After Harper completed his bachelor’s degree, Hawkes invited him to Ottawa to work as his legislative assistant. Witnessing the Mulroney government’s fiscal irresponsibility, Harper soon became disenchanted. He abhorred the posturing and adolescent antics he saw daily in the Commons, and the influence special interest groups had on governance. At one point, he assisted a Commons committee, chaired by Hawkes, that was conducting a review of the unemployment insurance program. The Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects had just presented its final report, criticizing Canada’s UI program for encouraging youths to drop out of school and workers to choose seasonal jobs. This conclusion was subsequently confirmed by two other commissions, one appointed by Brian Mulroney, the other by Newfoundland’s premier, Brian Peckford. All three recommended separating the intended insurance function (against sudden unemployment) from what was really disguised welfare for seasonal workers.
Instead, Hawkes’s committee proposed the exact opposite: further extending unemployment insurance to other vulnerable social groups. The experience turned Harper off federal politics. So, a year into his time in Ottawa, he returned to the University of Calgary, leaving the security and assured success he could have enjoyed in the governing party. His plan was to become a public intellectual, offering dispassionate analysis and advice to politicians and the public.
By the fall of 1986, Harper, now twenty-seven, began work on his master’s degree. He set himself the task of systematically reading all the major works on political economy, past and recent. He was joined in this by John Weissenberger, a student from Quebec then working on his Ph.D. in geology. Their friendship had begun a few years prior, when both became active in PC politics. They met twice a week for Chinese food at a mall across from the university, where they would discuss and exchange the books they were reading. “We were both philosophical conservatives, and we were both interested in public policy,” Weissenberger later recalled.
Besides classics, they read William F. Buckley’s 1951 conservative shocker, God and Man at Yale, and his 1959 follow-up, Up from Liberalism. They read theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a former socialist converted to conservatism. And they absorbed Austrian Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek’s seminal work, The Road to Serfdom, which inspired a generation of neo-conservatives. Hayek had experienced the turmoil in central Europe after Germany’s defeat in 1918 and the rise of communism and fascism. He denounced the newly popular nanny state as a threat to both freedom and prosperity. Central economic planning led to failures, which led to more planning and hence more state control.
Harper and Weissenberger were also impressed with Peter Brimelow’s The Patriot Game, in which the former business editor of Maclean’s cast the obsession with placating Quebec as the futile governing principle of Liberal politics in Canada. Since Harper’s birth on April 30, 1959, just a year before the outbreak of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, the province’s alienation from Canadian federalism had indeed been the dominant concern of Canada’s national politics. “What does Quebec want?” was the country’s central existential question, and no answer had ever proved adequate.
Harper’s sense of identification with the West escalated in the fall of 1986, when Brian Mulroney announced that a new fleet of 138 CF-18 fighter planes would be serviced by Montreal’s Canadair rather than Winnipeg’s Bristol Aerospace. The awarding of the $1.2 billion contract, which contradicted the recommendation of the government’s own experts, sparked indignation across the prairies. Mulroney’s minister of energy, Pat Carney, later wrote in her memoir, Trade Secrets, that the decision “changed Canadian history by hardening western alienation, breathing life into the Reform movement and bringing on the slow death of the Progressive Conservative Party.”
Harper and Weissenberger were at the time planning a “Blue Tory network” within the PC party that would move the party to the right, but the CF-18 fiasco made them despair of the possibility of internal reform. Then, at an informal economics department meeting, they met Preston Manning.
In May of 1987, Harper found himself in Vancouver for the Western Assembly on Canada’s Economic and Political Future, held under a banner proclaiming The West Wants In. He had prepared a paper with Weissenberger that sat on a table at the back of the room. Entitled “A Taxpayers Reform Agenda,” it expressed a commitment to “strong conservative principles.” It urged, for example, that activist government must be countered by bringing to bear the views of the taxpayers, and advocated “the implementation of the new economics — of smaller government, regional diversification, non- discriminatory or discretionary spending, privatization, fair trade, and less expensive and less bureaucratic income transfers.” It also opposed the constitutional amendments accepted three weeks earlier by the first ministers meeting at Meech Lake. It contained no trace of social or religious conservatism.
