THE GENESIS OF STEVE
While some Canadian political careers have ended in snowstorms, Stephen Harper’s began in one. Harper and his best friend, John Weissenberger, jumped into a Volkswagen Jetta and headed to the founding convention of the Reform Party in Winnipeg on Halloween 1987. The early storm slowed but did not stop the excited, young politicos.
Harper had worked hard for a year in federal politics as legislative assistant to Alberta MP Jim Hawkes, the PC party whip. But, lonely and out of place in Brian Mulroney’s Ottawa, he moved back to Alberta in 1986. Both Harper and Weissenberger resigned from the Progressive Conservative Party in the summer of 1987. They were appalled by Prime Minister Mulroney’s unwillingness to tackle the deficit, and by what they saw as the federal government’s shameless pandering to ethnic nationalism in Quebec.
The last straw was Mulroney’s decision to award the maintenance contract for Canada’s fleet of 138 CF-18 fighter jets to Canadair in Montreal, even though Bristol Aerospace in Winnipeg had the superior bid. It was time to reclaim the conservative brand that Mulroney had besmirched. They wanted to be there when the new party that proposed to do just that announced its name, defined a set of principles, and chose a leader. Harper had another reason to attend. He had met Preston Manning earlier that summer and the two men had hit it off. Manning had asked the bright young man to address the convention.
At lunch on Saturday, October 31, Harper and his friend sat at a table with David Somerville, president of the National Citizens Coalition (NCC) and former Toronto Sun reporter. Somerville polled the table and discovered that all eight people sitting there were members of the NCC. The right-wing advocacy group would be profoundly important throughout Harper’s political career. It gave him a place to work between elected offices, an opportunity to hone his political marketing skills, and a ready-made agenda. The NCC was anti–public health insurance, anti-union, anti–Wheat Board, and pro–corporate governance and control.1 The coalition’s favourite weapon was advertising, and its advertisement of choice, the attack ad. (Sooner than he could have known, Stephen Harper would be meeting the man who perfected the attack ad and helped send Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and both Bushes to the White House.)
Like the right-wing Fraser Institute, the NCC was founded in 1974, just after the October 1973 oil crisis. Oil rose from $3 to $12 per barrel overnight, doubling gasoline prices. Governments around the world made draconian adjustments to this unforeseen disaster. Downing Street asked Britons to heat only one room in their homes over the winter. The state of Oregon banned Christmas lights. Most shocking of all, the nation famous for seeing the “USA in their Chevrolets”2 drove into service stations that had run out gas. Financial markets were rattled by a series of recessions and high inflation. Within months of the oil price shock, the US government took action. On February 11, 1974, the then US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, unveiled Project Independence, a plan to make the US self-supporting in the energy sector. It was like divine intervention, conferring as it did a golden future on Alberta.
In 1974, seven of the top fifteen Fortune 500 companies were oil companies. Having experienced the deprivation of the Middle East’s vast supply of cheap, light sweet crude, the companies aggressively pursued new ways to develop oil that, although dirtier and more expensive, was closer to home. Blessed with the world’s third-largest reserves of alternative oil, Alberta was about to be transformed into the richest—and most aggrieved—province in Canada. The only thing heavier than the oil beneath Alberta’s prairie was the hand of Ottawa trying to control and capitalize on it. The creation of Petro-Canada and the National Energy Program infuriated the West.
Next to money, the mother’s milk of politics, anger is the most important resource of political parties, especially an opposition party, let alone a protest party like Reform. The West had always resented freight rates that were 20 percent higher for them than for eastern Canadians. Now, in a country where the provinces own natural resources under the constitution, oil-rich Alberta saw the federal government conniving ways to horn in on its staggering prosperity.
Although he was a transplanted Easterner, Harper quickly grafted Alberta’s sense of grievance to his own restless search for identity. After dropping out of the University of Toronto just two months into his studies, the young Harper headed west, taking a job at Imperial Oil. He liked the place and stayed. His father had worked for the firm as an accountant in Toronto, and in 1958 led the team that assembled one of the first commercial mainframes in North America. Later, while a student at the University of Calgary, Harper became a devotee of the “Calgary School” of economics, which argued that Ottawa and Liberal elites had discriminated against Alberta.
At the founding convention of the Reform Party, Harper skilfully tapped into the sense of Western alienation that would quickly make the new party a serious force in Canadian politics. Titling his speech “Achieving Economic Justice in Confederation,” the expatriate Ontarian began with a quote from an unnamed “Western Canadian”: “I am not advocating separation, but if we were separate, I would not advocate joining.” It was red meat for lions, and Harper kept serving it up. “In fact, a lot of economic evidence, including the MacDonald Royal Commission, suggests that the West would be better off outside of Canada,” he said. It was a typical and telling analysis. For Harper, only one measure of being “better off ” mattered, and that was economic. To him, that meant corporate balance sheets and the GDP, not the day-to-day situation of average people. There was no concept of social security, no passion for equalization of the country’s unevenly divided treasure, and no doubt that anything governments could do, private enterprise could do better—including delivering health care. It was a philosophical tunnel vision Harper would never lose.
The study that he mentioned, ponderously christened the MacDonald Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada, had in fact recommended in 1985 that Canada take “a leap of faith” and enter a free trade agreement with the United States, a move that was certainly in the interests of the West. Harper’s speech was detailed, well-written, and consistently critical of what he called the “welfare state” that had sprung up in Canada run by powerful and distant federal bureaucrats. Funding for that welfare state, he claimed, had come from tax grabs, the windfall profits of Western resource industries, particularly oil. As for Atlantic Canada, Harper declared that it had been reduced to a state of permanent dependency by transfer payments. It was grandiosity as only a young man can be grandiose. In one fell swoop, a man not yet thirty ascribed a loser mentality to an entire region of the country he knew little or nothing about, beyond what his father had told him. Harper’s father, Joseph, had grown up in New Brunswick and moved to Toronto in 1951 after qualifying as a chartered accountant.
After ridiculing Pierre Trudeau’s “Just Society,” Harper ended his speech with Reform’s vision for Canada: “What Canada really requires is the sweeping winds of change. For the vested interests of the National Policy, the Welfare State, and the Quebec question, this will be a challenge they will resist.” The country could “no longer be built on the economic exploitation and political disenfranchisement of Western Canada,” he declared. “In the meantime, we require a political party to put the pursuit of the West’s agenda at the top of its list.” It was the first open declaration of Harper’s long-term intentions: the reverse takeover of a country from the home base of a province that looked south for its prosperity and inspiration.
The speech also marked Harper’s first public success with exploiting a grievance for political gain. When he finished speaking, the audience gave the twenty-eight-year-old a standing ovation, the reward for both championing their cause and identifying the culprit who was keeping the West down: Central Canada and the Eastern Establishment. Although Preston Manning, the soft-spoken, professorial man who had studied physics in university, became the party’s first leader, Alberta Report called Harper’s speech the “highlight” of the Convention.
