Harper Gambles on Quebec

Two years into a minority government, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives still haven’t been able to make the breakthroughs in Ontario that would guarantee them a majority. In fact, despite polls which show that Canadians favour Harper as a leader two-to-one over Liberal leader Stephane Dion, the Conservatives have never moved beyond 39 percent in the polls, which means that their prospects for winning a majority remain slim.

Canadian federal politics were thrown into a state of disequilibrium in 1993, when the Progressive Conservatives were reduced to two seats and two regional powers emerged: the Bloc in Quebec and Reform in Western Canada.

Stephen Harper was one of the early organizers of the Reform Party but he left federal politics for a time in the 1990s, convinced that an alliance between the oil and natural resource capitalists of the West and the finance capitalists of Ontario wasn’t possible. As head of the National Citizens’ Coalition, he penned the infamous “firewall” letter, suggesting that Alberta’s provincial government opt out of federal programs and essentially remove Alberta economically from Canada.

As talks got underway to merge the Reform/Canadian Alliance parties and the remnants of the old Progressive Conservatives, Harper was persuaded to re-enter politics. He ran for and won the leadership of the newly created Conservative Party and then toppled the Liberals after 13 years, winning a minority government in 2006. Despite small vote gains in rural Ontario, Harper couldn’t break through in seat-rich southern, urban Ontario to win the seats that would guarantee him a majority. The Conservatives did, however, end their decade long exile in Quebec, picking up ten seats in the wake of the collapse of Liberal support combined with soft nationalists turning away from the Bloc.

Since 2006, Harper has tried repeatedly to position himself as an Ontario-friendly leader, with virtually no success. His confrontational relationship with the Liberal government in Ontario has gone from bad to worse, with his Ontario lieutenant, Jim Flaherty, a former finance minister under Mike Harris, now officially engaged in a war of words with the Premier McGinty. John Baird, another of his high-profile Ontario MPs, has been linked to a scandal in Ottawa municipal politics and has had to lower his profile in the province.

Instead, it appears that Harper has decided to gamble on Quebec giving him the seats he needs to win a majority. In the past week, his labour minister, Jean-Pierre Blackburn, told Quebec media that if the Conservatives win a majority in the next election, they would re-open the constitution to recognize Quebec as a nation within Canada.

Harper’s control over his ministers is now the stuff of legend in Ottawa – there is no doubt that Blackburn spoke with Harper’s full authorization. This follows Harper’s 2007 Parliamentary motion, which recognized the Quebecois as a nation within Canada without opening the constitution.

This strategy marks a shift for Harper. As leader of the Canadian Alliance, he delivered a speech to a Montreal crowd in January 2002 in which he criticized soft nationalism as an approach for Conservatives to win seats in Quebec.

“Over the past few years I have concluded that this strategy is fundamentally mistaken. It ignores the real lesson of Canadian history - that while Conservatives have come to power by exploiting a nationalist strategy in Quebec, such coalitions have never lasted very long. Indeed, they have ended in political disaster,” he said.

He wasn’t mistaken and in fact, the last attempt to amend the Constitution by a Conservative Prime Minister led to the 1993 destruction of the Progressive Conservatives. It appears, however, that Harper has become so desperate to win a majority that he is willing to once again roll the dice on Quebec, while at the same time positioning himself to Ontario finance capital as the only Canadian politician who can control the nationalists in Quebec.

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