Jack Aubry – The Ottawa Citizen via Canada.com
To Liberal Chretienites, the appointment of Tory Hugh Segal to the Senate only months before a federal election was yet another sign of Paul Martin’s total ineptitude as prime minister.
“Why would you put one of the Conservative Party’s top minds and political strategists in a comfortable place to plot your demise? It makes no sense,” asked a bitter Liberal close to Chretien the day after the 2005 appointment.
The well-connected loyalist’s misgivings about Segal’s appointment, which the good senator took as high praise when it was relayed to him, were well-founded as he played a role in advising Stephen Harper during his winning winter election that gave him and his family moving rights to 24 Sussex Drive.
The Senate appointment also appears to have given Segal time to finish off his book on how the Conservative Party of Canada put itself back together again and swept the Liberals out of power for the first time in a dozen years.
And while Segal has a few kind words for Martin, he saves most of his compliments in the book for Harper’s political genius in making it happen. That’s what you get, at least according to the bitter Chretienite, when you take “your foot off the throat of your opponent.”
Segal, who is best known as a good-humoured television pundit presenting the Conservative side, has written an intelligent, well-balanced account of the divorce and eventual reconciliation of his party. It is a sometimes dry and academic account, with many unique insider-observations, which could serve as the other bookend to Eddie Goldenberg’s recent political tome about the backrooms for Liberals.
For political junkies, the books are must-reads. Just don’t read them in bed unless your mission is to sleep quickly.
See SEGAL on PAGE C2
Continued from PAGE C1
While he roughs up his longtime nemesis Joe Clark, Segal has mostly praise for his subjects. Belinda Stronach, who seems to attract vitriol from most Conservative men, is credited for her role in uniting the party, Segal charitably saying “she lacked neither impact nor clarity in making her case to both sides.”
And he credits her for saving his party from defeat in 2005 by crossing the floor to the Liberals because the Conservatives were ill-prepared at the time to go into an election campaign.
And even greater kudos go to Peter MacKay for his “courage” in entering negotiations with Harper to reunite the party in 2003. Segal also exposes the key role played by the muzzled Scott Reid, the Conservative MP for Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington, who is described as “an integral part of Harper’s brain trust.” And as mentioned, the true bon mots are saved for Harper, his leader, who he portrays as a focused man of integrity with a sharp, disciplined mind.
But Segal often breaks away from his expected partisanship in his writings with candour and wit about events in the past decade. For instance, he says he found the RCMP’s “extraordinary” intervention in the middle of the winter election, by revealing it was investigating alleged leaks in Martin’s Liberal cabinet, as troublesome for the country. He writes that the impact of the police force confirming in writing to an NDP MP that a preliminary investigation was underway moved the spectre of corruption from the Chretien regime to the Martin government.
“Simply put, it fuelled the ‘time for change’ sub-theme that can so easily threaten any government of long standing. The precedent of the RCMP engaging in this way should trouble everyone, whether it is seen or experienced negatively or positively, however innocent the RCMP’s likely intent,” Segal says.
When I interviewed Segal about his book, he said he was “stunned” by the RCMP’s public disclosure of the investigation during the election and acknowledged that the force has not yet explained the apparent faux-pas.
“We should all be uncomfortable because if it can happen to government A one day, it could happen to government B,” Segal said. “And one wonders, whether that’s, all things considered, a good thing in terms of the relationship between the democratic process, elected political parties and national paramilitary police force, which has an outstanding reputation, and I think is best, when it’s apolitical.”
It doesn’t appear Harper is too concerned about receiving the same treatment as Martin since RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli remains at his post despite the force’s treatment of Maher Arar.
A former chief of staff to Brian Mulroney and associate secretary to Bill Davis’s cabinet, Segal also suggests in his book that the Conservatives’ margin of victory in the election was reduced by Harper’s negative comments in the final days of the campaign about the Supreme Court of Canada and the federal bureaucracy.
He wrote that combined with the late-campaign negative-ad attacks by the Liberals, “Harper’s well-intentioned musing about the liberal bias of the Supreme Court and the public service, did serve to depress the Tories’ seat total but not enough to keep them out of office or to preserve Martin’s political career.”
Having visited ridings across the country on behalf of the Tories during the election, a humble Segal writes that his involvement with the strategy of the campaign was exaggerated by the media. He praises at various points the Tory campaign for being “disciplined,” “focused,” “clear,” “well targeted” and “articulated.”
And ever the pragmatist, Segal even sends a message for Harper to start cutting the Parliamentary Press Gallery some slack when he writes: “The leader was disciplined and focused, and the bus was even-handed and sustained. The media were more than fair, although some in the PM’s present entourage have yet to recognize that fact.”
After the election, there has been talk among well-connected Conservatives that Segal, for whatever reason, has been put back on the sidelines and is not often consulted about the government’s strategy and policies.
Maybe that’s why his book’s last chapter, which is filled with surprising advice for Harper such as not to be so afraid of using the notwithstanding clause for the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, reads like a personal letter to the prime minister after it has become obvious that his phone calls will not be returned.
And that advice, boiled down to one fine point, is that the Harper Conservatives should be “humble and self-deprecating.” It is the same advice Aline Chretien would reportedly give her husband when she sensed he was getting too full of himself: Take it down a notch since Canadians like their politicians humble.
Segal writes that it was humility on the part of Harper and MacKay that brought Sir John A’s party back together again and everything good that has followed since then.
The question that is left hanging by this book is whether the Harper PMO is still listening to their guru comfortably enshrined — thanks to Martin — in the Senate.
Jack Aubry is a national affairs writer in the CanWest News office on Parliament Hill. His e-mail address is jaubry@thecitizen.canwest.com
Recent Comments