The king of common sense by Macfarlane, David Toronto Life, 30(9), June 1996 54–60 SO, MR. DOWNTOWN magazine writer. What do I think about Mike Harris? I’ll tell you what I think about Mike Harris. I think you’re the last person in the fucking province who’s going to understand Mike Harris, that’s what I think about Mike Harris. So I was there when Mike Harris waved happily from the podium of the Metropolitan Ballroom to 2,500 applauding people. Can you guess why? Because Mike Harris knows Salman Rushdie? Because Mike Harris jogs, and wears well-cut suits and can account for every clause and subclause in the Meech Lake Accord? No. No, siree. I was there. I was clapping. I was cheering. I was clapping and cheering partly because Harris says things that I understand. I’m not a constitutional lawyer or a moral philosopher or a social worker. What the fuck do I know? I only run a small business. I only produce goods, employ people, pay taxes, take risks, look after my family. I guess I find it refreshing to hear a politician who says things I understand. For a change. Things like Harris said that night: “The last two governments in this province hiked taxes no fewer than sixty-five times, including eleven personal-income tax hikes. [Bob Rae] alone increased total tax rates the equivalent of some four billion dollars. And what did we get? Nearly nine per cent unemployment. Successive double-digit deficits. A $100-billion accumulated debt. The highest per capita number of people in the country trapped in the cycle of welfare dependency.” THE WIDE, GRITTY STREET between Toronto’s Westin Harbour Castle and the hotel’s convention centre seems almost deserted. The occasional taxi speeds by; a limousine turns languidly into the Westin’s entrance; a few pedestrians scurry through the light drizzle and disappear. The street has the end-of-the-world look that Toronto believes it never sinks to – downtown public space up for grabs after the workday is over. At the hotel’s west entrance, a small knot of protesters circle the side-walk, chanting, “Cut the cuts” and “Shame, shame, shame.” Above them, through the glassed-in, second-floor skywalk, a few men in suits begin to cross from the gleaming hotel to the fortress-like convention centre. At first, there are only a few – although there is purpose and haste in their step that seems to imply that more will follow. Many more. Within minutes the skywalk is filled by a thick, efficiently moving procession of men – mostly men, mostly professionals and businessmen. They pass aloft, paying no heed to the slivers of the protesters’ shouts that make it through the soundproof glass and into the now crowded and boisterous climate-controlled passageway. They are on their way to the annual Ontario Progressive Conservative Party dinner – 2,500 confident, no-nonsense participants in what will prove to be one of the largest and most successful political fund-raisers ever held in Canada. Some people have paid $500 a plate. Others, buying the chance to have a pre-dinner drink with the premier, have paid $700. Almost one-and-a-half-million dollars will find its way into the party’s coffers tonight. So what if below them a little knot of protesters do their thing? Who are they? OPSEU members? Single mothers? Teachers? Welfare recipients? It hardly matters. For the people who are coming to the fund-raiser hold firmly, almost religiously, to the same conviction that the government does: that in the face of the dire economic consequences that threaten Ontario, there is simply no time left to be distracted by protests. There is no time to shilly-shally on the only fiscal agenda that makes sense to them. Cut spending and cut taxes, no matter how many interest groups gather on the steps of Queen’s Park, no matter how many unions go on strike, no matter how many well-meaning but misguided citizens hold candles in the twilight in front of the statues of Queen Victoria and Sir Oliver Mowat “to mourn the loss of Ontario as we know it,” no matter how many university students are hauled out of the legislature’s public gallery. The party faithful does not believe this is an easy thing to do. This is hanging tough. This is “staying the course.” As Ontario’s Conservatives file across the skywalk, over the heads of the protesters, they neither falter nor look down. At the centre of all this, of course, is the solid, comfortable figure of Mike Harris. There are, tonight, lots of places in the province where one could voice the opinion that Mike Harris is merely a puppet – a creation of young, aggressive neoconservative politicos such as last year’s campaign chair Tom Long, or strategist Mike Murphy, or the powerful inner circle of free-market, antigovernment Svengalis who ran the Harris campaign. Who took the mantra of tax and spending cuts from radically Republican jurisdictions such as Michigan or New Jersey, and taught it by rote to the conveniently down-to-earth, pleasantly uncomplicated veteran MPP from North Bay. There are plenty of places where one could describe Mike Harris as the perfect subject for American-style, right-wing hypnosis – but the Westin Harbour Castle convention centre is not one of them. It is Mike Harris’s