How far will Prime Minister Stephen Harper go with separatists to hang onto power?

by david on June 26, 2012 in Canadian Constitution, Canadian Politics, Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair, Wedge Politics

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, left, with Parti Quebecois Leader Pauline Marois … or something very much like that. The politicians pictured above may not be exactly as illustrated in real life. Below: Thomas Mulcair, Jack Layton.

Now that our sullen neo-conservative prime minister is on speaking terms once again with former PM Brian Mulroney – in desperate hopes of staving off an eventual electoral disaster in Quebec at the hands of the federalist NDP leader, Thomas Mulcair – one wonders how long it will be before the Harper Government sits down to sup with separatists.

Sure enough, it was only a few hours after Mr. Harper’s meeting with Mr. Mulroney that Industry Minister Christian Paradis, the PM’s “Quebec lieutenant,” had proclaimed a rapprochement between the Harper Conservatives and the separatist Parti Quebecois. Details, it is reported, will follow.

What a catastrophe from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s perspective that he must eventually face an opponent who is both immensely popular in Quebec and a demonstrably a committed federalist!

Indeed, it can be persuasively argued that Mr. Mulcair is a much better federalist than Mr. Harper. Mr. Mulcair, after all, took a chance on the federal NDP at time when being anything but a sovereignist in Quebec looked like a recipe for electoral suicide. Mr. Harper is well known as a signatory to a sovereignist screed in Alberta that refuses to go peaceably down the Memory Hole, despite the best efforts of the Conservative media establishment here and elsewhere.

So now Mr. Harper, after long rejecting Mr. Mulroney as a political embarrassment over the Airbus Affair, has come hat in hand to his elder for some tips on how to make Quebec behave itself.

And one of the key secrets to Mr. Mulroney’s electoral success, as is well known, was his willingness to welcome Quebec nationalists into the federal Conservative fold.

This is not to suggest that Mr. Mulroney was making common cause with the separatist movement in Quebec for cynical reasons. On the contrary, the Conservative apologist Robert Fulford likely had it right when he stated that Mr. Mulroney “set out to bring permanent internal peace to Canada by dissolving the arguments for separatism.”

This is what drove the genuinely patriotic Mr. Mulroney’s efforts to recognize the reality that Quebec constitutes a “distinct society” within Canada, which culminated in the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords that had failed so irrevocably by 1992.

It was English Canada’s deep discomfort with recognizing that reality – with Mr. Mulroney’s vision of Canada as two nations in one country – that provided the wedge for the Reform Party under Preston Manning not only to defeat Mr. Mulroney’s constitutional proposals in a national referendum, but to set up the takeover by the Reform Party of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada in 2003.

There is no little irony in the reality these were the circumstances that allowed the rise of the American-influenced and ideologically fundamentalist wing of Canada’s conservative movement – eventually led by the steely eyed Mr. Harper after Mr. Manning and Stockwell Day proved insufficiently hard edged – to form the government.

And now the grip on the country by Mr. Harper and his fellow ideologues is weakening, in no small part because their neoconservative nostrums are so unconvincing to the people of Quebec.

But if Mr. Mulroney only welcomed Quebec nationalists to get them to become Canadian nationalists, can we trust Mr. Harper to be motivated by the same thing?

This seems unlikely. Mr. Harper’s (neo) Conservative Party, after all, is the one that has been willing to slap Quebec at every turn and on every issue – whether it’s support for the arts, the long-gun registry or military adventures abroad – the better to drive effective electoral wedges within English Canada.

This was the party that was prepared, for example, to scream that former Liberal leader Stephane Dion and the late NDP leader Jack Layton were “selling out to separatists” when they dared in 2008 to talk of a democratic coalition that would depend on votes from the sovereignist Bloc Quebecois, a story that has now been mostly purged from the Internet.

And this was the party whose MPs shouted down Quebec MP Gilles Duceppe, then the leader of the BQ, by singing O Canada when he tried to speak about the coalition in Parliament – a crude riposte that, quite literally, must have been music to the ears of Quebec’s die-hard separatists.

