“The Man Behind Stephen Harper” by Marci McDonald | The Walrus

The Man Behind Stephen Harper

The new Conservative Party has tasted success and wants majority rule. If Tom Flanagan and his Calgary School have their way, they’ll get it without compromising their principles

By Marci McDonald

DispatchesFrom the October 2004 magazine

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No one in the department joined the party. By then, Flanagan had plunged into a new intellectual passion, the theories of the once scorned Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, who lauded free markets as the cornerstone of free societies, impervious to intrusive government meddling. In the late 1970s when Flanagan stumbled on his work, Margaret Thatcher had just cut short a Conservative policy confab in Britain by slapping down Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty on a desk. “This,” she said, “is what we believe.”

In the 1988 election on free trade, Flanagan cast his ballot for Mulroney’s Conservatives. He points out that even his second wife, Marianne, a speech therapist he’d met on a winter trek with the Rocky Mountain Ramblers, voted Reform before he did. But by 1990, he was furious at Mulroney’s mushrooming deficits — heresy to fiscal conservatives like himself — and he signed up. Months later, when Manning was looking for a right-hand man, Flanagan leaped at the job.

His university colleagues were stunned he was willing to rub shoulders with the Reform hoi polloi. “He is not a social animal in any way,” Gibbins says. “If people look on Harper as reserved, Tom is a further evolutionary step behind that.” At Duke, however, Allan Kornberg viewed the move as a logical leap for the grad student who’d once pored over Goldwater voting patterns. “Tom’s always been interested in building a conservative movement,” Kornberg says, “and a conservative party.”

Still, it was the theoretical nuts and bolts of politics that fascinated Flanagan — the sort of statistical prowess he’d acquired at Duke that now allows him to parse pollsters’ bafflegab. “He’d equipped himself with all this theory,” recalls Rick Anderson. “But he didn’t have much respect for the practical school of politics. And there’s no book learnin’ for that.”

For Manning, the heart of his populist vision was a constant consultation process with the party’s grassroots. Flanagan didn’t hide his distaste for it. He arrived at constituency meetings armed with studies and stats as if he were back in the classroom. “Tom would get in all these terrible tussles with folks who he thought didn’t know as much as he did,” recalls one former Reform insider. “Finally one night he just had this outburst: why are you people always talking and not listening to me? This guy goes up to the microphone and says, ‘Because we pay your salary.’”

In Manning’s office, Flanagan set out to create a chain of command in which everyone, including Harper, reported to him — a foretaste of the tight Conservative campaign ship he would run last spring. Along the way, he found himself stickhandling reports that security squads at some party rallies were members of the neo-Nazi Heritage Front. That scandal was sparked by the revelation that Heritage Front member Grant Bristow was a Canadian Security Intelligence Services (csis) informer. “Preston used to say, ‘When you turn on a lightbulb, you get a lot of bugs,’” Cooper says. “Well, one of Tom’s jobs was to swat the bugs.”

The party’s unruly rank and file wasn’t Flanagan’s only frustration. Manning was ignoring his flow charts and increasingly giving his counsel the cold shoulder. He felt useless, shut out of the inner circle he had tried to command. “Nobody seemed to want his advice,” Cooper says.

Manning’s closest collaborator had suddenly become Anderson, a veteran Ottawa operative who’d run the Washington office of the lobbying giant, Hill & Knowlton. To Flanagan, Anderson was a hired political gun — a onetime Liberal with no loyalty to Reform policies — who had slyly insinuated himself into the leader’s confidence. Harper too was miffed that Anderson had usurped his wunderkind role. As Manning noted later in his memoir Think Big : “Stephen had difficulty accepting that there might be a few other people (not many, perhaps, but a few) who were as smart as he was with respect to policy and strategy.”

Harper and Flanagan had already hit it off as ardent devotees of Hayek, and tolerated Manning’s populism as a tedious inconvenience. Now they were galvanized by a common foe. Their friendship was cemented in that summer of their mutual discontent. “Tom thinks along the same lines as Stephen,” Manning says. “They reinforce each other. But Tom always saw the gloomy side.”

