G. Bruce Doern - How Ottawa Spends, 2014-2015: The Harper Government—Good to Go?

G. BRUCE DOERN AND CHRISTOPHER STONEY

INTRODUCTION

In last years How Ottawa Spends, we characterized the Harper Conservative government as suffering from the mid-term blues but still offering up its long-term policy plans. In 201415 our entry point is to ask whether the Harper government is good to go. Good to go refers to the increasing possibility that it will be out of office after the fall 2015 federal election.

The immediate trigger for the good to go descriptor and prediction was the increasingly direct association of the Senate scandal with the prime minister himself and with the Prime Ministers Office (PMO). Good to go was of course the phrase uttered by former PMO chief of staff Nigel Wright to Harpers legal counsel Benjamin Perrin after Wright had spoken to Harper about whether the $90,000 payment to reimburse Senator Mike Duffy for alleged illegal expenses would proceed. Wright sent an email saying we are good to go from the PM. The exchange emerged after court documents were made public, suggesting to many that Harper was more fully briefed on the Duffy deal than he subsequently led parliament and the media to believe during weeks of unrelenting questioning from opposition parties. The ambiguous phrase quickly morphed via social media, regular media, and opposition party coverage into notions that Harper was good to go and variously that his government was good to leave office (and indeed that Harper might want to leave as Conservative leader) and that Tory ministerial challengers were beginning to become more public in their criticisms of Harper. Harper has denied repeatedly that he had anything to do with such a payment but this defence did not resonate with his super-controlling prime ministerial style, including his reputation as arguably the micro-manager supreme.

Such triggers and labels for discussing and predicting the possible demise of a government can often turn on very specific high profile events / decisions but they can also emerge in the context of the life cycle of governments in power. Harper is now in his eighth year in office and such periods of long tenure are often precisely the time when Canadian voters, not to mention the media, are anxious to find ways of expressing the normal clarion call of time for a change. Similar rumblings of discontent had emerged in the latter Liberal Chrtien-Martin era in the 2003 to 2005 period in the wake of the Sponsorship corruption scandal and indeed in Martins battle within the Liberal cabinet to succeed Chrtien as prime minister.

This chapter explores the probability and possibility of the good to go argument. It does so in two major ways. First we explore the building and immediate context of political-economic forces and policies that are shaping the run-up to a late 2015 fall election. Second we set out and examine the Harper governments priorities as expressed both in its October 2013 Speech from the Throne and in the closely linked and themed Budget Speech of February 11, 2014. In both sections, we relate these priorities and policies to the insights and arguments supplied by our contributing authors both on macro issues and on selected more particular policy and federal departmental realms. Brief conclusions then follow.

POLITICAL-ECONOMIC FORCES AND CONTEXT

With the next election drawing ever nearer, strategies and battle lines are becoming increasingly clear as the parties look to define the issues and shape the political agenda. For the Harper Conservatives they remain focused on the narrative of overseeing an improving economy, job creation and growth and a balanced budget without raising taxes. While the government will be able to point to its achievements in slaying the deficit, and even trumpet a modest surplus by Budget 2015, the recovery has been more sluggish than they would have liked and concern still lingers that further stimulus funding will be required both for public infrastructure and private corporations, particularly those located in the auto and manufacturing sector.