Harper’s views on who gets to govern varied between 2004 and now

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/03/2011 (5619 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA – Prime Minister Stephen Harper insists he never plotted with the NDP and Bloc Quebecois to replace Paul Martin’s newly minted minority Liberal government in 2004.

“I do deny it,” Harper said Monday, rebutting the recollections of NDP Leader Jack Layton and Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe.

On Sept. 9, 2004, Harper, Layton and Duceppe sent a letter to the governor general, urging her to consult them and consider all her options should Martin’s government be defeated.

Both Layton and Duceppe say the objective was to persuade Adrienne Clarkson to give Harper a chance to govern, supported by the other two opposition parties, rather than plunging the country into another election.

Harper doesn’t remember it that way.

He said the whole point of the letter was “to put pressure on the government to influence its agenda without bringing it down, without defeating it and replacing it.”

“Remember the context,” he told reporters Monday.

“Mr. Martin was saying that any amendment, any change to the government policy, no matter how small, he would treat as a confidence measure and go to the governor general.

“My position was, if he did that, the governor general should come to us and I would have told the governor general, ‘We in fact are not trying to bring down the government. All Mr. Martin has to do is sit down and talk with us and I’m sure we will find a resolution.'”

But that’s not quite what Harper said at a joint news conference with Layton and Duceppe on the same September day in 2004 that they sent their letter to the governor general.

All three emphasized that they were not trying to create a formal coalition. That said, they didn’t deny they were asking to be allowed to form a government.

Harper called that scenario “extremely hypothetical,” but went on to say that if the Martin government was defeated, “the governor general should first consult widely before accepting any advice to dissolve Parliament.”

“So I would not want the prime minister to think that he can simply fail in the House of Commons as a route to another general election. That’s not the way our system works.”

A reporter asked whether Canadians might not “get the impression that you’re trying to run the government here even though you’ve lost the election.”

Harper responded: “It is the Parliament that’s supposed to run the country, not just the largest party and the single leader of that party. I guess that’s a criticism that I’ve had and that we’ve had and that most Canadians have had for a long, long time.”

That would seem to be directly at odds with Harper’s assertion on the opening day of this election campaign.

“First of all you don’t try and form a government if you lost the election. That is not legitimate,” he said Saturday.

“If Canadians elect the other party, even by a minority, you respect that judgment. It is illegitimate to attempt to overturn that and if you want to overturn it, you go back to the people and get a mandate to do so.”