Tom Flanagan confirms Harper is lying about his coalition intentions

Ex-adviser says Harper had coalition plan in 2004

Postmedia News
Mar 28, 2011 – 8:30 PM ET
By Randy Boswell

OTTAWA — A key adviser to Stephen Harper during his days as Opposition leader says the “co-opposition” arrangement Mr. Harper negotiated with NDP leader Jack Layton and Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe in September 2004 was seen by Conservatives at the time as a potential avenue to a Harper-led minority government — without seeking Canadians’ approval in an election.

Tom Flanagan, the federal Conservatives’ former campaign manager and a one-time Harper chief of staff, told Postmedia News on Monday that the deal Mr. Harper described in 2004 as a “co-opposition” accord — but insisted then and insists now was not a formal coalition — was a “perfectly legitimate exercise” aimed at exploring whether there was “common ground for the Conservatives to undertake a minority government.”

Mr. Flanagan’s comments are significant because they raise further questions about Mr. Harper’s interpretation of the episode and, perhaps, his current election strategy of branding Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff a would-be coalition leader — even if he finishes second behind the Conservatives in the May 2 election — willing to strike a deal with Mr. Layton and Mr. Duceppe to trump a Mr. Harper minority and become prime minister.

Although Mr. Ignatieff explicitly ruled out forming a so-called “coalition of losers” on the first day of the campaign on Saturday, Mr. Harper has continued to make it the central thrust of his message to voters, casting the election as a choice between a “stable,” majority Conservative government or a “reckless,” Ignatieff-led alliance of also-rans — the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc.

But Mr. Harper’s strong denunciations of coalition-making in the current political context have led to pointed questions about his own actions in 2004, when the then-Opposition leader co-signed a letter with Mr. Layton and Mr. Duceppe urging Adrienne Clarkson — Canada’s governor general at the time — to “consider all of your options” before allowing Mr. Martin to call another general election.

“We respectfully point out,” read the letter, “that the opposition parties, who together constitute a majority in the House, have been in close consultation. We believe that, should a request for dissolution arise, this should give you cause, as constitutional practice has determined, to consult the opposition leaders and consider all of your options before exercising your constitutional authority.”

At a news conference in September of that year, Mr. Harper sat next to Mr. Layton and Mr. Duceppe as he elaborated on the message sent to Ms. Clarkson.

“There has been some informal chitter-chatter around the Hill that if a prime minister were weakened by his own party or defeated in the House, that he could just automatically call an election,” Mr. Harper said at the time. “That’s not our understanding of how the constitutional system works, particularly in a minority Parliament.”

On the day in October 2004 when Mr. Martin’s government delivered its throne speech, CTV journalist Mike Duffy — later appointed by Mr. Harper as a Conservative senator — reported that some Conservatives saw the Liberals’ troubles as a chance to make Mr. Harper prime minister.

“It is possible that you could change prime minister without having an election,” Mr. Duffy said on CTV on Oct. 5, 2004. “If you could put Stephen Harper — and this is some of the thinking of Conservatives — in 24 Sussex Drive, even for five or six months without an election, it would make the Conservative option much more palatable to Canadians because they’d see that they don’t have horns and a tail.”

Mr. Harper is striking a very different tone during this campaign on the question of whether a party other than the first-place finisher in an election should be given the opportunity to form a government without a fresh mandate from voters.

“You don’t try and form a government if you lost the election. That is not legitimate,” Mr. Harper said on Saturday, moments after meeting with Gov. Gen. David Johnston, while responding to reporters’ questions at the entrance to Rideau Hall. “If Canadians elect the other party, even by a minority, you respect that judgment. It is illegitimate to attempt to overturn that. And if you want to overturn it, you go back to the people and get a mandate to do so.”

Mr. Harper also argues that Ignatieff’s denials about having coalition ambitions are meaningless and that a postelection alliance with the NDP and Bloc is now the Liberals’ “hidden agenda.”

Meanwhile, however, Liberal strategists argue that Mr. Harper is exhibiting hypocrisy on the coalition issue while Mr. Duceppe has bluntly called the prime minister a “liar” over his recent denials about the aims of the 2004 “co-opposition” pact.

In the interview, Mr. Flanagan recalled that Mr. Harper — amid widespread doubt about whether Paul Martin’s minority Liberal government could win the support of Parliament after its October 2004 throne speech — was ready to consider forming a Conservative-led minority government without going to an election.

“As leader of the Opposition, (Mr. Harper) was going to be faced with the responsibility of voting on Martin’s budget and other legislation. And he was consulting with other opposition parties, and it doesn’t mean that he was trying to build a coalition,” said Mr. Flanagan.

“I was working for him at the time, but I wasn’t involved in this. I don’t know exactly. But the non-coalition explanation would be that he was seeing if there was common ground if the Liberals were defeated before Paul Martin could justifiably get a new election. Would there have been common ground for the Conservatives to undertake a minority government?”

Mr. Flanagan, author of the 2007 book Harper’s Team: Behind the Scenes in the Conservative Rise to Power, added that: “At that point, we had, I think, 98 seats — slender, but it wouldn’t have been totally out of consideration. Would there have been some common basis on which the Mr. Harper government could propose a budget and maybe some other legislation that would be supported by these two parties, at least for a while?”

Asked if Mr. Harper might have had a different motivation for sending the letter to Ms. Clarkson — one other than ensuring that she explored the option of Conservative-led minority if Martin’s government fell — Mr. Flanagan replied: “I can’t see what other point there would have been in writing the letter except to remind everybody that it was possible to change the government in that set of circumstances without an election.”

He added that “it could have been interpreted as a warning shot across the bow of Mr. Martin, but again, it’s not effective unless it’s alluding to a real possibility that this could happen.”

In the end, the solidarity between opposition parties broke down, with the NDP’s Layton giving support to ensure the survival — at least for a time — of Martin’s Liberal government.

“It didn’t go anywhere, but I think it’s a perfectly legitimate exercise. It’s different from forming a coalition,” said Mr. Flanagan. “You can square the circle because (Mr. Harper) did give Martin the chance to form a government, but if that government couldn’t be sustained, then he could say, ‘Well, we would save the taxpayers the expense of another immediate election, but I didn’t rush to form a government . . .’”

Mr. Flanagan, a University of Calgary political scientist who no longer works as a Mr. Harper adviser, said he disagrees with his former boss about whether a minority government can — in certain circumstances — be formed by a second-place party.

“I actually don’t agree with him on that point. I think that’s true 99% of the time, but there are occasions when it isn’t. You had the Peterson-Rae coalition in Ontario, for example, which was a coalition of second- and third-place finishers.”