Shortly after the Halloween Convention, Preston Manning laid the foundations of Stephen Harper’s political career. Fiscal policies were central to Reform, deploring as the party did the debt and deficit run up by the Mulroney Progressive Conservatives. In Manning’s mind, Mulroney’s profligacy merely exacerbated debts accumulated under the Trudeau government. A bright—and very affordable—economics student fit the bill to become the impecunious party’s chief policy advisor. “We asked Bob Mansell at the University of Calgary for the name of his smartest grad student,” Manning recalled, “and he told us Stephen Harper.”
Harper worked hard developing policy but threw his hat into the electoral ring at the first opportunity, running for Reform in what became the free trade election of 1988. It must have been an odd experience. He ran against his old boss, Progressive Conservative Jim Hawkes, in Calgary West. In those days, he called himself “Steve Harper” and ran on the slogan “The West Wants In.” Possibly, but it didn’t want “Steve,” at least not yet.
Although he lost his first attempt at elected politics, Harper was soon on his way to Ottawa anyway. His ticket was punched by another Reformer, Deborah Grey, who had won a by-election in March 1989. Grey needed a legislative assistant and Stephen Harper drew the assignment. They were the original political odd couple, as Preston Manning told me: “That was a case of two opposite personalities.”
As a politician trying to grow a political party, Manning paid more attention to ability than to personality. He told me that in the ten years Stephen Harper had been with him, he really didn’t know the stranger at his elbow: “I did not have a close relationship with Stephen Harper—especially after 1997. On a personal level, he keeps it close to the vest. When he first joined us, he was not married. I do remember that he didn’t care if you were married or had a wife and kids to think about.”
At first, Harper thrived on hard, purpose-driven work. While serving as the party’s chief policy advisor, he finished his master’s degree, gave a speech at a memorial event for the founder of the NCC, served as national spokesperson for the “No” campaign in the 1992 Quebec constitutional referendum, and found time to marry Laureen Tesky. And then in the early nineties, Preston Manning decided to hire a new political strategist for Reform. Rick Anderson was a proven organizer and a former manager of Hill & Knowlton in Ottawa. He was experienced, personable, and diligent. He was also very much resented by Stephen Harper.
Harper was already having policy disagreements with his leader by this time, over matters such as the Charlottetown Accord constitutional issue and Reform’s focus for the next election. Manning wanted to run a national campaign in 1993; Harper believed the party should invest its resources in Alberta. Although Harper himself had quit the position of chief policy officer in 1992, the idea of being replaced by a Trudeau Liberal was especially galling. “Stephen was quite suspicious of Rick Anderson when he joined Reform because he had been a Liberal. The chemistry was not great,” Manning recalled. “Since those days, Rick and Stephen Harper have come to a greater mutual respect. When Rick’s daughter passed away from brain cancer [in January 2010], Stephen Harper was very deeply moved emotionally.”
Harper’s next run at federal politics came in 1993, when he again ran against his old boss, PC MP Jim Hawkes. In a moody display of his unhappiness with Reform, Harper withdrew from the party’s national campaign and concentrated exclusively on his own attempt to get elected. This time the winds of change Harper had talked about in his 1987 speech were howling. The Progressive Conservative Party was blown into political oblivion like tumbleweed. When the gales subsided, the PCs’ representation had been reduced to two seats, and Stephen Harper was the new member for Calgary West in a caucus of fifty-two Reform MPs.
Although Jim Hawkes may not have known it, he was not defeated by the rebranded “Stephen” Harper alone. Working behind the scenes was the NCC and legendary American pollster and strategist Arthur Finkelstein, who had worked for the NCC since the early 1980s. Hawkes had raised the ire of the NCC on the subject dearest to its political heart: third-party funding during elections. The far-right organization portrayed legislation limiting the amount of money third parties could spend during elections as “gag laws” rather than a sensible attempt to make sure these contests didn’t come down to who could buy the most advertising. Finkelstein saw Jim Hawkes as Brian Mulroney’s point man against third-party spending. The NCC was locked and loaded. Careful not to say it was supporting Stephen Harper, the organization spent $50,000 to get “Hawkes’s head on a platter,” as the American pollster described his goal.
Like its founder, Colin M. Brown, members of the NCC vigorously resisted any limits on their “freedom.” Brown was a millionaire life insurance salesman from London, Ontario, who didn’t approve of medicare. The motto of the NCC was “More freedom through less government.” Brown had adamantly opposed hospital insurance, medicare, and the expansion of social welfare during the Pearson and Diefenbaker years. Both Preston Manning and his father, Ernest, were ardent supporters of the NCC, sharing its values and vision. Brown himself quit the PC party in 1975 to personally fight the National Energy Program and the so-called gag laws. He assisted the pro–free trade campaign by the business coalition in the 1988 election, which outspent its opponents four to one. At its peak, the NCC took in $2.8 million per year in donations. The organization fervently believed that citizens and organizations should be able to spend as much of their own money as they wanted in election campaigns—a right in the United States that has turned politics into the sport of kings and wealthy kingmakers.
Arthur Finkelstein was crucial to the NCC’s plan to turn Canada blue. In 1982, the lobbying group hired this brilliant and secretive political consultant who had perfected the political attack ad. His job was to teach the NCC the art of commando politics as practised in the United States and several other countries where Finkelstein operated. Finkelstein, who knocked down incumbents like bowling pins in US politics, was the most sought-after neo-conservative political strategist in the world. A Libertarian in his personal politics, his first success came in the 1970 Senate race in the US, in which he got James L. Buckley, brother of William F. Buckley, elected. As a member of the Republican caucus, Buckley became the lead petitioner in the Supreme Court decision that shaped new campaign finance law in the United States, striking down limits on spending in Congressional races. (On behalf of the NCC, Stephen Harper took the same issue all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, where he ultimately lost in 2004.)
In 1988, Finkelstein did a poll that alarmed the far right, suggesting that Canadians might be on the brink of electing NDP leader Ed Broadbent as prime minister. Broadbent stood at 40 percent in the polls—majority government territory if the numbers held until the federal election looming in the fall. Since there were difficulties driving a scandal-ridden Brian Mulroney’s numbers up, the NCC decided to bring Ed Broadbent’s down. They spent half a million dollars doing it. Under Finkelstein’s guidance, the message was simple and deadly: Broadbent the socialist, who wanted to take Canada out of NATO and who opposed Senate reform, was “Scary, very, very, scary.”
