STEPHEN HARPER’S IDENTITY CRISIS
When Harper arrived on Parliament Hill 20 years ago, he had to deal with a new reality: he was now a career politician. But how would he define that role?
Stephen Harper arrived on Parliament Hill on Nov. 6, 1993, struggling with an uncomfortable fact: He was now a career politician.
Twelve days had passed since the seismic election in which the ruling Progressive Conservatives, under Kim Campbell, had been reduced to two seats. Preston Manning’s oncemaligned Reform party had elected 52 MPs. Harper was among them, prepared to battle Jean Chrétien’s victorious majority Liberals.
Only two Reformers had Ottawa experience: Deborah Grey, who had won a 1989 byelection; and Harper, now 34, who had been her aide for a year and had worked briefly for Conservative MP Jim Hawkes.
Reformers had campaigned in the ’93 election using a simple slogan: “So you don’t trust politicians. Neither do we.” The irony wasn’t lost on the new MP.
“I’ve never thought of myself as a politician,” Harper told reporters. “Obviously I am now.
“It’s going to be a real challenge to remain a representative of the people of Calgary in the Parliament of Canada, as opposed to becoming an Ottawa animal.” Indeed. Over the next decade, Harper would careen back and forth in an ever-evolving identity crisis. Freshfaced idealist. Principled conservative. Frustrated Reformer. Political realist. Calculating tactician.
Harper, once Reform’s chief policy officer, hadn’t been keen to run against his old mentor, Hawkes, in either 1988 or 1993, and didn’t expect to win, according to Hawkes. But the former Tory MP said Reform “wouldn’t keep paying (Harper) for his advice and his research if he didn’t run.”
Tom Flanagan, a former Reform strategist, said a reluctant Harper was also persuaded by his father, brothers and friends.
Once in Parliament, Harper argued Reform would bring a purer sense of democracy to Canada. Reformers promised that if they ever governed, Canadians could vote on key issues through national plebiscites, and dissatisfied constituents could fire — or “recall” — their MP.
“If there is a conflict between my party’s view, my personal view and the wishes of a clear majority of my constituents, it is the latter that ultimately must prevail,” Harper said. If Reform stuck to its policies, he predicted, the flatlining Progressive Conservatives would never be back.
“It was truly a mission to change the way things were done in Ottawa,” recalled Jay Hill, a Reform MP who moved into the parliamentary office adjacent to Harper. The Reform party promised to: Create a “Triple-E” Senate: elected, equal and effective. Require balanced budgets. Put punishment of criminals and citizen protection ahead of “all other objectives” in the justice system. Allow more “free votes” for MPs. Shrink or eliminate funding for official bilingualism, foreign aid, business subsidies and multiculturalism.
Review MPs’ and senators’ expense allowances. Find ways to eliminate “patron- ge positions” on agencies, boards and commissions.
Harper said the fledgling party could not afford to water down its principles simply to broaden support. “That’s what the Conservatives did and look where they are today,” he said. “If you claim to stand for nothing, you end up with nothing.”
Conservatives had treated Harper with “disdain” when he worked for Grey, because he “jumped ship” to Reform, she said. “But Stephen didn’t care ... If he thinks (something) is right, he will lead,” Grey said.
Under Manning’s leadership, Reform MPs had freedom to speak their minds. That led to MPs publicly displaying a range of views on controversial policies. Some, for instance, publicly questioned protection against discrimination for gays and ethnic minorities.
Manning said Harper’s modernday “penchant for control” stems from what he saw as Reform’s lack of discipline. “Some of them abused it and, of course, it hurt the whole picture,” said Manning. “Stephen had real reservations about that. His inclination would be to more clamp down on it.”
“The Reform party became something I don’t think he thought it was going to become, quite honestly,” said Cynthia Williams, Harper’s onetime fiancée who had discovered politics with him. “I think he thought it was going to be about changing the democracy system, not about all the social issues they got into.”
