OTTAWA - It would be easy, looking back over the last five months, to say that Canada's Parliament was drowned in noise, litigation and scandal.
The Conservative government has had a long, stormy spring, buffeted by scandals great and small, real and debatable, self-engineered or carefully cultivated by an opposition that tasted blood in the water.
Stephen Harper's battle-weary minority limped into the House of Commons' summer break Friday bearing fresh scars from multiple fights:
- The Chuck Cadman bribery allegations, fuelled by Cadman's widow -- herself a Tory candidate -- and by Harper's own words to Cadman's biographer.
- The fight with Elections Canada over election expenses that resulted in an extraordinary RCMP raid on Tory party headquarters.
- Damaging diplomatic leaks on Barack Obama's NAFTA positioning that intruded in the U.S. presidential primaries.
- Tory MP Tom Lukiwski's 16-year-old homophobic videotape and tearful apology.
- Maxime Bernier's disastrous run at Foreign Affairs and his security-rattling personal life.
Yes, the Harper Conservatives could be excused if they felt they'd come fourth in a Commons dart fight. But underneath the flesh wounds, the Conservatives do have something to feel good about.
Without a doubt, the government's and this Parliament's high-water mark for co-operation was reached when Conservatives and Liberals came together to agree to extend Canada's mission in Afghanistan until 2011.
Yes, Harper did take advantage of a pliable and enfeebled Liberal party. But he also attenuated his own instinct for brawling politics to reach across the aisle and temper those instincts to get Stephan Dion and his party to buy into extending a mission they initially created.
The result was the relatively noiseless prolonging of a mission that had bitterly divided parties and the people of Canada for months. The political pay-off for the Conservatives came with the removal of an issue from the list of ballot-box questions that could swamp them at the polls if the war goes awry.
There were other achievements.
Sometime around the end of September, the government will surpass that of Liberal Lester Pearson to become the third-longest surviving minority since Confederation -- no small accomplishment for a minority as numerically weak as Harper's.
Asked whether longevity is itself praiseworthy, academic Tom Flanagan, a former Harper campaign strategist said: "Of course it is. You can't do anything else unless you survive.''
More significantly, many close observers now see that Canada's most conservative government in two generations is ploddingly, subtly, changing the way the country is governed.
"They are very, very quietly, behind all these smokescreens, making all these changes to the way government operates,'' says Heather MacIvor, a political scientist and self-confessed "process geek'' at the University of Windsor, Ont.
The Conservatives have now cut taxes, including the GST, and raised spending, especially on provincial transfers and the military, to the point that Canada's budgetary surplus is balanced on a wire.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's February budget projected a razor-thin operating surplus of just $1.3 billion in 2009, the smallest since 1998.
"The most important (policy change) is just this: limiting the fiscal capacity of future governments,'' said MacIvor.
"They've deliberately thrown away much of the federal spending power.''
Adds Flanagan, a professor at the University of Calgary: "This was something that was never announced as an objective, but I'm sure it's not an unintended result. It's the intended result.''
And it's just one of many major shifts.
The budget implementation bill included changes to Canada's Immigration Act that critics claim roll back the clock to a time when Canada's immigration minister could arbitrarily decide who gets in and who's rejected.
Immigration Minister Diane Finley counters that she needs flexibility to fast-track the most needed skilled labour into Canada while reducing the backlog of would-be immigrants waiting in the queue.
Repeated amnesties, fee waivers and refunds in the federal gun registry, meanwhile, have left the system that cost $1 billion to set up crumbling for want of up-to-date data. The federal firearms commissioner reported in April that about 76,000 gun enthusiasts, holding some 234,000 weapons, failed to renew licences that ran out during 2006.
The Tories are preparing the ground for a major nuclear power renaissance in Canada, including the possibility of reprocessing and enriching uranium in this country for the first time.
They summarily fired Linda Keen, the head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, in January after she failed to bend to the minister's demands in a dispute over a medical isotope reactor in Chalk River, Ont.
Keen is currently suing the government for wrongful dismissal.
The government has renewed Canada's military commitment to Afghanistan through 2011; has enacted a slew of tough-on-crime laws that will swell the country's prison population; and has served notice that it opposes Vancouver's safe-injection drug site.
It forced through tax changes that will give the heritage minister de facto censorship powers over Canadian film and TV productions deemed "contrary to public policy.''
And only successive court losses stopped the Conservatives' regulatory attempt to end the barley monopoly at the Canadian Wheat Board. The courts ruled Parliament must vote on changes to the legislation.
That wasn't all that happened this spring, although Flanagan characterizes other events as "not so much rooted in the Conservative platform.''
The Tories went against type with a pair of highly symbolic announcements:
- Industry Minister Jim Prentice stepped in to stop the sale of the Radarsat 2 satellite, Canadarm and Dextre space robotics to an American arms-maker in April, the first time Ottawa had outright blocked an American takeover of a Canadian firm since the Investment Canada Act came into being 19 years ago.
- And Harper's formal apology this month for the Canadian government's role in the native residential school system was a moving and historic moment in Parliament -- notwithstanding a Tory backbencher's untimely and prejudicial musings the same day about the work ethic of aboriginals.
- There were also changes to the Consumer Protection Act, and the long overdue introduction of new and controversial copyright legislation.
As Flanagan puts it: "Any open-minded person writing the history of this government -- whether you support or oppose most of the things they've done -- you'd have to agree they actually have done things.''
