Tracing Stephen Harper’s long road to power,
In the first of three leader profiles, we trace Stephen Harper’s journey to political clarity — and to being comfortable in his own skin — which began in the leafy suburbs of Toronto
The impulse to seek clues and draw inferences about a political leader who stubbornly avoids self-revelation is all but irresistible.
To those plumbing the personality and shifting moods of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a traumatic moment from before his birth offers at least some explanation for what may have helped shape him.
In Moncton, N.B., in 1950, Harris Chapman Harper, a local community pillar, was married, raising two sons and serving as principal of Prince Edward School. Harris Harper was descended from an Englishman who set sail for Canada in 1774. Harris served in the militia, was a crack shot and had established a cadet corps at which he spent his summers happily drilling recruits.
On Jan. 21, 1950, a frigid Saturday in Moncton, Harris Harper left home after lunch to walk to his doctor’s office less than a kilometre away for a vitamin B injection.
After receiving the shot, Harper was seen going down the steps of the office on Highfield St. The person who saw him said the 47-year-old man seemed disoriented. Harris Harper was never seen again.
Police were alerted, a massive search mounted and cross-Canada alerts issued. Five years later, no trace found, Harris Harper was declared legally dead.
Naturally, speculation abounded. Was it foul play? A dreadful accident? Had Harper committed suicide? Had he merely run off for a new life? But without his wallet? And with an uncashed paycheque on his dresser? Whatever the reason, the impact on Harris Harper’s family was profound. In August 1951, upon finishing his chartered accountancy studies, Harper’s oldest son, Joseph, perhaps wishing to put some distance between himself and the scene of such heartbreak, left for Toronto.
There, he found work. And six months later, at a dance at Danforth United Church, he met Margaret Johnston.
Eighteen-year-old Margaret, who also traced her roots back to an English ancestor who left for Canada, was from a large family in Ontario’s rural Grey County and had grown up poor during the Depression.
In truth, Margaret, who had come to Toronto to attend secretarial school, was hardly bowled over that first night by the young man from New Brunswick. She intended to give him the slip. But fate had other plans.
Joe and Margaret married in 1954. They would have three sons: Stephen, Grant and Robert. Their eldest boy, in a most unlikely way, would one day become prime minister of Canada.
When Joe Harper moved west to Ontario, he found love, prosperity and a peaceful life. Still, he seems — from what little is known about the Harpers — to have carried both the effects of his family trauma and the influence of his vanished father with him. No mere geographical move frees one of that.
Whether by nature or circumstance, Joe Harper was cautious, wary, reserved. Stephen Harper would one day say that Harris Harper’s disappearance had left his dad with an indelible sense of the impermanence of love, security, happiness.
“It made (my father) appreciate that all the good things in life, all the best things in life, in work and play, in friendships and family, are still just passing things,” Stephen said in a eulogy at Joe Harper’s funeral in 2003.
Joe Harper prized prudence, security and the self-contained consolations of home. He was a teetotaller who found all the adventure he needed cocooned in a happy marriage.
“Before I met your mother, I had never been a really happy person,” Joe once told his oldest son. “After I met her, I have never really been unhappy since.”
Stephen Harper once told the Star that his father was “a person of scrupulous integrity. He was a stickler for following the letter and spirit of all rules.”
The words were said in praise. But it’s not difficult to imagine such a stance as the search for order in an unruly world, not difficult to imagine that life under such a patriarch might have been stifling.
Joe Harper immersed himself in military history, which he took to with an obsessive’s zeal. He spent years researching and writing monographs on the history of regimental flags.
“It was really the thing, I think, of all the work he did in his life (that) he took the most pleasure from,” his son the prime minister would say.
In his career, in his accounting ledgers and innovative work in computer systems, Joe Harper found comfort in the immutable logic of facts and figures.
In hobbies, he immersed himself in the fixed, reliable facts of the past.
And in the suburban redoubts where he raised his sons, he found what safety and security there was in a world that could shatter lives over a lunch hour.
Reaching for the top in his own way
When he speaks of his childhood, Stephen Harper describes an idyllic family, safe neighbourhood and life so happy it would have made the heartwarming art of Norman Rockwell look like Edvard Munch’s
The Scream.
