Stephen Harper: The making of a prime minister
JOHN IBBITSON
The Globe and Mail
Last updated Saturday, Aug. 01, 2015
He is a lion in autumn, weaker than in his prime, but still a force of nature. He faces his fifth, and perhaps final, test as national leader. But in a way, the result won’t matter. Whether Stephen Harper wins or loses the general election of October 19 is moot. He has already reshaped Canada. And Canada will not easily be changed back.
He has made the federal government smaller, less intrusive, less ambitious. He has made Canada a less Atlantic and a more Pacific nation.
He has brought peace to a fractious federation. Under his leadership, Canada speaks with a very different voice in the world. He has also given us a very different politics – more intensely partisan, more ideological, more polarizing. This, too, is unlikely to change, now that people are used to it.
And then there is Harper himself. Slow to trust and quick to take offence, brooding and resentful at times, secretive beyond reason, perhaps the most introverted person ever to seek high office in this country, he has nonetheless defeated a plethora of challengers to give Canada its first ever truly conservative government, with profound consequences for the country. He has brought the West for the first time fully into the life of the nation, while making his Conservatives the only conservative party in the developed world broadly supported by immigrants. And he has lasted a decade in office, no mean feat in this democracy or any other.
But despite those many years in the public eye, who he is, and why he does what he does, remains elusive– even though such an understanding is crucial for voters who may be unsure of how to cast their ballot. How did Steve Harper become Stephen Harper?
THE YOUNG HARPER
If, as essayist and editor B.K. Sandwell claimed, “Toronto has no social classes / only the Masseys and the masses,” the Masseys and their friends went to “Trins.” Bishop John Strachan founded the college in 1851 in bitter opposition to the Upper Canadian government, which had decided that King’s College, which Strachan had also founded, should be secular rather than Anglican. From that day onward, Trinity has fostered a reputation for exclusivity and exclusion. Small, cloistered, its architecture and mores a self-conscious imitation of Oxford or Cambridge, the college educated the sons and daughters of the elite, many of whom had already submitted their children to the academic excellence and social terrors of private boarding schools.
“We are the salt of the earth, so give ear to us,” the men and women of college loved to proclaim in their fake Oxbridge accents:
No new ideas shall ever come near to us!
Orthodox! Catholic!
Crammed with divinity!
Damn the dissenters, Hurrah for old Trinity!
Students wore black academic gowns. At the men’s residence, jacket and tie were required for dinner. The food was appalling, but you could leave your coffee cup pretty much anywhere you liked, and someone would silently pick it up and return it to Strachan Hall.
The rituals of the college were bizarre, but proudly held. They included “pouring out,” in which second-year students would forcibly eject from the dining hall any man of college who annoyed his neighbours at the table; “deportations,” in which second-year students would kidnap first-year students and leave them stranded, sometimes naked, in a park, at Centre Island, or even in another town; and Episkopon, in which the ghost of Bishop Strachan visited the men and women of the college to chastise them for their erring ways, through skits and songs composed by a committee that sought to push the boundaries of sexual – especially homophobic – humour.
Initiation was hell. Days of drinking and hazing culminated in the Cake Fight, in which the students of first year would seek to push through a phalanx of second-year students guarding the gate at Henderson Tower.
Though the tower protected the sophomores, the freshmen were drenched in an indescribably foul concoction from the roof above that dedicated students had been preparing all summer. It typically included beer, urine, scraps from the kitchen, yeast, and anything else that could be found and then left to ferment in the heat. Only after surviving this misery were freshmen and [fresh]women entitled to don their gowns.
Trinity also offered an excellent education, and the camaraderie of a small college filled with exceptional students. Rather than eating cafeteria-style, the students were served dinner, which brought the entire college together each night (the men at Trinity; the women at their own residence, St. Hilda’s), and the discussions and debates this fostered could be the best part of a student’s education. But a shy freshman arriving from a suburban, middle-class background, educated at public schools, already suspicious of the Tory descendants of the Family Compact with their snobbish disdain for anyone Not Like Us, could be traumatized by such an environment.
Steve Harper lasted two weeks.
Or maybe three. No one can remember exactly; this isn’t a part of his life that Harper prefers to talk about. But he was clearly not happy at Trinity. He was put off by the huge, impersonal classes of the University of Toronto. He didn’t like the professors who warned the students that the person sitting beside them would be gone by Christmas. He didn’t like the pretensions of many of the students. He didn’t like any of it.
Robert Harper does not believe that Harper’s decision to quit university was sudden; in fact, he believes it was something that had been brewing for more than a year, that Steve didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life and wasn’t prepared to commit to university until he had answered that question.
But whatever was going through his mind in the months leading up to his decision to quit, the fact remains that in his first encounter with the Upper Canadian elite – the young men and women who would go on to run the businesses, lead the political parties, manage the bureaucracies, and shape the arts and academies of English Central Canada – Stephen Harper decided he wanted none of it, or them. He could have tried to fit in to this new world, which was closed but less impermeable than in the past, but instead he fled from it. His decision to reject that world, and his sense of exclusion from it, would shape his life and his politics. It marked him.
It also produced a deep ambivalence toward academia that would shape the next decade of his life. It would be three years before he returned to university – an eternity for someone that young and that intelligent – and he would drop in and out of school repeatedly during his years as a graduate student. All his life, Stephen Harper has resisted taking orders from other people. Starting with professors.
