It was a strange thing that Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the other day. He says a lot of strange things these days because of the election campaign.
Harper was visiting the vegetable section in a supermarket as part of his new image makeover.
Make him look more homey, a friendly sort of guy who does the family shopping and cares whether people get sick and die eating tainted food no longer inspected by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
Out of the blue, a reporter asked Harper, if he were a vegetable, what kind of vegetable would he be?
Harper was caught. He didn’t know what to say. He hemmed. He hawed. He crooked his head and he smiled. And then he remembered why he was there. The makeover!
Harper answered he would be, “more of a fruit, all sweet and colourful.” Talk about staying on message. Harper never said what kind. A lemon perhaps?
Actually, Harper is more like an onion. You start peeling away to find out what’s in the middle, but layer after layer is the same. Only the smell gets stronger.
He was asked why he called an election. He replied his government had been blocked by the Opposition. He needed a majority to govern.
But then he added he expects to get only another minority. So why call an election? Go figure.
Trying to figure out Harper can be difficult.
Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams said in a nationally televised speech last Wednesday that to find out what Harper is really planning for Canada, one has to go back four or five years and read up on what Harper said back then.
Fair enough. It was on June 8, 2004 before a crowd of cheering partisans in Victoria that Harper revealed his plans for the Supreme Court of Canada.
His gripe stemmed back to an earlier Supreme Court decision that went against him when he was head of the National Citizens Coalition. The case is called Harper v. Canada.
Harper wanted the Elections Canada law changed so that “third parties,” such as big corporations and their lobbyists, could spend as much as they wanted on advertising at election time.
The Supreme Court saw it differently and said it would go against democracy as guaranteed by the Charter of Rights, and it upheld the strict limitations on third-party spending in the Elections Canada law.
So it was understandable that later, in 2004, Harper openly lashed out at the Supreme Court before his cheering fans, and announced that if elected he would change the role of Canada’s highest court.
Harper slammed the Supreme Court for giving prisoners the right to vote, but that “third-party” supporters such as himself couldn’t spend what they want at election time. A foreshadow of the “in and out” scandal of the 2006 election.
He would make the judges listen more to what his government said and less to what the Charter said about the things that really mattered to him - abortion, same-sex marriages, and minority language rights. The crowd cheered.
It was somewhat tacky for a former lobbyist turned national politician to whip up a crowd against the national judiciary - the sort of thing one might expect from the leader of some tin-pot, emerging democracy.
“We’ve got to have courts that apply the law, not courts that apply their own criteria,” he told the crowd.
If he became prime minister, judges would defer to his laws, he said.
The irony, of course, is that the first Supreme Court judge that Harper got to appoint last year, Justice Marshall Rothstein of Manitoba, has proven to be anything but a Harper toady.
All of Rothstein’s judgments so far have been based on the law, not 2006 ballot box results.
And there are no signs whatsoever that this second judge he appointed last week, Justice Thomas Cromwell of the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal, will be any different.
So what happened? Did Harper misjudge how judges feel about the law? Did Rothstein come under Charter influence or the influence of his colleagues on the bench?
Or, rather, was Harper out to lunch right from the start and whoever was on the short list that came up from the bar associations would have been a good, impartial judge?
Sure, three years ago at an anti-abortion conference Vic Toews got to deliver his famous, shameful speech “Abuse of the Charter by the Supreme Court,” but eventually after one too many gaffes the embarrassing Toews was quietly eased out of his Justice portfolio.
And Maurice Vellacott did go around accusing Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin of saying she had “god-like powers.” It was all in his mind. She never said such a thing. And so Vellacott had to resign as chairman of the Commons aboriginal rights committee.
And Harper and his entire cabinet boycotted the 25th anniversary celebrations of the Charter in Ottawa last year. Not a single one of them was there. It was shameful in a democracy that pretends to have an independent judiciary.
But Harper never did end up stacking federal courts with judges who have predetermined conservative views on the cases before them.
But was it because, as Williams says, Harper didn’t have his majority, or rather because our democracy is stronger than the machinations of any one man, majority government or not?
Oct. 14 will tell.
Richard Cleroux is a freelance reporter and columnist on Parliament Hill. His e-mail address is
richard[email protected].
