Revenge of the Harperites

OTTAWA—By now, it’s easy to have forgotten that day in 2011 when Stephen Harper, fresh from winning a majority Conservative government, showed up as the surprise guest at a 700-person barbecue in the backyard of the Ford family home in Toronto. “He’s my new fishing partner,” the late Rob Ford told the enthusiastic crowd at an event that was supposed to be private. “He took me up north a couple of weeks ago and I love to fish.” For his part, Harper thanked the then-mayor, who later admitted to doing crack cocaine while in office, for his and brother Doug Ford’s help on behalf of the federal Conservatives in 2011: “Rob endorsed us in the election. That helped a lot.” Intended as an appreciation event for then-finance minister Jim Flaherty, an old friend of the Fords and architect of the Conservatives’ 2011 election success in Toronto, the barbecue at the Fords was arranged by two Ontario Conservative MPs. One was Kellie Leitch, who is now soon to retire, and the other was Patrick Brown. It was Brown’s resignation over alleged sexual misconduct that of course opened the way for Doug Ford’s out-of-nowhere run for the Ontario Progressive Conservatives’ top job this year. Addressing that 2011 gathering, Harper lauded Ford’s mother, Diane, for “giving us this great Conservative political dynasty.” In leaked remarks, Harper added Rob Ford was “doing something very important that needs to be done here. He’s cleaning up the NDP mess in Toronto.” Harper, who like Flaherty could barely abide the fact that Ontario was governed by the Liberals, went on to envision a PC triumph in Ontario. “We started cleaning up the left-wing mess federally in this area. Rob’s doing it municipally,” Harper said. “And now we’ve got to complete the hat trick and do it provincially as well.” In the federal campaign four years later, Harper enlisted the Ford sideshow in hopes of propping up the Conservatives’ weak election foray. It didn’t work, but Doug Ford did get a warm-up for his eventual run for premier. “Make no mistake, God help this country. It would be an absolute disaster if Justin Trudeau and Kathleen Wynne were running this country,” he angrily told a cheering Etobicoke crowd while Harper looked on. With little government experience, Doug Ford must be delighted to have been embraced in recent months by a large group of displaced Harperites from Ottawa. No doubt they helped engineer Ford’s hide-and-seek election tour, coached him to avoid “bozo eruptions” and assisted in writing a PC campaign platform that was short on details and long on over-promising. Ford’s hypocritical anti-elitism fits with the Harper Conservatives’ playbook. The depiction of Liberals as wanton spendthrifts is standard practice from this group, too, even if the right-wingers have promised to throw more money around. But more to the point is the vilification of the public service, a favourite scapegoat for the Harperites. In a largely symbolic move, Ford quickly froze salary increases for Ontario public service managers, who had been under a salary freeze decreed by the Liberals from 2012 to 2017. Public service hiring was also frozen, which, considering attrition, will fairly quickly contribute to poorer services ahead for Ontarians. Echoing Harper’s canard that carbon taxes are just a tax grab, Ontario’s Tory government is intent on adopting the wilfully ignorant approach to the environment and the climate change emergency practised by the federal Conservatives while in power in Ottawa. As Harper did as prime minister, Ford is cancelling an energy-saving home retrofit program. And the new team at Queen’s Park is scrapping cap-and-trade. Under the pen of Christine Elliott, Flaherty’s widow and the new Ontario health minister, Ford has also launched what amounts to a pre-emptive strike against national pharmacare by scaling back Ontario’s free prescription drug plan for youths. On the propaganda front, the new premier’s people quickly renamed the Ontario government after him, referring in a press release to “the Ford Government”—a tactic of the Harper PMO. With populism on the rise and the Harper/Ford axis flexing its muscles, the Conservatives are clearly pondering new political opportunities nationally. Ford is eager to lend Ontario’s weight to the divisive provincial uprising against the federal Liberals’ national carbon tax program. And who knows what Harper himself is up to. Emerging from three years of general silence, the former prime minister is making himself heard, most notably in his support of Trump on some issues and his implicit criticism of Trudeau for allegedly not realizing Canada needs the U.S. more than vice versa. The former prime minister raised eyebrows by meeting privately at the White House Monday with U.S. economic adviser Larry Kudlow. Harper’s forthcoming book on populism is likely to view the phenomenon as a transformative, lasting change. And the former prime minister may be getting ready to help out with the anti-elitist campaign against Trudeau that seems to be the federal Conservatives' best idea so far for an election strategy. Les Whittington is an Ottawa journalist and a regular contributor to The Hill Times. The Hill Times