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Monday May 15 2006 |
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THE
SQUEEZE
by Angelo Persichilli
THE HILL TIMES
A former chief of staff to a Canadian Prime Minister once told me that
keeping an eye on disgruntled governing MPs, who were disappointed about not
getting into Cabinet, was not the most difficult part of the job. The real
challenge, he said, was keeping the actual Cabinet ministers in check: “MPs
are, of course, disappointed, still hopeful to be in Cabinet at the earliest
opportunity. So the vast majority of them stay put.” Contrary to what many
believe, the ministers become the real problems.
Those words came back to me a few days ago while watching
Question Period.
I noticed the behaviour of the “disgruntled but still
disciplined” Conservative MPs, and the hard-to-hide smiles stamped on the
faces of the newly anointed Cabinet ministers in the government benches.
“When they receive the famous call before from the PMO,” the
former chief of staff said, “they are cheerful and grateful to the world for
their appointment. They are courteous, they thank you for the honour and
they call you before they make any statement or insignificant decision.”
Then things change, he said, slowly, and, surely in the following months.
“First, the calls become less frequent, then, they resent your calls and
start to believe they are ministers, exclusively, because they’re good and
the Prime Minister had no choice but to appoint them,” he said.
Of course, in the first and the second stages, the former
chief of staff explained, the MPs are usually manageable, and most of the
“anointed” Cabinet ministers accept the Prime Minister as the boss, even
though they credit themselves for getting where they are.
However, he warned, there is a third stage. That’s when the
ministers believe they were born to be members of the executive, and to
titles given to them by their parents, along with their first and last
names. “In that case,” the experienced chief of staff said, “you need to
intervene with a squeeze in the right place.” The disease is easy to
diagnose: the honourable Members confuse success with power. Success for
them may be getting their faces on prime time TV and on the front pages of
newspapers, but it doesn’t necessarily coincide with power. Most of the time
the mouthpieces go on the air and puppeteers are behind the stage.
That’s were the real power is.
If the minister is smart and doesn’t scream too much when
the squeeze comes, the minister returns into the ranks and stays in the
front benches of the House.
But if the squeeze is too much to handle, the Cabinet
minister is gently invited to park the limo in the back of the Hill, return
home in a taxi and start to enjoy the new title of government backbencher.
At that point, the minister is finished. If the minister
goes quietly into the night, he or she will easily be forgotten, if the
minister complains, then it’s regarded as sour grapes and not credible and
the minister is in a lose-lose situation.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper is now enjoying the first
stage. He will have the discipline of his Cabinet until the summer recess or
at least while he is strong in the polls. At that point, he can expect some
turbulence from the less intelligent “anointed.” He won’t be attacked in the
open, but the ministers will “negotiate” their loyalty by asking for more
freedom.
That’s the best time for the media. It’s what I call the
“leaking season.” It’s when selected “tips” reach the media in order to send
a message to the top or to destabilize a rival in government. It’s a
dangerous game because the selective “leakage” might be out of the hands of
the “disgruntled” Cabinet minister and could provoke disaster for the
government (isn’t that how the sponsorship scandal started?) The stability
of the government, at that point, depends on the ability of the leader to
find a balance between freedom and anarchy.
Of course, all of this might be heavily influenced by the
timing of new elections.
At that time, unity is a must and all MPs, ministers or
otherwise, will be in line.
In this context, try to understand what’s going on in the
minds of a bunch of former Liberal Cabinet ministers now on the opposition
benches.
Can you imagine when a government party is defeated in a
general election and you have to deal with a bunch of former honourable
members? In this case the ‘chief of staff’ to the Prime Minister becomes the
electorate.
While the Liberals were in power, Canadian voters warned the
Liberals many times. They also applied “the squeeze” during the 2004 general
election downsizing them to a minority government, to no avail. The Almighty
Liberal Party believed to be the governing party by God’s will.
Now, can you imagine God sitting in the opposition benches?
The ministerial adrenaline is still running in their blood and they expose
their frustration by throwing at the government benches whatever bad comes
into their mind. They know that most of the time they don’t make any sense,
especially considering what they were saying only a few months ago when they
sat in the government side of the House. But they say it nonetheless because
they know that nobody in the country (aside from some journalists with short
memories) pays attention to their hit parade of inconsistencies.
Canadians are very tolerant people: they understand the
frustration and give them some slack.
People understand that it’s very hard to get to the top of
government, but it’s also easy to settle on the top. On the other hand, it’s
also very easy to plunge, but difficult to adapt to being at the bottom.
The bad thing for the government is that they can expect
from the Liberal benches more frustration and more dirt being hurled at them
on a daily basis. The good thing is that nobody pays attention to them and
Mr. Harper has at least until the end of the year to solidify his leadership
and be immune from the outside and inside threats.
You might wonder about the feeling of the Bloc Québécois and
the NDP members.
Well, they have neither frustration to vent, or government
ambitions to foster.
They know they’ve been elected to be in the benches and
they’re happy to watch the never-ending game between Liberals and
Conservatives from their own vantage point.
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