night. It is his revolution – the Common Sense Revolution – that is being celebrated. It is Mike Harris who embodies what these committed Conservatives so fervently believe in. He is their hope, and because he is their hope, a slight, tremulous vibration of anxiety runs beneath the confident schmoozing of the gathering. “It won’t touch him,” says a trim, prematurely bald man, as the escalator glides upward toward the Metropolitan Ballroom. “I don’t know,” says someone in front of him. “You never know about these things.” Readers of the Globe and Mail had awakened that morning to the front-page headlines: HARRIS GETS HELP WITH LIVING COSTS – DEAL WITH RIDING ASSOCIATION MEANS TAXPAYERS ON HOOK FOR CLOTHES, DRY CLEANING, MEALS. Written by the Globe’s Estanislao Oziewicz, the story began, “While Mike Harris preached the merits of government fiscal restraint, Ontario taxpayers were indirectly footing thousands of dollars in bills for his golf club membership, suits, dry cleaning, entertaining and meals, and to supplement his already tax-supported Toronto housing.” On one hand, it seemed like small potatoes – a few thousand dollars of expenses that Harris’s riding association had provided over the years to their MPP. On the other hand, it had more than a whiff of hypocrisy to it, and hypocrisy was one thing – the thing, in fact – that the Ontario Conservatives knew the public would not tolerate. The timing wasn’t good. For someone bent on changing the face of government in Ontario forever, Harris had been keeping a remarkably low, carefully maintained media profile – letting colleagues such as Finance Minister Ernie Eves, Social Services Minister David Tsubouchi, Education Minister John Snobelen, Environment Minister Brenda Elliott and Management Board chair David Johnson take the heat in the house and in the scrums during the difficulties of the first year. However, on the day of the fund-raiser, the spotlight found him. That afternoon, he entered the legislature with his face expressionless and his arms held straight down in an attitude oddly reminiscent of Brian Mulroney. As he bowed to the speaker and took his seat between Ernie Eves and Dave Johnson, he looked as if his mind were somewhere else entirely, as he often does in the house. Still, he withstood a withering attack from the opposition benches – defending himself in the emotionless monotone that has become his government’s principal tactic during question period. He managed, by mumbled obfuscation as much as anything, to deflect the opposition. Somewhat. His answers were not entirely satisfactory. He barely acknowledged, for instance, that donations to his riding association were tax-deductible and that, therefore, his dry-cleaning and golf-club membership bills were being paid for by the hardworking, hard-pressed public. But the approach of his government, even more than most governments, is that in the mud-wrestle of question period answers don’t have to be satisfactory. Most people at the fund-raiser slough the issue off, but there are some who are not so sure. They know that few things infuriate voters more quickly than a politician floundering on the slope between lofty principle and self-interest. If the Globe’s story catches the public’s attention, and if, then, the few loose cannons in the Tory caucus start to go off again, and if labour trouble persists, and if economic growth doesn’t pan out quite the way Ernie Eves hopes it will, the next twelve months could be as dramatic as the first twelve and not nearly as happy. But, almost as soon as it is felt, the anxiety vanishes in the booming music, in the arc of the TV lights, in the standing ovation. Suddenly, Mike Harris and his wife, Janet, are making their entrance into the cheering, clapping room, and the place is charged with a confidence that makes the Globe’s story feel like yesterday’s news. Harris, in this setting, brims with emotion and energy. The change from his demeanour in the house is so remarkable it’s almost eerie. He looks like a different person. He moves like a different person, and after he and Janet shake dozens of hands and kiss scores of cheeks and wave happily from the podium and blow more kisses, he speaks like a different person. He is warm, and clear, and emphatic, and he immediately puts to rest the little matter of HARRIS GETS HELP WITH LIVING COSTS. It is not going to matter. Just as the protesters are not going to matter. Just as the unions are not going to matter. Just as all the distractions from his goal are not going to matter. “We’ll have you home early,” he says. “Those of you who read the Globe and Mail this morning know I have to have this suit back to Tuxedo Junction by nine.” And there is, in the laughter in the room, something that sounds like optimism, something that sounds like confidence and something that sounds a little like relief. SO, MR. DOWNTOWN magazine writer. What do I think about Mike Harris? I’ll tell you what I think about Mike Harris. I think you’re the last person in the fucking province who’s going to understand Mike Harris, that’s what I think about Mike Harris. So, you said his press people have been giving you the runaround? You poor baby. Tell me