The administration of Stephen Harper, 2006–15

First premiership

Harper’s government enacted an accountability act on June 21, 2006, that established new procedures for the conduct of government business predicated on “fairness, openness, and transparency”; however, the prime minister’s boldest legislative move came in November when he introduced a motion in the House of Commons declaring that the Québécois formed a nation “within a united Canada.” In so doing, Harper not only beat to the punch separatists who were preparing to push a similar motion without the “within a united Canada” qualifier but also curried the favour of many within Quebec who previously had seen the nationalist Bloc Québécois as their only advocate. The prospect of shifting the balance of power in Quebec’s representation in the House of Commons away from the Liberals and the Bloc contributed to Harper’s attempts to force a vote of confidence that would necessitate new federal elections, but the Liberals, not ready to go to the polls, avoided confrontation with the government, even when Harper announced his intention not to adhere to Canada’s commitment to greenhouse-gas reduction targets set out under the Kyoto Protocol. In the meantime the Canadian economy continued to perform well, and the value of the Canadian dollar soared, reaching parity with the U.S. dollar in September 2007 for the first time since November 1976.

In September 2008—sensing that chances of winning a parliamentary majority were good, while at the same time fearing that this fortuitous moment might pass quickly if the economic crisis that had befallen the United States spread to Canada—Harper went against an earlier promise to hold regularly scheduled elections, dissolved Parliament, and called federal elections for October 14. Led by Stéphane Dion, the Liberals proposed a Green Shift agenda that called for a tax on carbon emissions. They looked as if they might mount a serious challenge to the Conservatives, particularly as the Canadian economy began to falter and as Harper seemed insensitive to many by suggesting that the economic downturn provided a good opportunity to buy stock cheaply. In the end, however, the Conservatives triumphed, capturing more than 37 percent of the popular vote and adding 19 seats to reach of total of 143 seats—still short of majority rule—while the Liberal Party lost 27 seats from its total representation, dropping to a total of 76 as it registered its lowest percentage of the national popular vote (26 percent) in the party’s history. In the meantime the NDP, led by Jack Layton, tallied just over 18 percent of the vote, adding 7 seats to its total for the 2006 elections to reach 37 seats, and the Gilles Duceppe-led Bloc Québécois basically held steady, making up for some losses in by-elections to return to a total of 50 seats, one shy of its total in the 2006 results, as it claimed 10 percent of the popular vote.

Second premiership

Only weeks after their election victory, Harper and the Conservatives introduced a budget update that contained new policies, including the suspension of programs to achieve pay equity between women and men, the temporary suspension of the federal public sector’s right to strike over wage issues, and limitations on public financing for political parties. To block this program, the three principal opposition parties threatened a no-confidence vote to bring down Harper’s government and pledged to replace it with a Liberal-NDP coalition government with the support of the Bloc Québécois. To avoid a vote, Harper requested that Parliament be prorogued. When it returned to session in late January 2009, the government introduced a new budget update that included an economic stimulus package. In exchange for forthcoming quarterly budget reports that would provide opportunities for confidence votes, the Liberals agreed to support the budget.

Canada survived the global economic downturn that began in 2008 better than most of its partners in the Group of Eight (G8), partly because of the country’s closely regulated banking system. Notwithstanding Harper’s generally assured stewardship of the economy, in March 2011 a House of Commons committee found his government to be in contempt after it failed to provide MPs with requested budgetary information relating to the costs of government proposals for anticrime programs, corporate tax cuts, and plans to purchase fighter jets from the United States. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff responded by sponsoring a no-confidence vote that brought down the government, forcing a general election in early May.

Harper ran a disciplined low-key campaign, promising voters continued stability and warning them of the dangers of coalition government that might result from an opposition victory. The centrepiece of the Liberal Party platform was the “Family Pack,” a basket of social programs to be funded by reversals in the corporate tax cuts passed by the Conservatives. It was the NDP, however, benefitting from the growing personal popularity of its energetic leader Layton, that captured the attention of voters on the left. The NDP surged in the polls, and on election day the party captured its highest total of seats ever, 103, to surpass the Liberals as the official opposition. The NDP’s remarkable dominance of the vote in Quebec, where it captured 59 seats, resulted in the marginalization of the Bloc Québécois. As predicted, the Conservatives won the elections, but the magnitude of their victory surprised most observers; they easily ascended to majority rule by winning 166 seats. In the meantime, the Liberals limped to the finish line with less than 20 percent of the popular vote, dropping to 34 seats in the House of Commons, a showing that brought into question the continued viability of the party that had dominated politics in Canada for most of the 20th century. In late July Turmel became the interim leader of the NDP when Layton stepped down to battle cancer. He died on August 22.

