Interviewing Harper: What to ask? Why not ask about prorogation?

Yesterday, National Post columnist John Ivison and I interviewed Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Like most, but not all, news organizations in Ottawa both the Post and Canwest News Service have standing requests in with the PM's commmunications staff for interviews with the prime minister. Over the Christmas break, he did 'year-end' interviews with CTV and TVA but (so far as I know) no one else.

This week, the lucky numbers popped up for us, CBC, and La Presse.

So what to ask? Well, before you can get to that, you need to know how much time you're getting to interview him.

The amount of time we get to ask questions is always one of the biggest haggling points with PMO handlers. CTV for the last few years makes a big production deal out of the year-end PM interview and reserves a full half-hour on its programmming schedule to broadcast it. As a result, CTV — over the last few years anyhow — has generally gotten the biggest chunk of PM's time — 30-40 minutes.

This week, Peter Mansbridge, anchor of CBC's The National, got 18 minutes. That's a lot of material for television but, when Evan Solomon asked Mansbridge for a preview about his "wide-ranging" interview, Mansbridge joked: "I love how you call it wide-ranging. It's 15 minutes. How wide-ranging can it be?"

So what did we get? Well, I turned my tape recorder as I sat down next to the PM in his Langevin Block office and when I turned it off at the end of the interview, while standing in his office's anteroom, a total of 13 minutes and 39 seconds had elapsed on the digital counter.

That's not a lot of time — and John and I knew going in, we'd be lucky to get 15 minutes — but it is enough time if you're smart about your questions. So the question we and our editors had before the interview, then, was what questions to ask?

We are there, incidentally, as proxies for our readers, not as proxies for the opposition parties or for a particular interest group. That's important to remember because the goal for Canwest, at least, is to leave the interview with a story that the local editors of the Vancouver Sun, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen and other Canwest papers would find interesting enough that they would make (valuable) space for in their papers. It's important to note that even though we are all part of the same company, the decisions about what goes in each paper is very much made by editors at each paper and they make those decisions based on their knowledge of their own local reader communit.

So before we sit down to hash out the questions we have two things in mind: We're not getting much time and we need something that local editors believe will strike a chord with their readers.

So, first, we had to think about any news events that had popped up that day. When Mansbridge did his, the news had just emerged that airports in Canada would be installing full-body scanners and he, quite appropriately, began his interview with that subject.

No such news-of-the-day item had cropped up as we sketched out our questions but we also felt that since we and other news organizations had extensively reported that day on the Mansbridge interview, we ought to, as John put it in his column this morning,"push on to ground less well tilled".

Had we done the interview in the same news cycle as Mansbrige, the issue of proroguing Parliament would almost certainly have been near the top of our list of things to ask. But we were coming a day later and Mansbridge had, it seemed to use, done a reasonably good job or probing Harper on that issue:

PETER MANSBRIDGE: Let’s move on to the other issue that has come up in the last week, and that was the decision to prorogue Parliament. You know that it’s received a lot of attention, a lot of discussion. When you made the call to the Governor General last week and she gave you the approval for that idea of proroguing, what did you say to her as the main argument for suspending…?

RT. HON. STEPHEN HARPER: Well, first of all, as you know, a decision to prorogue when the government has the confidence of the House is a routine constitutional matter, and truth of the matter, Peter, is that sessions of Parliament since Confederation have been on average roughly a year. Look, the reason is quite simple: the government has I think notwithstanding a very difficult economy, we’ve had a reasonably successful year in Parliament in the past year, but it’s been an extraordinary year in which we were obviously trying to implement an extraordinary economic action plan, a series of stimulus measures to deal with the peculiar circumstances of 2009. We’re now looking at a very different year coming forward, a year that we’re much more optimistic about, and we want to take some time to recalibrate the government’s agenda, both on the economy and on some other matters. So we’re going to present Parliament with a series of proposals for legislation going forward when the House reconvenes.

MANSBRIDGE: But you’ve seen the reaction. I’m not just talking about the partisan reaction. There’ve been editorials, there’ve been commentaries by respected constitutional experts who say this is the kind of thing that is leading to the cynicism on the part of Canadian people about the political process, that the process is there for, you know, for parties and politicians, but not for the people. A session of Parliament could be suspended at a time when there were all kinds of things still on the books, some of which you said are extremely important to your government, and they’re off the books now.

HARPER: Well, let’s be clear. First of all, the government passed all of its important economic and financial legislation of the past session, so we did conclude all of that. We have, as you know, some important crime legislation. That legislation will continue to be difficult. It continued to be difficult through the past Parliament, both, in both Houses of Parliament, but particularly the Senate. As you know, we have some opportunity to fill some Senate vacancies and help deal with that problem. But as I say, Peter, there’s nothing particularly unusual about a session of Parliament being roughly a year in length. Governments do want to examine their agenda from time to time and refresh it, and I would simply invite the opposition parties to take the opportunity to advance their own ideas. The government is going to look comprehensively at its agenda for the new Throne Speech, and we’d certainly be delighted to hear any suggestions of a general or specific nature that they have.

MANSBRIDGE: But what do you say to those outside of the political process who look at what’s happened here, second time in a year, different circumstances in both cases, but the argument being made by many, I mean, you know, you can’t pick up a story on this issue without somebody referring to the Afghan detainee issue, saying that that’s really the reason that you and your government wanted to stop the investigative work of the committee.

