OTTAWA—For the first time since taking power more than four years ago, Prime Minister Stephen Harper this week openly embraced a solid, social-conservative policy of the right — refusing to have Canada support abortion in foreign-aid projects.

Political observers were stunned.

After all this time practising the politics of pragmatism, steering his party away from any of the polarizing, social conservatism that scares off many women, urban and centrist voters, Harper branded his government as anti-abortion.

It’s a decision that could well haunt the Conservatives into the next election campaign, depending on how Harper’s opponents handle it.

What’s even more odd about this decision is that it runs directly counter to how the Prime Minister himself wanted to handle this hot potato when Liberals forced the question on to the national agenda earlier this year.

Harper, according to Conservative-caucus sources, was not leaning this way two months ago, and made that clear to his MPs in March.

So, if you want to understand why Canada now stands virtually alone among its G8 partners in opposing abortion as part of family-planning projects in poor nations, you have to take a close look at Harper’s tactics, not his ideology.

And though it’s pretty much become a cliché around Parliament Hill the past four years, you could actually blame the opposition Liberals for how this has all turned out.

This potentially far-reaching foreign-policy decision has its roots in a domestic skirmish on Parliament Hill about six weeks ago, when the Liberals decided to have some sport with Conservatives and force a question on abortion in the Commons.

Ever since January, when Harper announced in the op-ed pages of the Star that Canada’s new foreign-aid priority would focus on the health of mothers and children, the Liberals had been demanding to know whether this would also include support for abortion among the family-planning initiatives.

It was a way, Liberal tacticians believed, to pry open some divisions within the Conservative caucus.

So the Liberals, in retrospect too clever by half, used an opposition day in the Commons to hold a vote on a motion that called on Canada to support the “full range” of family planning initiatives in foreign aid.

The motion, sponsored by Liberal MP Bob Rae, also read in part: “the Canadian government should refrain from advancing the failed right-wing ideologies previously imposed by the George W. Bush administration in the United States which made humanitarian assistance conditional upon a ‘global gag rule’ that required all non-governmental organizations receiving federal funding to refrain from promoting medically sound family planning.”

According to Conservative insiders, Harper initially argued at a special caucus meeting on the day of the vote for his party to avoid the ideological trap, and quietly vote in favour of the motion.

But the Conservative caucus, which is roughly evenly divided between pro-choice and anti-abortion sentiments, had another idea.

They believed that the mention of Bush gave Conservatives a way to oppose the motion — Canada’s Parliament shouldn’t be voting on policies of another government.

Harper, according to caucus sources, allowed himself to be persuaded. When he closed the caucus meeting, he cited some Mahatma Gandhi wisdom about a leader needing to heed his followers, and agreed the Conservatives, against his initial instincts, should oppose the motion.

What Harper didn’t know at the time was that the Liberals were walking into their own trap, with huge consequences for Canada’s foreign-aid policies.

When the vote took place on March 23, three Liberal MPs voted with the Conservatives and 13 others stayed away. The Commons voted against the “full range” of options. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff later told interviewers it was “a bad day at the office.” It was more than that.

This is what he did back in 2002, when he saw Peter MacKay win the leadership of the old Progressive Conservative party through a deal with David Orchard, an anti-free-trade farmer from Saskatchewan, who had amassed enough support in the race to potentially steer the PCs away from their traditional base.

“Harper saw the MacKay-Orchard deal as an opening,” says Bob Plamondon, author of Full Circle, an insider account of how the right eventually united under Harper’s leadership, starting almost immediately after that convention and secret talks between MacKay and Harper.

Harper calculated, correctly, that if the Progressive Conservatives were out shopping for coalitions, he might be able to provide a more solid, acceptable one to the majority of the old party. History shows he was right — within a year, the parties were merged and he was the leader.

Moreover, there’s another element of Harper’s past that’s important in understanding why he wrapped his party in the anti-abortion mantle this week.

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In the late 1980s, in a memo to then Reform Party leader Preston Manning, Harper laid out the need for the fledgling party to build coalitions with the Christian right, which he described as a growing social force and key to the Conservative base. “I believe that the Reform Party cannot afford to lose moderate pro-life voters,” said the memo, which was revealed in William Johnson’s biography of Harper a few years ago.

Casting forward to the present, then, Harper has been given two strategic ingredients to make a bold move — a weak coalition among his Liberal rivals and an opportunity to shore up the social-Conservative base.

That wing of the party is clearly delighted. On Lifesitenews.com this week, REAL Women vice-president Gwen Landolt is quoted saying she’s glad Canada isn’t trying to force its “elitist imperialism” of pro-choice on the Third World.

As a bonus, caucus is happy too — one Conservative said that the mood at this week’s meeting was upbeat, because Harper cast this week’s announcement as totally in line with what his MPs and senators demanded at that special gathering in March.

What’s more, Harper hasn’t actually had to revisit abortion policies in this country. Again, the Liberals may have given him the strategic “out” on this one.

In a little-noticed intervention in February, Liberal MP Keith Martin, a physician and an international-development veteran, suggested to reporters that the solution in the abortion-maternal-health controversy could be for G8 nations to divide up the programs — other countries could deliver abortion-related services and Canada could focus on other priorities, such as clean water or other medical needs.

That’s exactly the kind of thing Harper and International Development Minister Bev Oda were talking about this week in the wake of the abortion decision.

In other words, if U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton believes abortion is such a necessary part of aid for women in developing countries — as she so publicly declared when visiting Canada a few weeks ago — then she can put American money where her mouth is.

One Conservative said this week that he’s getting tired of Clinton being held up as an example of consistency in this debate — in large swaths of the United States, abortion is still illegal, so Canada isn’t the only country that’s going to have one policy at home on this issue and another on the world stage.

All this said, there are people who aren’t convinced that Harper has handled this all that well; he’s just lucky he hasn’t handled this as badly as the Liberals did.

“My guess is that the Conservatives started the maternal-health agenda to build a relationship with urban/suburban women under 50 without thinking through what would become a challenge with part of their base, namely that some funds would end up supporting choice/abortion,” says Bruce Anderson, a pollster with Harris-Decima and a political analyst with National Public Relations. “To my eyes, since then the Conservatives have not been trying to provoke a debate on this as much as avoid one,” Anderson says.

Much depends on how Harper’s opponents take the debate from here.

“If the Liberals are on their game, they will continue to shine a light on this choice that the PM has made,” says Anderson. Clinton may be annoying some Conservatives, but she still is somewhat of an icon for centrist and centre-left women in Canada, says Anderson, and it doesn’t look good for Harper to be seen to be antagonizing that constituency.

Meanwhile, the women who will potentially feel the biggest effect of this decision — women in developing countries who are seeking an abortion — don’t have a vote in Canada. If they did, the past few months might have turned out differently. But Canada is now an anti-abortion nation on the world stage, for very domestic, political reasons.

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