Party of One (4 page)

The political strategist who had turned the word
liberal
into an epithet of abuse in the United States told his audience that 60 percent of people have no interest in news. In Finkelstein’s opinion, content has become the victim of the speed of communication. The day was coming when there would be no breadth of information. The news would be purely episodic and the audience’s critical faculty weakened. It was good news for marketers and nirvana for political strategists riding herd on the suggestible masses.

Technology has also made political manipulation frighteningly less difficult, Finkelstein noted. While acknowledging that freedom of speech was sacrosanct, he observed that it was hard to clarify the truth on the internet. Although he said that lying about people had never been his specialty, discrediting them was—as John Kerry learned after he was “swift-boated” in the presidential election against George W. Bush. Finkelstein was widely suspected of having organized the attack ads. “I do not slander someone without proof, but with proof, I am happy to,” he said, pointing out that if Kerry had responded more quickly to the attacks against him, he would have become president.

To Finkelstein, a negative campaign is legitimate as long as it’s not patently untrue. It comes down to casting the appropriate lights and shadows over your opponent; you are relentless in highlighting his failings and you never mention his strengths. Because most people water-ski over the surface of events, they
don’t want deep content or even to know what a politician thinks. They want to know who he is sleeping with and how many of the good human vices he has. Finkelstein said it came from watching “nonsense programs” on TV. With the right information, you can cut somebody off at the neck instantly. It was, he told his audience, “a dangerous world we live in.”

It would be four more years before Stephen Harper commissioned a poll by Arthur Finkelstein in 1998 to test the waters for making a run at political leadership in Canada. But what Harper had to offer was on display at the ninth annual memorial dinner for the founder of the NCC, Colin M. Brown. Speaking in Ancaster, Ontario, as a Reform MP, Harper delivered the same message in 1994 he had delivered to the same group in 1989— that there was a “crisis in the welfare state.” Harper argued that Western countries were suffering from high unemployment, low economic growth, and very high government expenditures. The choice was either a major reform of government programs or “the state as we know it will experience a financial collapse.”

In the public question period after the speech, Harper was asked what he thought of Premier Ralph Klein’s slash-and-burn approach to reducing the deficit in Alberta. Harper heartily endorsed Klein and offered a prediction: “If Premier Klein can carry off his program in Alberta, it will lead to a revolution, a very quick political revolution across the country.” But as one of his audience members, NCC president David Somerville, noted, getting rid of the deficit would be meaningful only if the system itself were changed in such a way that successor governments and the bureaucracy would be unable to undo the reforms. Stephen Harper was clearly listening.

Despite his hard work and speeches promoting a competitive international market economy for Canada, Harper was growing less and less comfortable in the Reform Party. Preston Manning
told me that he thought that part of the explanation for Harper’s restlessness was that he had turned against a fundamental principle of Reform: freedom of expression for its MPs. “What soured Stephen early on with Reform was that if a member’s constituents differed from the Party’s position, we allowed the member to represent the constituents,” Manning recalled. “It bothered Stephen that one rogue member could undermine all our work. While the Conservatives and Liberals appeared united, we sometimes got hammered by our own people, and that soured Stephen Harper. Personally, I would prefer the benefits of freedom even at the cost of flack.”

Stephen Harper’s instinct to control the message and muzzle others took root as he lived through several media meltdowns triggered by bizarre ideas or extremist outbursts from Reformers on the fringe. But another anxiety was eating away at Harper—the sinking feeling that as the election of 1997 approached, Reform was stagnant. He resigned his seat six months before the June 1997 election. “When Stephen left Reform, it was because he thought we were going to lose. In his view, we had made no progress east of Ontario. He was disappointed and discouraged,” Manning said. “I had more faith than Stephen did and we pulled it off. We had 150,000 members. This was a blow to Stephen; it tarnished him.”

