Prime Minister Stephen Harper tweeted Tuesday morning that he was “wheels up en route to London, U.K.” Also Paris and Dublin, not to mention the G8 summit hosted by Britain in Northern Ireland next week.
It will be a good change for him, a week on the world stage where, after seven years in office, he is now a ranking figure, one with a better narrative than any of his colleagues on his country’s economy and fiscal frameworks.
If Harper thinks he’s got problems at home, wait until he meets French President François Hollande at the Élysée. With 11 per cent unemployment and 26 per cent youth unemployment, Hollande’s approval ratings have tanked after only a year in office. What he wouldn’t give for numbers like Canada put up last week, 7.1 per cent unemployment, 13.6 per cent youth unemployment and an astonishing 95,000 new jobs in May, if you believe the Statistics Canada data. Harper’s got bragging rights on the economy.
When he returns from his European swing, Parliament will have risen for the summer. And from his perspective, not a moment too soon, after the worst sitting for this government in its seven years in office. He will have the summer to push the reset button, with a major cabinet shuffle to promote generational change on the front bench, with a throne speech in the fall to give the Conservatives a new agenda.
Which isn’t to say Harper doesn’t have to deal with the many troubling issues that have arisen in the last few months.
Quite apart from the Senate expense scandal, Harper has serious problems with his party and his caucus, both of them arising from the management style of his own office, a place in need of grown-ups.
The first problem Harper has to deal with is a potential split in the Conservative party at its policy convention in Calgary in two weeks. There’s a serious rift looming over a fundamental question of representation at a leadership convention — one member, one vote, as opposed to all ridings being equal.
The Conservatives have been having this conversation since the merger talks between the Reform-Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties in 2003. It was a deal-breaker then for PC leader Peter MacKay — the principle that all ridings are created equal — and it prevailed. But it keeps coming back.
At a time when he needs the party to be united behind him, it could be bitterly divided. The last thing Harper needs is a fight over this issue, and he would be wise to arrange for the PC wing of the party to win the vote.
Then there’s the caucus, where backbenchers are tired of being treated like doorknobs by the Prime Minister’s Office and the House leadership. By the time of the annual midsummer caucus, many Conservative MPs are hoping House Leader Peter Van Loan and Conservative whip Gordon O’Connor will have been shuffled out of their present roles. It’s one thing for the opposition parties to dislike them, and quite another for them to be detested by their own backbench.
Last week, veteran Alberta MP Brent Rathgeber bolted Conservative ranks to sit as an independent, ostensibly over PMO and the House leadership gutting his private member’s bill to disclose the salaries of public servants earning more than $188,000 a year, raising the disclosure level to $444,000. But more fundamentally, as Rathgeber wrote, “we have morphed into what we once mocked.” He was referring to accountability and the supremacy of the legislative branch of government.
Rathgeber’s defection is symptomatic of a simmering caucus revolt, and Harper would do well to mend his fences, because as Brian Mulroney used to say, “you can’t lead without the caucus.”
Harper and the PMO would do well to remember that.
L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy magazine.
