after their old whipping boys, the unions. One private member’s bill introduced by a Tory backbencher would force unions to divulge the salaries of their staff members. But the big guns were trained on the unions that represent federal public employees. The sweeping changes to the Public Service Labour Relations Act in the 2014 budget implementation bill surprised and shocked the people who run the public sector unions. Union leaders said Tony Clement, whose Treasury Board negotiates wage deals with federal government employees, never let on that he was planning to change the bargaining rules.
Ron Cochrane, who has negotiated many deals between the government and its unions, told Kathryn May of the Ottawa Citizen that he had never seen such radical changes to the bargaining system. “This bill removes any semblance of fairness in collective bargaining,” he said. “[Clement] has taken every caution to make sure that no matter what happens, he will win. He has stacked the deck in his favour and that is unheard of in labour relations anywhere. And it will be pretty hard to fight an employer that stacks the deck against you … This has become a game of cards where [unions] don’t get any cards. The employer holds the deck.”25
A GOVERNMENT CAN ATTACK its critics and even its own employees. It can hide public information and prevent elected members of the national legislature from understanding how the people’s money is spent. Those things are frightening enough, but there’s no greater assault on democracy than denying people their right to vote.
Conservatives in the United States pioneered vote suppression. The Canadian right has begun to mimic its American heroes, who have worked for decades to manipulate voters and voting rules to keep poor people, blacks and immigrants from voting.
Keeping opponents away from the ballot box, either through legal means or trickery, is an important part of North American right-wing strategy. Radical right strategist Paul Weyrich told fifteen thousand conservative ministers and preachers in 1980, “I don’t want everyone to vote. Elections are not run by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they aren’t now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”26 Winning elections is not just about door-knocking, advertising, and making sure your supporters get out. “Sometimes,” one California Republican strategist said, “vote suppression is as important to this business as vote-getting.”27
In Canada, robocalls are the most famous vote suppression strategy. It’s unfortunate that the Canadian media did not come up with a better name for the scandal that was uncovered in the 2011 election. People get robocalls all the time, mainly from tour companies, insurance sellers and cable TV corporations. They’re annoying, but they’re not illegal. Vote suppression robocalls are a different thing altogether. They’re designed to trick people into not voting. In Canada, callers told people that their polling station had moved to a distant location. That was one of the more simple kinds of robocalls.
In Canada and the United States, all parties use robocalls to some extent. They’re mainly bought, at a very cheap rate, from call centres to advertise on behalf of candidates and attack opponents. People all over Canada got robocalls in the 2011 election campaign reminding them to vote. Barack Obama and John McCain both used robocalls in the 2008 presidential election.
In the United States, sleazy robocalling is now common in elections. Many of these calls are quite sophisticated and sometimes comical: candidates impersonating each other, calls made in the middle of the night to deliberately infuriate voters, calls with fake caller ID numbers that make them appear to come from an opponent’s campaign. Vote suppression robocalls are supposed to keep people away from the polls. Mainly, they’re used by Republicans, although Hillary Clinton did use them during her campaign against Barack Obama in the 2008 primaries.28
In 2012, voters who signed a recall petition to force a new election for governor of Wisconsin got an interesting phone call. The robocaller told them that, since they’d already made their feelings known by supporting the petition, there was no need to vote in the recall election.29 In November 2010, more than a hundred thousand people in predominantly Democratic and African-American areas of Maryland got calls telling them not to bother voting in mid-term congressional and local elections because the Democrats were going to win anyway. A soothing voice told them to “relax.”30 (The ringleader behind the calls was convicted of vote fraud, but the more surprising fact is that the calls cost just $2,000.)