The campaign virtually sidelined Broadbent, and free trade, not leadership, became the key issue in the 1988 election. But there was still a problem with promoting free trade, because the man who was advocating it, Brian Mulroney, was not popular. Arthur Finkelstein was not deterred, as Gerry Nicholls reported in his book Loyal to the Core. Finkelstein told his colleagues at the NCC, “We have to convince Canadians to drink pig piss.” They did. Brian Mulroney won a second majority government on the issue of free trade, despite serious doubts about his government’s integrity.
Finkelstein would have an enormous influence on Stephen Harper’s political career. He worked only for conservative candidates and always tried to get a benefit for Israel out of any of his campaigns.3 But, according to his associate Gerry Nicholls, he was not a mercenary and wouldn’t work with a candidate he didn’t agree with, or for the biggest paycheque. But there was a striking exception to that practice. Although gay, Finkelstein helped to elect Republican candidates all over the United States who thought homosexuality was immoral and who opposed gay marriage. He managed to keep the contradiction between his professional and private life secret until 2005. Meanwhile, according to a CNN report on Finkelstein in 1996, his abilities were almost magical: “He is the stuff of Hollywood, a man who can topple even the most powerful foes, yet so secretive that few have ever heard of him.”
Executives at the NCC tended to see elections as wars, as did Stephen Harper. Finkelstein had honed the art of third-party advertising to a razor’s edge. The strategic use of attack ads could elect or destroy a candidate for public office in a heartbeat. Donors to the NCC not only got to support or attack a candidate; they also received a tax deduction. Finkelstein’s modus operandi was always the same: pinpoint polling aimed at exposing a weakness in an opponent; then use a trenchant, repetitive advertisement to exploit the candidate’s Achilles’ heel. The right fifteen-second spot on TV or radio could end an opponent’s career when the attack ad followed the formula of Arthur Finkelstein, nicknamed the “Merchant of Venom.” His specialties were upset victories and close races. According to “Finkel-Think,” 80 percent of the vote in the US is decided before parties even begin to campaign—evenly split at 40:40. The election is taken by the party that wins the close races in the remaining 20 percent of the swing vote.
Not much is known about Arthur Finkelstein—by design. He almost never grants interviews, and he never appears as a talking head on any of the network gabfests. His advice to clients is almost always delivered face to face—as it would be to Stephen Harper in 1998. But while speaking to a private university in Prague in May 2011, Finkelstein was recorded, and the audio ended up on YouTube. It was an ex gratia lesson from the master strategist about how to win in modern politics and about where the world was headed. In a smooth, calm, intelligent voice, he talked about his work in the United States, Canada, Israel, and Eastern Europe, and about the nature of politics. Sounding a little bit like a political reincarnation of philosopher George Berkeley, Finkelstein told his audience that what they perceived to be true was true—as distinct from the objective truth.
An old philosophical chestnut: perception as reality. Good politicians will first tell you things that are true and only later begin to mislead you, Finkelstein said. If they tell lies to you first and get caught out, they will always be disbelieved. Money is important because it determines who gets to hear what, he continued. As for political candidates, apparently looks and size matter. Finkelstein offered his audience an interesting statistic: the taller candidate wins 75 percent of the time. “An ugly person could not be elected now,” he said. And if you were female and wanted to get into politics, Finkelstein had some advice: look mannish, strong, and wear a pantsuit. If the economy is a mess, he pointed out, the electorate looks to business people as leaders. The most important resource for any politician is time, both to raise money and to build an identity and image. He noted that 60 to 90 percent of the vote in every election is decided before a candidate ever hits the hustings.
He also talked about different types of campaigns, including ones in which the goal is to get people not to vote for a candidate, just as Finkelstein and the NCC had done in the contest between Jim Hawkes and Stephen Harper in 1993. The trick is to create a totally negative vote against an opponent while not showing your own candidate. Surprisingly, Finkelstein said that issues don’t matter—people will vote for you if they like you, the way Americans liked John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.
Finkelstein explained that the current world economic crisis is worse than it feels, claiming anger is rife at the base level of society. Young people will take to the streets when the realization sinks in that their future holds not fame and fortune, but penury. As a result, nervous societies will rely more and more on authoritarian regimes led by people who are capable of ruling with an iron fist. Finkelstein also thought that the future could include the rise of another Hitler if unemployment got any worse. Scapegoating would take place around the world as sovereign nations looked for someone to blame for their reversal of fortune. In Hungary, it’s the fault of the Roma, he noted, in France the Muslims are to blame, in the United States, it’s Mexicans. These groups will be accused of taking jobs from native citizens and destroying their way of life.
But every crisis has a political silver lining for strategic thinkers. Finkelstein advised that the riots in Greece—the economic basket case of the European Union—could be used to discredit the socialist campaign against austerity. Fear is a political superweapon in the power wars. “Politics is a three-dimensional game of chess,” he said in Prague. There is you and the other candidate, and then God steps in: Bin Laden is captured; there is an earthquake or a tidal wave, an ever-changing backdrop that affects the game on the board. In chess as in politics, a good player is always ready to react with the right move.
Finkelstein told his audience that humour is important, especially in advertising. If you make the advertisement amusing, everyone will want to see it, creating resonance. And the medium is the message. He reminded his listeners that in the 1960 presidential debate, those who saw it on television thought Kennedy won; people who listened on the radio gave the nod to Nixon.
Finkelstein pointed out that politics had changed drastically since his days with Nixon, largely because of what he called “fragmentation of information.” Today, more information is available about smaller things. People are capable of knowing more and more about less and less. They have turned away from the big things and immersed themselves in the distracting diversity of information on the internet purely of interest to themselves. They are not wired in, but wired out.
The political strategist who had turned the word liberal into an epithet of abuse in the United States told his audience that 60 percent of people have no interest in news. In Finkelstein’s opinion, content has become the victim of the speed of communication. The day was coming when there would be no breadth of information. The news would be purely episodic and the audience’s critical faculty weakened. It was good news for marketers and nirvana for political strategists riding herd on the suggestible masses.
Technology has also made political manipulation frighteningly less difficult, Finkelstein noted. While acknowledging that freedom of speech was sacrosanct, he observed that it was hard to clarify the truth on the internet. Although he said that lying about people had never been his specialty, discrediting them was—as John Kerry learned after he was “swift-boated” in the presidential election against George W. Bush. Finkelstein was widely suspected of having organized the attack ads. “I do not slander someone without proof, but with proof, I am happy to,” he said, pointing out that if Kerry had responded more quickly to the attacks against him, he would have become president.
To Finkelstein, a negative campaign is legitimate as long as it’s not patently untrue. It comes down to casting the appropriate lights and shadows over your opponent; you are relentless in highlighting his failings and you never mention his strengths. Because most people water-ski over the surface of events, they don’t want deep content or even to know what a politician thinks. They want to know who he is sleeping with and how many of the good human vices he has. Finkelstein said it came from watching “nonsense programs” on TV. With the right information, you can cut somebody off at the neck instantly. It was, he told his audience, “a dangerous world we live in.”
