All this hubbub surrounding the seemingly never-ending Mike Duffy scandal reminds me of a debate I had a few years ago with Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
OK, strictly speaking, it wasn’t actually a debate.
In January 2011, I wrote a column decrying what I thought was Harper’s betrayal of his conservative principles. More specifically, I noted: “Harper has essentially thrown economic conservatives under the bus. During his term in office, he’s engaged in spending sprees, chalked up enormous deficits, increased the size and scope of government.”
A few days later, the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge interviewed the prime minister and asked his opinion on what I had written. Harper told Mansbridge, “We’re political realists, Conservatives. We don’t compare ourselves to some abstract ideology.”
To me, that was a startling statement. After all, here was Harper, former head of a pre-eminent free-market advocacy group, the National Citizens Coalition, saying on a national TV broadcast that ideology was less important to him than so-called political realism.
And of course, when a politician says he’s a realist, it usually means he will abandon any ideological value if it gets in the way of winning elections.
For Harper, being realistic meant abandoning fiscal conservatism, abandoning his commitment to smaller government and abandoning his belief that government should live within its means. It also meant, by the way, that he largely abandoned his commitment to Senate reform.
Indeed, back in his Reform Party days, Harper was a staunch advocate for making the upper house elected, equal and effective. Yet once he assumed power, Harper the realist decided not to push that goal too strongly, probably because taking on the massive job of Senate reform was not really in his political interest.
And to be sure, convincing the provincial premiers to go along with reforming the Senate would have required expending an awful lot of energy and an awful lot of valuable political capital on an issue that offered little in the way of positive returns. Or to be more blunt, reforming the Senate would not help Harper get re-elected.
Plus, from the prime minister’s perspective, the Senate status quo worked just fine. Let’s face it, would Harper really want elected Conservative senators running around Ottawa who wouldn’t owe their jobs to his patronage? Such senators might show an independent streak and (horror of horrors) speak their own minds without regard to Conservative talking points.
So when it came to the Senate, Harper decided to be realistic, meaning he packed it with people who could help his party.
One such person packed into the Senate this way was Duffy, who won his appointment not because he was a champion of conservative ideology or because he would represent the concerns of Prince Edward Island, but because he was a high-profile personality who could help the Tories raise money.
That’s political realism in its purest form.
Too bad it all blew up in Harper’s face when news broke that Duffy had inappropriately claimed housing expenses, a problem which eventually plunged the Conservative government into a messy scandal, involving even the Prime Minister’s Office.
It just goes to show that sometimes being politically realistic isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.
But maybe there’s a bright side to all this. Perhaps this Duffy experience will convince Harper that he should forget about realism and go back to relying on abstract ideology.
True, that might not help him win the next election, but it might ensure he leaves a better legacy.
Gerry Nicholls is a communications consultant and former vice-president of the National Citizens Coalition.
