But make no mistake. It was a performance staged for a domestic audience. With an election a year away and rumours swirling about whether Harper will stay or go, it was an unusually revealing one.
Stephen Harper believes he’s changed the country. And for the first time, he stated it boldly as fact.
The media-averse prime minister gave a substantive, freewheeling one-hour interview in front of a friendly business audience on a swanky stage far from Parliament, far from the UN.
Asked if Canada is more conservative now in outlook, in sensibility and in character since he’s led it, Harper didn’t hesitate.
“I like to think so,” he said. “We’ve made it a policy of moving incrementally but constantly in our eight and half years in office” to the right with a low-tax, free trade and tough-on-crime agenda.
“I think that we’ve moved and I think the country has moved with us,” he said.
He had advice for other Conservative parties in the world: recruit immigrant voters and candidates, calling them key to the “growth of Conservatism in Canada.”
And Harper appeared certain he — or at least his party — will win the next election because of it.
“This is a huge transformation. It’s why we’ve come to office and have stayed in office and it’s one of many reasons — including the country’s economic performance — that I believe after next year we will remain in office.”
Notice he didn’t say “I.”
Harper almost always uses “We.” He rarely slips.
But he did slip in the same expansive interview, and made headlines, when he said: “I haven’t ruled out — we haven’t ruled out anything” in the way of military support for the U.S.-led campaign against ISIL.
He revealed, in the U.S., that America had formally sought additional help from Ottawa and he backed President Barack Obama’s airstrikes to hit Islamic State operating bases.
And though his domestic political foes slammed him for ignoring Parliament, his strides on the world stage gave Harper a platform neither New Democrat Leader Tom Mulcair nor Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has.
Harper relished the international statesman role.
He snubbed a UN climate change summit, but won rave reviews as one of “two fathers of accountability” in the drive for better tracking of billions in global health funds for mothers and children.
He didn’t send his minister to the UN indigenous people’s conference.
But Harper made a surprise appearance at the UN Security Council — swallowing any lingering bitterness after losing the 2010 bid for a Canadian seat on the body. He spoke, briefly, to back tougher counter-terrorism measures in the fight against the Islamic State, or ISIL as it’s also known.
Then, he delivered a surprise in his address to the annual UN general assembly — a meeting he’s skipped for the past four years. A positive, soft-power message free of his usual criticism of the international body.
The prime minister’s third ever address was very different from his 2006 call to action in Afghanistan and scolding of the UN’s blah-blah bureaucratic unaccountable ways. But similar to the one he made in 2010, after he took up the cause of maternal and child health, something he calls “closest to my heart.”
He urged world leaders to keep focused on “saving lives of vulnerable women and children” as a global priority.
This past week, the rampage of ISIL through Syria and Iraq dominated the speeches of most other major world leaders who addressed the UN.
Not Harper’s.
Yet this week puts the spotlight on Harper as a bundle of contradictions:
The man who ripped Justin Trudeau for discussing the “root causes” of terrorism, after the Boston Marathon bombing, discussed the “roots of war” at the UN — human misery, grinding poverty and the denial of justice. These, he said, are the “seeds of future conflicts.”
He gave his “diagnosis” of what’s at the heart of a rise in extremist groups in the Middle East and North Africa, listing historical grievances, suspicion of the West since the Crusades, and Sunni-Shia Muslim rivalries.
As for radicalized foreign fighters, including young jihadists in Canada, Harper frankly admitted: “it’s a phenomenon we don’t fully understand . . . many are “just errant individuals who for whatever reason drift to these kind of causes.”
Then there was China — where he will travel in November to attend an APEC summit.
Harper has said little on China since approving the takeover of Calgary’s Nexen by the Beijing-owned energy company CNOOC, but then fencing the oilsands from any further investment from Chinese state-owned companies.
This week the Conservative prime minister embraced a philosophy that is remarkably similar to past Liberal governments.
“I think the conventional wisdom has been — which I share — that if we can engage China economically and peacefully and do it over a long and extended period of time, that the likely eventual evolution of that is to be in a fairly positive direction. There’s no guarantees (sic) in this world but I haven’t heard a better approach than that.”
Harper may believe he’s changed Canada.
But on foreign policy issues, University of Ottawa professor Roland Paris is unconvinced. He has studied reams of data and says Harper is actually at odds with broader Canadian public opinion.
Canadians are decidedly “liberal internationalist.” By that, he says, they hold a “remarkably tenacious” vision of Canada as a diplomatic peacemaker in the world.
“I don’t think Canadians have really moved far from that deeper conviction that . . . Canada should be engaged broadly in international organizations and should be promoting international rules, norms and institutions, and that doing so serves our interests and reflects our values.”
In an interview, Paris said this is not — as the Conservatives like to say — a view of the Liberal or media elites, but a deeply and widely held notion, shared by new immigrants to Canada as well. But it is not the approach of Harper.
He said one way of looking at the prime minister’s view of Canada’s role on the world stage is this: “It’s an attempt by the governing elite to change the attitudes of the mass public.”
The big test of Harper’s confident prediction, of course, will come in an election, either as early as the spring or as late as the fall of 2015. Harper says it will put his party back in power for a fourth mandate, a feat that Sir John A. Macdonald achieved in 1891, the last Conservative prime minister to do so.
No surprise Harper was so chatty at the open mikes this week, keen to set out to write his own political history.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com/
Author: Tonda MacCharles
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