something. What do you expect? You think they don’t see you coming? Tell me, do you all wear Rockports? Is it a union thing? You thing his press people don’t have your number. You think they don’t know that you’re going to spend half an hour with the guy and then write that he looks more like he should be wearing cleats and a headset on the sidelines of a football field than sitting in the office formerly occupied by luminaries such as Bob Rae, David Peterson, Bill Davis and John Robarts. You think they don’t know you’re going to announce to your readers – sipping their cappuccinos, listening to their CB-fucking-C – that he’s not very urbane? Not very sophisticated? Not very well-read? That he’s the most anti-intellectual premier since Mitch Hepburn? That he clips Reader’s Digest for chrissake? That he wouldn’t know a Michael Snow if he found one hanging in his locker? That he wouldn’t recognize Jukka-Pekka Saraste or Maureen Forrester if he had to play through them on the back nine? That he can’t speak French and that he uses English the way a mechanic uses the side of a wrench on a rusty bolt? That he’s not very introspective? You think they don’t know that by the time you use the third, or the fourth, or the fifth quote from someone who describes him as “uncomplicated” that you’re going to be laying on the irony so thick even his backbenchers will notice it? You think his press people don’t see you coming a mile away? So tell me, if you’re so bright and he’s so dumb, how come you haven’t figured out that’s what those flacks in his office are hired to do: they’re there to give people like you the runaround. And you know why? Because you’re irrelevant, that’s why. You don’t count. You don’t like his ties? Tough shit. It embarrasses you to have a premier who looks comfortable in a Tim Hortons on a Saturday morning? Too bad. I take it you prefer the kind who looks comfortable at film festival galas and PEN benefits. Why am I not surprised? The thing is, speaking politically, speaking tactically, speaking in terms of reality – you are aware of the existence of reality, aren’t you? – Mike Harris doesn’t give a stale fart in a high wind what you prefer. And if you don’t know that yet, you know what? You know fuck-all about Mike Harris. And less about Ontario. So you’ve got your basic bio, I guess. Not exactly a page-turner, is it? Born 1945, in Toronto, but got the hell out. Grew up in North Bay – it’s past Huntsville, if you can imagine that. He likes to make it sound as if his childhood was a tough one: that the young Mike Harris had to wait, with the wind howling through the cracks in the log cabin while his father carved the daily ration of bologna, but that’s a bit much. Let’s just say he survived, somehow, 200 miles away from the nearest croissant and the Sunday New York Times. He went to Waterloo Lutheran University for part of one year. Which part? Probably the twenty-five-cent draft by the trayload part, if you want to know. Then he went into the ski business with his old man, taught elementary school, managed a golf club, served as a trustee on the Nipissing board of education. He married in 1967; he divorced in 1969. “Quite a mistake,” he says. I guess. There are Monopoly games that have lasted longer. Quite a mistake – you can make something of it if you want, but your friend Bob Rae says the same thing about the first NDP budget and you don’t see that as some kind of major character flaw, do you? And then he remarried: Janet Harrison, in 1974, and they have two adopted sons, Michael, eleven, and Jeffrey, four. Not what you would call rivetting. Fact: always says hello to Queen’s Park staffers in the hall-ways, whatever their political affiliation. Fact: likes to shoot the breeze at Christmas parties. Fact: likes to go fishing with his eldest son. At about this point, your readers should start dozing off. They say he was a pretty good teacher and a reasonably dedicated member of the school board. No better, or worse, than many. That he’s even more right-wing now than he was fifteen years ago puts him pretty much in the same boat as everyone except Rick Salutin and the Italians. He has served as MPP for Nipissing for fifteen years. He has been party leader for six. But it is his two-decades-old forays into resort management that still fire the tirelessly inventive imaginations of his detractors. His CV has supplied every opposition politician at Queen’s Park and every journalist in the province who isn’t employed by the Sun with two new search-and-replace terms for dunce: ski instructor and golf pro. Still. Pretty ordinary stuff. In fact, it’s about as ordinary as it is possible to get without living in Peterborough. It’s so ordinary it’s almost interesting. Almost. We are dealing with ordinariness of a very considerable degree when the fact that twenty years ago he drank beer and watched the strippers in a North Bay hotel keeps getting into print. You perk up at this whiff of scandal, I can tell. I can see your story now. Headline: PREMIER ADMITS TO ORDERING ANOTHER BLUE. NICE TITS, HARRIS ACKNOWLEDGES. What was he supposed to do? Live in North Bay and not go into a hotel and drink beer? Drink beer in a North Bay hotel