Trouble has a way of finding Tony Clement. This year alone, the Industry Minister has been roasted for lavish government spending in his riding, which played host to the G8; for his ham-fisted defence of the decision to make the long-form version of the census voluntary; for the $16-billion to be spent buying and maintaining a new fleet of F-35 fighter aircraft; and this week for vetoing BHP Billiton Ltd.’s attempted takeover of Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan.
During these contretemps, all the usual criticisms were trotted out: that Mr. Clement too willingly sacrifices his conservative principles to political opportunism; that he is hyper-partisan; that he is little more than an errand boy for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, doing his bidding and cleaning up his messes.
But those critics miss a larger point. From the outbreak of SARS when Mr. Clement was Ontario health minister in 2003 to the BHP decision this week, he has survived and surmounted a string of crises that long ago would have sunk a lesser politician.
That which did not kill him made his as strong as he is today: one of the most powerful cabinet ministers in the federal government. And harsh experience has done more than streak his hair with grey. It has transformed a radical neo-conservative into a thoughtful, engaged and, yes, pragmatic political leader.
“There’s a difference between being pragmatic and being cynical,” he said Friday in an interview. “I’m not cynical. But on certain issues I think I’ve learned to put some water in with the wine.”
Just about anyone with an opinion on the matter has noted that the decision not to allow the Australian mining giant to take over Potash Corp. prevented open political war between the Conservatives in Ottawa and Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, who had staked everything he had in opposing the takeover.
Few also believed that Mr. Clement made his decision without taking into account Mr. Harper’s views.
Mr. Clement maintains the call on BHP was a meeting of minds. His staff worked up a report, without offering a conclusion; he developed his own opinion, based on the facts of the case, and then he consulted with the Prime Minister.
“We went over the reasons that I was considering … and he was pretty well of the same mindset,” Mr. Clement said. “Those are the meetings when you come out saying, ‘Phew, at least we don’t have a clash of views on that issue.’ ”
The two men have evolved together, from ideologues in the 1990s to savvier politicians today. Their backgrounds, though, are very different. Mr. Harper is the product of a settled, stable WASP family from Toronto.
Mr. Clement’s background is partly Middle Eastern, and, after his parents moved from England to Canada when he was four, the marriage ended, leaving him to be raised by a single mother.
The disillusions of perceived American decline in the 1970s, along with just about everything Pierre Trudeau stood for, turned him into an enthusiastic neo-conservative. He joined a band of young radicals who gleefully waged war on moderate conservatives on university campuses and then within the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, setting their sights on Mike Harris as the party’s saviour, for whom they collectively wrote the Common Sense Revolution manifesto.
Mr. Clement won a riding in the suburban city of Brampton, outside Toronto, in 1995, and two years later, at 36, found himself in cabinet, where he quickly earned a reputation as an articulate spokesman for the radical conservative government.
