As the Conservatives wrapped up a two-day celebration of their majority win in May, they began madly tossing around so many hockey metaphors a curious voter must have wondered if we had elected a government or an NHL franchise.
The halls of the new Ottawa Convention Centre were suddenly filled with memories of Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky, tales of Stanley Cup victories past and possibly future, references to the Vancouver Canucks and the Winnipeg Jets.
But the over-the-top pep rally that wrapped up the convention was really just the way corporations rally their executives at annual meetings.
This was the gathering of the corporation running this country.
As Stephen Harper takes a run at making the Conservatives Canada’s natural governing party, this convention was a good starting point to look at the way the country will be governed over the next four years.
From Harper, they got a keynote address that was equal parts red meat, a reach across the Ottawa River to Quebec, and an aspirational take on Canada’s place in the world and the legacy of this government.
But the real work of this government will be to ensure it’s in a position to replicate its victory in 2015.
It will do so with superior fundraising, coupled with its elimination of vote subsidies, which should give it an even greater advantage over its opponents.
It will do so with a sophisticated voter targeting system, data mining and get-out-the-vote machinery that is light years ahead of its opponents.
Senator Irving Gerstein, the party’s chief fundraiser, stressed that this government must be run like a business.
He said superior technology is responsible for the victory of 40 Conservative MPs on May 2.
“That’s what this business is all about and what the other political parties just don’t get,’’ said Gerstein, rewarded for his work with a Harper appointment to the Senate. (He’s also one of four Tories facing Election Canada charges of overspending in the 2006 campaign.)
It will be a government that, in the words of former Reform party leader Preston Manning, is more “facilitator, enabler, partner” with Canadians, rather than a government that says it has the great solutions to problems.
It will be, in short, a government that gets out of Canadians’ faces, takes care of business and leaves voters to focus on family and lifestyle and not worry about what is happening in Ottawa.
Taking their cue, the 2,200 delegates treated their convention like an annual meeting of a Fortune 500 company.
It played it out with almost surgical precision, largely soulless, aimed at avoiding controversy.
A policy that would strip Canadian citizenship of anyone who took up arms against the country — the so-called Omar Khadr resolution — was lauded from the floor as a “patriotic gesture to our brave men and women in uniform.’’
But it failed.
However, another resolution that would push the government to seek mandatory life sentences for those twice convicted of a litany of crimes including drug trafficking — two strikes and you’re out — passed.
A move to remove support for a domestic cap-and-trade system passed, as did a move that has the party supporting legislation to define marriage as a union between man and woman, but no longer refers to a “Conservative government” backing that stance.
None of those votes bind the Harper government.
So far, there is no indication the prime minister wants to move in those directions. Instead, it will be incremental as we go.
By choosing the status quo in a debate over the weight of riding associations in choosing a new leader, it has merely delayed the inevitable.
Harper will not lead this party forever and the politics of leadership and power will surely follow at subsequent conventions.
But for now, to use the metaphor of choice in downtown Ottawa, Harper will be ragging the puck.
Tim Harper is a national affairs writer for the Toronto Star.