and not look at the strippers? We’re talking ordinary. He probably actually admits to watching television. Thinks stags are still okay. Safe to say he doesn’t know Michael Ignatieff. Prefers a slalom ski and twin Merc 100s to the J-stroke. Conceivably, he has never been to Prego. A regular, hamburger-on-the-barbecue kind of guy – except for one small biographical detail. A year ago the drop-out from North Bay, the small-town donut-dunker, was right about Ontario when every pleat-trousered pundit, cell-phoned lawyer, silk-tied Rhodes Scholar and MaxMara-ed Charlie Pachter collector who’s ever ordered an egg-white omelette at the Prince Arthur Room was wrong. Funny thing, isn’t it? So here’s your story. When he was elected party leader, according to the prevailing political wisdom, Mike Harris was just this side of the lunatic fringe. He inherited the party almost by default – a party that was so broke and dispirited and so far out of the spotlight it couldn’t run a drink tab at Bistro 990. But Harris kept on saying what he’d always been saying (deficit too big, taxes too high), and last June he took a long, steaming piss on prevailing political wisdom. We won eighty-two seats; the Liberals, thirty; the NDP, seventeen – which makes you wonder what socially conscious, environmentally sensitive, triple-A-rated, debt-free utopia those seventeen NDP ridings are in. So I was there when Mike Harris waved happily from the podium of the Metropolitan Ballroom to 2,500 applauding people. Can you guess why? Because Mike Harris knows Salman Rushdie? Because Mike Harris jogs, and wears well-cut suits and can account for every clause and subclause in the Meech Lake Accord? No. No, siree. I was there. I was clapping. I was cheering. I was clapping and cheering partly because Harris says things that I understand. I’m not a constitutional lawyer or a moral philosopher or a social worker. What the fuck do I know? I only run a small business. I only produce goods, employ people, pay taxes, take risks, look after my family. I guess I find it refreshing to hear a politician who says things I understand. For a change. Things like Harris said that night: “The last two governments in this province hiked taxes no fewer than sixty-five times, including eleven personal-income tax hikes. Bob Rae alone increased total tax rates the equivalent of some four billion dollars. And what did we get? Nearly nine per cent unemployment. Successive double-digit deficits. A $100-billion accumulated debt. The highest per capita number of people in the country trapped in the cycle of welfare dependency.” But mostly I was there because I felt something in that room I haven’t felt for quite a while in this province. I felt plain old capitalist confidence. It was like a blast of pure oxygen. It was like the ventilation system was finally starting to work. I saw people exchanging cards; I heard people talking deals; I saw people making appointments. I sensed something in the air that seemed a lot like let’s-give-it-a-shot optimism, and I’ll tell you, I don’t know what it’s been like in the espresso bars, but around here, in regular grind country, let’s-give-it-a-shot optimism has been in pretty short supply. So, to get a blast of it was infectious. It was exhilarating. You could feel the red tape loosening around your neck. You could feel the cash flowing through your veins. You could just picture those fibre optics between Hong Kong and Ontario starting to sizzle. You could see the bullshit drying up and blowing away. It was like somebody saying, “You want a drink but it’s after the one o’clock closing?” and – instead of embarking on reports and interventions and surveys and committee hearings and debates and constituent assemblies and round-table discussions and expert opinions and community meetings – they say, “Will that be straight up or on the rocks?” And you know something else? This was not the old guard. These were not septuagenarian senators and scotch-pickled Granite Club members and Bay Street old boys who go to the members’ lounge at the opera and who privately admit to admiring Bob Rae. This was something new. These were people who don’t spend their breakfasts eating three-grain toast and marmalade and getting upset with Andrew Coyne. These were people who thought those Bob Rae billboards at Bay and Wellesley were clever as hell. Some of these suits would have been sent around to the tradesmen’s entrance at the Toronto Club. A few of the dresses looked like the only time they’d been trotted out after bridesmaid’s duty was for a night out to the Phantom. Believe me, this was not the Big Blue Machine. This was new. This was so new it wasn’t even Larry Grossman – who, by the way, I saw standing at the doorway of the Metropolitan Ballroom, looking sharp and healthy and young. He stared at all those table settings, and all that media, and those two big overhead screens, and those speakers, and he heard the buzz in that room, and I don’t know what he was thinking, but he had that kind of frozen smile that actors have at the Academy Awards when someone else’s name is pulled from the envelope. It was like being let out of school. It was like somebody finally saying, “Look, we