It would be four more years before Stephen Harper commissioned a poll by Arthur Finkelstein in 1998 to test the waters for making a run at political leadership in Canada. But what Harper had to offer was on display at the ninth annual memorial dinner for the founder of the NCC, Colin M. Brown. Speaking in Ancaster, Ontario, as a Reform MP, Harper delivered the same message in 1994 he had delivered to the same group in 1989— that there was a “crisis in the welfare state.” Harper argued that Western countries were suffering from high unemployment, low economic growth, and very high government expenditures. The choice was either a major reform of government programs or “the state as we know it will experience a financial collapse.”
In the public question period after the speech, Harper was asked what he thought of Premier Ralph Klein’s slash-and-burn approach to reducing the deficit in Alberta. Harper heartily endorsed Klein and offered a prediction: “If Premier Klein can carry off his program in Alberta, it will lead to a revolution, a very quick political revolution across the country.” But as one of his audience members, NCC president David Somerville, noted, getting rid of the deficit would be meaningful only if the system itself were changed in such a way that successor governments and the bureaucracy would be unable to undo the reforms. Stephen Harper was clearly listening.
Despite his hard work and speeches promoting a competitive international market economy for Canada, Harper was growing less and less comfortable in the Reform Party. Preston Manning told me that he thought that part of the explanation for Harper’s restlessness was that he had turned against a fundamental principle of Reform: freedom of expression for its MPs. “What soured Stephen early on with Reform was that if a member’s constituents differed from the Party’s position, we allowed the member to represent the constituents,” Manning recalled. “It bothered Stephen that one rogue member could undermine all our work. While the Conservatives and Liberals appeared united, we sometimes got hammered by our own people, and that soured Stephen Harper. Personally, I would prefer the benefits of freedom even at the cost of flack.”
Stephen Harper’s instinct to control the message and muzzle others took root as he lived through several media meltdowns triggered by bizarre ideas or extremist outbursts from Reformers on the fringe. But another anxiety was eating away at Harper—the sinking feeling that as the election of 1997 approached, Reform was stagnant. He resigned his seat six months before the June 1997 election. “When Stephen left Reform, it was because he thought we were going to lose. In his view, we had made no progress east of Ontario. He was disappointed and discouraged,” Manning said. “I had more faith than Stephen did and we pulled it off. We had 150,000 members. This was a blow to Stephen; it tarnished him.”
On the same January day that Harper resigned his seat in Parliament, he introduced himself to the staff at his new place of employment, the National Citizens Coalition. Although the lobby group claimed to be independent of political parties, they had hired a politician to become their vice-president. As for Stephen Harper, he ruled out a future run for the leadership of the Reform Party. Resorting to the cliché of frustrated politicians everywhere, he said he wanted to spend more time with his family. He also told reporters that he no longer wanted to be bound by party politics. Instead, he would push for public policies that were important to him. The NCC was the perfect vehicle to practise the wicked game of wedge politics.
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien had called a federal election for June 2, 1997. Stephen Harper and the NCC jumped into the fray, targeting MPs’ gold-plated pensions. Two Liberal MPs, Anne McLellan and Judy Bethal, were presented in ads as “pension porkers,” their heads placed on a pair of pigs guzzling champagne while wallowing in a trough filled with tax dollars. Pure Finkelstein. Bethel was defeated and McLellan won in a cliffhanger. The Liberals won a solid majority government and Reform became the Official Opposition, winning sixty seats.
After the election, the only politics in Stephen Harper’s life took place at the office. As vice-president of the NCC, he shared an office in Calgary with the organization’s president, David Somerville. According to long-time NCC employee Gerry Nicholls, it was a case of two type-A personalities unable to play well together. Whether by design or disenchantment, Somerville presided over his last staff meeting as president on December 12, 1997, less than a year after the arrival of Stephen Harper. A pattern was beginning to emerge. Harper had a habit of undermining or replacing the people he had once worked for or supported: Jim Hawkes, Brian Mulroney, Preston Manning, and David Somerville. Now that he was his own man, fully in charge of an influential lobby group, the methodical autocrat popped out of the smooth-talking, unflappable media personality that Harper projected after joining the NCC. The new president didn’t like his authority challenged, and according to Nicholls, referred to the NCC as “a dictatorship fighting for democracy.”
STEPHEN HARPER’S DIRECT connection to Republican Party political values and strategy was far deeper than the NCC and Arthur Finkelstein. Just after the Chrétien victory in June 1997, he gave a speech to the Council for National Policy (CNP). The New York Times described the CNP as “a little known group of a few hundred of the most influential conservative leaders in business, government politics, academia and religion in the United States.” The CNP meet three times a year behind closed doors at various locations—a sort of Bilderberg Group of the continental United States. Wealthy right-wing donors use the meetings to network with top conservative operatives to plan long-term strategy.
The CNP was co-founded in 1981 in Dallas, Texas, by Baptist pastor Reverend Tim LaHaye, who was head of the Moral Majority, a group made up of conservative Christians who wanted to assist the political right in the United States. Political success on the right in the US existed at the confluence of social and economic conservatism—and Stephen Harper immediately grasped the potential for similar alliance-building in Canada. Reverend LaHaye was a true believer who enjoyed spreading the word. He claimed that his books about Armageddon and the Rapture had sold fifty-five million copies. He believed that there would be a mass conversion of Jews to Christianity during the “end times.” LaHaye was so certain of the gospel that he even tried to convert the Dalai Lama when he bumped into him in a hotel corridor in Israel.
When the CNP meets, a lot of money is on the table. One of the original directors of the organization gave $4.5 million to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group that played a key role in sinking the presidential ambitions of John Kerry. The same director donated $3 million to the Progress for America Voter Fund, which backed President George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security. Seed money was also given by Nelson Baker Hunt, the billionaire son of oilman Howard L. Hunt. Ronald Reagan addressed the CNP’s tenth anniversary celebration and had this to say: “A handful of men and women, individuals of character, had a vision. A vision to see the return of righteousness, justice, and truth to our great nation.” Besides the vision, the CNP also had tax-exempt status.
Past members of the group include Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, former US attorneys general Ed Meese and John Ashcroft, gun rights activist Colonel Oliver North, and the mother of Erik Princep, founder of the private security company Blackwater, which later ran amok in the Iraq War. Their common enemy was political and philosophical liberalism. Their agenda was cleaving to Christian heritage, unqualified support of Israel, a strong military, gun rights, traditional values, and small government—things Canada’s NCC would not find objectionable.