Hill, who later became whip and government House leader, said Harper drew a crucial lesson from Reform’s public lack of cohesiveness: if the public thinks you can’t govern yourselves, “you will not be very successful in convincing Canadians to let you govern them.”
In caucus, Harper wasn’t happy, despite his prominent role as national unity critic. He disliked Manning’s focus on how Reformers should build a “populist” party that would attract Canadians of different political stripes. As early as March 1989, he had addressed this in a confidential memo to Manning.
“My biggest fear has always been that the Reform Party wants to avoid being ‘labelled’ at all costs,” he wrote. “I hope this is not true. Labels can be erroneous and disadvantageous, but they are absolutely necessary to establish an electoral identity and create some viable base of support for a new party.”
Harper wrote of a “political realignment” sweeping most western countries: the left would “target” voters with specific concerns — “loans for students, funding for daycare needs, pensions for seniors, subsidies for dairy farmers, etc.” By comparison, the right’s appeal would be directed to “ordinary people” who are hostile toward the “economic malaise” and “moral uncertainties” of the “Welfare State.”
He believed voters needed a clear, conservative choice — not just a party bouncing from one populist cause to another. Later, said Hill,
■ Harper also sharedaa related objective with his confidants: “the absolute eradication, the destruction, of the Liberal Party of Canada.”
Yet Harper himself was prepared to compromise — when necessary.
In May 1996, in a private speech to conservative activists, Harper laid out a roadmap for a three-partner coalition: populists in western and rural Canada who voted Reform; traditional conservatives in Ontario and Atlantic Canada who voted Progressive Conservative; and francophone nationalists in Quebec who voted Bloc Québécois. Harper and Flanagan reproduced much of the speech in a magazine article.
“Although we like to think of ourselves as living in a mature democracy, we live, instead, in something little better than a benign dictatorship,” they wrote, referring to Chretien’s Liberals.
Then came four sentences that foreshadowed Harper’s political strategy for the next decade.
“If co-operation is ever to work, the fragments of Canadian conservatism must recognize that each represents an authentic aspect of a larger conservative philosophy.
“Reformers will have to realize that there is something genuinely conservative in the Tory penchant for compromise and incrementalism.
“Tories will have to admit that compromise, to be honourable, must be guided by underlying principles, and that Reformers are not extremists for openly advocating smaller government, free markets, traditional values and equality before the law.
“If there is a conflict between my party’s view, my personal view and the wishes of a clear majority of my constituents, it is the latter that ultimately
must prevail.”
Stephen Harper
“And both will have to recognize that Quebec nationalism, while not in itself a conservative movement, appeals to the kinds of voters who in other provinces support conservative parties.”
Principles, compromise and incrementalism. Harper now believed they weren’t mutually exclusive.
In October 1996, just three years after being elected, Harper dropped out of politics — uncomfortable with Manning’s leadership and displeased with how the party was defined by its position on social issues. Publicly, he said he wanted to join the private sector and spend time with his family. In December 1993, Harper and Laureen Teskey had married. Their first child, Ben, was born in 1996 and another child, Rachel, arrived two years later.
Harper moved back to Calgary and in early 1997 joined the National Citizens Coalition, a conservative lobby group, eventually becoming its president.
Gerry Nicholls, who worked closely with him at the NCC, described Harper as “pretty close to being a libertarian.”
“He was tough on any conservative politician who he saw straying from the ideological path. Whenever it looked like they were getting all wobbly, he would attack — and ferociously.”
If Harper were still president of the NCC now, he would be “ripping Prime Minister Harper to shreds” for his government’s spending hikes, deficits and self-serving TV ads, Nicholls said.
Nicholls saw Harper the family man, who loved to play basement hockey with his kids, and who could do funny impressions of politicians such as Manning and Chretien.
But he also saw a very tough boss. “If you did something wrong, you heard about it. Because I think he liked to use fear as a management tool.”
