Leader of the West
by JAY NORDLINGER March 11, 2013, Issue
The progress of Stephen Harper, Canada’s Conservative prime minister
In January, there was a rumor that Stephen Harper would appear at CPAC. Harper is the prime minister of Canada, and a Conservative. CPAC is the annual conservative jamboree in Washington, D.C. As a source close to Harper says, it took the prime minister’s office “about 30 seconds” to deny that Harper would be speaking at CPAC. The organization had indeed invited Harper; but he had declined. It was only natural for the organization to invite him: Harper is maybe the leading conservative head of state or government right now. It was equally natural for Harper to decline. For one thing, a head of state or government probably has no business speaking at a partisan gathering on foreign soil. For another thing, Conservatives up north tend to be wary of associating with us conservatives down south. The Canadian media portray us as a bunch of yahoos and extremists. Of course, we are portrayed the same way here, but we have countervailing media: right-leaning media. The Canadians have precious few such outlets.
It is the kiss of death, or at least not an advantage, for a Canadian Conservative to be known as a “U.S.-style” conservative, a Canadian Republican. A leading Conservative says, “Our whole careers, we’ve had to defend ourselves against charges of being lackeys of the American Right.” He remembers the 2005–06 election period, during which “some well-meaning fellow” published an op-ed in the
Washington Times, saying that Harper was a conservative in the American image, a Great Right Hope, and the best friend George W. Bush would ever have. “We had to distance ourselves from what he wrote,” says the leading Conservative. “It actually became a major story here, that obscure column in the
Washington Times.” Oh, yes. Harper wrote a letter to the editor objecting to the column. In due course, his opponents made an attack ad out of the column, quoting it on the air.
For some months, National Review sought an interview with Harper. In the end, his office declined — politely, their being Canadian and all. Did he not want attention or praise from an American conservative magazine? Was he worried about the Washington Times treatment? Could be. But he grants very few interviews even to Canadian publications. David Frum, the Canadian-born author and analyst, has another point, and a related one: Harper is a very disciplined politician. And “when there is no reason to speak, there is a reason not to speak.”
It was not so long ago that American conservatives kind of snickered at Canada. They had terrific hockey, sure, but they also had Trudeaupian socialism, and a pinko foreign policy, and this pathetic national health-care system: Why, if a Canadian had a true medical problem, he had to run here. There is much less snickering now, as President Obama takes the U.S. in a more “Canadian” direction. For several years, I worked at golf courses in Michigan, and sometimes Canadians would try to use their pretty, multicolored money, to pay their greens fees. We would smile and shake our heads. “But don’t you accept our dollar at par?” they would say. No, not on your life: We barely considered Canadian money real money. Today, the Canadian dollar is worth more than the U.S. (by a hair). “This is a source of pride for us,” says a Canadian intellectual and politico, “but it’s also a mixed blessing: A stronger dollar hurts exports.” There is an expression in golf, and it applies to currency and its perpetual fluctuations: “Every shot pleases somebody.”
Conservatives, wherever they live, can be pleased with Stephen Harper. He is a leader of the West, an advocate of freedom, democracy, capitalism, human rights — Western civilization, we could say. There are not many conservatives in the highest offices at the moment. One thinks of Britain’s Cameron, Germany’s Merkel, Israel’s Netanyahu — India’s Singh? They all have their virtues, as do other leaders. But the example to our north is particularly interesting, not least because he is a surprise: a conservative flower that has bloomed in unpromising soil.
Harper was born in 1959, in Toronto, where he grew up. This is worth knowing because he is always thought of as a man of the Canadian West. That is certainly true in cultural and political terms. After high school, Harper moved to Alberta (the province above Montana, Idaho, and Washington). He is “very suspicious of establishment elites,” says a Conservative insider. We are talking about those “who wear cufflinks and pocket squares, and eat at restaurants with ‘Bistro’ in their names.” Harper attended the University of Calgary, where he earned two degrees: a bachelor’s and a master’s, both in economics. He liked watching National Review’s founder, William F. Buckley Jr., on television. He admired the big conservative statesmen on the world stage: Reagan and Thatcher. In a 2002 interview, he was asked to name thinkers who had influenced him. He said, “I’m an economist by training, so obviously all the classical economists from Smith right up to people like Hayek, as well as some of the modern public-choice theorists — people like James Buchanan.”