The CNP commands the elite of US Republican potentates. Vice-President Dick Cheney flew in on Air Force 2 to address the group at one of their meetings. Mitt Romney gave an address to the CNP in Salt Lake City, Utah. When he made his first run for president, George W. Bush gave a speech to the CNP in San Antonio, Texas, that helped him gain the support of the conservatives in the 2000 presidential election. In accordance with CNP practice, Bush’s speech was never released. In the same year that the future president addressed the group, the CNP gave Charles G. Koch the Free Enterprise Award. Koch and his brother preside over the secondlargest private company in the United States, Koch Industries, based in Wichita, Kansas. Oil is the basis of their enormous wealth, and the family has been involved in the Alberta tar sands for over fifty years. As reported in The Washington Post, the Koch brothers are one of the biggest leaseholders in the enormous development, controlling over half a million hectares. Koch Industries also concentrates on shipping and refining heavy oil. The company has upgraded its Corpus Christi refinery to handle heavy bitumen.
“Canada is one of the cheapest places in the world for Big Oil to do business,” according to Mitchell Anderson, who is writing a book, The Oil Vikings, about Norway’s wise resource use. In 2012, Canada produced over two billion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE, which includes crude oil, natural gas, and other petroleum liquids) and collected $18 billion in provincial and federal taxes, and royalties. Taxpayers realized a benefit of $9 per BOE. Of that total, Alberta produced 1.5 billion BOE in 2012 and collected $6.13 billion in non-renewable royalties. By charging the oil companies higher taxes and investing equity ownership in production, the Norwegian government paid $46.29 BOE to their taxpayers for their oil in 2012—over five times what Canadians received. Norway has an $ 850-billion sovereign wealth fund for its population of about five million people.4
So when Stephen Harper gave a speech to what was essentially a secret society of wealthy, hard-right Republicans, it was odd for a few reasons. After all, the members of the CNP are in the business of scrutinizing potential Republican leadership candidates. For example, after listening to Senator John McCain of Arizona speak, they decided that he wasn’t conservative enough. The group also vowed to run a third-party candidate if the Republican Party chose Rudy Giuliani as its leader because of his pro-choice position on abortion. Stephen Harper wasn’t even a politician anymore and he also happened to be a Canadian. So what was behind the invitation? Whatever the reason, there was no mystery about why he jumped at a chance to speak to them. The CNP had enormous influence on the US government.
In 2003, Alberta’s economic development minister, Mark Norris, attended a three-day session of the CNP in a Virginia suburb close to Washington. Norris went to promote the tar sands, but also, as the Calgary Herald reported at the time, to mend fences because Canada had not participated in the Iraq War. Donald Rumsfeld was the keynote speaker at the event.
Beyond the appeal of the CNP’s great power, the council also shared Stephen Harper’s values. For one thing, Harper disliked the governance model in Canada, preferring Congress over Parliament. As he would later tell The Globe and Mail, the difference between the calibre and experience of the Bush cabinet and any Canadian equivalent was embarrassing to Canada. President Bush got to recruit “top people” from private industry into his inner political circle, while Canadian prime ministers were stuck with a cabinet stocked from the relatively feeble pool of elected MPs.
Like Harper, the CNP was highly secretive. Its membership and donor list are private. Its events are closed to the public. It has been alleged that members are told not to use the name of the organization in emails to protect against leaks. For Harper, one of the most attractive aspects of speaking to the council was that the event would remain secret. CNP by-laws both blocked the media from attending and prevented the release of a transcript of what had been said unless all speakers agreed. Thinking that he could say whatever he wanted without media coverage, Harper gave quite a speech that June night in 1997.5
His American audience must have felt as though they were in Utah listening to a well-scrubbed Republican candidate for the US Senate. The speech was a perfect blend of neo-con and theo-con, which was predictable enough. But what was unexpected was how Harper derided his own country to a foreign audience as “a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the word.” By comparison, Harper was effusive in his praise of the United States and its Republican politics: “Your country and, particularly, your conservative movement, is a light and inspiration to people in this country and across the world.”
He then gave a shorthand civics lesson about governance in Canada, in which his disdain for parliamentary institutions was stunning: “Our executive is the Queen, who doesn’t live here. Her representative is the Governor-General, who is an appointed buddy of the Prime Minister. Of our two legislative houses, the Senate, our upper House, is also appointed, also by the Prime Minister, where he puts his buddies, fundraisers and the like. So the Senate is not very important in our political system. And we have a Supreme Court, like yours, which, since we put a Charter of Rights in our Constitution in 1982, is becoming increasingly arbitrary and important. It is also appointed by the Prime Minister. Unlike your Supreme Court, we have no ratification process.” Stephen Harper was essentially describing the Canadian system of government as a dictatorship run by the Prime Minister of Canada: “So if you sort of remove three of the four elements, what you see is a system that’s described as unpaid checks and political imbalances. The House of Commons, the bastion of the Prime Minister’s power, the body that selects the prime minister, is an elected body.”
But Harper warned his audience not to be fooled. Even though voters selected the members of the House of Commons, it was not like the US House of Representatives. What was it like, then? Harper asked his audience to think of the Commons in terms of the US Electoral College. In the United States, the Electoral College chooses the president and then disappears. But the Commons continues sitting for the next four years, having the power to vote on every issue. To Stephen Harper, Canadian parliamentary democracy was the political version of the movie Groundhog Day. It was an extraordinary description. Harper reduced the work of Parliament to being simply a rubber stamp of the prime minister’s legislative agenda: “The important thing to know is that this is how it will be until the Prime Minister calls the next election. The same majority vote on every issue. So if you ask me ‘What’s the vote going to be on gun control?’ or on the budget, we know that already.”
In strikingly simple words, Stephen Harper again declared to his American audience his personal view of Canadian governance. Between elections, the House of Commons was the property of the prime minister. If you were a member of the opposition, your business was restricted to going through a token exercise of voting on outcomes that were inevitable—the government always winning, the opposition always losing. Missing from his analysis was the opposition’s role in bringing out public information in Question Period, and the work of all-party committees in amending legislation and holding the government to account when it breaks its promises or misleads the people.
If Harper’s view of how Canada’s parliamentary system works was inept, his view of the country’s other political parties was grossly dismissive. He described the NDP as a socialist party, “proof that the Devil lives and interferes in the affairs of men.” It was only partly an attempt at humour. He was hitting the perfect tone with his audience, just as he had done ten years earlier at the Reform Party’s founding convention. He articulated what they despised. The NDP, in effect, represented the opposite of what everyone in the room believed with regard to social value issues. Having dismissed the NDP with the perfect Finkelstein word “socialist,” Harper added the other hot-button epithet of abuse—“radical.” The NDP was a branch of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), which was “explicitly radical.”
His description of the Liberal Party was carefully designed to stir just as much revulsion in his audience but in a different way. To Christian-right American conservatives, Bill Clinton, the sexual libertine and great deceiver, was the devil incarnate. So when Harper described Canadian Liberals as a type of “Clinton pragmatic Democrat,” it was the end of the conversation: the Liberals were a degenerate political party, full stop.