Harper’s self-imposed political exile lasted five years. In 2001, however, a political crisis lured him back to Ottawa.
That summer, the Canadian Alliance — a new party composed of some Conservatives and Reformers under Stockwell Day — was in tatters after several MPs left Day’s caucus. Harper was persuaded to seek the Alliance leadership, having been warned that if Day stayed, the party would implode and Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark — whom Harper disliked — would become the leader of Canada’s conservative movement.
In March 2002, Harper handily won the Canadian Alliance leadership. With that victory, he also became leader of the official Opposition in Parliament.
Glimmers of his political approach soon emerged.
He admonished prime minister Chrétien for not supporting the looming U.S. military invasion of Iraq. He also delivered a speech in which he attacked the “modern Left” for “moral neutrality” and said “serious conservative parties” could not ignore “values questions” — on foreign affairs, defence, criminal justice, child care and health care.
Yet he also urged “social conservatives” to unite and remember: “Real gains are inevitably incremental.”
When his party came third in a 2003 Ontario byelection won by Clark’s Tories, Harper realized the Progressive Conservative party he had hoped would wither was still alive.
Swiftly, he approached the Tories’ new leader, Peter MacKay, about merging the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservatives. MacKay agreed, though he had won the leadership of his own party by promising not to do so.
Later, speaking about Harper, MacKay said: “I think that is a hallmark of political maturation — that you evolve and recognize that the art of the possible, the art of politics, does involve compromise.”
Some had concerns about the newly minted Conservative Party of Canada. Progressive Conservative MP Scott Brison, whom Harper wanted in his caucus, told Harper he was worried about opposition among some Canadian Alliance MPs to same-sex marriage. Brison had come out as a gay man a year earlier.
Brison said Harper told him: “Look, for a Conservative party to be successful electorally in Canada, we need a strong component of social conservatism. And that has to be part of the tent.”
Brison joined the Liberals.
Harper and MacKay had a deal, but who would lead the new party? It was widely assumed Harper would run: he had the advantage of being leader of the Canadian Alliance and of having engineered the merger.
Several contenders were rumoured, including former Ontario premier Mike Harris, whose “Common Sense Revolution” had brought significant conservative change to the province in the late 1990s.
During that period, recalled Flanagan, Harper told him of his great “admiration” for Harris.
“He said, ‘If Mike Harris decides to run then I won’t run,’” said Fla- nagan. “Stephen felt that Harris had earned the right to lead a national Conservative party if he wanted to.”
Flanagan said it was indicative of Harper’s character. He had an element of “super partisanship leading to ruthlessness” but was not “somebody who is personally arrogant, who has to get the glory.”
“He’s not greedy. He’s not vain. He doesn’t have a big ego,” Flanagan said.
Ultimately, Harris didn’t enter the contest, and Harper easily won the leadership of the now-united Conservative party in March 2004 against rivals Belinda Stronach and Tony Clement. He vowed to bring about major change if he ever became prime minister.
“I will not name appointed people to the Senate,” he declared. “We can create a country built on solid Conservative values, not on expensive Liberal promises — a country the Liberals wouldn’t even recognize.”
But it was the Liberals, now under Paul Martin, who clung to a minority government in the June 2004 election.
Their attacks on Harper’s supposed “hidden agenda” worked, helped by some Conservative candidates who spoke recklessly (one compared abortion to the beheading of an American in Iraq by Islamic terrorists, for instance).
Harper drew lessons from his defeat. In the next campaign, he kept talkative candidates away from the media, and made a dazzling political pledge to reduce the goods and services tax, the GST — even though many conservative economists said it was bad policy.
But it helped him win a minority Conservative government in January 2006. Now, the one-time reluctant politician had power, and was determined not to let it slip away.
Canadians were about to learn what Stephen Harper was like when it mattered most — as prime minister.
NEXT: CLINGING TO POWER