The assembly voted to found a new party, and Harper attended the founding convention in Winnipeg as a featured speaker. “This paper is about justice and injustice, about fairness and unfairness, and about compassion and selfishness, in the economic treatment of western Canada under Confederation,” he began. Using facts and figures, he laid out how Alberta and the West had been plundered. He was given a standing ovation, prompting the Alberta Report to comment, “The speech was acknowledged by delegates, party officials, and media as a highlight of the convention.” Manning soon named Harper the Reform Party’s chief policy officer; they alone were authorized to speak in the name of the party.
The media was immediately patronizing toward Reform. Delegates woke up on November 1 to a story in the Toronto Star by Val Sears that treated them like spooks: “WINNIPEG— A broomstick load of revolutionary ghosts rode Winnipeg’s Halloween sky last night, summoned by the West’s newest political bloc, the Reform Party of Canada.” The memory of the new party’s treatment by the country’s political establishment would stay with Harper. Still, it confirmed the beginning of a new phase of his life. He was developing a vision, a mission, and now had a vehicle for implementing them.
From that time on, Harper would be in the public sphere. He decided to run in the 1988 federal election as a Reform candidate in Calgary West, against his old mentor, Jim Hawkes. Quebec was one of his greatest concerns at the outset. In his nomination speech to the constituency association, he explained that he had turned against the policy of official languages. Mulroney had put Lucien Bouchard, the ardent separatist and promoter of Quebec as a French-only jurisdiction, in charge of the file. “Many are like me,” Harper said, “individuals who once supported official bilingualism but now realize that federal language policy is collapsing under the weight of its own hypocrisy.” A few years later, he would famously write, “As a religion, bilingualism is the god that failed. It has led to no fairness, produced no unity, and cost Canadian taxpayers untold millions.”
Harper and his party both went down to defeat. He soon started strategizing for the next election, laying out a vision for Reform that placed him somewhat at odds with the organization he had only recently helped create. On March 10, 1989, he sent Manning a confidential twenty-one-page memo that brazenly challenged his leader’s most cherished assumptions.
Manning was a populist, Harper a conservative. Manning envisaged his party surging to power as part of a movement that animated a whole people, on the model of Social Credit’s ascent to power in Alberta in 1935. He wanted Reform to draw support indifferently from Tories, Liberals, and New Democrats. In a “leader’s foreword” to the 1988 election platform, he had written, “We reject political debate defined in the narrow terminology of the Left, Right, and Centre.” He looked for support not in the big cities, but in the hinterland. So committed was he to this vision that he insisted on a sunset clause in Reform’s constitution: if the party had not achieved power by the year 2000, it would be dissolved, barring a contrary vote from two-thirds of its members.
As a conservative, Harper wanted a long-term, patiently constructed, permanent party that would build coalitions of economic and social conservatives to form a government. Unlike Manning, he believed Canada needed the kind of ideological polarization and political realignment exemplified by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US. This would mean a conflict between the ever-burgeoning public sector and the overtaxed urban middle class of the private sector. “It was a battle,” he wrote in his memo, “not only for tax dollars, but about social values and social organization, especially over the size and role of government.”
Around this central axis of political conflict, Harper saw secondary alignments based on interests and values. Whole sectors of society, even regions, benefited from state subsidies. The “political class” tended to be liberal on such issues as crime, unconventional lifestyles, and family values, while the working and rural classes tended to be “outrightly hostile to the liberal intellectualism of the Welfare State class.” He proposed that the Reform Party become a political movement that would defend the private sector and moderate social conservatism. Only when economic and social conservatives worked together could a right-wing party take power in Canada.
