Stephen Harper remains an enigma
MONTREAL— Few people, if any, know at what exact point Stephen Harper felt in his bones that he would lose the election to Justin Trudeau, but it was some time before Canada’s television networks declared the advent of a majority Liberal government on Monday.
Indeed, watching the Conservative leader coolly concede defeat later that evening, it seemed likely he had not bothered to prepare a victory speech.
Harper had stopped trying to outrun the wheels of change some days or possibly weeks before election night.
His campaign always came across more like a farewell tour for diehard fans than like a performance orchestrated to earn an encore.
Like most manifestations of life in Harperland, his re-election strategy mystified those who covered it. It will take some time for the Conservatives themselves to make sense of it all.
That being said, coming to terms with defeat likely comes more easily to a prime minister who has almost a decade in power under his belt than to one such as Paul Martin, who never had enough time to put his mark on Canada’s highest political office.
By the time Harper and Trudeau appeared together for the memorial ceremony of the first anniversary of the Parliament Hill shootings on Thursday, the pair of them looked more like comrades-in-arms than like two rivals who had just spent the past months in electoral combat.
The mantle of elder statesman may yet suit Harper better than that of party leader.
For the outgoing prime minister, the ceremony was an opportunity to look back on a series of events that shaped the last year of his mandate in ways he had no reason to anticipate.
Harper’s reign — like that of all his predecessors — featured its share of dark days. It was marked by a higher-than-average number of estrangements from formerly close friends and associates and a fair amount of personal betrayals. Some were reportedly reciprocal.
The near-toppling of Harper’s second government just weeks after the 2008 election almost brought his tenure to an abrupt end; the premature death of Jim Flaherty robbed his team of one of its rare happy warriors.
But chances are Harper’s darkest minutes in office were spent closeted in the grand Reading Room of Parliament’s centre block in fear for the life of his House of Commons colleagues and his own. Nothing prepares a Canadian politician to dodge real bullets.
There are many issues a prime minister can lose sleep over. The threat of successful terrorist attacks on one’s watch is not far from the top of the list. The calculating Conservative strategists who saw a partisan opportunity in the Parliament Hill shootings never had to wake up — as Harper did — to a country expecting to be kept safe from arbitrary acts of terrorist violence. In the immediate aftermath of last year’s shootings, security would have become job one for any party in federal power.
Harper had imagined a different worst-case scenario might overtake his pre-election year.
Months before the shootings, he uncharacteristically opened up to his opposition counterparts about his concerns about the possible election of a Parti Québécois majority government in the upcoming provincial campaign.
In the end, the Conservative prime minister was spared the unity crisis he so dreaded. In contrast with his three predecessors, Harper never had to deal with a surging or a resurging sovereigntist movement.
In hindsight though, he might have willingly traded the anti-terrorism file and an attending combat mission in the Middle East for a more familiar constitutional war of words.
That is just an assumption on my part.
More pages have probably been written about Harper over his active political life than about any other recent prime minister. (The Pierre Trudeau book industry really picked up steam only after he retired.)
To my knowledge Harper has co-operated with none of the many authors who have dissected — sometimes with an axe — his motives, his political persona and his presumed thinking.
Three of his 2015 election rivals published precampaign memoirs that doubled up as political manifestos. Many parliamentary journalists know more about the incoming Trudeau’s world view than about what really makes the outgoing Harper tick.
He has kept his thoughts to himself to the very end, forcing those who covered him to treat their own bathwater as a source of insights. Even his resignation letter — if such a written note exists — has yet to surface. Historians may have to file an access-to-information request to get their hands on it. Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.