Five Questions I Wanted To Ask Stephen Harper Last Night, But Couldn’t

Last night, our four national political leaders climbed onstage and had a surprisingly not-terrible series of exchanges. The debate, organized by Maclean's and moderated by the sharp Paul Wells, featured leaders getting into a surprising amount of depth about their platforms, policies, and ideologies.

The quick analysis of the thing is this: Elizabeth May was pointed and intelligent and managed to prove herself relevant onstage. Justin Trudeau looked good on the economy but still fell back into a flowery bed of meaningless platitudes at other points. Thomas Mulcair had a case of the yips and sliced otherwise easy tee-ups (these are all golf references, I'm told) but still had strong moments, especially on energy exports. Stephen Harper stayed standing despite being clobbered about a weakening economy, and looked really strong on foreign affairs.

There, you're caught up.

The one part of last night's debate you probably missed is when the debate ended. While the opposition leaders dragged themselves to a separate stage to be subjected to a torrent of snarky questions from the assembled journalists, Harper went out the fire escape.

Harper did answer questions after the 2011 debate. But not this time. The prime minister's thoroughly annoying disdain for the media has reached a fever pitch.

And that's frustrating. Because for those of us who would rather report on what the prime minister plans to actually do — as opposed to reporting on what he tells us he's going to do — not being able to ask questions makes it quite difficult. I assume he wants it that way.

It's not that the prime minister is taking no questions. He's taking five a day. But as I wrote last week, that's only from those journalists willing to pay $3,000 for the privilege.

So here are the five questions I would have asked last night. You can call me anytime, Steve, and we'll go through them.

Why do you hate us so much?

Obviously, go-to question off the bat has got to be why the prime minister is so special that he doesn't have to talk to media. But I suppose it's a necessary one, because at a certain point it's kind of personal. Like when your friend's boyfriend just seems to really dislike you and you're all "what, like, dude, we've met twice, where is this coming from?" and your friend is all "no, no, he really likes you" but you know they're lying. It's like that.

What needs to change in the fight against the Islamic State?

Harper's best moment from the debate last night was his evisceration of the other party leaders on the fight against the Islamic State. While the opposition party leaders wrung their hands about how the United Nations didn't sanction the fight—because we all know how effect the UN can be when it gets involved in crisis, eh, Rwanda?—and how our mission is vague and wrong and something.

"What we are doing in ISIS is precisely the mission that our international allies think we should be doing. These are the priorities: hit them in the air, and help to train people, particularly the Kurds, on the ground," Harper said during the debate. Pretty simple.

But while he offered the most compelling case for intervention, while the other three waffled through platitudes, it would have been interesting to hear the prime minister's take on recent developments in the region. Evidently, those Kurds, our allies, are currently the most effective force in the fight against the so-called Islamic State. Yet our other ally, Turkey, is dropping bombs on Kurdish compounds in an effort to take out the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) which is fighting alongside the main Kurdish units. While Canada designates the PKK as a terrorist organization, it is also our de facto ally, and those Turkish operations against the group are impacting our actual allies, that we're training and equipping.

Hearing Harper walk us through his plans on what to do there would be helpful.

Thunderdome: yay or nay?

I know what you're thinking: reporters aren't supposed to ask yes-or-no questions. But I think that given the effects of the prime minister's tough-on-crime agenda, this might be a worthwhile question.

Nothing in the debate last night touched on crime and justice, so it'd be nice to hear the prime minister on this. Many of his efforts to hike penalties for genuinely dangerous offenders have been pretty laudable—while his efforts to lock up drug dealers has not been quite so great—but the problem is that he didn't seem to prepare for the results. Right now, Canadian prisons are bursting at the seams, and the costs of warehousing these offenders is growing significantly. It's actually becoming a waste of money, and it's leading to some damn well unconstitutional whoopsie-daisies, like locking up a woman in solitary confinement for seven goddamn months.

So if you want to stay tough on crime, but don't want to actually pay to lock them up, maybe it would be worthwhile to let them fight for freedom or death in the Thunderdome. Just a suggestion.

Would consider rephrasing: "how long is too long to be held in solitary confinement?"

Is our economy screwed, or not?

We didn't get to hear Harper, last night, admit that his most recent budget is on track to carry a deficit, but he did cop to the fact that we're probably in a recession. So that's a start.

But while the opposition leaders forcefully tried to suggest that Harper was secretly bad at economics, and had somehow managed to fake it for the past nine years, the prime minister still commands some respect on the file. But for the past several months, pretty much all we've heard from him is: I'm giving parents money and that is good. The other parties are going to tax you and that is bad.

It would've been nice to actually hear the big guy go on for a bit about what he actually think needs to be done to turn the listing ship to starboard and get us back to port, or some equally nautical metaphor.

Can we pave over the Senate and turn it into a Denny's?

Last night, May offered the most coherent reason to burn down the Senate and salt the earth on which it sits, so no future lifetime Senators can grow from its ashes.

"The single biggest scandal that has yet occurred in the Canadian Senate was not the misspending," May began. She was referring to the Climate Accountability Act, a bill designed to push the government to align its policy-making to the goal of reducing carbon emissions. Then the Senate voted it down. "This is the first time in the history of this country that appointed senators have killed a bill without a single day of study in the Senate of Canada."

Then there was a pause. Moderator Paul Wells rounds on Harper.

"Mr. Harper, did you ask the senators to stop that bill?"

Awkward.

"We cannot force them to do anything," said the prime minister. "What we ask them to do, Paul, is we ask them to support the party's position."

In other words: we forced them to kill the bill.

Conservatives in the Senate, by the way, did the same thing to a bill that would afford human rights protections to transgender people so, sincerely, fuck them.

The idea that a cabal of unelected, unaccountable, and unbelievably arrogant party bagmen in the Senate—who are offset slightly by genuinely good and hardworking people from both parties that are trying to make an inherently unworkable institution workable—can kill legislation passed by a majority of the House of Commons would have made 2004 Stephen Harper very mad. I want to see that 2004-vintage Stephen Harper.

I also want a Denny's in my building.

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