A central tenet of Harper\u2019s political strategy is if the other guy is talking about something, you should take away his bragging rights<\/p>\n
by Paul Wells on Friday, November 6, 2009 9:00am <\/p>\n
The Conservative strategists around Stephen Harper like to think in terms of \u201csword issues\u201d and \u201cshield issues.\u201d A sword issue is one Conservatives can use to gain votes: tough-on-crime policies, tax cuts, the home-renovation tax credit. \u201cShield issues\u201d are the ones the Conservatives will lose votes on, unless they are clever about protecting themselves.<\/p>\n
The environment is the shield issue par excellence: Harper isn\u2019t going to win big with environmentalists. (This is the part of the column where we tell you something you already knew.) But he\u2019s told a succession of environment ministers (Rona Ambrose, John Baird, Jim Prentice) to furrow their brows at the appropriate moments, so the gap between Liberals and Conservatives doesn\u2019t open so wide that votes start to disappear into it. Same with arts funding. Cuts to arts programs cost the Conservatives hard-won momentum in Quebec in 2008. So Harper named a new heritage minister, James Moore, and has given him plenty of latitude to make peace with people in the arts and show business.<\/p>\n
Later this autumn, Harper will make his \ufb01rst trips to China and India. This sure looks like a shield. Michael Ignatieff, the Liberal leader, is forever talking about China and India, as did St\u00e9phane Dion and Paul Martin and Jean Chr\u00e9tien before him. \u201cStephen Harper hasn\u2019t been to India,\u201d Ignatieff told the Toronto Board of Trade in September. \u201cAnd he refused his only invitation to China. Our market share in both countries has fallen since he took of\ufb01ce. We\u2019ve run our \ufb01rst trade de\ufb01cits in 30 years. We can\u2019t afford to keep losing ground.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a central tenet of Harper\u2019s political strategy that if the other guy is talking about something, you should take away his bragging rights. So it came as no surprise when the Prime Minister\u2019s Of\ufb01ce announced Harper\u2019s \ufb01rst trip to India for Nov. 16 to 18, to be followed by a China trip from Dec. 2 to 6. Now the polarity of bragging rights is reversed: it\u2019s Harper who will be able to point out that Ignatieff hasn\u2019t been to India since he entered Canadian politics in 2006\u2014and that it was Ignatieff who cancelled, in September, his only invitation to China.<\/p>\n
But the gap between the Liberals and the Conservatives doesn\u2019t end with that rather trivial difference. And the longer you look at what the Conservatives are doing with regard to China\u2014and, to a much greater extent, with India\u2014the more the two countries start to look like Conservative swords.<\/p>\n
China, of course, is a dif\ufb01cult \ufb01le for the Conservatives. It is the last important bastion of global Communism, and a lot of senior Conservatives, including Trade Minister Stockwell Day and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, are no fans of the Beijing regime. Harper and Kenney met the Dalai Lama in 2007, the kind of gesture Beijing always notices and never likes. David Emerson, the Vancouver Liberal-turned-Conservative cabinet minister, seemed like a lonely voice in favour of sustained engagement with China, and he didn\u2019t even run again in 2008.<\/p>\n
And yet, by mid-century, according to some estimates, China will have passed the United States as the world\u2019s largest economy, and there\u2019s no way even a stubborn Prime Minister can ignore that kind of performance for long. So Harper is \ufb01nally getting on a plane\u2014and his of\ufb01ce was careful to add that his visit will have followed \u201c18 ministerial-level visits to China since 2006.\u201d More than with any other country, relations with China bene\ufb01t from continuous engagement. If China is worth visiting, Harper\u2019s personal reluctance to do the visiting for nearly four years has hurt the bilateral relationship. He is clearly eager to minimize, and begin reversing, the damage.<\/p>\n
India is another matter: English-speaking, Commonwealth member, chaotic and imperfect, but a thriving democracy\u2014what\u2019s not to like? Harper\u2019s trip, the PMO notes, follows 11 ministerial-level trips since 2006. And during last year\u2019s election campaign, he announced plans to open a trade of\ufb01ce in the Indian province of Gujarat to go with of\ufb01ces in Hyderabad and Calcutta.<\/p>\n
The Liberals essentially blacklisted Gujarat after Hindu-Muslim violence in 2002 killed 1,000 people there. But the Gujarati community in Toronto has tripled in size in a decade, to 145,000 people. It\u2019s one of the fastest-growing South Asian communities in the country. And at the end of September, Stock Day travelled to Ahmedabad to open the Canadian trade of\ufb01ce for Gujarat.<\/p>\n
This kind of sustained effort and attention will be noticed in ridings like Brampton-Springdale, where Liberal incumbent Ruby Dhalla beat Conservative challenger Parm Gill by only 773 votes last October. Dhalla\u2019s share of the riding vote represented a six-point drop from her 2006 score. Gill outpolled the 2006 Conservative candidate by nine points. Any further swing would \ufb01nish Dhalla off.<\/p>\n
This has been the pattern of Conservative and Liberal behaviour on so many issues for the past \ufb01ve years: the Liberals chastise their opponents for failing to understand the way the world works, while the Conservatives quietly outmanoeuvre the Liberals. What\u2019s past is no guarantee of the future, of course. Ignatieff could stop merely lecturing Harper and instead launch an outreach program to ethnic communities that would parallel, or even outpace, the Conservatives. Of course he could beat the Conservatives on some other issue. Or he could keep assuming Liberal virtue outshines Conservative virtue while the evidence supporting that assumption continues to erode. So many options.<\/p>\n