Or maybe starting with his dad. The news that he was quitting university did not go down well with Joe and Margaret. They couldn’t believe their ears. Their eldest son had always worked so hard and done so well. How could he have decided to quit, and so quickly?
Joe had insisted that the boys pay their own university tuition, to instill the notion that a degree was a means to an end, and the end was a good job. In high school, Steve had worked as an office boy in a provincial government office, and as a summer clerk at the local LCBO to help pay for his tuition and books. If he wasn’t going to go to university, then he was going to have to earn a living. But doing what? He was 19 and had only a high school education, but he didn’t care. The one thing that both Steve and his father agreed on was that he needed to get a job.
Gordon Shaw was overseeing offices for Imperial Oil in both Edmonton and Calgary. He got a call from Joe Harper, who confessed he had a problem with his son. “We can’t get along with him at home,” Shaw recalls his friend saying. Was there a job for Steve out there? There was – for an office clerk, in the Edmonton office. Shaw extended the offer. Steve took it immediately. At that point in their relationship, it appears, both Joe and Steve needed to put a couple of time zones between them.
At certain crucial times in his life, Stephen Harper has displayed a tendency to prefer flight over fight. If a situation becomes untenable, he simply abandons the situation, rather than trying to change it to his advantage.
Over the years, Harper learned to curb this tendency, but he hadn’t yet when he was 19. The same week he quit school, he flew west to a new city, a new life, and a new job – though not much of one.
Steve Harper was on his own.
TEMPER
There are disagreeable aspects to Stephen Harper’s personality. He is prone to mood swings. He can fly off the handle. He goes into funks, sometimes for long periods. He is suspicious of others. The public is aware of these traits mostly through what’s written and reported in the media. In public, Harper is almost invariably calm, measured, and careful in what he says and how he says it. Yet none of us, watching him, have any difficulty believing that this closed, repressed personality is capable of lashing out from time to time. We all get the vibe. His personality also comes out in the tactics that the Conservative Party uses against its enemies, both perceived and real – which are, in a word, ruthless.
As with most of us, Harper’s character flaws are the reverse side of his character strengths: One would not exist without the other. He has been Prime Minister for a decade not despite these qualities but because of them.
The most cited characteristic of Stephen Harper is his legendary temper.
He can descend into rages, sometimes over trivial things, at other times during moments of crisis. A former aide to Harper recalls a time during the 2004 election campaign when things suddenly started to go very badly for the Conservatives, for reasons we’ll examine later. Harper was on the campaign bus, in Quebec, leading a conference call with senior campaign staff back at headquarters in Ottawa. “He was very, very angry,” the former aide recalls. “It was: ‘We are fucking going to do this, and you are fucking going to do that and I want to see this fucking thing done right now.’ And then he paused and asked: ‘And why does nothing happen around here unless I say ‘fuck’? ”
Harper’s temper manifests itself in different ways. Some days, he just gets up on the wrong side of the bed. Other times, he flies off the handle when confronted with bad news. That’s when the decibel level goes through the roof and the f-bombs start flying. Harper’s reaction when he was told in April, 2008, that the RCMP had raided Conservative Party headquarters in connection with the in-and-out affair, carrying out boxes of material past the TV cameras, was wondrous to behold.
But when Harper is really angry at you, he’s very calm. He looks you straight in the eye and tells you how you’ve failed him, and if you are a faithful follower, you simply want to die. The state beyond that is even worse. He simply cuts you out. He doesn’t speak to you, doesn’t reply to your messages, freezes you out of meetings. At this point, you should be pursuing a new career opportunity.
Another of Harper’s less attractive qualities is a perceived lack of loyalty toward others. One-time political adviser Tom Flanagan points out that Harper has betrayed or estranged many in the conservative movement who were at one time senior to him – Joe Clark, Jim Hawkes, Brian Mulroney, Preston Manning. This, Flanagan believes, is the product of Harper’s need to dominate whatever environment he is in. “I think he has this very strong instinct to be in charge,” he said. “He really wants to be the alpha figure, and he’s achieved that. So part of that is to dispose of anyone who might be considered to be a rival in some sense or another.”
Flanagan also asserts that “there is a huge streak of paranoia in Stephen. And he attracts people who have a paranoid streak. And if you don’t have one to begin with, you develop it, because you’re constantly hearing theories.” At its root, “looking back, there’s a visceral reluctance to trust the motives of other people,” Flanagan concludes. “He often overcomes his initial suspicions and will sign on to other people’s ideas. But the initial response is always one of suspicion.” Flanagan believes Harper is prone to depression. “He can be suspicious, secretive, and vindictive, prone to sudden eruptions of white-hot rage over meaningless trivia,” he wrote in 2014, “at other times falling into week-long depressions in which he is incapable of making decisions.”
Concerning Flanagan’s contention that Harper is prone to paranoia or depression, [one of his oldest friends, John] Weissenberger simply replies: “Bullshit.” Harper does not suffer from depression. Depression is a clinical condition that may be unrelated to external events. When Harper goes into a funk, there’s always a good reason. Those funks can be long and deep, combining introspection with sulking with a sudden loss of self-confidence. But he always comes out of them, and over the years he’s done an increasingly better job of keeping them under control.