That left just two other parties to describe. Harper damned the Progressive Conservatives by calling them “liberal” Republicans, which meant to this audience that they weren’t Republican at all. Only the Reformers qualified as conservative Republicans. Preston Manning was populist in the same, leader-driven way that Ross Perot had been. And then Harper’s final sales pitch on behalf of Reform: “It’s the closest thing we have to a neo-conservative party.”
Harper could not finish his Montreal speech without offering his audience a précis of the Quebec separatist movement, and what he called “the appeasement of ethnic nationalism.” For a moment, he was back in that Volkswagen ten years earlier heading for Winnipeg, full of anger at Brian Mulroney’s catering to Quebec. In making a passing reference to the referendum that included distinct society status for Quebec, he frightened his audience by talking about other changes on the table that “would just horrify you,” such as “putting universal Medicare in our Constitution, and feminist rights and a whole bunch of other things.” Harper ended by telling his American audience that the trouble with Canada was political, not social. Arthur Finkelstein had taught the NCC the value of humour in spreading one’s message, and Harper ended with a very clever line, especially given that the audience was the inner sanctum of the Christian right: “As long as there are exams, there will always be prayer in schools.”
Though Harper had protested that he was happy to be free of the constraints of party politics, another possibility was more plausible. He simply wanted to be party leader—partly because he didn’t like having to live with other people’s compromises, as his former boss Jim Hawkes had noted. So when Jean Charest resigned the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party in the spring of 1998, Harper listened when he was approached by party members to run for the top job. He was young and spoke French, and since he had once been a member of the Progressive Conservatives, his bid could be presented as a homecoming of sorts.
Harper mentor Tom Flanagan told The Globe and Mail what he thought it would take to get the lapsed Reformer to run: “Harper could be persuaded to run on a platform of bringing together under one umbrella, the two right-of-centre parties.” Interestingly, when that idea was floated at the Winds of Change conference in 1996, Harper himself thought it would never happen because of deepseated differences between Canada’s main strains of conservatism.
On April 7, 1998, Harper called Gerry Nicholls, a senior staffer at the NCC, to say he would be giving an important speech in Calgary to the Home and Mortgage Loan Association. Although he wanted a media advisory flagging the event, no interviews would be given until the speech was delivered. Senior CBC journalists including Don Newman, Jason Moscovitz, and Julie Van Dusen bombarded the NCC with calls, suspecting that Harper intended to use his Calgary speech to announce that he was running for the Tory leadership.
The day after the speech, Harper was featured in a front-page story in the Globe, in which he said that he would not be a candidate for the leadership because his candidacy “would burn bridges to those Reformers with whom I have worked for many years.” But just ten days later, Harper was back in Toronto planning to attend a very important meeting. A group of PC party activists was looking to Harper to become the Blue Tory candidate they wanted to run for the leadership against Red Tory Hugh Segal.
For a man who supposedly wanted to spend more time with his family and enjoyed the freedom of being a lobbyist for right-wing causes, Harper spent a lot of time politicking behind the scenes. He asked American pollster and political consultant John McLaughlin to attend the meeting with him. McLaughlin, who worked at the NCC, was one of Finkelstein’s “boys.” His clients included Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger; Iain Duncan Smith, the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK; multiple incumbent US senators and members of Congress; governors and mayors; and the Republican National Committee itself. Despite Harper’s coy public denials, McLaughlin knew from previous conversations that Harper wanted to be prime minister.
The meeting took place on April 21, 1998, at the Toronto law office of Bob Dechert, who headed up the so-called “Blue Committee,” composed of Ontario backroom boys looking to make peace between Reform and the Progressive Conservatives so that the Liberals would not be in power forever. Conservative MP Jim Jones also attended. The committee laboured to convince Harper to enter the leadership race, impressed with his demeanour and his ability to speak French. McLaughlin was enthusiastic about the prospects of a Harper candidacy—Harper, less so. During the three-hour meeting, no one had asked him any questions about policy.
The team around Ontario premier Mike Harris was also talking to Harper, promising that the Harris machine would be there to help his campaign if he decided to run. But Harper knew that he couldn’t pull off the kind of victory he needed without the help of Reformers, who were now the Official Opposition nationally. Harper began to make discreet calls to members of Manning’s caucus, mindful of the fact that a lot of the financial support for the NCC came from Reformers. If Harper upset Manning any more than he already had by abandoning the party before the 1997 federal election, the NCC’s finances could take a hit. Manning might even undermine Harper with the NCC board.
One of the more startling revelations made by Gerry Nicholls about his NCC years with Harper was the way Stephen Harper’s political mind worked. Fearing that Manning might work against him, Harper decided to make a proactive strike. Nicholls was asked to write a memo to his boss, Harper, which would then be leaked, claiming that Manning was undermining Harper. Nicholls refused to take part in the subterfuge and came to the conclusion that the enmity Harper bore Manning was not just based on disagreement over conservative principles. It was personal, as he recorded in his diary: “Captain Ahab hunting the white whale.”
The seduction song to lure Stephen Harper back to the Progressive Conservative Party came to an end in Toronto on June 16, 1998. The formidable Arthur Finkelstein himself had been asked to conduct a special poll to assess Harper’s chances in such a race, and on that day he came to Toronto to deliver the results in person, as he almost always did. The ambitious politician must have been crestfallen. Finkelstein found that although Harper was a star in media and political circles, he had no name recognition with the vast majority of voters. Name recognition was critical to winning. The disappointing poll, combined with the lack of hoped-for support from Reform members, convinced Stephen Harper that this was not the time to run.
Instead, he took the NCC into his hands like a lump of clay and made a statue of himself. He was the NCC. From now on, there would be more policy delineation and more court battles, like the one to have spending limits for third parties during an election declared unconstitutional. He began criticizing the Canadian Wheat Board with even greater fervour than the NCC had shown before. As for Elections Canada, those “jackasses” were “out of control,” as Harper put it in an NCC fundraising letter. He continued to war with the media, particularly the CBC. NCC news releases were sent to select journalists only, and a trusted few would be contacted directly by Harper himself if he wanted to get a particular story out. As for the NCC itself, he wanted it leaner and meaner, even cancelling the Christmas bonus to set an example of frugality.
FROM HIS PERCH at the NCC, Harper kept a watchful eye on the national conservative scene over the next two years. In July 2000, Stockwell Day bested Preston Manning as leader of the Canadian Alliance, a new party made up of the old Reform Party and a few provincial PC organizations. By April 2001, Harper could see that Day was in trouble. Despite bursting onto the national scene in a wetsuit aboard a Sea-Doo, Day never did get his bat going in what Mike Duffy liked to call “the big leagues.” Day’s Christian fundamentalism was a problem, as was his awkward relationship with the media. Ottawa was foreign territory: the man who was a star as Alberta’s treasurer just wasn’t a movable feast.
