Tories try to muzzle admiring right-wing U.S. pundits E-mail warns that pro-Harper comments puts majority at risk
Sheldon Alberts, The Ottawa Citizen Published: Saturday, January 21, 2006
WASHINGTON - In the dying days of the Canadian federal election campaign, American conservatives are being asked to keep their affection for Stephen Harper quiet out of fear that any expression of U.S. support could harm his chances of forming a majority government.
In an e-mail circulated by the head of a right-wing think-tank, U.S. conservatives were warned to refuse interviews with Canadian media until after Monday's vote.
The missive from Paul Weyrich, chairman of the Washington-based Free Congress Foundation, came at the request of Gerald Chipeur, a Calgary lawyer and conservative political activist in Alberta.
According to Mr. Weyrich, Mr. Chipeur telephoned him this week with news that Mr. Harper's Conservatives are "within striking distance of electing an outright majority," but that the party could lose that opportunity if it appeared that it was too closely aligned with the U.S. political right.
"He said the Canadian media, which is trying to save the current Liberal government, has a strategy of calling conservatives in the U.S.A. in the hopes that someone will inadvertently say something that can be hung around the Conservatives," Mr. Weyrich said in the e-mail, which was sent Thursday to Washington-area conservatives and posted yesterday on several political blogs.
"Canadian voters have been led to believe that American conservatives are scary and if the Conservative party can be linked with us, they perhaps can diminish a Conservative victory," continued Mr. Weyrich, considered one of the most influential neoconservative activists in Washington.
"Chipeur asks that if Canadian media calls, please do not be interviewed until Monday evening at which point hopefully there will be reason to celebrate."
Neither Mr. Chipeur nor Mr. Weyrich returned calls placed to their offices yesterday. An assistant to Mr. Weyrich confirmed the gag order among staffers at the Free Congress Foundation.
The memo underscores the depth of anxiety among conservatives, on both sides of the border, over how Canadian voters will react to perceptions Mr. Harper shares an ideological kinship with President George W. Bush and the Republican Party.
In December, Mr. Harper wrote the conservative Washington Times to distance himself from an op-ed article that predicted he would cosy up to the U.S. president.
The author of the Times piece, former Cato Institute fellow Patrick Basham, described Mr. Harper as "pro-free trade, pro-Iraq war, anti-Kyoto, and socially conservative."
Mr. Basham's newspaper prediction that Mr. Harper would "quickly become Mr. Bush's new best friend internationally and the poster boy for his ideal foreign leader" became central elements of a Liberal attack ad against the Conservatives.
Mr. Harper said the article "greatly" oversimplified his views.
In an interview yesterday, Mr. Basham said he has since received dozens of e-mails from Canadian conservatives urging him to stop writing nice things about Mr. Harper.
"I had to stop printing them off because there was a pile on the floor," he said.
"The conservative Canadian reaction has been overwhelmingly negative," said Mr. Basham, a Canadian citizen who has worked in the U.S. capital for five years.
"Conservative Canadians accused me of costing Harper the election, doing the Liberals' dirty work for them." The Ottawa Citizen 2006