This article was published more than 4 years ago. Some information may no longer be current. There's a simple way to cull the field of candidates running for the Conservative leadership. Ask yourself: Who would Stephen Harper support?
The Conservative Party is still Mr. Harper's party. He initiated the union of the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Alliance parties back in He has been its only permanent leader. The , or so members of the party mostly joined on his watch. In the main, their values are his values. If Stephen Harper would never vote for a candidate, that candidate shouldn't be running.
While neither Mr. Harper nor his friends are offering their views, there are four criteria he would probably use. One caveat: This is how prime minister Stephen Harper would think. How that thinking has evolved in the months since he left politics may be a different matter. Read more: Who's running for the Conservative leadership?
Read the list of candidates. First: Is the candidate proficient in French? Harper worked hard to master the language from the time he was a teenager, and he would expect any serious candidate to make a serious effort. A lot would happen. Losing by five points is still losing. The election campaign began on Nov. By the Jan. But the handy thing about hypothetical questions is the way they illuminate real-world choices.
But then Innovative asked how respondents would vote if Harper came back to lead the Conservatives. The one argument that could perhaps justify the speculation is that Harper did not like losing to Justin Trudeau and would like a chance at a rematch, especially since Trudeau has in many ways revealed himself to be exactly what so many of his critics long suspected — bluntly, a carefully constructed political brand that does not match well with the reality of the man who carries it.
But not only is it far from certain that Harper would win such a rematch, even if he gets a chance, which might not be for years, it would be a huge risk to leave a comfortable private life just for that chance at knocking Trudeau out of the PMO. Watching, an intelligence vast, cool and unsympathetic, for the moment to return. He seems to have gotten over it far faster and much more completely than his strongest critics have yet been able to get over him.
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A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of NP Posted will soon be in your inbox. Stephen Joseph Harper, of course, never set out to be lovable. He always knew he would rile the nabobs of the establishment, the media, the bar and the academy. So what? He was out to reform a nation and a world that he deemed infested with entitled liberals who coddled criminals, ran up debt and cozied up to dictators. He knew he'd be the skunk at the party.
Consider his deft and poignant eulogy for a fallen comrade, Jim Flaherty, in which Harper noted the contrast between himself and the gregarious ex-finance minister who charmed his way through the great recession. That's something in this business — something I envy. I can't even get my friends to like me.
Indeed, have we ever seen a prime minister so bereft of the back-slapping, shoulder-punching, baby-kissing arts of human contact? Even the cerebral Pierre Trudeau enjoyed a pirouette at the palace. For Harper, it was always an ordeal. The fact that he could steel himself to endure it, though, tells us much about his success as a politician.
He never set hearts a-thumping — except among his enemies — but Harper's discipline made up the difference. Take the little matter of elections. It was a gigantic achievement to lead a fractious party to victory three times in a row, even in the teeth of a deep recession. What's more, Harper did not step to the head of an established political machine; he had to build his own from the wreckage of two defeated parties.
Preston Manning's Reform Party split the right; Harper united it. After that, he piled up wins. The immigrant vote? The Jewish vote? Keeping the social conservatives close while keeping them quiet? Surviving minority government? Check, even if prorogation wasn't pretty.
Running rings round Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff? Check and check. Don't say that Harper didn't know how to pirouette, too. He preached against chasing "the almighty dollar" in China, then led the chase. He swore to balance the budget, then ran six deficits. He campaigned on a cap-and-trade carbon plan in , then mocked it in There was no rose in his lapel, but he could swivel like Pierre Trudeau and flip-flop with the best.
His defining zig-zag, for many voters, was the recession budget of As the financial winds howled in the fall of , he said, "We're not running a deficit We're not going into deficit.
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