Latino voters in Los Angeles were targeted with robocalls in 2010 telling them to make sure they got out and voted on November 3. The actual election was on November 2. Voters in Louisiana, Maine and New Hampshire got phone calls telling them to vote online instead of showing up at polling stations. They were directed to websites with bogus applications for absentee ballots. Not only were the websites decoys, but they were also set up to gather information about the people who fell for the ploy.31
In the 2011 election, Canadians started getting vote suppression robocalls. Quite likely, robocalls sending people to the wrong polling place were just part of a plan to play fast and loose with people’s right to vote. At least one polling station was in the clubhouse of a gated community. Four polls in Willowdale, Ontario, where Tory Chungsen Leung took the seat from Liberal Martha Hall Findlay by 932 votes, were placed in the Willowdale Lawn Bowling Club, even though there is a public library and civic centre two blocks away. (The Tories won three of those polls by more than 400 votes). In Mississauga East, Ontario, four polls were tucked away on the second floor of a mammoth grocery store, above a deli and sushi counter. Conservatives won three of those polls. In 2006, Liberal MP Mark Holland had swept six polls in Ajax–Pickering, Ontario, that were placed in a high school. Five years later, the Tories handily won the same polls, which were now moved to the evangelical Forest Brook Church.32
Then there are voter ID laws, which Canadian opposition politicians fought ferociously during the debate on Harper’s Fair Elections Act. These laws have been used to make sure thousands of voters, mostly poor and minority citizens, do not vote.
In the United States, some academics have called the practice of using ID rules to monkey-wrench the system “vote caging.” The practice goes back at least as far as the 2004 presidential and congressional elections. The goal is to prevent as many people as possible from voting for your opponent. Often, this form of vote suppression is artfully done.
Take, for example, the registered letter campaign that supposedly identifies people who have moved away from an electoral district but, in fact, does much more. Here’s how it works: the team backing a candidate sends registered letters to a large number of people living in areas where most people vote for their opponent. Invariably, a lot of these letters are returned. Some people have moved. Some aren’t home when the letter carrier comes and don’t bother going to the post office to pick up the mail. Some people know that demand letters from creditors and bill collectors come as registered mail, so they won’t sign for them. Sometimes, especially in poorer neighbourhoods, letter carriers don’t try too hard to get registered mail into the hands of people.
The names of the people whose letters are returned are put on what are called caging lists. The candidate gives the list to the poll clerks. The people on the list will be challenged when they show up to vote, and will have to show a lot of identification and proof of residence. But here’s where the real art of the thing comes into play. Not only will the people on the caging list find it difficult to vote, but so will the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people stuck in long lineups as each person on the caging list is forced to show ID or swear an affidavit. Many of the people waiting to vote will become bored or frustrated and drift away from the line. Others will show up at their polling station, look at the crowd that’s formed, and wander off. So a lot of people in the targeted area will not vote, which is the point of the exercise. To make this work, a candidate just needs to buy some stamps and know the voting patterns of a district.33 Waits of up to ten hours at some U.S. voting stations have caused many people to simply give up and walk away.34
The so-called Fair Elections Act was designed to create a framework where voter ID laws would suppress the vote for the benefit of Conservatives, while hobbling the ability of Elections Canada to catch and punish illegal vote suppression. Yves Côté, the official at Elections Canada who investigates electoral fraud, said he was not consulted about the changes to the election law. He told MPs on the committee studying the bill that the Tories’ plan would make fraud investigations much more difficult.35
Tova Wang, a Brussels-based senior fellow at Demos, a New York–based pro-democracy non-governmental organization, said the Tory plan to get rid of the vouching system was a “solution in search of a problem,” because there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in this country. “It’s sort of the like they’re taking the worst of the conservative playbook in the US and taking it to Canada,” she said. Elections Canada’s system was held up as a model to the world, she added.36
The Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson explained voter suppression to his readers: “Various measures have been designed to discourage voting by chunks of the electorate not central to the Conservatives’ targeted core and that additional 10 per cent they hope to woo. By making vouching more difficult and preventing Elections Canada from encouraging higher turnout, the Conservatives are trying to help themselves, although this is explained tortuously as a matter of ‘principle.’”37
Former auditor general Sheila Fraser, who co-chaired an advisory board created by Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand in the fall of 2013, told Canadian Press reporter Joan Bryden that the election bill was an attack on Canada’s democracy. She said it will disenfranchise thousands of voters, undercut the independence of Elections Canada’s electoral fraud investigators, strengthen the power of Canada’s rich, established political parties and undermine Canadians’ faith in the election system.
“Elections are the base of our democracy and if we do not have truly a fair electoral process and one that can be managed well by a truly independent body, it really is an attack on our democracy and we should all be concerned about that,” Fraser said. “When you look at the people who may not be able to vote, when you look at the limitations that are being put on the chief electoral officer, when you see the difficulties, just the operational difficulties that are going to be created in all this, I think it’s going to be very difficult to have a fair, a truly fair, election.”38
THE COURTS ARE the last resort for people who want to challenge Harper’s vision of a meaner, more militaristic Canada where individual rights are things to be subverted. No other government has gone after the courts the way Harper’s has. His mouthpieces have, for years, yammered about “unelected” and “unaccountable” judges, hoping to put pressure on the judiciary to toe the line until the current generation of judges can be replaced as they retire. So far, the courts have held their ground.