know you all drive at 120 kilometres an hour anyway, so screw it, we’ll make it legal.” It was like lighting up a cigar. It was like being able to tell politically incorrect jokes again. It was like looking around the room and seeing maybe one woman for every twelve men, which was exactly what I was doing when the guy beside me noticed the same thing and gave me a nudge and said, “How’d so many broads get in?” and we laughed. God, we laughed. We laughed because the Dow Jones was going through the roof. We laughed because the NDP’s labour reform law was dead and the Employer Health Tax was on the block. We laughed because Harris said, “We said we would cut taxes to create jobs. And we will. By roughly four billion dollars over three years.” And we laughed because when one of the protesters on the sidewalk shouted, “How many more women’s centres are you going to close?” someone in front of me just laughed. Just laughed and kept on walking. And I thought, My, my, Mr. Harris sure has turned things around. So that’s the story. A no-brainer basically – the only difference of opinion being to what or to whom the absence of grey matter refers. If your denim shirt, Armani tie and intermittent attendance at the Tarragon Theatre are anything to go by, you’ll probably conclude that Mike Harris is the one without much in the way of smarts. You have your reasons, I’m sure, but I have to admit they kind of go over my head. I tend toward the more simplistic, less subtle, somewhat less fashionable conviction that if you’re pissing away a million an hour to service a $100-billion debt, if you’ve got some pretty chilly New York bond-raters getting cooler by the second, if you’ve got unemployment rising steadily from seven to eight to nine per cent, and if you’ve got one of the highest tax rates in a country that’s already taxed down to its jockey shorts, it does not take a particularly high IQ to realize that you better do something. You better do something pretty fucking fast, or else forget welfare, forget day care, forget the AGO, forget your arts that-nobody-in-their-right-mind-would-pay-for grants. You better even forget Bay Street; we’ll all be standing on Highway 400, selling blueberries to the Americans and the Japanese and the Germans who are on their way to greet the serfs at their summer estates in Muskoka and Georgian Bay. What was that? The unions might see things differently? Of course, the unions might see things differently. That’s what unions are for, stupid. They get paid to see things differently. Such as: I think that maybe four people shouldn’t be hired to do a job that one person can do – the unions see things differently. I’m under the impression that there’s a recession chewing its way up my legs like a rabid rottweiler – the unions see things differently. I have this notion that if a shoe factory can’t make a profit here, then maybe it should move to where it can – the unions see things differently. But the difference of perception that I really like is this: Bob Rae thought the NDP should be re-elected in Ontario in June 1995 – the unions saw things differently. I mean, who did Buzz Hargrove want to be premier, Pete Seeger? What did he think was going to happen? Having the unions for an ally during the last provincial election campaign turned out to be kind of like having the French for allies during World War II. Let’s just say they were less than resolute in the face of the approaching panzer divisions. Which leaves the unions more or less where Harris and the Conservatives want them to be: representing their own self-interest and not much more. There’s OPSEU over there. And there’s the auto workers here. And there’s Bob White, blathering away on the CBC as per usual. And nobody – certainly nobody who’s worried about meeting a payroll, or making a tax instalment, or buying a car, or paying for their kid’s orthodontist’s annual holiday in the Exumas – gives a shit. Solidarity forever – unless, of course, you have to deal with something as unco-operative as economic reality. So Harris will ignore the unions whenever he possibly can. He’ll ignore them, in fact, in much the same way his press people will ignore you. I mean, why should they let you at him? And why should you imagine that he’s going to tell you anything interesting or revealing. Do you really think he’s going to lean forward, over a friendly cup of instant coffee in his spartan Queen’s Park office, and tell you his secrets? That cutting welfare is a crock of shit, for instance. That it’s perfectly obvious that the economy of Ontario is not being dragged down by unconscionable, tax-supported purchases of cigarettes and potato chips at the corner of Dundas and Sherbourne. That ripping the heart out of Toronto’s cultural industries makes no economic sense to the city or the province? That by the time you get your tax cut this year – a cut paid for with enough shutdowns and layoffs and “economic drag” to fill a Steinbeck novel – you are going to be able to go out to dinner once or twice and, despite your best efforts to keep things trickling down to the out-of-work actor who grinds the fresh pepper and recommends the rack of lamb, the economy of the province