Chantal Hébert
Independent columnist
As the spring session of Parliament winds down, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government is sporting bruises for all to see. But like all black eyes, this one will eventually fade.
Two years from now, there will likely be little or no external trace of the beating the government is enduring over its handling of the Senate scandal this spring. What remains to be seen is whether Harper and his team fully recover from the internal bleeding caused by the episode.
With ongoing investigations into Senate spending, the upper house will almost certainly continue to give the government more than its share of headaches between now and the 2015 election.
But at the end of the day, it’s the abrupt loss of a chief of staff with a central role in the operations of the government that falls in the potentially more lethal category of political injuries.
It’s possible to draw a tentative line between a string of scandals and an election defeat but past experience suggests it is hardly a straight one.
At the midpoint of his first mandate in 1986, Brian Mulroney was mired in real and alleged scandals and ministerial body bags were piling up. Buoyed by promising poll numbers, the opposition was convinced it had the Tories dead in its sights.
But by the time the 1988 election came around, the prime minister had successfully negotiated landmark constitutional and free trade agreements.
A policy-based campaign narrative resulted in Mulroney’s second majority mandate.
As was the case with his Tory predecessor, time is still on Harper’s side. With two years to go to the next election, the government is actually operating on a longer timeline than the lifespan it could bank on at the beginning of each its minority mandates.
Like Mulroney in 1988, Harper can count on the blessing of a split opposition to divide the anti-Conservative vote in 2015. On that score, a combination of strong leaders at the head of the Liberals and the NDP could be a blessing in disguise for the prime minister.
But there are also differences and they are not necessarily in Harper’s favour.
At the darkest hour of his first mandate, Mulroney reached out to the civil service.
Rather than circle the partisan wagons as Harper is doing, his Tory predecessor used the expertise of people like Derek Burney and Marc Lortie to replenish the intellectual resources of his PMO.
Trust has never flowed in abundance between the public service and Harper’s political team. A siege mentality likely helped keep the Conservative government safe over its minority years but that mindset has a significant down side.
It is a rare bunker that qualifies as a hotbed of fresh ideas and perspectives — especially when it is manned by a tightly knit palace guard. And then Mulroney and his officials were on a non-stop mission to share their take on national and foreign policy with voters.
The then-prime minister and his ministers were omnipresent in the media.
Harper leads the least communicative federal government on record; its default communications strategy is nondisclosure.
If anything, the prime minister’s resistance to engage in serious adult political conversation with the opposition parties, the provinces and Canadians is compounding his predicament this spring.
Finally, in politics as in real life, age is a major factor in the recovery equation.
In 1988, Mulroney still had political capital to invest in his free-trade initiative. It earned him a second majority mandate. After only four years, he had not been in power long enough to wear out his welcome.
Four years later, the same prime minister was so in the red when it came to support and credibility that he could not rally a majority behind the Charlottetown constitutional accord, even with the help of his main opposition rivals in Parliament and the support of an army of corporate and academic talking heads.
On their own, scandals, internal dissent and leadership wars do not always kill governments but over time they eventually turn them into softer election targets.
Chantal Hébert is a syndicated Toronto Star national affairs writer.