FORD NATION IS NOW AT THE VANGUARD OF CANADIAN CONSERVATISM.

‘Harper is still lurking. Be vigilant.” Paranoid polemicist Michael Harris tweeted that immortal missive four days after the 2015 election that handed Justin Trudeau’s Liberals a majority government. It has since been mocked and feted as the ne plus ultra of the fantastical suspicions Harper engendered in some Canadians, even as he governed like a bigger-spending Jean Chrétien.

Harper himself is now out of the game. But there’s no question his people still play key roles in the country’s politics.

Federal Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer is essentially a somewhat socially conservative and more cheerful version of Harper, and it’s by no means out of the question he could become prime minister in 2019, with lots of Harper-era cabinet ministers in tow — but not Jason Kenney, whom polls suggest is very likely to be Alberta’s next premier despite being nearly as reviled by the Harper-haters as the man himself.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed how many veterans of Harper’s Ottawa have found themselves in Doug Ford’s orbit, as well.

Kory Teneycke, formerly Harper’s director of communications, managed Ford’s campaign. Chris Froggatt, formerly John Baird’s chief of staff, was its vicechair, and is now chair of Ford’s transition team — of which Baird himself, who spent 10 years as an MPP at Queen’s Park, is a member. Ford’s MPPs include former Harper cabinet minister Greg Rickford, apologetic House of Commons buffoon Paul Calandra, and former backbenchers Parm Gill and Daryl Kramp.

There’s nothing especially remarkable about this, of course: Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats all pop up in various jurisdictions to help their teams. What’s interesting is that Ford presents so differently than Harper, or Scheer, or Kenney, or even Baird, who can bluster with the best of them.

During most of the 2015 campaign, Harper wouldn’t even say the Fords’ name; whenaskedabouttheirvarious controversies, he would literally call them “those individuals.” In 2013, at the height of the crack video insanity, Kenney had called on Rob to step down as mayor. “We’re not fans of anyone who is promoting, by their behaviour, the use of illegal drugs, drugs that are harmful and drugs that are illegal,” echoed then-immigration minister Chris Alexander.

But Harper’s final campaign bottomed out on Oct. 17, 2018, when he agreed to appear at a rally hosted by the Fords — whom he thanked by name and posed for a photo with. The rally was at the Toronto Congress Centre in Etobicoke, where Doug Ford and his fans celebrated Thursday night wearing Ford-branded T-shirts and waving Ford-branded signs, some of which didn’t even have the PC party logo on them.

After years of moving approximately zero votes to either provincial or federal Conservative candidates, Ford Nation can now claim to have installed itself at the vanguard of the Canadian conservative movement.

It wouldn’t be a tremendously credible claim in isolation: conventional politicians like Patrick Brown or Christine Elliott might well have won an even more thumping majority than Ford did. The evidence for some kind of global populist revolution having swept Ontario is minimal: Someone had to win this election; it was never going to be the Liberals; rightly or wrongly, the NDP simply isn’t an option for millions of Ontarian voters.

And yet, Scheer took to Twitter on Friday with a quite remarkable encomium to the Ford victory. “Justin Trudeau is doing to Canada now what McGuinty/ Wynne have spent the last 15 years doing in Ontario: higher taxes, rewarding insiders and cronies, borrowing billions from future generations, and failing to put people first,” he wrote.

That latter, amorphous phrase — “for the people” — was utterly central to Ford’s campaign.

“Across Canada, momentum is growing for policies that put people before government,” Scheer continued. “Momentum is growing for leadership that prioritizes creating prosperity and opportunity for all Canadians. Now is the time to unite behind our positive, Conservative vision for Canada.”

But what is that vision, other than “positive” and anti-crony and pro-people? Is it small-c “conservative,” or just big-C “Conservative”? Ford hasn’t offered Ontarians a timeline to return to balanced budgets, let alone for helping out “future generations” by paying down debt. What he has promised is $8 to $10 billion in new spending, tax cuts, $6 billion in government “efficiencies” to be achieved without a single public-sector job cut — and indeed to expand the public service as the economy grows.

It is not a conservative platform by any traditional definition.

Meanwhile, in Ottawa, Scheer is dancing to the tune of the “fake Conservatives” in the dairy industry to whom he owes his leadership, issuing ever more strident decrees that said industry be protected from the world of free trade.

From a non-paranoiac perspective, Harper’s government wasn’t particularly conservative — certainly not when it comes to spending and debt.

Is the movement he left behind on track to become nothing more than a collection of slogans and strategies designed to get parties who call themselves conservative elected? Is it just a tribe now?

Ford’s government may play a key role in answering that question.