Stephen Harper, a cerebral partisan

CBC News

Stephen Harper gives a thumbs-up to supporters at a campaign rally in Victoria, B.C., on Jan. 22, 2006. (CP file photo)

Stephen Harper himself would tell you he's a prime example of policy over pizzazz. And after Canadians handed his Conservatives a minority government on Jan. 23, 2006, he set out to prove that equation.

"My strengths are not spin or passion, you know that," Harper said repeatedly in the closing weeks of the 2005-06 general election. "I believe it's better to light one candle than to promise a million light bulbs."

He has also, however, proved to be something of a control freak and a keen partisan, taking every opportunity as prime minister to marshal his message and slam the Liberals.

And though he has chosen to move methodically through his agenda — one policy, one candle, at a time — when it comes to Canada's future, Harper has often spoken of the need to redesign the political equivalent of the entire electrical grid.

From his days as a graduate student of economics at the University of Calgary, the Toronto-born Harper has been a staunch believer in smaller government, traditional values and letting citizens have greater control over their lives. To him, that once meant whittling down or eliminating some social programs, business development agencies and the costly gun registry in order to reduce taxes and put money and power back into the hands of Canadians.

But his first year in power has seen Harper move ahead cautiously on a limited agenda, in particular his five priorities — a new political accountability act, tax cuts, a tough-on-crime package, a new way of financing child care and wait-time guarantees for certain hospital care.

What's more, Harper's careful agenda was hijacked in large part by other issues, such as the so-called fiscal imbalance demands of certain provinces, and global warming, which he initially tried to play down.

Still, Harper seemed content with the broad progress he made, even the tenor of the debate that has been taking place.

Just before he was sworn in, he told an interviewer, "I don't think my fundamental beliefs have changed in a decade. But certainly my views on individual issues have evolved, and I deal with the situation as I find it."

Just over a year later, on the anniversary of his government taking office, he spoke to the Canadian Club in Ottawa, where he said "Well, here we are 12 months later, and I have to say — I'm sleeping better these days!"

The road to government

Today's Conservative party was formed in late 2003, rising from the ashes of the once-mighty Progressive Conservative Party of Canada — reduced to a rump in the Liberal sweep of 1993 — and the Canadian Alliance, the successor of the populist Reform Party of Canada. Harper was elected leader of the newly merged party in March 2004, and was almost immediately plunged into an election campaign called by Paul Martin, the new Liberal prime minister.

Polls showed the Conservatives within striking distance of a majority government with two weeks left to go until election day in June 2004, but Harper's party won only 99 of the 308 seats in the House of Commons. That was thanks to the Martin team's late-campaign push to portray him as a scary social conservative and a clone of two former PC leaders: former prime minister Brian Mulroney, under whose watch the Canadian deficit skyrocketed, and former Ontario premier Mike Harris, who slashed taxes and social programs at the same time in the 1990s

Bleeding from that defeat, and from media portrayals of him as an angry voice of Western Canada extremism, Harper disappeared from public view in the summer of 2004 to consider his own future and that of his new party. He emerged from his bout of thinking convinced that there was a way for him to lead the Conservatives to government, even if he had to swallow his intellectual pride and be made over into a more palatable public figure.

His friend Tom Flanagan, a University of Calgary academic who has been the closest thing to a mentor Harper has ever had, once credited the Conservative leader with "a rare strategic gift combined with a lot of brain power … he can size up a situation of political conflict; he can figure out who your main enemies are, where your opportunities lie."

Some observers have pointed out that the prime minister's particular brand of intelligence also carries some unattractive baggage.

"He exhibits a cold brilliance and a cold arrogance that are unattractive in a public figure," said William Johnson, author of an otherwise glowing 2005 biography of Harper. "We like our leaders to come begging for our favour. Harper does not beg; he rarely even goes through the motions … Harper and charisma fit together like porridge and champagne." Characteristically, Harper declined to be interviewed for the Johnson book, which ended up praising him for his integrity, good judgment on key issues of the day, willingness to make tough decisions and commitment to make Canada a better place. Johnson concludes that because of these merits, Harper rates better than any Canadian leader since Pierre Trudeau.

From Trudeau to Reform

Harper waits for a television interview to begin in June 2004. (Canadian Press)

Trudeau was one of the young Stephen Harper's earliest political inspirations.

That admiration ended when Trudeau enraged the West by bringing in the National Energy Program in 1980. By then, Harper was living in Alberta and about to study economics at the University of Calgary. He ended up working to elect Jim Hawkes, one of Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative candidates, and followed the new MP from Calgary West to Ottawa to work for him after Mulroney swept to power in 1984.

Ottawa's power games and the Tory government's seeming inability to tackle real reform almost turned him away from politics for good. He left the capital after a year to return to Calgary and pursue a master's degree in economics.