Those who know him describe Harper as a rare combination of intellectual and politico. He is the idea man, the campaign manager, the candidate — all of those. He is also a “regular guy,” they say, and completely unpretentious. A “hockey dad,” says one. Like his country in general, Harper is devoted to the sport, and, in fact, will come out with a book on the history of hockey toward the end of this year. (Almost no U.S. president has come out with a book while still in office. Reagan was one. In his first term, he published
Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation.)
Harper was first elected to Parliament in 1993. There were not many conservatives like him in the land — in Alberta, maybe, but not in Canada as a whole. Conrad Black, the historian and publisher, makes a point about the Liberal party: Starting in 1896, they held power for 80 out of 110 years. They were the most dominant party in the democratic world. The “natural governing party,” people called them. In 1996 — a hundred years after the beginning of this startling run — Harper co-authored a piece in which he said, “Although we like to think of ourselves as living in a mature democracy, we live, instead, in something little better than a benign dictatorship.” Right-leaning Canadians did not have their act together, being in different parties, being in a general and snippy disarray. Harper and his allies wanted to unite conservatives in one party that would challenge the status quo. Canada did not need “a second Liberal party,” he said, rather as Barry Goldwater once called for “a choice, not an echo.” In 2003, the new Conservative party was born, with Harper at its helm.
In a way, he was more fun before he became a big national leader. His tongue was freer. In 1997, he gave a notorious and wonderful speech to a group of Americans, saying, “Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it.” In 2002, he said, “There is a culture of defeat that we have to overcome” — particularly in Atlantic Canada (i.e., the provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, etc.). There was a “can’t do” attitude, a feeling that nothing could change for the better, that people were stuck in an endless gray. The media judged Harper’s words grossly impolitic, but others thought he had put his finger on something important.
The Conservatives, formed in late 2003, triumphed a short time later, in January 2006. They did not win a majority of seats in Parliament. But they won more than anyone else, and Harper was sworn in as prime minister on February 6 (Reagan’s birthday).
The new PM did not go on some revolutionary tear, given his minority government, and given the temper of Canada. But it was still clear there was a new sheriff in town. It was clear in ways both symbolic and material. For instance, previous governments had established the practice of lowering flags whenever a Canadian was killed in Afghanistan. Harper stopped this practice. There was a war on, and war brought casualties. The dead could be remembered on Remembrance Day. The armed forces should not be sentimentalized. Harper also spoke of “Arctic sovereignty,” a somewhat mystic phrase in the Canadian mind. Americans, Russians, and others had better not meddle. When Hamas took power in the Palestinian Authority, Harper’s Canada was the first government to cut off funding to the PA. (The first government after Israel’s.) The media and the opposition parties were scandalized, saying this was a sharp departure from Canadian tradition. They were quite right. They were further scandalized when Harper supported Israel, unequivocally, in the Second Lebanon War.
In 2011, Harper restored the name “Royal” to the Canadian armed forces: the Royal Canadian Navy, the Royal Canadian Air Force. He is duly mindful of Quebec, and gives speeches and interviews in French, but he has also said, “We’re part of a worldwide Anglo-American culture.” He goes out of his way to acknowledge Elizabeth II as the Canadian head of state. In his first months in office, he introduced the Australian prime minister, John Howard, to the parliament in Ottawa. He emphasized shared values, “values so many in the world can only dream of, values we should never take for granted.” Two months later, Harper spoke in London, noting what Britain had given Canada: the Magna Carta, parliamentary democracy, “the entrepreneurial spirit and free-market economy” — not to mention “Shakespeare, Dickens, Kipling, Lewis, and Chesterton.” Very few Canadians talk this way, or make such acknowledgments. (Kipling!) Very few Americans do. Very few Britons do. (Last fall, David Letterman had David Cameron on his TV show. He asked the prime minister to translate “Magna Carta.” Cameron was unable to do so, or said he was: He is a graduate of Eton and Oxford.)
Naturally, many on the left were aghast at Harper’s performance in London. The media sputtered over this new sheriff. His relations with them have been contentious, and this was particularly true in the first years. Soon after he was elected, Harper said, “Unfortunately, the press gallery has taken the view that they are going to be the opposition to the government.” They are still against him. But they are not as hot against him as they once were. As the previously quoted Conservative insider puts it, they have a “grudging respect” for him. They no longer treat him as a hick from the West, someone who ought to be in the Texas legislature rather than 24 Sussex Drive (the prime-ministerial residence). If anything, he is an “evil genius,” says the insider.