In the affluent Toronto communities of Leaside and Etobicoke, problems were few and minor, his mother ceaselessly loving, his father unfailingly wise, his two younger brothers his closest pals.
Stephen Joseph Harper was born just as the well-tended gardens of Bessborough Dr. were blossoming in the spring of 1959. The turbulent ’60s were arriving to rock the continent, but seem to have bypassed Leaside.
Harper has told no stories of childhood stress, trial, need or crucible.
“When I was a boy here, you felt safe; you knew people were looking out for you,” he once said. “You felt you could knock and did, in fact, knock on any door at any time if you were in trouble or you needed something.”
It’s telling that the anecdote is delivered in the distancing second person, the prime minister retailing nostalgic images and homey verities more than the particulars of his own history.
Still, if the Harper family of Bessborough Dr. sounds like something out of a 1960s sitcom, such a portrait seems to have the merit of being largely true.
Young Steve Harper’s first foray into public affairs reportedly occurred in 1964 as debate raged over proposals for Canada’s new flag.
The 5-year-old polled everyone on his street to see what they thought. Emotions ran high, he would recall. Some neighbours even stopped speaking to each other.
Steve remembers the chosen flag being raised outside his kindergarten class at Northlea Public School in 1965 and Bessborough Dr. returning to its untroubled ways. “Very quickly, peace came back to the neighbourhood.”
Steve had most of the privileges of affluence, spending summers with relatives in New Brunswick, travelling with his family when he was 11 through Western Canada. He was active in wholesome activities like Cubs and Scouts. He took piano lessons, played hockey, had a paper route for the Toronto Telegram.
Not long after he sold the Tely route, just before the paper failed, the Harpers moved to Etobicoke.
At St. Luke’s United Church, which the family attended, Harper took confirmation classes. But he quit those. Rev. Jim Moulton would tell the United Church Observer that young Steve was still wrestling with “the concept of God.”
In 1972, Steve Harper’s true religion was hockey. The Canada-Soviet Summit Series was on. And in the yard at John G. Althouse Middle School, it was all anyone talked about.
Steve watched the opening game with his father and brothers in the basement family room, watched in horror as the Soviets stunned Canada with a lopsided victory. “I remember sitting there like the people in the Montreal Forum just in disbelief,” Harper later said.
But as the nation reeled, Joe Harper reportedly noted to his son how Britain was similarly shocked after the shambolic retreat from Dunkirk at the outset of the Second World War, but rallied to meet the challenges of the times.
It can’t be every Canadian boy who had such an analogy made for him. But it was in keeping with Steve Harper's understanding of the distinct roles of mothers and fathers. He once told the Star that "from your mother you always get love. . . From your father you get initiation to the world."
Persistent asthma as a child kept Harper out of seriously competitive sports. But as it waned, he did play hockey. and in high school at Richview Collegiate Institute he took to long-distance running.
By then, tall and skinny, he had the appropriate frame and loping stride. He also had the will. And not least of the sport's attractions was likely its solitude. “It’s a treat being a long-distance runner," Alan Sillitoe wrote in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. "Out in the world by yourself with not a soul to make you bad-tempered or tell you what to do. . ."
Notwithstanding his running, and fondness for the Beatles, Steve Harper was seen — in the remorseless caste system of high school — as a member of the straitlaced geek camp. He wasn’t "what I would call one of the opinion leaders in high school," a former classmate would put it. While his peers might have beenexperimenting with sex and drugs, Harper joined the Liberal club, starred on the Reach for the Top team and won the academic gold medal at graduation in 1978.
His well-ordered life seemed on track That August, a Richview teacher led six graduating students on a weeklong canoe trip to Algonquin Park. In the fall, Steve was to start at the University of Toronto.
But after a few weeks, he quit. His parents were aghast. Steve Harper, chafing perhaps againstparental authority and his claustrophobically cosy Toronto boyhood, was bent on building his own muscles by pushing back against expectations. In 1978, uninspired and unfocused, the 19-year-old headed west to a menial office job in Alberta, and the serious business of finding himself.
NEXT WEEK Thomas Mulcair’s formative years