The Harper family
PM’S EARLY INFLUENCES
FATHER
Joseph Harper
According to the PM’s biographers, Joe Harper loved jazz, collected the music of Duke Ellington and was a lifelong self-improver. One former MP recalls Joe coming to visit Stephen in Ottawa when his son was working on Parliament Hill. For two weeks, Joe spent every day in the parliamentary library researching naval history. Joe made acquaintances, but few friends. He was sufficiently successful as a father that two of his sons followed his career path into accountancy, and the black sheep who didn’t became prime minister. “There is no adequate way of saying goodbye to the most important man in your life,” Stephen said at his father’s funeral in 2003.
MOTHER
Margaret Harper
Though her son has been the subject of several biographies, his mother remains a cipher to most Canadians, a loving, dependable homemaker of the sort for which Hallmark writes its more florid Mother’s Day cards. So dutiful was his mum, Harper once joked, it took the final game of the 1972 Canada-Soviet hockey series for her to stop “doing her housework.”
SIBLINGS
Grant and Robert Harper
Stephen Harper’s two younger brothers, called his best friends, followed their father into chartered accountancy and their brother to Calgary. Robert, the youngest at 50, worked for former Reform MP Deborah Grey, has managed Stephen’s election campaigns and does what little public speaking the family indulges in. He has said the PM was a neighbourhood leader even as a kid and, since leaving home, has “never taken the easy road.’’ About the fierce Harper privacy he makes no apology. “Every prime minister in my lifetime has had siblings and I don’t recall much focus on their families at all,” he said when his brother became PM in 2006.