Former Canadian PM Harper quits politics in trademark low-key style
OTTAWA: He led his government to a crushing defeat at the polls in October, then ceded his office to Justin Trudeau and largely vanished from public view. Now, 10 months later, Stephen Harper, the former Conservative prime minister of Canada, says he is giving up his seat in Parliament and quitting politics.
Mr Harper’s low-key announcement, in a brief video posted on Facebook on Friday, was in character with the rest of his 18-year political career, a decade of it spent as prime minister. Unlike Mr Trudeau, who seems to thrive on plunging into crowds and posing for selfies, Mr Harper’s style was more that of a remote corporate chief executive.
In the video, recorded in what appeared to be a boardroom with two Canadian flags behind him, Mr Harper offers no indication of his plans after politics, though several Canadian news outlets reported that he intended to open a consulting business with some of his former political aides.
Mr Harper did not mention his decision to immediately step down as the Conservative leader during his concession speech in October, leaving that task to a statement from a party official. And since then, he has given only one speech, at a Conservative Party convention. While he continued to hold a seat in Parliament representing Calgary, Alberta, his adopted home, Mr Harper was frequently absent from the House of Commons and did not participate in its debates. A privilege from his time as prime minister allowed him to leave the chamber through a back entrance, bypassing the throng of reporters and cameras in the main lobby.
In his brief farewell Friday, Mr Harper offered a modest list of achievements. He said his government had introduced tax cuts, balanced its budget (though that was not the case for most of his tenure), “got tough on crime and put families first” and “took principled decisions in a complex and dangerous world”.
He particularly highlighted that Canada was less affected by the 2008 global recession than other nations were. Some economists and political analysts attribute that at least in part to the effect of regulations that Mr Harper had intended to relax or eliminate.
No one disputes Mr Harper’s success in reuniting what had become a fragmented conservative moment in Canada, which brought the country’s centre-right a long period in power.
In 2003, as the leader of the Canadian Alliance, which began as a protest party in western Canada, Mr Harper helped engineer a merger with the venerable but much diminished Progressive Conservative Party.
Raymond Blake, an historian at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, said that the fairly limited list of achievements stems from Mr Harper’s belief in small government: “His mantra was: We will leave money in the hands of people and leave them to decide how to spend it.”
Mr Harper controversially rolled back the powers of several regulatory agencies, or replaced their leaders with people who shared his small-government philosophy. Public servants were severely restricted in their freedom to speak publicly.
Mr Harper, who was fiercely partisan, consolidated power in the prime minister’s office, and twice suspended Parliament to avoid votes that might have put his government out of power.
During the election campaign last year against the charismatic, if unproven, Mr Trudeau, Conservative television ads showed Mr Harper working hard late at night, the last person in the office.
But Mr Blake said Mr Harper’s lack of charm overshadowed his policies.
“He was cold and distant,” Mr Blake said. “He never made Canadians feel good about their country.”