Third premiership

Controversy erupted early in 2012 when the nature of Canadian law regarding same-sex marriage was brought into question by Justice Department lawyers responding to a pair of divorce cases. At issue was the legality of a requirement that same-sex married couples must live in Canada for one year before seeking divorce. More controversial was the new assertion that the marriage in Canada of same-sex couples (legal since 2004) who were residents of other countries was valid only if same-sex marriage was legal in their homelands. Almost immediately Prime Minister Harper sought to distance his government from the actions of the Justice Department in these cases.

The federal government was engulfed by scandal in 2013 when it was revealed that four senators—three of them appointed by Harper—had improperly used housing and travel allowances. As criminal investigations unfolded, Harper’s chief of staff was implicated in wrongdoing after he offered to pay to settle one of the senator’s expenses, an act that violated the Senate’s Conflict of Interest Code. Although Harper claimed to have had no knowledge of the deal, journalists uncovered evidence that numerous high-ranking Conservatives had been aware of it. The Liberals, hoping to regain their standing ahead of the 2015 general election, chose Justin Trudeau, the son of former long-serving prime minister Pierre Trudeau, as their leader in April 2013.

In foreign policy, Harper joined other NATO allies in condemning Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian autonomous republic of Crimea in March 2014, and Canada subsequently enacted a series of escalating economic sanctions against Russia in response to Russia’s role in the unrest in southeastern Ukraine. In October 2014 Harper received parliamentary approval to engage in military operations in the Middle East against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Against that backdrop, a pair of attacks unconnected with each other were carried out against uniformed Canadian military personnel in Canada. In the first incident, an individual struck two soldiers with a car in Quebec, killing one; the driver had been on a government watch list for suspected militant intent. Days later an honour guard at the National War Memorial in Ottawa was killed by a gunman who then stormed the halls of Parliament. Harper, who was present in the Parliament Buildings at the time, was safely evacuated, and ministers barricaded themselves in rooms while police exchanged gunfire with the suspect. Police identified the two attackers, who were both killed, as having been “radicalized” in their Islamic beliefs but did not cite a motive for the attacks. In a television address, Harper vowed that “Canada will never be intimidated” by such actions. To that end, in May 2015 Parliament passed Bill C-51, which strengthened existing antiterrorism legislation by authorizing the sharing of private information between 17 government organizations and expanded the portfolio of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to include preventive actions. The controversial bill was vehemently opposed by the NDP and its leader, Thomas Mulcair, who argued that the bill violated Canadians’ civil liberties and that CSIS operations lacked appropriate parliamentary oversight.

Largely as a result of declining world oil prices, the Canadian economy stumbled into recession in 2015. Although Harper was able to announce a budget surplus in August 2015 and claim a victory with the signing of the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement in October, the struggling economy and the six consecutive national budget deficits on his watch contributed to Harper’s vulnerability in the 2015 federal elections. Moreover, an expense scandal involving three senators that had been uncovered in 2012 resurfaced as a political liability for Harper during the 2015 election campaign, when Nigel Wright, his former chief of staff, testified in the high-profile trial of Sen. Mike Duffy, a Harper appointee. Wright had personally repaid the roughly $90,000 allowance that Duffy allegedly had wrongfully accepted.

The 78-day election campaign, the longest in Canada since the 19th century, began as a three-way race that was initially led by Mulcair and the NDP. As the campaign progressed, the NDP slid in the opinion polls, a consequence, according to a number of political observers, of a party platform that seemed to abandon traditional NDP tenets by insisting that new social programs be part of a balanced budget. Trudeau and the Liberals, who ran a tight campaign, flanked the NDP on the left by arguing that deficit spending would be required for a period to make improvements to Canadian infrastructure and to restart the economy.

In the process the Liberals not only surged ahead in the opinion polls during the last weeks of the campaign but won a surprising landslide victory in the elections, capturing 39.5 percent of the popular vote to achieve a 184-seat majority government and vault Trudeau to the premiership. The Conservatives netted about 32 percent of the vote to drop to 99 seats, whereas the NDP’s fall was even more precipitous, as it lost its status as the official opposition by taking some 20 percent of the vote to capture only 44 seats.