Months before his contract ran out in the fall of 1992, Flanagan quit, blaming Manning’s decision to name Anderson manager of the next election campaign. Not only did Anderson personally disagree with one of Reform’s key platform planks — opposition to the Charlottetown constitutional accords — he had a conflict of interest: his firm, Hill & Knowlton, was the government’s lobbyist for the referendum on the subject. For Flanagan, Anderson’s views were a fireable offence. “Tom doesn’t like the kind of hypocrisy you need in politics,” says John Herd Thompson, former head of Duke’s Canadian Studies Program. “Something’s right or wrong: he’s pretty unrevised and unrepentant.”

So anguished was Harper over whether to follow suit and abandon the Calgary Reform nomination he’d sewn up that he huddled with Flanagan and his university colleagues over his future. In the end, he went on to ride the wave that catapulted Reform from a single seat to fifty-two overnight, shattering the Conservative party into a two-seat curiosity. But Harper refused to campaign nationally and nearly a year later, when press leaks revealed an internal party probe into Manning’s expense ac¬counts, some Reformers fingered him as the source. He promptly went public — a stab Sandra Manning never forgave. In 1997, Harper decamped to the National Citizens’ Coalition, the country’s oldest libertarian lobby, whose motto is “More freedom through less government.”

For Harper and Flanagan, Manning’s decision to appoint Anderson had symbolized his willingness to betray a fundamental Reform credo — no special rights for any group or province — in his quest for more parliamentary seats. But Manning and Anderson saw it simply as a clash of egos over who had the moxie to make the party a national force. “They tried to turn it into this whole thing about how Preston was watering down the wine,” Anderson says. “I think they were actually trying to assert who was alpha male.”

That metaphor would soon prove apt. As the long unite-the-right minuet kicked off, Flanagan and Harper began jostling for position in a dance that might have been borrowed from a text on Flanagan’s newest enthusiasm: bio-politics — a collection of controversial theories on the biological basis for power that had become the rage of the American right.

“Tom just fell in love with that literature,” Gibbins recalls, “and brought it into the classroom.” Indeed, on Flanagan’s reading list was one book that had sparked a personal epiphany: Frans de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics, which won raves from Newt Gingrich in The New York Times. A study of the world’s largest captive chimp colony at a Netherlands zoo, it chronicles the scheming, coups, and ultimate murder of the would-be alpha male, Liut. Ezra Levant, then still a student, remembers being riveted by Flanagan’s lectures on the subject. “It was the most radical class I ever took,” he says. “If a series of young males were fighting for power, a thoughtful chimpanzee would make alliances with all the losers and eventually take over the group.”

Flanagan pressed copies of Chimpanzee Politics on Cooper and his Calgary School confreres, who delighted in watching staff meetings for tell-tale signs of simian rituals — their favourite a trademark show of bluster that de Waal dubbed “pant-hoot.” “We’d look at each other: ‘Yeah, there it is — pant-hoot,’ ” Cooper recalls.

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11 comment(s)

AnonymousFebruary 24, 2009 14:48 EST

What puts my nose out of joint is the idea that one group of white, rich males, who are members in a few departments at a low rated university are heralding themselves as the voices of "Western Mentality". I don't think so. We can and do have very different opinions here in the West, as Saskatchewan's political landscape over the last 50 years is evident. As there is no one opinion in the St. Lawrence region, there is no one "Western View" here. Unfortunately, that go-along-with-the-crowd approach in politics/media in Canada keeps people voting for one party only, like in Alberta, where the Conservative government remains in power. I urge others in the west of all political stripe including Conservatives to think and speak for themselves.

AnonymousMarch 09, 2009 01:35 EST

They're not really going out of their way to call themselves the "Western Mentality." In fact, left-wing media outlets (such as the Walrus, CBC, Macleans, etc) have essentially stated they are. I mean...this article clearly DOES NOT focus on other western views. It isolates a select few and infers they're the ones running the show when it comes to Conservative politics at a federal level. Try to strive for a bit more objectivity there, Walrus. Ridiculous.

AnonymousNovember 01, 2009 13:09 EST

I don't think so. We can and do have very different opinions here in the West, as Saskatchewan's political landscape over the last 50 years is evident. As there is no one opinion in the St. Lawrence region, there is no one "Western View" here. Unfortunately, that go-along-with-the-crowd approach in politics/media in Canada keeps people voting for one party only, like in Alberta, where the Conservative government remains in power.