Harper is a voracious reader, and the books he tackled in the next year would change the course of his life. Thinkers such as Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and William Buckley left him with a profound respect for the workings of a free-market economy and a set of neo-conservative beliefs that were being put into political practice by Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States.

The old parties didn't seem to have room for reform along those lines, so Harper was intrigued when he heard about a new political movement that was starting up in the West — a movement he would soon help to become the Reform Party of Canada.

He drafted much of the party's original policy and later accompanied its first MP, Deborah Grey, to Ottawa to help craft her speeches as he continued to be Reform's chief policy officer. He ran for Parliament in 1993, taking the riding of Calgary West from his old boss, Tory Jim Hawkes. That same year, Harper married graphic designer Laureen Teskey (they now have two children, Benjamin and Rachel).

A sabbatical from the Hill

Although he was seen as one of the new party's bright lights (the Ottawa Citizen called the fluently bilingual young man "the Reform MP least likely to drag his knuckles"), Harper's path to the prime ministership was not smooth. He would leave Parliament Hill once more, quitting his seat in early 1997 after disagreeing with Reform leader Preston Manning's handling of Canada's seemingly endless national unity debate. Harper took the helm of the National Citizens Coalition, where he spoke out in defence of taxpayers' rights; penned articles that called official bilingualism "the god that failed" and criticized federal politicians for the "appeasement" of Quebec separatists.

Given that history, it is little wonder official Ottawa was shocked earlier this year when he introduced a motion to recognize the Québécois people as constituting a nation.

When Reform became the Canadian Alliance and Stockwell Day imploded as its leader during the 2000 election campaign, Harper started thinking about party politics again. He defeated Day in a hard-fought leadership campaign to take Alliance's top job in 2002.

A year later, he succeeded in his quest to reunite the right, striking a deal with PC Leader Peter MacKay to merge Canada's two conservative parties in October 2003. He easily defeated former Magna CEO Belinda Stronach as well as former Ontario health minister Tony Clement to become the first leader of the new Conservative Party of Canada.

Stephen Harper laces up for the Leaside Lions, around 1970.

Harper refuses to answer most requests for interviews about his private life, and even passes on the light-hearted questionnaires news agencies send out during election campaigns. He distrusts the media and detests photo ops. "The guy is not a barbecue-going politician and he's not a baby kisser," Globe and Mail columnist John Ibbitson once noted. He is, however, a devoted family man who gains strength from his extrovert wife, Laureen.

As a boy, he earned marks close to 100 in most of his high school courses and won his school's gold medal. The asthma he had as a child left him with a propensity to catch bad colds and experience bouts of low physical energy.

It is said that he has few close friends but is fiercely loyal to them, and that he has a temper that shows itself when he believes he is being betrayed.

Extended minority

Stephen Harper addresses soldiers and media during his visit to Kandahar, March 13, 2006. (Department of National Defence)

When Harper's government celebrated its second anniversary in power in January 2008, its longevity had extended well past the average lifespan of a minority government: one year, three months and 29 days.

While he talked proudly of what he saw as his government's accomplishments — including everything from tax relief to efforts to make Canadians feel safer in their communities — that longevity isn't solely the result of his leadership or the actions of the government.

Disarray among the Liberals and a sense among observers that Canadians have had no appetite to go to the polls after back-to-back votes in 2004 and 2006 have also given the Tories a longer lease on minority life.

As he marked the second anniversary, Harper wasn't predicting when there would be an election – just that there would be one before the fixed date his government set of October 2009. But he emphasized that when the time came, the party would run on its "clear direction and on confidence in the future," continuing to lead and keep its word.

By the summer of 2008, Harper was blaming the opposition parties for creating a dysfunctional Parliament that was paralyzed into inaction, a charge that rang a little hollow for some observers who noted the government had got along pretty well getting its agenda through the House of Commons.

The prime minister also cited chaos at committee meetings, although the Conservatives are also alleged to have urged witnesses not to appear at meetings and are reported to have created a 200-page guide laying out ways to derail committee doings.

In late August, a fall election appeared inevitable, with the prime minister directly addressing the possibility of triggering a vote and insisting it wouldn't mean breaking a promise held in the fixed-election-date law, even as pundits suggested otherwise.

"It's trademark Harper in that he's making an unexpected decision and, once he makes it, he's going to pursue it full steam ahead and take the gamble," Flanagan told the Globe and Mail. "This is what he lives for, this sort of high-stakes politics. This is what galvanizes him, really gets him excited. This is when he's at his best."

Harper is the fifth-youngest person to become Canada's prime minister, after Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney, Arthur Meighen and Kim Campbell. (He is also the first prime minister since Lester Pearson not to have attended law school.) With the exception of Mulroney, the young prime ministers had unusually short terms in office before voters turfed them.