On the same January day that Harper resigned his seat in Parliament, he introduced himself to the staff at his new place of employment, the National Citizens Coalition. Although the lobby group claimed to be independent of political parties, they had hired a politician to become their vice-president. As for Stephen Harper, he ruled out a future run for the leadership of the Reform Party. Resorting to the cliché of frustrated politicians everywhere, he said he wanted to spend more time with his family. He also told reporters that he no longer wanted to be bound by party politics. Instead, he would push for public policies that were important to
him. The NCC was the perfect vehicle to practise the wicked game of wedge politics.

Prime Minister Jean Chrétien had called a federal election for June 2, 1997. Stephen Harper and the NCC jumped into the fray, targeting MPs’ gold-plated pensions. Two Liberal MPs, Anne McLellan and Judy Bethal, were presented in ads as “pension porkers,” their heads placed on a pair of pigs guzzling champagne while wallowing in a trough filled with tax dollars. Pure Finkelstein. Bethel was defeated and McLellan won in a cliffhanger. The Liberals won a solid majority government and Reform became the Official Opposition, winning sixty seats.

After the election, the only politics in Stephen Harper’s life took place at the office. As vice-president of the NCC, he shared an office in Calgary with the organization’s president, David Somerville. According to long-time NCC employee Gerry Nicholls, it was a case of two type-A personalities unable to play well together. Whether by design or disenchantment, Somerville presided over his last staff meeting as president on December 12, 1997, less than a year after the arrival of Stephen Harper. A pattern was beginning to emerge. Harper had a habit of undermining or replacing the people he had once worked for or supported: Jim Hawkes, Brian Mulroney, Preston Manning, and David Somerville. Now that he was his own man, fully in charge of an influential lobby group, the methodical autocrat popped out of the smooth-talking, unflappable media personality that Harper projected after joining the NCC. The new president didn’t like his authority challenged, and according to Nicholls, referred to the NCC as “a dictatorship fighting for democracy.”

S
TEPHEN
H
ARPER
’
S
DIRECT
connection to Republican Party political values and strategy was far deeper than the NCC and Arthur Finkelstein. Just after the Chrétien victory in June 1997, he
gave a speech to the Council for National Policy (CNP).
The New York Times
described the CNP as “a little known group of a few hundred of the most influential conservative leaders in business, government politics, academia and religion in the United States.” The CNP meet three times a year behind closed doors at various locations—a sort of Bilderberg Group of the continental United States. Wealthy right-wing donors use the meetings to network with top conservative operatives to plan long-term strategy.

The CNP was co-founded in 1981 in Dallas, Texas, by Baptist pastor Reverend Tim LaHaye, who was head of the Moral Majority, a group made up of conservative Christians who wanted to assist the political right in the United States. Political success on the right in the US existed at the confluence of social and economic conservatism—and Stephen Harper immediately grasped the potential for similar alliance-building in Canada. Reverend LaHaye was a true believer who enjoyed spreading the word. He claimed that his books about Armageddon and the Rapture had sold fifty-five million copies. He believed that there would be a mass conversion of Jews to Christianity during the “end times.” LaHaye was so certain of the gospel that he even tried to convert the Dalai Lama when he bumped into him in a hotel corridor in Israel.

When the CNP meets, a lot of money is on the table. One of the original directors of the organization gave $4.5 million to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group that played a key role in sinking the presidential ambitions of John Kerry. The same director donated $3 million to the Progress for America Voter Fund, which backed President George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security. Seed money was also given by Nelson Baker Hunt, the billionaire son of oilman Howard L. Hunt. Ronald Reagan addressed the CNP’s tenth anniversary celebration and had this to say: “A handful of men and women, individuals of character, had a vision. A vision to see the return of righteousness, justice, and
truth to our great nation.” Besides the vision, the CNP also had tax-exempt status.

Past members of the group include Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, former US attorneys general Ed Meese and John Ashcroft, gun rights activist Colonel Oliver North, and the mother of Erik Princep, founder of the private security company Blackwater, which later ran amok in the Iraq War. Their common enemy was political and philosophical liberalism. Their agenda was cleaving to Christian heritage, unqualified support of Israel, a strong military, gun rights, traditional values, and small government—things Canada’s NCC would not find objectionable.

