For Inlow, Flanagan’s conservative inclinations were no coincidence. He and his successors set out expressly to counter the prevailing leftist currents on the country’s campuses. “Canadian universities were almost the fiefdom of Karl Marx,” says Anthony Parel, a Jesuit-trained expert on Machiavelli, whom Inlow hired from Radio Vatican in Rome. “We wanted balance.” Balance is always in the eye of the beholder. Soon critics charged that the department had leaned too far to starboard. “They said we were all right-wing reactionaries,” Parel winces. “Very offensive epithets were used.” Radha Jhappan, now an associate professor at Carleton, remembers concluding it was pointless to apply for a more senior post in what she now refers to as the “department of redneckology.” At U of C, “I realized they’d rather hire a chimpanzee than me,” she says. “I was perceived as leftist, feminist — everything they can’t abide.”

Still, it wasn’t until the spring of 1996 that Flanagan bounded into the department brandishing a paper from a scholar at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. “He said, ‘Hey guys, guess what? We’re a ‘school!’ ” Cooper recalls. That twenty-page treatise entitled “The Calgary School: The New Motor of Canadian Political Thought” reported that a band of Alberta academics had “given birth to a new form of nationalism, that in turn is changing the terms of debate in English Canada.”

Today, its members can’t seem to decide whether to bask in their ongoing celebrity or shoot down the notion entirely. “It’s an external construct,” scoffs Cooper, rhyming off the group’s internal differences, then diving into his filing cabinet to unearth proof of their shared crusades. But it seems no accident that the group’s first nod of recognition came from an American. Not only are Flanagan and Morton U.S.-born, but Cooper is a member of the Bohemian Club, a fraternity of Republican movers and shakers who fork out a $10,000 initiation fee to gather every year in the redwoods outside San Francisco for a policy version of summer camp. In a crowd that has included Henry Kissinger and Vice-President Dick Cheney, Cooper gives a regular talk on Canadian politics — one reason the Calgary School’s views may hold more sway in Washington than Ottawa.

For the Calgary School, in turn, intellectual inspiration has always run north-south, not east-west. Its papers are studded with admiring references to some of the most controversial figures on the U.S. conservative landscape. In his argument for aboriginal assimilation, Flanagan repeatedly cites Thomas Sowell, a black Republican who became the darling of the Reagan-Bush right for attacking affirmative action. Not surprisingly, most of the group’s policy prescriptions — from an elected senate to parliamentary approval of judges — would have one effect: they would wipe out the quirky bilateral differences that are stumbling blocks to seamless integration with the United States.

But Shadia Drury, a member of the U of C department until last year, accuses her former colleagues of harbouring a more sinister mission. An expert on Leo Strauss, the philosophical father of the neo-conservative movement, Drury paints the Calgary School as a homegrown variation on American Straussians like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who share their teacher’s deep suspicions of liberal democracy. Strauss argued that a ruling elite often had to resort to deception — a noble lie — to protect citizens from themselves. To that end, he recommended harnessing the simplistic platitudes of populism to galvanize mass support for measures that would in fact restrict rights. Drury warned the Globe’s John Ibbitson that the members of the Calgary School “want to replace the rule of law with the populism of the majority,” and labelled Stephen Harper “their product.”

If so, there’s no mystery in the appeal of Strauss’s theories to Flanagan or Cooper, who edited Strauss’s thirty-year correspondence with Voegelin, Faith and Political Philosophy. “Strauss believed that good statesmen have powers of judgment and must rely on an inner circle,” the University of Chicago’s Robert Pippin told Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker last year. “The person who whispers in the ear of the King is more important than the King.”

From his summer home outside Washington, Kornberg scoffs at charges that his protégés are ultra-rightists masquerading as anti-establishment eggheads. “Their extremism has been greatly exaggerated,” he says. “It wouldn’t be surprising if it came from the University of Toronto or McGill. It’s the fact that it’s a provincial university out West that people find outrageous — how dare they?!”

At first, Flanagan had no plans to stay in Calgary. His wife was homesick — she eventually left the country, and the marriage, with their two kids — and he’d never had the slightest interest in Canadian politics. But once he decided to apply for citizenship, he volunteered to teach a summer class in the subject to force himself into a crash course. In the midst of that reading blitz, he stumbled on Louis Riel, the Metis firebrand hanged by Sir John A. Macdonald’s government in 1885 for treason.

What intrigued Flanagan was not Riel’s contentious place in history, but scattered references to his claims of prophecy. For Flanagan those allusions were the equivalent of a scholarly smoking gun. Suddenly, he saw Riel’s Metis rebellions as an attempt to found one of those misguided messianic movements against which Voegelin had warned. In Riel’s diaries and the obscure archives of Roman Catholic orders, he found evidence of his suspicions.

The result was Louis “David” Riel: “Prophet of the New World,” his 1979 profile of a man driven by ecstatic visions to raise a purified North American version of the Catholic Church with its papal seat in St. Boniface outside Winnipeg. According to Flanagan, not only did Riel view himself as its chief prophet — an heir to the Biblical King David — but he went to the gallows convinced that, Christ-like, he would rise again on the third day. “Riel did not see himself as a tribal soothsayer,” Flanagan writes. “He was the voice of God to a sinful world.”

Historians applauded Flanagan’s research, excavating Riel’s unsuspected religiosity, and the University of British Columbia awarded him its biography prize. But Metis and aboriginal scholars were appalled. Flanagan’s Riel wasn’t merely a stressed-out leader who’d had a mental meltdown; he was a delusional religious crackpot. “He turns nearly every interpretation of Riel into megalomania,” says Regina writer Maggie Siggins whose best-selling biography of Riel appeared five years later. “To make him that kind of crazy is to say that aboriginal people who followed him have no claim on land.”

It would take Flanagan another four years to get around to the subject of land claims. Along the way he became a one-man Riel industry, turning out a flood of books and papers, then constantly updating them with new research that spurred him to increasingly damning conclusions. In his 1983 preface to Riel and the Rebellion: 1885 Reconsidered, Flanagan confessed that earlier he’d taken for granted that the Metis had justified gripes. Now he was recanting. “I concluded that . . . the Metis grievances were at least partly of their own making,” he wrote. Flanagan admitted he was rushing his revised opinions into print with a motive: to block lobbying for a posthumous pardon that would exonerate Riel in time for the 1985 centennial of the Northwest Rebellion. A pardon, he declared, “now strikes me as quite wrong.”

By the 2000 edition, he was even more adamant. Rehabilitating Riel’s reputation, he warned, could cost Ca nadian taxpayers billions in Metis land claims. What seems most striking about the revised text is its notched-up adversarial tone. Flanagan’s closing argument reads not like a measured scholarly assessment, but political scare-mongering. In establishing his Metis provisional governments, Riel had twice issued unilateral declarations of independence from the federal government, Flanagan pointed out — exactly what Ottawa feared from Quebec.

What had happened to provoke not only Flanagan’s hardened line, but his rush to man the federal barricades? He has said he simply had a chance for more research — an exercise that turns out to have been financed largely from federal coffers. Between 1972 and 1994, he received nearly $620,000 in research grants on the subject from the Canada Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. That largesse includes a rare scholarly bonanza: $500,000 for a five-year project with four other academics, co-editing the collected writings of Louis Riel.

But Flanagan’s views wouldn’t have raised more than eyebrows if his telephone hadn’t rung on a June afternoon in 1986. The Justice Department offered him a $103,000 contract as its chief historical consultant on one of the biggest land-claims cases before the federal courts: a suit by the Manitoba Métis Federation for 1.4 million acres promised to Riel and his followers in 1870.