“This deal that the leader of the Liberal Party has made with the separatists is a betrayal of the voters of this country, a betrayal of the best interests of our economy, a betrayal of the best interests of our country, and we will fight it with every means that we have,” said Mr. Harper at the time. …But that was then.

Do you seriously think that facing a popular national NDP leader from Quebec with impeccable federalist credentials, Mr. Harper won’t take greater risks, drive deeper wedges, make more dangerous promises, make deals with anyone, in his efforts to keep his increasingly unpopular government afloat?

Yesterday’s grainy attack ad on Mr. Mulcair – almost a parody of itself – was one part of Mr. Harper’s strategy. Seeking out strange bedfellows is obviously another.

So will Mr. Harper sup with the separatists? It is said here he is bound to. And don’t count on him using a long spoon!

source: http://albertadiary.ca/2012/06/how-far-will-prime-minister-harper-go-with-separatists-to-hang-onto-power.html

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Tagged: Airbus Affair, Brian Mulroney, Charlottetown Accord, Christian Paradis, Distinct Society, Firewall Manifesto, Gilles Duceppe, Jack Layton, long-gun registry, Meech Lake Accord, Preston Manning, Robert Fulford, Stephane Dion, Stephen Harper, Stockwell Day, Thomas Mulcair

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David Climenhaga is an award-winning journalist, author, post-secondary teacher, poet and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions at the Toronto Globe and Mail and Calgary Herald. Read More

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The Calgary School, the Firewall Letter and Harper’s Vision for Canada

Saturday, December 26, 2009

After the 2006 election, journalist and long time follower of Stephen Harper and the Reform Party, Murray Dobbin; wrote:

Harper now talks about a “Canada First” policy. But for thirty years, he and the pro-American think tank at the “Calgary School” (the political science department at the University of Calgary) have joined together to promote “Alberta First.” That means a weakened federal government. In a letter to the National Post in 2000, Harper wrote:

“If Ottawa giveth, then Ottawa can taketh away. This is one more reason why Westerners, but Albertans in particular, need to think hard about their future in this country. After sober reflection, Albertans should decide that it is time to seek a new relationship with Canada. It is time to look at Quebec and to learn. What Albertans should take from this example is to become ’maitres chez nous’.”

After the 2000 election when Stockwell day was pummelled, Harper wrote an op-ed piece in which he declared that he was for Alberta first and the rest of Canada a distant second. A distant second?

In January of 2001, he helped to draft a letter to Alberta Premier Ralph Klein, suggesting ways to make Canada a distant second. So why wasn’t this letter published during the 2005/2006 election campaign? It might have saved us from this ruthless monster.

Dear Premier Klein:

During and since the recent federal election, we have been among a large number of Albertans discussing the future of our province. We are not dismayed by the outcome of the election so much as by the strategy employed by the current federal government to secure its re-election.

In our view, the Chretien government undertook a series of attacks not merely designed to defeat its partisan opponents, but to marginalize Alberta and Albertans within Canada’s political system. One well-documented incident was the attack against Alberta’s health care system. To your credit, you vehemently protested the unprecedented attack ads that the federal government launched against Alberta’s policies – policies the Prime Minister had previously found no fault with.

(My note: They must have forgotten the 1997 campaign when the Reformers ran a controversial television ad where the faces of PM Jean Chrétien, Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe, PC leader Jean Charest, and Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard, were crossed out; followed by a message saying that Quebec politicians had dominated the federal government for too long and that the Reform Party would end this favoritism towards that province.)

However, while your protest was necessary and appreciated by Albertans, we believe that it is not enough to respond only with protests. If the government in Ottawa concludes that Alberta is a soft target, we will be subjected to much worse than dishonest television ads. The Prime Minister has already signaled as much by announcing his so called “tough love” campaign for the West. We believe the time has come for Albertans to take greater charge of our own future. This means resuming control of the powers that we possess under the constitution of Canada but that we have allowed the federal government to exercise.

Intelligent use of these powers will help Alberta build a prosperous future in spite of a misguided and increasingly hostile government in Ottawa.