Harper was furious when he learned that pollster and strategist Arthur Finkelstein was talking to Day about helping him, a move that Harper viewed as a betrayal. Finkelstein called his trusted acolyte at the NCC, Gerry Nicholls, and asked if he should go to work for Day. Nicholls responded that if the American became involved in the race, the Harper team would be overwhelmed. Finkelstein eventually declined Day’s offer, and Stephen Harper and his team, with the help of the NCC, went to war against Day.
In March 2002, Stephen Harper deposed Day and found himself astride a political party of his own at last. With a hostile Joe Clark still at the helm of the Progressive Conservative Party, it was not the united right that Harper had once held out for when the PCs came calling. But even if the Canadian Alliance was what Brian Mulroney said it was—“Reform in pantyhose,” it was bigger than Preston Manning’s old party. Better still, there was now just one obstacle to full unification: the party of John A. Macdonald. The consummate political tactician was a dangerous commodity once he had a clear target in his sights. As one-time mentor Tom Flanagan put it, Stephen Harper was a “predator.”
Canadian politics on the right was about to go through volcanic changes. As long as Joe Clark was in charge, his PCs would never join forces with the Canadian Alliance because the former prime minister thought it would pull his party too far to the right. But five months after Harper captured the Alliance leadership, opportunity knocked. Joe Clark resigned. Tories chose popular Nova Scotia MP Peter MacKay to replace Clark on May 31, 2003. Alberta MP Jim Prentice finished second to MacKay on the last ballot, largely because of a backroom deal between MacKay and fellow leadership candidate David Orchard. In exchange for MacKay’s promise to review the North American Free Trade Agreement and not to merge the PCs with the Canadian Alliance, Orchard played the kingmaker and delivered his support to MacKay. Five months later, MacKay reneged on the deal. By the end of 2003, the merger with the Canadian Alliance was approved by Progressive Conservative Party members. A few months later, Stephen Harper easily dispatched Belinda Stronach and Tony Clement at the Conservative Party of Canada’s first leadership convention. MacKay got to date Stronach, but Stephen Harper got the party.
One of the reasons Stephen Harper was able to wipe out his opposition on the first ballot in the Conservative Party leadership, gaining nearly 70 percent of the vote, was that he had made himself into a thoroughly modern, professional politician. His years at the NCC had taught him that polling, marketing, and money were the holy trinity of the new politics.6 Seeking power was no longer a matter of debating with honourable gentlemen over great issues, but a gruesome fight to the finish with no holds barred. Ross Perot made an observation that nicely captured Stephen Harper’s quest for power in the new techno-democracy the Republicans had forged, and which Harper embraced: war has rules, mud-wrestling has rules, but politics has no rules.
One of the problems conservatives have always complained about in Canada is the media. Whether it was the Progressive Conservatives, Reform, or the Canadian Alliance, they all believed that there was a left-wing bias in the news. Reflective conservatives such as Preston Manning thought it through more carefully. Manning concluded that the bias wasn’t just in the media but in other major institutions in society like the university. Small “l” liberalism permeated society, from the politics of professors, to the interpretations of Canadian history, to the image of the military. If conservatives wanted to operate on a level playing field, they would have to come up with a way to institutionalize their own message the way liberals had so successfully done.
In the United States, think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute performed that function for the Republican Party. They began by offering counter-facts to the ones presented in the “liberal” news, which then became news. They created the impression that journalism was as partisan as politics. Such institutes could be just as potent in Canada, and nobody knew that better than Stephen Harper. These organizations take in approximately $26 million per year in Canada, with the Fraser Institute—a Harper favourite—commanding roughly a third of the market. Think-tanks here receive 30 percent of their income from corporations. By comparison, their counterparts in the United States draw just 10 percent of their budget from that source.
It is the ultimate “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” relationship. The corporations donate money in the expectation that their interests will be promoted. The “think-tanks” are set up as non-profit “research institutes” with no obligation to publish their list of donors or members. The US-based Donner Foundation gives money to the Macdonald-Laurier, Fraser, and C.D. Howe institutes in Canada, as well as to a group called the Frontier Centre. The Montreal Economics Institute, which pushed to make unions open their books to the public, receives 42 percent of its income from businesses. When the reports and studies of these think-tanks are made public, news organizations such as Sun Media, The Globe and Mail, and CanWest featured their work as hard news. It is a little like Noam Chomsky’s notion of manufacturing consent. The stories go mainstream, but the institutions remain hidden behind their undisclosed donor lists.
Both the Fraser and C.D. Howe institutes have campaigned against the Canada Health Act, which was music to Stephen Harper’s ears. (In 2001, he had proposed to Alberta’s premier Ralph Klein that he get rid of medicare, the RCMP, and the Canada Pension Plan.) Almost all of these think-tanks on the right stand broadly for the same things: unencumbered operation of free markets, lower taxes on corporations, and privatized health care. Many of their donors are Canadian—people such as gold entrepreneur Peter Munk and the Weston family. But they are not the only source of corporate money.
The Fraser Institute also receives money from the ultra-right-wing Koch brothers of Wichita, Kansas, who run the secondlargest private company in the United States, with annual revenues of over $100 billion.7 The Kochs and their Conservative friends spent more than $383 million in the run-up to the 2012 US election. Non-profit organizations set up as trusts reduce public reporting requirements and disguise the flow of money from one group to another, creating layers of anonymity. These entities operate without the public knowing who is actually in charge. All told, the Fraser Institute has received over $600,000 from these politically active American neo-conservatives. Despite the source of their donations, all of these institutes don the same camouflage— the cloak of fierce independence.
The fountainhead of Canada’s right-leaning think-tanks (which also have their progressive equivalents now) was the fertile brain of Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian free-market thinker who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1974. Hayek came up with the idea of setting up organizations like the Fraser Institute to supply a steady stream of studies to demonstrate the superiority of free markets over governments when it comes to solving society’s problems. Despite the fact that these organizations inspired by Hayek often serve the interests of business people and political parties, they register as charities and are permitted tax-free fundraising.
Stephen Harper addressed the thirtieth anniversary celebration of the Fraser Institute in 2004, sporting his silk Adam Smith tie. He liked the organization and came by his enthusiasm honestly. At the University of Calgary, he had studied the free-market philosophy of Hayek, the man widely credited with weaving economic and social conservatism together. Like Margaret Thatcher, Harper was a follower of Hayek and the Austrian school of economics—the supply side rules, interest rates have to be high enough to control the money supply, and debt is death. Hayek opposed the planned economy, both as a threat to freedom and an unworkable proposition.
