L. Ian MacDonald - Inside politics

Inside Politics

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Mulroney: The Making of the Prime Minister

From Bourassa to Bourassa: Wilderness to Restoration

Free Trade: Risks and Rewards ( ed)

Leo: A Life (with Leo Kolber)

Politics, People & Potpourri

L. Ian MacDonald

Inside Politics

Published for Policy Magazine

by

McGill-Queens University Press

Montreal & Kingston London Chicago

McGill-Queens University Press 2018

ISBN 978-0-7735-5362-0 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-7735-5370-5 (e PDF )
ISBN 978-0-7735-5371-2 (e PUB )

Legal deposit second quarter 2018

Bibliothque nationale du Qubec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Lan dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de lart dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

MacDonald, L. Ian, author
Inside politics/L. Ian MacDonald.

A collection of columns and articles.
Sequel to Politics, people & potpourri.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-7735-5362-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-5370-5 ( PDF ) ISBN 978-0-7735-5371-2 ( e PUB )

Canada Politics and government 20062015.
2. Canada Politics and government 2015 .
3. Politicians Canada. I. Title.

FC M 33 2018 971.07 ' C 2017-907280-3
C 2017-907281-1

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript.

For my girls, Grace and Zara

With special thanks to their Moms

Contents

Authors Note

This is my second collection of columns and articles, a sequel to Politics, People & Potpourri , also published by McGill-Queens University Press ( MQUP ) in the fall of 2009.

Inside Politics seemed like an obvious choice for a title of a book along similar lines. In the years since, much has happened in the politics of Canada and Quebec, as well as to the leaders who have defined and shaped the first two decades of the 21st century in our country.

In Canada, the Harper decade of Conservative rule gave way to a majority government led by Justin Trudeau and his sunny ways a reference not to his own father but to the signature of another great prime minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, more than a century ago.

The change of tone, from Stephen Harpers socially introverted personality and all-consuming message control, also marked generational change in Ottawa. Harper was born in April 1959, at the end of the Boomer Generation following the Second World War. Trudeau was born on Christmas Day in 1971, as part of Generation X. Harper was born in New Brunswick, grew up in middle-class Toronto, and gravitated to Calgary. Trudeau was born to parents who lived at 24 Sussex, was a survivor of their broken marriage, and became, as he told CBS s 60 Minutes in 2016, a snowboard instructor ... a bouncer in a nightclub ... a whitewater river guide and a teacher, before becoming a freshman MP from Montreal in the parliamentary class of 2008.

Harper was a born strategist who worked at becoming a retail politician. Trudeau was a born campaigner who worked at becoming a strategist. Whenever I spoke to Harper during his time in office, I never had a sense that he was longing to be out on the campaign trail. Whenever I spoke to Trudeau, I always thought it was the only place he wanted to be. When I once asked him how it was going out there on his constant tour, while he was leading the third party in the House, he replied: Im doing what I was born to do, and if you write that, Ill kill you.

There is no more majestic moment in a democracy than a peaceful change of government from one party to another. This is what Canadians witnessed during the two-week transition from a Conservative to a Liberal government in 2015, a change so seamless that Harper and Trudeau appeared together at the National War Memorial just three days after the election on the first anniversary of the terror attacks that claimed the lives of two Canadian soldiers. With their joint wreath-laying, Harper and Trudeau transformed a solemn memorial moment into a splendid and unifying occasion, signifying continuity as well as change.

In a career of writing about politics and politicians, Ive been fortunate to have my work informed by a period of service in government, first at the centre in Ottawa and then at our embassy in Washington. From 198588, I was privileged to serve as principal speechwriter to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. The speeches I worked on with him included his address to the United Nations General Assembly on apartheid in 1985, his speech to the House on the abolition of capital punishment as well as on the Meech Lake Accord in 1987, and his address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress in 1988. And in the 1988 election, transformed into a referendum on the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, Mulroney carried the entire Progressive Conservative campaign on his shoulders. He was the greatest campaigner of his time.

Ive often been asked what it was like to write for him. Ive always said it was like being the jockey for Secretariat in the Belmont Stakes you just let him run and win by 31 lengths.

There is nothing like working in a Prime Ministers Office or the Privy Council Office to give one a sense of how government works. These two central agencies in the Langevin Block are the seat of power in Canada. Holding the pen for a Speech from the Throne was an education on the size, scope and scale of government. Every department in government lobbies the PMO for a paragraph, or at least a mention, in a throne speech. Serving in the PMO alongside public servants working on budgets, trade and constitutional deals, while reconciling seemingly irreconcilable interests, was more than an education. It was a paradigm shift in my understanding of politics and public policy, and where they coincided.

During my time as minister of public affairs at the Canadian Embassy in Washington from 199294, I learned, day in and day out, the absolute truth behind one of the great clichs of diplomacy: relationships matter. Canadians operating at our embassy in Washington carry an advantage both on Capitol Hill and at the White House that only a few countries can claim: the benefit of the doubt. Our conversations with the U.S. government begin from a default posture of good will. That mutual respect has been tested at times in our recent bilateral history, and it should never be taken for granted.

In the present decade, it is Harper and Trudeau who have marked the political touchstones of the 2010s in Canada. Their two successful election campaigns, Harpers in 2011 and Trudeaus in 2015, are the opening chapters of this book.

The 2011 campaign was significant because it gave Harper a majority government and relegated to third place a Liberal Party led by Michael Ignatieff, a globally recognized authority on human rights whose failure to adapt to the retail game of politics made Harper seem downright extroverted.

The 2015 election was significant because it delivered a judgment not just on what Canadians felt about the Conservative Party after 10 years in office, but a positive verdict on how Trudeau rebuilt the Liberal brand from the ground up, from tripling its membership, to re-establishing its fundraising, to recruiting a strong cohort of new candidates. He made the Liberals competitive again, won the ballot over the NDP on the question of change, and then moved to majority territory when Canadians decided to throw the bums out, or actually, to throw the bum out.