Canada lucky to have had Harper

Stephen Harper was a good prime minister — a smart, basically decent, hard-working guy who, for all his flaws, left the country better than he found it.

If you say that publicly these days, be prepared to tuck and roll. Even some former Harper stalwarts will grouse about his legacy now, if you corner them privately. As for the Twitteratti, don’t even go there. Yet the record will show that Harper, who gave his farewell address to Conservatives Thursday night at the party’s convention in Vancouver, was, indeed, a better-than-fair steward in a long line of Canadian prime ministers sharing similar traits. Morever, he was considerably more moderate than his critics have long contended.

Consider: In late 2005, during the Christmas campaign, Harper and the Tories faced a barrage of negative messaging from a flailing Liberal machine.

The Harperites were vengeful gnomes who’d transform Canada into a pale copy of President George W. Bush’s America. They’d wreck medicare. They’d outlaw abortion and same-sex marriage. Most famously, according to one Liberal party ad, the Conservatives would send soldiers — soldiers with guns! — into Canadian streets. Zounds.

What actually occurred, following Harper’s first win in 2006, was relatively dull. Canada in early 2008 was not dramatically different from what it had been in 2003. This was “incremental conservatism,” as then-Harper confidant Tom Flanagan put it. The idea was to move the country rightward in baby steps, so as not to frighten the great, centrist middle class back into the Liberal party’s waiting embrace.

There were surprising deviations away from the former Reform Party’s abrasive tone, such as the recognition of the Quebecois as a nation in late 2006, and the apology for Indian residential schools in 2008.

The Conservatives began For all his failings, Stephen Harper ran a stable ship for much of his time as prime minister, says Michael Den Tandt. trimming the hated GST, as promised; they began re-equipping the long-neglected military, as promised; they pursued liberalized trade and maintained the military mission in Afghanistan, including the Liberalconceived blend of humanitarian and military aid. Faced with a global recession in 2009, they ran up a $56-billion stimulus deficit. Radical conservatism, this wasn’t.

But wait, said the critics. Should he ever get a majority, then you’ll see! And we did, following the election of May 2, 2011. And there was then, in one important respect, a departure. It was a strategy, fully developed by the fall of 2011, to dramatically speed the extraction of Canadian natural resources, mainly minerals and energy, to take advantage of a window of demand that might not exist forever.

Senior Conservatives understood time was not on Canada’s side in the matter of the 170-plus billion barrels of oil locked in the oil sands. The omnibus budget of 2012, a bloated monster that cemented Harper’ s

reputation for running roughshod over parliament, was the result.

It was clumsily executed. Communication throughout, especially with respect to environmental protection, was inept. It’s impossible to argue now, though, that the Harper government’s sense of urgency vis-à-vis pipelines was misplaced. In 2011, only the Keystone XL project to ship Alberta oil to the Gulf Coast was deemed at risk. Today every pipeline project is.

Tone, and the democratic deficit? Well, yes. There is that. The tone under Harper was often corrosive and it got worse as time marched on. The ads were often cruel, the digs at opponents personal, the attacks on institutions — including the Parliamentary Budget Office, a Conservative creation, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court — selfdefeating. Nobody, before or after the decision to kill the mandatory long-form census in 2010, was ever able to explain it. Harper did not shoulder personal responsibility during the Mike Duffy mess. The party’s descent into the politics of the niqab last fall was deplorable and disastrous. All granted.

But the sweeping demolition of Canada as we knew it? That never happened. Health care spending increased. Tax policy, as the PBO found in a 57-page analysis in May 2014, remained broadly progressive. Program spending as a share of gross domestic product actually grew marginally over the Conservative decade, set against spending in the last year of Paul Martin’s government.

And the great social-conservative rollback of individual liberties, the bugaboo of all those ‘stop Harper’ campaigns, was permanently deferred at the insistence of the man himself, who knew such a shift would be anathema to his prospects.

Furthermore, and not inconsequentially: Harper has spent a quarter century in politics without ever seeing his name attached to a personal scandal. That ain’t nothin’, as the saying in Blue country goes. He remains, for defenders and detractors both, an enigma; someone who was a gifted communicator and inexplicably reserved and awkward, simultaneously.

But he is not, nor was he ever, the ogre he has been made out to be. Is his record mixed? Absolutely. But no Canadian prime minister with ten years on the docket can say different.

For all his failings, Stephen Harper ran a broadly stable ship for much of his time in power, until that time ran down, as it does. It’s not bad. And it’s nothing at all like the extremism we were led to expect, back when he was an impatient young theorist with a knack for strategy.