Any attempt by the Canadian government to plan the economy was doomed to failure according to Hayek’s followers. Pierre Trudeau had created the Foreign Investment Review Agency, established Petro-Canada, and attempted to fix the price of oil with the National Energy Program. The result, Harper believed, had been stagflation and 20 percent interest rates. (Less ideological analysts might also have included in the list of causes a severe recession that hit the United States in the summer of 1981, provoked by the Federal Reserve’s restriction of the money supply to combat inflation, sending shock waves around the world.)
With no other rival for power inside the party, Stephen Harper began the work of transforming the Conservative Party of Canada into his own image, just as he had done with the National Citizens Coalition. In a speech to Civitas, a collection of conservative journalists, politicians, and intellectuals that was created after the 1996 Winds of Change conference in Calgary, he outlined how he would forge a new coalition of social and economic Conservatives:
Rebalancing the conservative agenda will require careful political judgment. First, the issues must be chosen carefully. For example, the social conservative issues we choose should not be denominational, but should unite social conservatives of different denominations and even different faiths. It also helps when social conservative concerns overlap those of people with a more libertarian orientation. . . . We must realize that real gains are inevitably incremental. This, in my experience, is harder for social conservatives than for economic conservatives. The explicitly moral orientation of social conservatives makes it difficult for many to accept the incremental approach. Yet, in democratic politics, any other approach will certainly fail.
Harper noted that changes to the conservative coalition risked the loss of some Red Tories, such as David Orchard or Joe Clark, but that it really didn’t matter: “This is not all bad. A more coherent coalition can take strong positions it wouldn’t otherwise be able to make—as the Alliance alone was able to do during the Iraq War. More important, a new approach can draw in new people. Many traditional Liberal voters, especially those from key ethnic and immigrant communities, will be attracted to a party with strong traditional views of values and family. This is similar to the phenomenon of the ‘Reagan democrats’ in the United States, who were so important in the development of that conservative coalition.” Family, crime, defence, even foreign policy driven by religious conviction were all theo-con weapons Harper would store in his arsenal for the looming battle to dislodge the Liberal hegemony. He was playing to the suburbs around big cities such as Toronto and Vancouver, which he believed were full of people whose social values made them natural Conservatives: Chinese, Koreans, Jews, Italians, Vietnamese, and Somalis.
Harper was set to recalibrate the conservative movement with a direct voter campaign that, if successful, would replace the Liberals as the voice of these ethnic communities, particularly around the Greater Toronto Area. His general in this critical battle was Jason Kenney, who, like Harper, had been president of a third-party lobby group—the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Kenney backed the Iraq War and once compared Hezbollah to the Nazi Party. Harper’s most important focus, lifted directly from the Republican playbook of President George W. Bush, was on forming an alliance between Canada’s Jewish community and the country’s 3.5 million evangelical Christians. A strange alliance indeed, because evangelicals believe that only those who have accepted Christ will be raptured up in the Second Coming, which, unless they convert, does not include Jews.
After taking over the Canadian Alliance, Harper’s views were reportedly influenced by neo-conservatives such as David Frum, then a speech writer for President Bush. Born Canadian, Frum emigrated to the United States and became a naturalized citizen. He was a member of the Canada Israel Committee and a board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition. Frum, like Harper, was a staunch supporter of the Iraq War, and believed with Donald Rumsfeld that the invading Americans would be welcomed by the Iraqis as liberators. He was a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute from 2003 to 2010. He co-authored a book with neo-conservative Richard Perle, An End to Evil, in which the authors defended the Iraq War and argued for similar attacks on Iran, Syria, and North Korea. They also wanted to completely abandon the Israeli–Palestinian peace process and have all Americans carry biometric identity cards.
When Harper went looking for help in writing his speech for the first Conservative Party of Canada convention on March 17, 2005, he called on David Frum. The carefully crafted speech was a hit. Although Harper promised not to bring in legislation on abortion if elected, he added a crucial qualifier for the party’s social conservatives: “I will always allow all your MPs to vote freely on matters of conscience.” He denied Joe Clark’s statement that the Harpercons had a hidden agenda, and used humour, short sentences, and a teleprompter to get his points across smoothly. Arthur Finkelstein would have approved.
As foreign affairs critic, the born-again Christian Stockwell Day played a crucial role for the new party in building the relationship between the Christian and Jewish vote. Just as Reverend Tim LaHaye had helped Republicans, Charles McVety, the president of the Canadian Christian College, assisted the Conservative Party. Also linked with Frank Dimant, the executive vice-president of B’nai Brith Canada, Stephen Harper had two solid power bases for money, votes, and workers. Churchgoers were the strongest supporters of Israel. The Conservative Party caucus boasted a healthy contingent of evangelical Christians, including Stephen Harper, who is a member of East Gate Alliance Church.
Harper’s Republican-style coalition building began to bear fruit. Billionaire Gerald Schwartz, a respected leader in the Jewish community, shifted his allegiance from the Liberals to the new Conservatives. Schwartz had previously been an important advisor of Paul Martin, and a valuable fundraiser. In exchange for Harper’s unqualified support for Israel, a number of high-powered members of the Jewish community followed Schwartz’s lead, including his wife, Heather Reisman, and legendary film producer Robert Lantos.
Finally, in 2006, it all came together for Harper. Though personally above reproach, Liberal Paul Martin was caught in the undertow of the sponsorship scandal and the inquiry he had called to get to the bottom of it. Stephen Harper won a minority government with his new coalition. According to an Ipsos Reid poll done in April 2006, 64 percent of Protestant churchgoers, the majority of them evangelical, voted Conservative in the January federal election of that year. It was a 24 percent jump over the numbers from 2004, when Paul Martin had eked out a minority government.
The Conservative victory was in every way a remarkable turn of events, not the least of which was the NDP’s joining with Harper to bring down the Martin government on a budget with much social spending in it. Until that moment, Canada had been a secular and progressive nation that believed in transfer payments to better distribute the country’s wealth, the Westminster model of governance, a national medicare program, a peacekeeping role for the armed forces, an arm’s-length public service, the separation of church and state, and solid support for the United Nations. Stephen Harper believed in none of these things.
Using Republican policies and strategies, and taking his advice from American super-consultants like Arthur Finkelstein and policy advisors such as transplanted American Tom Flanagan, Harper managed to ride to power on a base that he himself had earlier told The Globe and Mail was “similar to what George Bush has tapped.” Harper had shed his skin three times politically: Progressive Conservative to Reform, Reform to Canadian Alliance, and Canadian Alliance to Conservative Party of Canada. He had made clear along the way that he didn’t much like the Canada built by generations of politicians and public servants before him. In particular, he had no time for the country’s parliamentary democracy, much preferring the US system.
This perspective didn’t take long to show. On the day his government was sworn in, Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed Michael Fortier, who did not even run in the 2006 election, to his cabinet—just the way a US president does in the American system Harper so admired.
It was only the beginning.