Roundup: Simping for the return of Stephen Harper

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Yesterday, former Conservative campaign manager and current media darling Fred DeLorey wrote a column for iPolitics that posited that under a Pierre Poilievre government, appointing Stephen Harper to the Cabinet post of foreign affairs would be a “bold declaration of Canada’s readiness to assume a pivotal role in shaping global affairs.” It’s a…novel…argument, and while I will admit that I haven’t read the piece because my subscription has lapsed, I wanted to make a few points regardless.

The first point is that while it is possible for a prime minister to appoint a minister who doesn’t have a seat, the convention is that they find one as soon as possible, whether in the Commons or in the Senate, because otherwise they can’t report to Parliament or sponsor legislation without needing a proxy to do it for them. Harper himself appointed Michael Fortier to the Senate in order to serve as minister of public works, and later international trade. (Fortier resigned from the Senate to run for a seat in the Commons in the next election and was soundly defeated). I find the notion of Harper being given a Senate seat to be far too ironic considering his utter disdain for the institution, and in particular its appointed nature. The alternative is asking one of Poilievre’s MPs to resign in a safe seat to run a by-election for Harper to run in, but again, I have seen zero desire on his part to get back into electoral politics. He’s also a one-man show, and the party is still very much his cult of personality, three leaders later, so I have a hard time envisioning him being a team player and not undermining Poilievre’s authority at every turn.

As for it being a “bold declaration,” I think that on the face of it, it smacks of trying to copy Rishi Sunak giving David Cameron the post in the UK government (along with a seat in the Lords), and Sunak’s government is about to be wiped out in the upcoming general election. There has also been plenty of chatter since this proposal went up over Twitter, and a lot of it is from people who still, to this day, believe that Harper is some kind of Bond villain, and that his IDU is some kind of SPECTRE. He’s not, and it’s not. The IDU is a social club for terrible people, and Harper has spent a lot of time cultivating friendships with autocrats and dictators, and has been part of the move to create permission structures for far-right parties to engage in increasingly autocratic far-right behaviour. It’s hard to think of what kind of cachet Harper is going to have on the foreign policy circuit given that he didn’t really have any foreign policy wins when he was in office. Conservatives love to recount how he allegedly told Putin to get out of Ukraine at a major summit, and look how effective that was—Putin went from occupying Crimea to launching a full-scale invasion of the rest of the country. Harper really showed him! Meanwhile, he’s spent so much time cuddling up to these terrible people and laundering their actions in pretending that they are “centre-right democratic parties,” unless that’s the kind of foreign policy that Poilievre wants to cultivate (which is possible). I just fail to see where DeLorey sees an upside in any of this.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russians have been pounding Ukrainian power facilities, including a hydroelectric dam on the Dnipro River, or power supplies in Kharkiv, during which president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is calling on allies to summon the political will to deliver needed air defences. Russia says these are “revenge strikes” for attacks across their border, an claims these military targets including “concentrations of troops and foreign mercenaries.” Ukraine says that Russian oil refineries are legitimate targets. Ukraine is also worried that Russia could be preparing as many as 100,000 troops to make a new offensive push this summer, or to replenish depleted units.

https://twitter.com/defencehq/status/1771149078010765485

Good reads:

  • The prime minister and others have sent their best wishes to Catherine, Princess of Wales, with news of her cancer diagnosis.
  • The fiscal monitor shows the government posted a $25.7 billion deficit between April and January.
  • There are calls for the upcoming budget to fund school nutrition programmes in agreement with the provinces.
  • Anita Anand says new directives for requiring privacy assessments of new technologies will be unveiled this summer, but it may not be enshrined in law.
  • In spite of promising sanctions on “extremist” settlers in the West Bank, nothing has been announced yet as the government is still determining their way to do it.
  • NSICOP has delivered their report on foreign interference allegations, and now PMO has thirty sitting days to provide a declassified version to Parliament.
  • The Canadian Forces are looking to how Apple trains its retail employees as a model for how to instil character in their recruits.
  • Some veterans say the move to push all sexual assault cases out of the military justice system won’t solve any real problems as the civilian courts are straining.
  • The UN’s Marine Environment Protection Committee has approved new environmental protection measures for the Arctic as sea ice melts.
  • The Speaker has found a prima facie breach of privilege in one of the ArriveCan contractors refusing to answer questions, and now they are debating the response.
  • The federal government is threatening to withhold $357 million in housing funds for Ontario because they have made almost no progress on affordable housing targets.
  • The federal and Manitoba governments are putting up $20 million each for the landfill search to find the remains of murdered Indigenous women.
  • My weekend column looks at Naheed Nenshi’s candidacy for the Alberta NDP leadership, and why that is significant with how the province changed since 2015.

Odds and Ends:

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One thought on “Roundup: Simping for the return of Stephen Harper”

  1. I had no idea Fred DeLoray was such a Harper sycophant. Or so florid in his writing style.

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