Under the heading of the “Alberta Agenda,” we propose that our province move forward on the following fronts:

• Withdraw from the Canada Pension Plan to create an Alberta Pension Plan offering the same benefits at lower cost while giving Alberta control over the investment fund. Pensions are a provincial responsibility under section 94A of the Constitution Act. 1867; and the legislation setting up the Canada Pension Plan permits a province to run its own plan, as Quebec has done from the beginning. If Quebec can do it, why not Alberta?

• Collect our own revenue from personal income tax, as we already do for corporate income tax. Now that your government has made the historic innovation of the single-rate personal income tax, there is no reason to have Ottawa collect our revenue. Any incremental cost of collecting our own personal income tax would be far outweighed by the policy flexibility that Alberta would gain, as Quebec’s experience has shown.

• Start preparing now to let the contract with the RCMP run out in 2012 and create an Alberta Provincial Police Force. Alberta is a major province. Like the other major provinces of Ontario and Quebec, we should have our own provincial police force. We have no doubt that Alberta can run a more efficient and effective police force than Ottawa can – one that will not be misused as a laboratory for experiments in social engineering.

• Resume provincial responsibility for health-care policy. If Ottawa objects to provincial policy, fight in the courts. If we lose, we can afford the financial penalties that Ottawa may try to impose under the Canada Health Act. Albertans deserve better than the long waiting periods and technological backwardness that are rapidly coming to characterize Canadian medicine. Alberta should also argue that each province should raise its own revenue for health care – i.e., replace Canada Health and Social Transfer cash with tax points as Quebec has argued for many years. Poorer provinces would continue to rely on Equalization to ensure they have adequate revenues.

• Use section 88 of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Quebec Secession Reference to force Senate reform back onto the national agenda. Our reading of that decision is that the federal government and other provinces must seriously consider a proposal for constitutional reform endorsed by “a clear majority on a clear question” in a provincial referendum. You acted decisively once before to hold a senatorial election. Now is the time to drive the issue further.

All of these steps can be taken using the constitutional powers that Alberta now possesses. In addition, we believe it is imperative for you to take all possible political and legal measures to reduce the financial drain on Alberta caused by Canada’s tax-and-transfer system. The most recent Alberta Treasury estimates are that Albertans transfer $2,600 per capita annually to other Canadians, for a total outflow from our province approaching $8 billion a year. The same federal politicians who accuse us of not sharing their “Canadian values” have no compunction about appropriating our Canadian dollars to buy votes elsewhere in the country.

Mr. Premier, we acknowledge the constructive reforms that your government made in the 1990s – balancing the budget, paying down the provincial debt, privatizing government services, getting Albertans off welfare and into jobs, introducing a single-rate tax, pulling government out of the business of subsidizing business, and many other beneficial changes. But no government can rest on its laurels. An economic slowdown, and perhaps even recession, threatens North America, the government in Ottawa will be tempted to take advantage of Alberta’s prosperity, to redistribute income from Alberta to residents of other provinces in order to keep itself in power. It is imperative to take the initiative, to build firewalls around Alberta, to limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach upon legitimate provincial jurisdiction.

Once Alberta’s position is secured, only our imagination will limit the prospects for extending the reform agenda that your government undertook eight years ago. To cite only a few examples, lower taxes will unleash the energies of the private sector, easing conditions for Charter Schools will help individual freedom and improve public education, and greater use of the referendum and initiative will bring Albertans into closer touch with their own government.

The precondition for the success of this Alberta Agenda is the exercise of all our legitimate provincial jurisdictions under the constitution of Canada. Starting to act now will secure the future for all Albertans.

Sincerely yours,

Stephen Harper, President, National Citizens’ Coalition;

Tom FLANAGAN, professor of political science and former Director of Research, Reform Party of Canada;

Ted MORTON, professor of political science and Alberta Senator-elect;

Rainer KNOPFF, professor of political science;

Andrew CROOKS, chairman, Canadian Taxpayers Federation;

Ken BOESSENKOOL, former policy adviser to Stockwell Day, Treasurer of Alberta.

Posted by Emily Dee at 4:15 AM

Labels: Calgary School, Reform-Conservatives, Stephen Harper, Ted Morton, Tom Flanagan

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