Stephen Harper made that declaration once, I recall, when he and I were guests on a radio show sometime in the 1990s. Before I could reply, though, Harper’s line to the show was accidentally cut, so that was the end of that conversation.
These days, if Harper were to make the same assertion — that government should look to business for an example, one would have to ask him to clarify. What kind of business? A big bank? A wireless service provider? A pharmaceutical company?
Despite his long-held convictions about the superiority of the markets and business, Harper’s current brand of conservatism does not view all businesses as equal. Moreover, some of them, such as wireless providers and pharmaceutical manufacturers, are outright political targets.
Just in the past couple of weeks, Health Minister Rona Ambrose fired a shaming shot at drug companies: “Let me be clear: this (new) public register will name and shame those pharma companies who fail to publicly post information on drug shortages.”
And, in case you missed it, the federal government carried out a sustained, $9-million ad campaign slamming the Canadian wireless industry for failing to deliver “more choice, lower prices and better service” — slogans still emblazoned on Industry Canada’s we bsite.
This Conservative antipathy to (some) big business was noted recently at a Policy magazine lunch in Ottawa, held to set the stage for this current parliamentary session. Yaroslav Baran, who has worked with Harper as a communications adviser and is now with the Earnscliffe Strategy Group, was one of the speakers.
Baran said it was important to note how much the Conservative “brand” had changed with regard to business. Where once Conservatives were seen as the friend to all business, especially the “pinstriped” denizens of Bay Street, Baran suggested that Harper’s conservatism has not gone out of its way to cultivate any alliance with the Bay Street constituency.
In fact, Baran wondered aloud, who was a friend to Bay Street among the current parties? “Maybe only the Liberals?” he asked, and some of the Liberals around the room shrugged and only half-heartedly agreed.
Once upon a time, it was only the New Democrats who stood determinedly apart from the big business set, with former NDP leader Ed Broadbent famously dubbing his Liberal and Conservative rivals the “Bobbsey twins of Bay. St.”
But a couple of developments in the first decade of the 2000s started to unravel that political-corporate coziness.
First, former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien took deliberate aim at corporations with strict new limits on financial contributions to political campaigns. Many viewed this move as long overdue, even if it was also a swift kick to the coffers of his successor, Paul Martin, and to the Liberals’ long dependence on corporate donations.
Harper, when he came to power, turned Chrétien’s limits on corporate donations into a complete ban. As well, he introduced the famed accountability act, which imposed a tough, five-year restriction on taking government knowledge to the private sector, thus putting a serious dent in the traffic of personnel between Bay Street and Ottawa.
Then, less than two years after assuming office, Harper and his government were dealing with the worldwide economic collapse of 2008 — the blame for which fell at the feet of the banks, the markets and that whole pinstriped crowd.
It all fed into a narrative that the Harper government has carefully created about itself, as the champion of ordinary, working Canadians and the enemy of “elites” everywhere, whether they work in the media, academia, the public service or, yes, Bay Street.
Nowadays, it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine Harper, like Broadbent decades ago, using Bay Street as the backdrop to a campaign swipe against his rivals — most likely the Liberals. Nor is it as difficult to see how anti-big business sentiment, which traditionally sided with the NDP, could turn into Conservative support.
The geographic area of Bay St., incidentally, has indeed been represented by a Liberal MP in the Commons since the late 1980s, and is currently held by Toronto Centre MP Chrystia Freeland.
It should be stated that the Harper government isn’t opposed to all big business — not by a long shot. It has stood resolutely beside oil and energy companies on everything from pipelines to environmental regulation (or lack of it), and it regularly boasts how much Conservatives have done to reduce corporate taxes.
But if Harper were to declare today that government should be run like a business, we now know now he would mean small business — mom-and-pop operations, donut shops. Being seen as a friend to Bay Street, especially in the current us-versus-them climate in Ottawa, is just bad for political business.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com/
Author: Susan Delacourt
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