Little is known about the shadowy, sixty-year-old professor who is staying on Harper’s post- election payroll as a senior advisor from Calgary. Flanagan declined to be quoted in this story. In Ottawa, where he has refused interviews for the last three years, some journalists regard him as a modern- day Rasputin manipulating a leader sixteen years his junior. But in Calgary, one of his former students, Ezra Levant, publisher of the eight-month-old Western Standard magazine, cautions against that generational cliché. These days, Levant sees Flanagan and Harper more as “symbiotic partners.” But he does not disagree with a Globe and Mail report that once referred to Flanagan as the original godfather of the city’s conservative intellectual mafia. “I call him Don Tomaso,” Levant says. “He is the master strategist, the godfather – even of Harper.”
The first clue that the University of Calgary political science department is not quite like any other stares out from Room 748 of the Social Sciences tower – the book-crammed cubby-hole that serves as Barry Cooper’s office. Above a visitor’s chair hangs the mounted head of a black-tailed deer, academic conference credentials dangling from its antlers. Cooper didn’t bag the deer himself, but that doesn’t mean he would have had qualms about doing so. One of the ties that binds the members of the Calgary School is their macho derring-do in the wilds.
Harper himself has never been part of the Calgary School’s rollicking outdoorsmanship. But their tales provide grist for an image mill meant to set it apart from the Eastern academic establishment, which Cooper scorns for its timorous “garrison mentality.” As a disgruntled voice of the West in his weekly Calgary Herald columns, Cooper plays his own role to the hilt. He loves to recount how his great-grandmother shot an Indian intruder in her Alberta ranch house and his uncle announced the Calgary Stampede for forty-two years. He is less quick to admit that, growing up as the son of a wealthy doctor in Vancouver, he went to Shawnigan Lake School, one of the country’s more elite private boarding schools, north of Victoria.
In fact, Cooper didn’t come to U of C until 1981 – the last of the group to arrive – after ten years teaching at York University, where Jack Layton was one of his students. His friends from those days can’t recall him showing any interest in politics until he moved west. “Barry’s ideas were shaped by Alberta,” says Edward Andrew, a political-science professor at the University of Toronto, who dismisses his old pal as “a poseur. Partly he just likes to be a bad boy,” Andrew says. “The only influence on Cooper was that he didn’t get a job at U of T, despite my best efforts, so he became a Western chauvinist.”
Andrew is not so indulgent about Flanagan, whose flinty reserve and dry wit often earn him the label “chilly.” Unlike Cooper or Bercuson, Flanagan appears never to have strayed from a conservative path. As he likes to point out to startled Canadians, that path began in Ottawa – Ottawa, Illinois, a blue-collar town 130 kilometres southwest of Chicago. What he seldom mentions is Ottawa’s chief claim to fame: on August 21, 1858, ten thousand people gathered in the town square to hear the state’s young senatorial candidate, Abraham Lincoln, square off against his rival Stephen Douglas in the first of their legendary debates on slavery.
Flanagan shrugs off the Lincoln-Douglas debates as meaningless in shaping his political world view – just a plaque in the park. Shirley Hiland, a fellow student at Marquette High, is not surprised. Hiland recalls that the nuns on the Roman Catholic school’s teaching staff avoided such potentially charged chapters of history. Instead, they focused on the heroic feats of the French missionary who gave the school its name: Father Jacques Marquette who teamed up with the voyageur Louis Jolliet to become the first Europeans to discover and trace the Mississippi. “The emphasis was on Father Marquette,” Hiland says, “and how he brought Catholicism to the Indians.”
In a town where almost everybody worked for Libby Owens Ford, Flanagan’s father had a white- collar job, man¬aging the outlet of an auto-parts chain, that put the family a notch up the local social ladder. The defining influences on the household were the Roman Catholic Church and the Republican Party, two forces that did not always mix. Most U.S. Catholics then voted Democrat, but the only time Flanagan’s father made that radical gesture was in 1960 when a fellow Irish Catholic named John Kennedy ran for president.
Popular and known for taking on any teacher he thought had made a mistake, Flanagan graduated from Marquette in 1961 as class valedictorian, winning a $500 scholarship from the Retail Clerks of America – more than half his college tuition – a reward for his after-school labours at the town A & P. His father wanted him to go to Harvard, but he opted for the Catholic bastion of Indiana’s Notre Dame, where political science meant Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas.
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