Harper's high-wire act

Canada

May 5th 2005 OTTAWA
From The Economist print edition

The Conservative leader prepares to try to oust Paul Martin, a prime minister who is down but not quite out

A COUPLE of weeks ago, Canada's Conservatives seemed to see the road to power open up before them after a dozen divided and difficult years in the wilderness. Public support for the Liberal minority government plunged after a judicial inquiry heard damaging testimony of sleaze and party kickbacks. An opinion poll put the Tories ahead by as much as 11 percentage points. It seemed only a matter of time before Stephen Harper, the Tory leader, would join forces with other parties in Parliament to bring down the government and run the Liberals out of office at Canada's second election in a year.

It could still happen. On May 2nd, the Conservative parliamentary caucus backed Mr Harper's decision to table a motion of no-confidence in the government at the first available opportunity. But even if this succeeds—the arithmetic is complex—the polls now suggest that the Conservatives cannot be sure of forming a government after an election. Rarely has Canadian public opinion been so volatile.

Paul Martin, the embattled prime minister, has done his best to outwit Mr Harper. Last month he commandeered the airwaves to address the nation—something Canadian leaders rarely do. He apologised for party corruption. He vigorously denied any personal involvement in the matters under investigation by Judge John Gomery's inquiry: rake-offs from a government scheme to promote federalism by sponsoring sporting and cultural events in French-speaking Quebec. This scheme operated when Jean Chrétien was prime minister (and Mr Martin his finance minister). He claimed that a snap election would pre-empt the inquiry. Instead, he pledged to dissolve Parliament within 30 days of Judge Gomery's report, due in December.

The prime minister's next step was to shore up his parliamentary support by cutting a deal with the leftish New Democratic Party (NDP). This involved rewriting parts of the budget. Mr Martin withdrew promised tax cuts for businesses and added C$4.6 billion ($3.7 billion) in spending on low-cost housing, the environment, education and foreign aid.

The government can afford this largesse: the Liberals have delivered a budget surplus for the past eight years. But business lobbies were furious. Rolling back the tax cuts “sends a message...that Canada is losing interest in competing for investment and jobs,” fumed the Canadian Council of Chief Executives.

For now, the audiences that matter to Mr Martin are the House of Commons and public opinion. In both arenas, his prospects look a little less bleak. Not that the deal with the NDP guarantees the government's survival: combined, the two parties have only 151 of the house's 308 seats. The Conservatives with 99 have the backing of the 54 MPs of the separatist Bloc Québécois. So any confidence vote would turn on the votes of three independents, one of whom has said he will back the government. To complicate matters, three MPs are seriously ill. The Liberals are using an obscure parliamentary procedure to delay a confidence vote. They cannot indefinitely prevent one. But would Mr Harper win an election were one to follow?

The Tories are already trotting out star candidates they have recruited and sharpening their attack ads. Mr Harper's calculation is clearly that he must strike while public anger over Liberal sleaze is at its peak, or risk missing his chance. This looks like a gamble. A crop of recent opinion polls suggested that the Liberals have regained a narrow lead over the Conservatives. But in suburban Ontario, where Canadian elections tend to be decided, that lead is stronger. That may be why Belinda Stronach, a leading Tory moderate from Toronto, expressed doubts over the wisdom of an early vote.

Why is public opinion so ambivalent? Polls suggest many voters are not keen on another election so soon, though those reservations might dissipate once a campaign began. In English-speaking Canada, Mr Harper may receive few thanks for helping the Bloc, which is set to be the main beneficiary of Quebec's disgust over the sponsorship scam.

Almost all Canadians seem eager to punish the Liberals for steering hundreds of millions of dollars of public money to party friends. But far fewer want to give power to Mr Harper, a man many do not trust fully or feel much warmth for. He has made efforts to move his party towards the centre. Abortion rights, bilingualism, the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse-gas emission and state-financed health care all found support at the party's recent policy convention. But Mr Harper, who made his political career in Alberta, Canada's most Americanised province, is still seen by many as an icy neo-conservative more in the mould of America's Republican Party than of consensual Canada. The next few weeks will make or break Mr Harper's career. He will either become prime minister, or be cast on to Canada's large scrap heap of failed conservative leaders.

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