HARPER: I think polls have been pretty clear, Peter, that that’s not on the top of the radar of most Canadians.

MANSBRIDGE: No, but that’s not…

HARPER: What’s on the radar, what’s on the radar is the economy, and as I say, the government is looking at a…first thing we’re going to do when we come back is have the second stage of our economic action plan, a budget, new financial measures; that’s our focus. We’re in a very different kind of economic year, and that’s what we’re adjusting to. I’m sure the opposition will…you know, they’ve been on that subject for three or four years now. I’m sure they’ll continue on it.

MANSBRIDGE: No, but is it not legitimate to wonder, you know, whether or not…just because it’s not on the radar of most Canadians, showing up in, you know, public and one assumes internal polling, that that means it’s not important?

HARPER: Well, obviously we have a big difference of opinion with the opposition as to whether that is an issue that warrants attention or not. But as I say, the decision to have a new session of Parliament after a year is not unusual. Last year circumstances were unusual. I think everybody concedes that. This year circumstances are frankly quite normal. As Prime Minister, I think my sessions of Parliament have been a year or slightly over a year, so this is fairly standard procedure. I mean, I don’t think it makes sense for a session of Parliament to go on and on without the government periodically re-examining its overall agenda.

MANSBRIDGE: Do you think the decision to prorogue should be left in the hands of the government of the day, or should it be a decision that perhaps Parliament should have a vote on?

HARPER: No, I think it’s ultimately should be in the hands of the government of the day because it’s ultimately about the government presenting its agenda to Parliament, and the government calibrating its own agenda. When Parliament prorogues, for example, private members’ legislation is not broken off. It continues. So the opposition’s work will continue as soon as we come back.

Every news bureau in Ottawa received this transcript and each generated at least one news story out of it, a news story that appeared in the papers on Wednesday, the same day we were doing the interview. My Canwest colleague Andrew Mayeda, in fact, played up the 'prorogue' section of the interview: Prorogue 'routine', Harper says: Government will "recalibrate agenda

Other organizations emphasized other issues Mansbridge brought up in the interview:

• Toronto Star: PM downplays detainee scandal: 
• Canadian Press: Harper not satisfied with economic recovery until jobless rate comes down
• Sun Media: Canada will face labour shortage: Harper
• Sun Media: PM rips U.S. security rules
• The Globe and Mail: Harper to revive Senate reform plan

So I, John, and our editors found ourselves wondering if we should bring up the prorogue issue at all in our 13 minutes, knowing that, if we did so, other important topics would have to be left out given the time constraints. Among our considerations:

• If we filed a story on Harper's views on proroguing, local editors responsible for deciding what goes in Thursday's papers would likely not be much interested because they had just put a story in the paper on Wednesday with Harper's views on proroguing. It may matter a great deal to those inside the bubble on Parliament Hill who asked the question but it doesn't to our readers. And that would have been the only new part to the file, the fact that we, rather than CBC, had asked the questions.
• Was there a serious angle that Mansbridge missed or didn't have time to pursue with regards to proroguing? We didn't think so. Mansbridge had asked five questions on the topic. That's plenty. In our meetings, I said that a smaller issue Peter might have pursued was that while some could take as reasonable the desire to 'recalibrate" the agenda or re-set Senate committeees by proroguging,  I had yet to hear a reasonable explanation as to why the prorogation period had to last until March. Why not just prorogue on Jan. 25 and call Parliament back on Jan. 27, as planned, for the throne speech? Doing that would still have allowed for the reasonable objective of re-setting committees and recalibrating agendas without seriously interrupting Parliament's ongoing business. But while I'm still interested in getting some answers to that question, that seemed a question about tactics and was not the kind of forward-looking question that would generate a news story that would interest most readers.
• Was Harper likely to say something to us on proroguing that he didn't say to Mansbridge? In our judgement, no. Harper would have said much the same thing to us and probably used the same phrases. Indeed, when I asked him in our interview about the economy, he repeated much of the same material he did to Mansbridge. And in fact, he used phrases and lines I've heard him use for the past four months in speeches in Canada or abroad in China, India, South Korea, and Singapore. The PM, like most politicians, is prepared with talking points on a variety of issues and (perhaps unlike some politicians) the PM rarely strays from those well-considered phrases particularly when it comes to a contentious issue like proroguing.

So for all those reasons, we put the topic of prorogation off to the side, believing that we had already served our readers interested in this issue well be reporting on Harper's first comments on prorogation and we would continue to serve our readers well by getting Harper to speak about other issues we know are important to Canadians. So we chose Afghanistan, climate change, the senate, election speculation, the economy,  the budget/deficit, and a personal question (most good interviews, in my opinion, try to draw a subject out with at least one question they likely can't have prepared for and mine was a query about what kind of career he saw for himself after politics, in a decade, say) We knew that with seven topics we'd have to move quickly to touch on all of them in our allotted 10-12 minutes.

And, at the end of the day, we think we chose relatively well. Harper's comments on the Afghanistan mission seemed the most newsworthy to us and, indeed, the story focusing on those comments is the line or lead story todayon the front pages of the National Post, Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, the Windsor Star and is among three lead stories played by the Ottawa Citizen  . The story was 'teased' or mentioned on the front pages of the Montreal Gazette and the Regina Leader-Post.