The CNP commands the elite of US Republican potentates. Vice-President Dick Cheney flew in on Air Force 2 to address the group at one of their meetings. Mitt Romney gave an address to the CNP in Salt Lake City, Utah. When he made his first run for president, George W. Bush gave a speech to the CNP in San Antonio, Texas, that helped him gain the support of the conservatives in the 2000 presidential election. In accordance with CNP practice, Bush’s speech was never released. In the same year that the future president addressed the group, the CNP gave Charles G. Koch the Free Enterprise Award. Koch and his brother preside over the secondlargest private company in the United States, Koch Industries, based in Wichita, Kansas. Oil is the basis of their enormous wealth, and the family has been involved in the Alberta tar sands for over fifty years. As reported in
The Washington Post
, the Koch brothers are one of the biggest leaseholders in the enormous development, controlling over half a million hectares. Koch Industries also concentrates on shipping and refining heavy oil. The company has upgraded its Corpus Christi refinery to handle heavy bitumen.

“Canada is one of the cheapest places in the world for Big Oil to do business,” according to Mitchell Anderson, who is writing a book,
The Oil Vikings
, about Norway’s wise resource use. In
2012, Canada produced over two billion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE, which includes crude oil, natural gas, and other petroleum liquids) and collected $18 billion in provincial and federal taxes, and royalties. Taxpayers realized a benefit of $9 per BOE. Of that total, Alberta produced 1.5 billion BOE in 2012 and collected $6.13 billion in non-renewable royalties. By charging the oil companies higher taxes and investing equity ownership in production, the Norwegian government paid $46.29 BOE to their taxpayers for their oil in 2012—over five times what Canadians received. Norway has an $ 850-billion sovereign wealth fund for its population of about five million people.
⁴

So when Stephen Harper gave a speech to what was essentially a secret society of wealthy, hard-right Republicans, it was odd for a few reasons. After all, the members of the CNP are in the business of scrutinizing potential Republican leadership candidates. For example, after listening to Senator John McCain of Arizona speak, they decided that he wasn’t conservative enough. The group also vowed to run a third-party candidate if the Republican Party chose Rudy Giuliani as its leader because of his pro-choice position on abortion. Stephen Harper wasn’t even a politician anymore and he also happened to be a Canadian. So what was behind the invitation? Whatever the reason, there was no mystery about why he jumped at a chance to speak to them. The CNP had enormous influence on the US government.

In 2003, Alberta’s economic development minister, Mark Norris, attended a three-day session of the CNP in a Virginia suburb close to Washington. Norris went to promote the tar sands, but also, as the
Calgary Herald
reported at the time, to mend fences because Canada had not participated in the Iraq War. Donald Rumsfeld was the keynote speaker at the event.

Beyond the appeal of the CNP’s great power, the council also shared Stephen Harper’s values. For one thing, Harper disliked the
governance model in Canada, preferring Congress over Parliament. As he would later tell
The Globe and Mail
, the difference between the calibre and experience of the Bush cabinet and any Canadian equivalent was embarrassing to Canada. President Bush got to recruit “top people” from private industry into his inner political circle, while Canadian prime ministers were stuck with a cabinet stocked from the relatively feeble pool of elected MPs.

Like Harper, the CNP was highly secretive. Its membership and donor list are private. Its events are closed to the public. It has been alleged that members are told not to use the name of the organization in emails to protect against leaks. For Harper, one of the most attractive aspects of speaking to the council was that the event would remain secret. CNP by-laws both blocked the media from attending and prevented the release of a transcript of what had been said unless all speakers agreed. Thinking that he could say whatever he wanted without media coverage, Harper gave quite a speech that June night in 1997.
⁵

His American audience must have felt as though they were in Utah listening to a well-scrubbed Republican candidate for the US Senate. The speech was a perfect blend of neo-con and theo-con, which was predictable enough. But what was unexpected was how Harper derided his own country to a foreign audience as “a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the word.” By comparison, Harper was effusive in his praise of the United States and its Republican politics: “Your country and, particularly, your conservative movement, is a light and inspiration to people in this country and across the world.”