Letter From Canada: Who Are You Calling A Bush Lover?

The TV ad begins with a blurred image set to an ominous drumbeat, suggesting that this may be the start of a documentary about, say, serial killers. Slowly the grayness on the screen reveals an unflattering picture of … Stephen Harper, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. “Who paid for Stephen Harper’s rise to the head of the party?” a female voice asks. “We do know he’s very popular with right-wingers in the U.S. They have money. Maybe they helped?”

There have been times in habitually left-leaning Canada when the suggestion that a politician took money from U.S. conservatives would have been enough to seal victory for the other guy. So when strategists for the ruling Liberal Party unveiled 12 schlock-horror ads last week, three of which linked Harper to “right-wingers in the U.S.” (read: the Bush Administration), they may have thought they had pulled off a political masterstroke. Never mind that the charges are at best misleading. This is election time in Canada, and truth gets as much respect as a mouse cornered by a hungry cat.

Even Prime Minister Paul Martin descended into the muck last week, all but branding his opponent an alien from outer space, or at least Texas. “The farthest of the U.S. far right–that’s what [he] means when he says it’s time for a change in Canada,” Martin told supporters in Toronto. “Well, let me tell you something … That’s not the kind of change that Canadians want. America is our neighbor. It is not our nation.”

But Canada may not be quite what it used to be. Polls indicate that despite the anti-U.S. attacks, Conservatives are likely to be the big winners in the Jan. 23 federal vote. That would make Harper, 46, Canada’s first Conservative Prime Minister since 1993.

The Liberals have only themselves to blame for losing the upper hand. For the past two years, they have been dogged by revelations that a federal program was manipulated to create a Liberal-friendly slush fund and kickback scheme in the province of Quebec. A Nov. 1 report by a national commission exonerated Prime Minister Martin, but the scandal has left a lingering stench. “I’m tired of being screwed by the Liberals,” says Gerry Gagné, 47, a lifelong Liberal supporter from Low, Que., in a now common refrain.

During the last federal election, in June 2004, the Liberals successfully painted the Toronto-born Harper as a far-right ideologue out to shred Canada’s social fabric. Harper never effectively fought back. But he has since repositioned himself. While he originally supported the Iraq war and promotes such traditional Tory issues as tax cuts and a tougher stance on crime, he is also pushing such centrist initiatives as tax credits for people who buy mass-transit passes. Harper has vowed to revisit the issue of same-sex marriage, which is now legal in Canada, by putting it to a vote in Parliament, but he has promised not to touch abortion rights. And he has worked hard to recast his cold and humorless image, though he admitted during a televised debate last week that “my strengths are not spin or passion.”

Harper’s shrewdest move has been to distance himself from the U.S. After a Dec. 2 Op-Ed piece in the Washington Times said Harper’s election would “put a smile on President George W. Bush’s face,” Harper wrote a letter to the editor pointing out the differences between his policies and those of the Bush Administration. And when the Liberals released the TV spots playing up Harper’s supposed love affair with U.S. conservatives, the Tories returned fire, issuing a press release that chided their opponents for resorting to “American-style” campaign tactics. Canada’s conservatives have learned how to dance to their own drumbeat.