is not going to heat up because you and your wife get carried away and order something a little better than the house red. Mike Harris, who is not nearly so dumb as you people like to think, is not going to tell you this because such details don’t matter. They matter to you, of course. You’ll want to stop the fucking presses. I can see the headlines now: CHEAP EFFECTIVE METHOD OF CONTROLLING SPEEDING DEEP-SIXED; JUST FELT LIKE IT, SAY TORIES OF PHOTO-RADAR DECISION. OR: FILM AGENCY SLASHED TO BONE: AIDES DENY LINK BETWEEN HARSH CULTURAL POLICY AND PREMIER’S BEWILDERED ATTENDANCE AT GALA OPENING OF LE CONFESSIONNAL. That these policies don’t make much economic sense is a detail that doesn’t matter to him, mostly because it doesn’t matter to the people who do matter to him. Perception is everything in political life – the perception of Wall Street; the perception of Bay Street; the perception of secretaries who, as we speak, are sitting in a mall on their coffee break, worrying about their split ends, their kids and their Visa bills; the perception of pipefitters who, for reasons known only to them the The Toronto Sun, believe they are out of work because Bob Rae was too sympathetic to Quebec; and the perception of people like me, who get up every day at 5:30 and get home at quarter to eight, who pay this tax and that tax, fill out this form and that form, who work like hell and who wind up at every year-end with an overdraft the size of a new minivan and an appointment with a Revenue Canada auditor. We’re the ones who count for him, and we’re the ones who are receiving his signals. Big signals. Signals to the constituency of the party faithful and the financially pissed off. Signals that something quite different is on its way. That we’re open for business. We’re loosening up. We’re hanging tough. We’re staying the course. Tell me: have you noticed how much Harris says “frankly”? “Frankly, Pamela....” “To be honest with you, Steve....” “Well, Peter, to be perfectly frank....” “Frankly, Mr. Speaker....” Frankly, he means the answer he’s giving is just the tip of the iceberg, but he’s forthright enough to admit the iceberg is there. He means that if people like you look just below the surface, you’ll see the outlines of one helluva big agenda. Ontario Hydro? Just watch him. TVO? You betcha. You can call it privatization. You can call it Americanization. You can call it what Lyn McLeod calls it: “an erosion of our most basic values.” Or you can call it necessary. He’s frank enough to hint, but that’s about it. For now. And so, you know what? If I were in Mike Harris’s press office, and you called me up and asked for an interview with the premier, I’d give you the runaround too. I’d figure, what’s the point? What he doesn’t know can’t hurt us. THE JOURNALIST IS wearing badly scuffed Rockports, a denim shirt and an Armani tie. Almost three months after the first request for an interview, Mike Harris seats himself behind a can of diet ginger ale at the end of an oak table in his Queen’s Park offices. A press aide seats himself too, silently at Harris’s left, his tape recorder pointedly beside the journalist’s. In his many phone calls to the premier’s press office, the journalist hadn’t thought to ask if anyone else would sit in on the interview, and the press aide, in his many courteous, if never absolutely concrete, replies, hadn’t thought it necessary to mention it. This is simply the way things are done here. The two tape recorders make the encounter seem more like a small scrum than a conversation – a formalization of question-and-answer that Harris seems to prefer to rambling chats. “I worked across from him for years,” a former MPP had said, “and I can’t say I ever got to know him.” Still, Harris is relaxed and cordial. He apologizes for an earlier cancelled appointment. He makes a few jokes about giving speeches and about the rigours of question period. His eyes, often becalmed in a solid, unexpressive English-Canadian face, actually light up when he chuckles. A little earlier, he had asked the photographer to name three people who had been shot in the back of the head. The photographer, peering through the Hasselblad at the twenty-second premier of Ontario, got John F. Kennedy right. Harris filled in the rest: Abraham Lincoln and whoever was sitting in front of Pee-Wee Herman in that movie theatre. Harris’s voice – the sort that would carry naturally and well from the stands at a baseball game – is low and unemphatic and graced with a kind of small-town politeness and lack of pretension. It is, in fact, the perfect voice to speak for the Common Sense Revolution. For rather than sounding zealous in the manner of Tom Long, or robotic in the manner of Health Minister Jim Wilson, or impervious in the manner of Dave Johnson, or prevaricating in the manner of John Snobelen, or irritable in the manner of David Tsubouchi, Harris sounds direct, calm, down-to-earth, like an auto mechanic who doesn’t pretend to know everything but does know a thing or two about cars. His voice rolls along, as if passing through two big hands rubbing themselves clean of oil, and announces, a little sadly, that there are some pretty big problems under the