The Meaning of Harper

(3 of 5)

Indeed, as Harper huddled with his transition team on Parliament Hill to prepare to take power from the Liberals, the only griping that could be heard about the act concerned a Draconian restriction barring former ministers and other officials from lobbying the government for five years after leaving office. "Good luck hiring staff," muttered a lobbyist.

Achieving clean government will be a key to Harper's success. The initial test will come if and when Harper is confronted by scandal in his own government. "The first time a minister's hand is found in the cookie jar will be a moment of truth," says Ezra Levant, publisher of the Calgary-based Western Standard. "Harper will have to move quickly in order to demonstrate how unacceptable it is to him personally."

3. The Quebec Blues
For more than three decades, Canadians have been periodically distressed over the issue of Quebec sovereignty. Whenever the movement starts to gain momentum--as it has since the revelations about the sponsorship scandal began to surface two years ago--the country begins to slip into panic mode. A package of Conservative electoral pledges aimed at changing the face of federal-provincial relations may not end up having much effect on all this, but it certainly has caught Quebeckers' attention and helped the Tories win 10 seats in La Belle Province--far better than expected at the start of the campaign.

It was the election's biggest surprise, in part because the Tories had been all but moribund in Quebec since 1993. With the Liberal Party floundering in Quebec, Harper made repeated trips to the province throughout the campaign. The turning point for the Tories, though, came during a Dec. 19 trip to Quebec City, in which Harper expanded on his party's plans to address provincial demands that Ottawa turn over more federal tax revenues to the provinces, thereby addressing the so-called fiscal imbalance. Harper also talked about the need for future federal governments to respect provincial jurisdictions more assiduously in fields like health and education, and to give the provinces greater ability to represent themselves on the international stage in those areas.

But when Harper criticized the federal Liberals, saying their "outrageous spending power gave rise to domineering and paternalistic federalism," Tory organizers could practically hear voters marching their way. "Quebeckers started to look at us as an option from that point," says Jean-Pierre Blackburn, an M.P. in the Mulroney era. Blackburn--who could end up in a junior portfolio in a Harper Cabinet--began the campaign with 5% support and ended up winning his seat in the sovereigntist-leaning Jonquire-Alma riding with 52% of the vote. "It was Mission: Impossible," Blackburn says. Overall the Harper onslaught helped leave the Liberals with 21% of the vote provincewide, their worst showing since Confederation, according to pollster Jean-Marc Lger of Lger Marketing.

The Tory program for Quebec has caught many political rivals off guard. "I think a lot of sovereigntists are a bit dumbfounded by how these two issues [fiscal imbalance and a greater voice in international affairs] easily appealed to what they thought was a nationalist constituency," says Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies. But the Tory promise to offer more fiscal power to the provinces is of course not just a Quebec issue: it is being eyed by all the provinces. In the end, it could have the largest impact of any of the Conservative campaign planks--if Harper can implement some form of it in this minority Parliament or in a subsequent mandate. Sensing a winning issue in all regions of the country, Harper quietly turned the five priorities he touted during the campaign to six, with the addition of the pledge to give provinces more clout.