That Stephen Harper recently sought counsel from Brian Mulroney and Jean Charest on a potentially shifting Quebec political landscape is a significant political story on a number of fronts.
Just as significant, however, is that the meetings were “secret,” becoming public knowledge only after they were revealed by an enterprising Canadian Press reporter.
Last month, it was a “secret” meeting between Harper and Dalton McGuinty where the Ontario premier pitched for federal help in developing the mineral-rich Ring of Fire in northwestern Ontario, a deposit worth potentially billions of dollars of revenue for this province.
There might be legitimate reasons for Harper trying to keep secret a meeting with a former prime minister he once deemed persona non grata.
But there is no reason that meetings with sitting premiers are not revealed.
These are meetings between leaders who have been entrusted by a plurality of voters to steer the future of the country and their province, and voters have a right to know when these leaders meet and what is on their agenda.
Much has been written about Harper’s approach to federal-provincial relations, an approach that clearly lays out the dividing line between the responsibilities of the two levels of government.
It was most starkly on display last winter when a protracted negotiation on health-care funding was short-circuited by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, who laid out a long-term funding proposal to the provincial finance ministers. Take it or leave it, the provinces were told, and you decide how to deliver services.
We know Harper has turned the page on the grandiose federal-provincial summits favoured by previous governments, gatherings that often turned into preening and posturing festivals.
But it’s not accurate to say that Harper doesn’t deal with the provinces.
He just does it without telling us.
It’s not precisely clear when federal-provincial relations began operating in the dark, in secret hotel rendezvous. Not only is it now accepted practice, but the premiers clearly defer to the prime minister.
It is all part of the incredible leeway Harper is given to simply disappear, as if swallowed up by the earth, with no one able to determine what he is doing.
Last year, Harper took a private trip to New York, with Canadians learning only when he showed up at his seat behind home plate during a televised Blue Jays game at Yankee Stadium.
Last summer, he popped up at a barbecue with Mayor Rob Ford, cheerleading for Ontario PC Leader Tim Hudak in that province’s looming election.
This is not to argue for an American-style system in which a White House pool of reporters stakes out the president during his holiday, but Americans do not let their president simply step away from the radar. When the U.S president is on holiday, he is still the president.
During the George W. Bush years, that meant a gaggle of reporters sweltering in Texas in August as the president cleared bush and whizzed around Crawford on a bike.
Under Barack Obama, the assignment became much more palatable, with holiday stakeouts in Hawaii. But reporters still received regular briefings and the business of government continued.
Harper is allowed to disappear for days on end, if not longer.
Harper’s communications director, Andrew MacDougall, says the prime minister holds a huge number of meetings with leaders, “stakeholders” and citizens.
“Some are public, some are not. Sometimes this is at our request, sometimes at their request,” MacDougall says. “Meetings are logged with the lobbying commissioner when appropriate and required.”
And MacDougall is adamant that the prime minister and his family have every right to privacy during their personal time.
This is a prime minister who long ago learned that to be in Canadians’ faces each day just hastens the day when voters tire of him.
He’s not hiding. On his official website, there are thousands of photos of him, doing everything from meeting with foreign leaders and glad-handing at the G20 summit to kicking off construction of the Mississauga Rapid Transit bus corridor.
MacDougall’s view on private time for the prime minister might very well be shared by a majority of Canadians.
No one is lobbying to join them for a shopping jaunt to New York.
We’re just interested in a better idea of where he is so it won’t be up to anonymous sources to tell us what the man we elected prime minister is doing.
Tim Harper is a national affairs writer for the Toronto Star.