The Great Harper Hope, five years later

Though he has now officially been in power for half a decade, I still have a hard time thinking of Stephen Harper as anything other than an interim prime minister. Whether he is followed by another Liberal PM or a successor from his own party, it is almost impossible to imagine Canada’s next leader being more… well, Harpery than the present incumbent, in terms of background, ideology, and attitude. If he represents a unique moment in Canadian political history, the signs are pointing to it being a passing one.

By any measurement, Stephen Harper is simply not the sort of person who is supposed to become prime minister of Canada, which is what makes the extraordinary fact that he did so worthy of analysis. Notwithstanding his actions while in office — which we can debate later — Harper, in his prior capacities as third-party insurgent and right-wing activist, easily remains one of the most articulate and intellectual iconoclasts this country has produced. His pointed, biting critiques of the Canadian “system” — the vast, untruly, and interlocking apparati of state bureaucracies, parliamentary institutions, party establishments, federal entitlements, and nationalist interest groups that give Canada its distinctive political, economic, and cultural character — remain vital reading for any interested student. Since Canada is not, by and large, a country that tends to reward its radicals, the fact that a man as brazenly and unapologetically critical of the status quo as Harper could someday wind up in the nation’s top job is really an accomplishment of more significance than is often acknowledged.

His roots being such, Harper’s successes as prime minister only deserve to be measured according to the degree he leaves the loathed Canadian system, the one he now has tremendous influence over, any different than he found it. He has no right to be satisfied — as many of the much less intellectual prime ministers before him were — with mild administrative achievements like raising the GDP a few points or dicking around with taxes. If the man can be said to have a destiny, it should be to serve as a sort of Trudeau of the right — a truly transformative leader capable of fundamentally reinventing, in some sweeping way, the country whose flaws he had devoted so much of his earlier life to exposing.

It is an enormously ambitious undertaking, and one Harper has so far fallen notably short of achieving. Whether a truly conservative, reformist era will ever come to the country is the first great question of 21st century Canadian politics. Harper’s election five years ago was a key turning point, but the final answer may still be many years off.

To be a conservative in a country as swaggering and cocksure in its liberal superiority as Canada requires a profound sort of cynicism, and Stephen Harper is a remarkably cynical man. Here we can define cynicism with both customary meanings: the depressed, nihilistic sense that everything is awful and all problems are unsolvable, and the wily, shamelessly self-interested sense that any problem is merely a thinly-disguised opportunity to ruin someone else’s day. The degree to which these two divergent styles of cynicism can be ulitized to achieve the same ends forms the essence of Harperism.

It was the nihilistic style of cynicism that had a lot to do with Harper co-founding the Reform Party in 1987, an organization too bitter and frustrated with the broken promises and moderate ideology of the Mulroney government to concede that the Prime Minister’s Progressive-Conservative machine could ever be a legitimate destination for right-wing voters. Yet it was opportunistic cynicism of the second sort that prompted Harper to defend that same Progressive-Conservative government several decades later, ensuing that the scope of a federal inquiry into crimes of corruption committed during the Mulroney years would be sufficiently modest (and later appointing the legal architect of that modesty as Canada’s 28th governor general). Only because Canadians’ memories are so short, and thus unable to distinguish between the Conservative Party of today from the Progressive Conservatives of yore, was the man Harper once despised suddenly worth defending. If there was a short-term polling advantage to be gained from keeping another nominal “Tory” out of nasty headlines, then so be it.

It’s that same cynical logic that explains why Harper — the man who once went so enthusiastically on the Sean Hannity show to denounce the corrosive anti-Americanism of the Chretien administration — is now running ugly, chauvinistic attack ads against Michael Ignatieff for the high crime of declaring to “love” of the United States. Or why, as Terrance Corcoran pointed out in this weekend’s National Post, it is so darn difficult “for anyone to come up with five economically ‘conservative’ achievements” to credit to Harper’s five years in office, despite the fact that the economy was supposedly the one issue on which the former University of Calgary economist was unafraid of being unabashedly right-wing.

Weirdly unprincipled as such posturing may be, no one has ever lost a Canadian election by bashing America too harshly, or spending too much, and Harper’s unapologetic cynicism has undoubtedly made him a formidable electoral opponent. When enemies can become friends, beliefs can become burdens, and a lifetime of provocative, on-the-record statements can be brushed off with a mere hand wave, all with remarkably little unease or embarrassment, then it’s very hard for partisan critics to find ammunition. There are lots of wonderful left-wing sites floating around the net documenting the vast, glaring contradictions between what Harper has repeatedly said he actually believes and how he has governed, and many of the more damning quotes have been used in Liberal attack ads. But for some reason, none of it seems to stick. The left is right to gnash their teeth in frustration over this stuff, since the hornswoggling going on is truly epic in scale, even by the oscillating standards of most western politicians.

It’s equally frustrating to the right, of course, and sites like the ones above can be just as depressing to conservatives, since they represent great tales of What Could Have Been. But in this regard, Harper seems more comfortable than most in making the case to his supporters that his maintenance of power is a worthwhile end to itself. Indeed, it may be the truest glimpse of the old Harper still remaining. “This is the style of government you get when the prime minister doesn’t believe in half of what he’s doing,” he might say to his critics on the right. “Do you really want to take a chance on electing a government with actual passion?”

Like the boy with his finger in the dike, Harper’s brand of cynical conservatism begs the question of a more unpleasant alternative to an uninspiring solution. Similarly, for every year Harper remains in power, the more he normalizes the idea that a man of his particularly unorthodox, anti-establishment background can be “handled” as the country’s PM, which may all be an elaborate ruse to help set the stage for some presumed parliamentary majority to be achieved in some theoretical future election (as he himself has mused during a few of his rare, mask-slipping moments).

The opposition parties, of course, aren’t buying any of it, and continue to view Harper as such a serious existential threat to Canada As We Know It that they’re willing to resort to increasingly unprecedented and frantic tactics, culminating in the desperate scheme of forming a three-party coalition government — all to pry this fairly unaccomplished leader from the levers of power. There is something oddly class conscious about the whole idea, whereby Ignatieff, Layton, and Duceppe  — two academics and a former union organizer — work to dislodge a man whose right-wing ideas so threaten the world their people have built. As vanguards of the country’s liberal establishment, Harper could not ask for a more ably cast collection of opponents.

I continue to hold out hope that if Harper does eventually win a majority government, then the Conservative Party will prove itself worthy of its name, ushering in an era of spending cuts, program dismantling, and democratic reform, allowing the Prime Minister will govern in the manner his life’s work implies he desires. There is simply too much evidence to suggest that Harper has no ambition higher than to continuing to bob along in a nonthreatening fashion; Ottawa’s polite houseguest who leaves all the toiletries just as he found them.

If he fails, however, or is forcibly displaced by an unruly (and I would argue, unconstitutional) coalition government, then the nation’s conventional wisdom will likely consolidate around the premise that Harper, despite his moderate cover, was simply too right-wing for Canada, and had to be — like an incompatible internal organ — expelled for the survival of the host. A new era of “moderation” will be deemed necessary for the Conservative Party, with Harper’s successor expected to distance himself from the “divisive” and “polarizing” views that prevented his predecessor from making a breakthrough with the Canadian people.

In other words, all that cynicism would have been in vain, and Harper’s lasting legacy will prove deeply ironic: a renewed affinity for politics as usual.