hood. The problem is this,” he says. “Every delay contributes to the problem. If we don’t do anything for a year, we’re ten billion worse off than we were.” He has a hint of sadness in his face. And, in fact, he has had a few personal crosses to bear: he struggled with a neurological disorder in the late 1970s that left him, briefly, in a wheelchair; his youngest son has a mild form of cerebral palsy; he is, like most politicians, away from home far more than he would like to be. Of his first year in office, he says, “It’s been quite a ride” – without a smile. His steady, uncomplicated manner belies the accusation that he was a conveniently empty vessel that a handful of ambitious young neoconservatives filled up and set loose. He seems far too set in his ways to be so crassly manipulated. And, if the clearly transparent fictions he sometimes uses in his speeches are anything to go by (“A prominent businessperson in Hong Kong came up to me at a reception and said, ’Premier Harris, perhaps you could explain something to me....’”), he is not a good enough actor to play such a role. Which is not to say that the Republican rhetoric is not there: the quotations in his speeches, his points of political reference and his buzzwords are almost invariably American. It is not to say that Ontario’s PCS were not dead on in their reading of the province’s mood and demographics; last year’s election, orchestrated by Tom Long, is universally acknowledged as a masterpiece of populist campaigning. It is not to say that Harris has not under-gone intensive media training. Embellished, coached and improved during the campaign and his first year in power, Mike Harris seems to have remained Mike Harris. “I seek advice from a lot of sources,” he says. “There are a number of people who were on the campaign team who gave me advice who are still with me on a staff basis. There are some whom I still consult with who are not on staff. There are friends whose advice I trust.” What you see with Michael is what you get,” says David Peterson. And what you see most clearly is what Peterson calls “a certain purity of thought and action.” All attempts to understand him lead to this. Harris, says Peterson, is “not complicated, not devious, not tricky, not hypocritical. For a couple of years before the election, he was saying what he was going to do if they got elected, and now he’s doing it. You may not agree with it. It’s certainly not the approach that I would advocate. But you can’t possibly be surprised by what he’s doing. He’s proceeding as he said he would.” This purity of thought and action is, at once, Harris’s strength and Harris’s weakness. You could describe it as stead-fast conviction or you could describe it as close-mindedness. Sitting in that Queen’s Park office, taking occasional sips from his can of diet ginger ale and struggling with the last, slightly cavernous-sounding stages of a cold that has been dogging him for the better part of a week, Harris reveals, in his quiet, understated way, how firmly he holds his position. Asked to look back over the year, what he says is surprising: “Legislatively, we are not so far along as I had hoped we would be.” Critics have been alarmed, pundits have been astonished, and supporters have been greatly encouraged by the speed at which the Harris government blew through its first year in power. “We had an opportunity to implement a pretty focused agenda,” Harris says. Queen’s Park has never seen a cyclone quite like it. The government has repealed the NDP’s labour reform law, canned photo radar, rammed a wide-ranging and much criticized omnibus bill through the house, had riot police on the legislature’s front steps, survived a major labour dispute, cut here an slashed there and, in the week leading up to the first Conservative budget, left little doubt that the promised tax cut was in the cards. No one, not even the National Citizens’ Coalition, has suggested that the government is moving too slowly. And yet, without much in the way of expression, with no rhetorical purpose other than stating how the past year looks to him, Mike Harris sips his diet ginger ale and wishes he could move faster. These soft-spoken, unheralded comments make it clear that Mike Harris is not kidding. Everything his government does is predicated on what seems to be the ticking bomb of the deficit. And so clear is all this to him, such common sense does it make, that he is actually surprised by the intensity of the opposition he has encountered. He expects debate and argument, he says, but over how to downsize, how to balance the budget, how to do more for less, how to privatize – in short, how to implement his revolution. “These,” he says, “are legitimate discussion points.” And those who don’t see them as legitimate, those who don’t take them as a given in Ontario, are now, he says, “out of the game.” On this point the journalist looks up. The premier’s voice calmly continues; the two tapes slowly turn in their machines. The press aide doesn’t move. “Out of the game,” the journalist writes in his notepad – and only then, in that ordinary-looking room, with those two ordinary people, does it become clear that everything has changed.