When the Supreme Court ruled that Harper could not use the budget omnibus bill to change the rules for appointing Quebec judges to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin got the full treatment from Harper and the Prime Minister’s Office. After years of mutterings about “activist judges” and attacks on “unelected” members of the Supreme Court—ignoring the fact that no country elects Supreme Court judges—Harper accused McLachlin of acting unethically, which is probably the most serious allegation that can be made about any judge.
Harper claimed McLachlin tried to meddle in the appointment process that ended with Marc Nadon, a semi-retired judge of the Federal Court of Appeal, being appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada. Soon after the appointment, all of the judges on the Supreme Court agreed that Nadon did not meet the qualification requirements, and that the government could not change those rules without support from the provinces for a constitutional amendment.39 Behind closed doors, PMO staff told a reporter that McLachlin “lobbied” against the appointment of Nadon. This, according to Harper’s team, was unethical, and far below the standards set for politicians, who get into a lot of trouble when they phone judges and try to sway their decisions.
“Neither the prime minister nor the minister of justice would ever call a sitting judge on a matter that is or may be before the court,” the PMO statement said. “The Chief Justice initiated the call to the Minister of Justice. After the Minister received her call he advised the Prime Minister that given the subject she wished to raise, taking a phone call from the Chief Justice would be inadvisable and inappropriate. The Prime Minister agreed and did not take her call.”
Harper took it a step further later that day. “I can tell you this,” said Harper, speaking in London, Ontario. “I think if people thought that the prime minister, other ministers of the government, were consulting judges before them or—even worse—consulting judges on cases that might come before them, before the judges themselves had the opportunity to hear the appropriate evidence, I think the entire opposition, entire media and entire legal community would be outraged. So I do not think that’s the appropriate way to go.” Because of the nature of her job and its demand for complete discretion, McLachlin could not properly defend herself. In truth, when McLachlin called MacKay there was no nominee, let alone no looming court case. Nadon was just one of six people whose name was on a short list. The lawsuit against Nadon’s appointment would come somewhat out of the blue from Rocco Galati, a Toronto-based lawyer who took up the issue on his own time and paid for his own counsel. It would be the first legal challenge of an appointment in the 139-year history of the Supreme Court. McLachlin had the right to discuss the rest of Harper’s secret list of six candidates, which included one Federal Court judge warned for plagiarizing government pleadings. The list had been shown to her by the five MPs appointed to vet the prime minister’s picks, and apparently that’s when she decided to warn the government that a Federal Court appointee might not qualify for a Quebec seat on the Supreme Court.
In an unusual move, McLachlin fought back as much as she could. Owen Rees, the court’s executive legal officer, put out a statement saying McLachlin was one of the people who was consulted during the search for a new Supreme Court judge, but she hadn’t overstepped her role when she tried to alert Harper. “The chief justice did not lobby the government against the appointment of Justice Nadon,” Rees wrote in an email sent to journalists. Yes, Rees said, McLachlin or people in her office flagged a potential problem to both Justice Minister Peter MacKay and the prime minister’s chief of staff, Ray Novak. But, Rees added, she “did not express any views on the merits of the issue.”
Rees quoted McLachlin saying: “Given the potential impact on the Court, I wished to ensure that the government was aware of the eligibility issue. At no time did I express any opinion as to the merits of the eligibility issue. It is customary for Chief Justices to be consulted during the appointment process and there is nothing inappropriate in raising a potential issue affecting a future appointment.”
