The rise of a Machiavellian PMO
NationalPost.com – Full Comment
August 26, 2015. Allan Levine, National Post
What happens when over the course of five decades, the most insignificant of prime ministerial gaffes are blown out of proportion? When freedom of information legislation permits the exposure and public ridicule of personal spending habits (albeit, with taxpayer money)? When style and image are overblown, become the target of humiliation and are seemingly far more important than discussions of policy? And when a prime minister or any politician pays a heavy and usually embarrassing price for any mistake, miscalculation, misspeak, slip-up, stumble — or even when an airline loses a politician’s luggage?
One predictable result is: Stephen Harper and his Machiavellian Prime Minister’s Office.
As columnist Jeffrey Simpson recently put it, the “takeaway lesson” of the Senator Mike Duffy affair on how the PMO operates is that, “everything in the Harper entourage revolved around image, reputation, damage-control and spin.” True, but why is this surprising?
There is no denying the Harper PMO’s manipulation of the Mike Duffy affair and many other issues, or the prime minister’s hyper-control freakish behaviour. But the real question is: why has Harper and his PMO adopted such an obsessively contrived approach? The short answer: because since the early 1960s, that is how the media have set the rules of the game. And often you really do reap what you sow.
History in this case offers some revealing lessons. Political leaders like Harper have innately understood that power and continued electoral success are dependent on firmly controlling all aspects of a government’s day-to-day life, no matter how trivial or insignificant the issue may be. Based on past precedent, the thinking is that if you permit the media to dictate your agenda, attack or mock any inconsistencies in your policies or focus on a hasty remark made in a weak moment, then the journalistic knives will be out. In the age of social media, this quest for absolute control has become even more paramount.
Political leaders like Harper have innately understood that power and continued electoral success are dependent on firmly controlling all aspects of a government’s day-to-day life
The transition from a partisan press to more judgmental journalism began in the late ’50s and early ’60s and escalated after television soon dominated political coverage within a decade after that. Private and off-the-record conversations, which had governed politician-journalist relationships for decades faded; everything was now fair game.
John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson were the first prime ministers to receive this kind of critical treatment. Pearson was an honourable man who, despite never winning a majority government, left a significant parliamentary legacy. Yet, even though he had advertising executives Keith Davey (later a senator) and Richard O’Hagan backing him as Ottawa’s first real media image makers, he nonetheless received a lot of negative press coverage. He was constantly at the mercy of journalists, who relished the various scandals that beset his administration and he was forever trying to figure out how to keep his cabinet discussions private; before most meetings ended, a few resourceful journalists already had copies of the minutes. Judgmental journalism, boosted by the success of investigative reporting that exposed the Watergate scandal in the U.S., impacted negatively on many of the politicians who followed Pearson.
It might be ancient history, yet recall the abysmal media treatment of Progressive Conservative Leader Joe Clark on his 1979 pre-election foreign tour. The trip was scheduled too tightly and was dependent on commercial airlines. It was a public relations disaster. How could Clark expect to be prime minister, the cranky reporters travelling with him asked, if he couldn’t even keep track of his (and their) luggage? (As if it was his fault!) The nasty coverage likely prevented Clark from winning a majority government in the 1979 federal election.
In the years that followed, John Turner, Kim Campbell, Paul Martin, Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff all experienced various degrees of critical media commentary, particularly when they committed gaffes during election campaigns. A rusty Turner was caught patting bums in 1984; while Campbell declared in the 1993 campaign that, “an election is no time to discuss serious issues.” That comment was taken out of context, but like Turner and the others she was nonetheless pilloried by the media. The media portrayal of her as indecisive and shaky were hardly the only reasons the Conservatives were decimated in the ’93 election, yet they were contributing factors.
Campbell’s predecessor, Brian Mulroney, on the other hand won two majority governments. However, he also cared far too much about what the members of the media wrote and said about him and his government. His strategy of attempting to befriend and cater to journalists ultimately failed him. He and members of his family were subjected to personal criticism, including details on the renovations done at 24 Sussex Drive to his and his wife Mila’s clothes and shoe closets. And, as the first prime minister to be subjected to access to information legislation, he suffered through nit-picking media commentary about his hotel expenses on a trip overseas.
A much tougher Harperesque approach with the media was taken by both Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien. Despite being the media darling in the 1968 campaign, Trudeau, once in office, ignored journalists’ demands for interviews and answers to questions he did not want to provide. During the 1980 federal election campaign, his advisers, Keith Davey and Jim Coutts, determined that the less access the media had to Trudeau the better the wiser it would be. So they adopted a strategy of “low-bridging” their candidate, essentially keeping him away from journalists as much as possible. Trudeau won that election in part because his chief opponent, Joe Clark, who courted the media, was the recipient of critical coverage.
Chrétien, too, was as authoritarian a prime minister as Harper, also not acquiescing to media demands. As the title of Jeffery Simpson’s 2001 book aptly asserted, Chrétien was the El Comandante of “the Friendly Dictatorship.” In those years, Canada had become a one-party state controlled by the Liberals.
But the times have changed. Now it is Harper’s autocratic actions that are under the media microscope. If anything, it is ironic that in his approach to power and journalistic access, he most resembles two successful Liberal prime ministers, Trudeau and Chrétien (with a little Richard Nixon paranoia thrown in). The fallout from the Mike Duffy scandal may well contribute to Harper’s defeat or to a minority Conservative government on Oct. 19. Yet given all what he knows of the past experiences of his prime ministerial predecessors, it is highly doubtful whether he or his PMO would have adopted a more open and affable approach.
In Ottawa, it is a classic Darwinian struggle: the strong and authoritarian survive; the weak stumble and vanish on election day. They might not want to admit it, but no one knows this basic truism about Canadian politics better than the mighty media.
Historian and writer Allan Levine’s most recent book is Toronto: Biography of a City.
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