Academics and lawyers couldn’t understand what Harper, MacKay and their apologists objected to. “There is nothing unusual about contacts between the chief justice and the minister of justice and the prime minister. Indeed, regular contact is healthy for the relationship between the branches of government and the administration of the country’s top court,” Adam Dodek, vice-dean of the University of Ottawa law school, told The Canadian Press. “Every minister of justice in this Conservative government and in its predecessor Liberal governments going back at least fifteen years has stated publicly that they have consulted with the chief justice of Canada about appointments to the Supreme Court of Canada. So where is the issue and where is the problem here?”40
Lawyers and law professors rallied to McLachlin’s defence. Harper’s attack was condemned by the Canadian Council of Law Deans. Fred Headon, president of the Canadian Bar Association, complained about the way Harper attacked McLachlin, and he was joined by all living former presidents of the association. The Advocates’ Society sent Harper a letter saying “there is no substance” to the government’s criticism of McLachlin’s actions and no evidence that she either lobbied against Nadon’s appointment or tried to interfere in a matter before the court.
The comments at issue here can only serve to undermine the respect and confidence of ordinary Canadians in the proper administration of justice, and we therefore urge you to make a public statement advising Canadians that the chief justice did not conduct herself inappropriately in any way. Nothing less than such a correction will repair the potential damage caused by these remarks.41
Instead of retracting his accusations, Harper changed his story, saying he hadn’t needed to talk to the chief justice about his choice for the Quebec seat because he believed Nadon’s appointment would be challenged in court. Also, he said he was ready with supportive opinions from two retired Supreme Court judges and Peter Hogg, a constitutional scholar who had advised the Governor General to accept Harper’s request to prorogue Parliament in 2008, when it was obvious Harper had lost the confidence of the House of Commons.
Brent Rathgeber, a lawyer and former Conservative MP who, while in the Tory caucus, vetted two Supreme Court appointments for Harper, said Harper was trying to rewrite history. “The narrative now is, ‘There was no need for me to talk to the chief justice because I was already aware of the issue, as opposed to the original narrative, which was, ‘It would have been inappropriate for me to talk to the chief justice,’” Rathberger told Tonda MacCharles of the Toronto Star. “Now it’s changed to, ‘It would have been redundant and unnecessary for me to speak to the chief justice.’ And I’m fairly confident the reason they changed that narrative is that they know they messed this one up, that they crossed the line and that their insinuation that the chief justice in her administrative [heads-up] acted inappropriately was beyond the pale, over the top and unacceptable by the entire legal, judicial and media communities.”42
And he was backed by NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, who said: “I think that one of the basic responsibilities of a justice minister, the attorney general of Canada, is to protect the integrity of our courts from any attempt to intimidate them. And this is a clear intent as far as we’re concerned by the government to try to force its will on that institution, the way it’s done on so many others in the past. Mr. Harper doesn’t accept no for an answer. The way Mr. MacKay’s behaving today, you’d almost think that he was watching the playoffs and he thinks that Supreme Court judgments are a best of seven series.”43
More than 650 lawyers and law teachers from across Canada released an open letter in early May demanding Harper retract his criticism of McLachlin. “We … deplore the unprecedented and baseless insinuation by the Prime Minister of Canada that the Chief Justice engaged in improper conduct,” the lawyers told Harper. “Public criticism of the Chief Justice impugns the integrity of Canada’s entire judiciary and undermines the independence of Canada’s courts.”
At the same time, seven senior law professors asked the Genevabased International Commission of Jurists to investigate the Conservatives’ “unfounded criticisms leveled at the Chief Justice,” writing in a letter:
We fear that the unprecedented statements of the Prime Minister and Minister of Justice and Attorney General, which question the integrity and judgment of the Chief Justice of Canada, may seriously undermine judicial independence in Canada. An independent judiciary is vital to the health of any democracy and a foundational tenet of Canada’s constitutional order and the rule of law. Impugning the integrity of the judiciary, including through public and personal criticism of the Chief Justice, represents an attempt to subvert that judicial independence.44
In the end, Canadians will decide whether Stephen Harper was out of line when he attacked the country’s top judge. They’ll make that decision taking into account the prime minister’s skills as the real chief executive officer of our country’s government. Fair elections and independent courts are our last hope. There’s no point having a free press, functioning Parliament, independent parliamentary watchdogs, unfettered scientists and an end to government propaganda campaigns unless we have free elections and courts that have the power to roll back tyranny. If we lose those, it’s all over. They won’t be coming back. There will be no us, only them.
In the spring of 2014, after the Senate scandal, the robocalls affair, the attempt to rewrite election laws, protests by veterans, Harper’s attack on the Supreme Court, and a string of other scandals and assaults on democracy, one pollster found that the Prime Minister’s Office is the least-trusted institution in Canada.45 The wisdom of the people had shown through.