Neal Norris Edson AlbertaJune 28, 2010 18:03 EST

I just heard what Tom said about the Protesters in Toronto I think He is a GOOF ..... And this guy is allowed to teach Students Maybe we should let some Immigrant teach his class after He is FIRED !!!

AnonymousAugust 31, 2010 16:33 EST

Neal Norris Edson wrote:" Maybe we should let some Immigrant teach his class..."

But Flanagan IS an immigrant. He's from an ultra-right wing country called Texas.

AnonymousSeptember 14, 2010 11:27 EST

Flanagan is pure intolerance. He has a mission that must be completed. He wants aboriginal people to un-exist on paper. Assimilation has been Canada\\\\\\\'s act since the 1600\\\\\\\'s and only in recent decades have they been embracing the different cultures found in Canada, Aboriginals as well as citizens from other countries. Flanagan is here only to put his piss mark in the snow. He has no brain or heart, just an objective that will solifidy his mark on history regardless if he completes his mission or not. This is the worst kind of man that has a strangle-hold on Canada\\\\\\\'s future, a capitalist.

Flanagan, deals were made, papers were signed and they must be upheld. Just because you don\\\\\\\'t like them doesn\\\\\\\'t me they should be destroyed. Swallow it.

AnonymousNovember 30, 2010 23:00 EST

It's very insulting to have ex yanks like Flanagon involved in Canadian politics. The only party that would accept him are the Hopeless Harper bunch. It's also very insulting to have people like Flanagon and Richards taking cheap shots at our native Indians.. It comes natural to people like Flanagon when you consider how the religious republican whiteys treated the black people in the US. Blacks were raped robbed and murdered by Yankee white terrorists. Religious scam artists have no place in Canadian politics. Their specialty lies in child molesting.
You Flanagon will have trouble accepting the fact that right wing governments are very very corrupt, and are considering helping the MAFIA to get more involved with CRAC(cons,reform,alliance coalition). Hopeless is a brainwashed .liar and cannot be trusted. You would do Canadians a lot of good if you and your Yankee friends that are destroying Alberta would go back where you came from. What religious groups are involved with the
possible war in north and south Korea? Hopeless has to be a twisted psycho to allow and support what is happening in Alberta BC and Saskatchewan. Are these politicians getting paid under the table? No NDP government would allow it..
You must be very happy with the US gov people that are making a profit from the oil they are stealing from Iraq. Of course they had to slaughter a 100,000 Iraqi people and Saddam
Hussien.. Now Exxon can get in there and steal all the oil they want. Yes this was all planned.
Capitalists,communists and the Mafia have a lot in common.

AnonymousDecember 01, 2010 15:39 EST

@anonymous, but there is no mention of Texas in his bio. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Flanagan_(political_scientist)

AnonymousDecember 08, 2010 11:05 EST

From Macleans magazine:

Tom Flanagan
Tom Flanagan is the only person ever to have lived in both Ottawa, Illinois, and Ottawa, Ontario. Born and educated in the United States, he immigrated to Canada in 1968. He is professor of political science at the University of Calgary and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In the years 2001-06, Tom held various positions for Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada - including chief of staff, campaign manager and political adviser.

Latest articles commented on by Tom Flanagan

Nadine LumleyDecember 21, 2011 16:42 EST

Steve Harper, President, the Corporate Party of Canada

Harper’s Neoconservatism: This entire “hard right” movement is a crock.

It is not a religious evangelist movement, **OR a moral movement.
It is a corporate movement.

http://pushedleft.blogspot.com/2010/11/democracy-for-sale-and-my-epiphany.html

?
From Emily Dee:

Nadine LumleyDecember 21, 2011 16:42 EST

Ten things you don’t know about Steve Harper, the leader of Canada’s “Corporate Party”

1. Harper’s an Evangelist (i.e. a Holy Roller, but he doesn’t believe in it, it’s just for show, it’s actually just a front for “corporate interests”)
1. Harper’s church rejected divorcee Laureen, so after living common-law together, they married in a civil ceremony on December 11, 1993. So much for his religious shtick.
2. He's getting divorced (check out his website, all pics of Harper and Laureen together have been removed; note I don’t care they broke up, I care how he lies about it for 3 /4 years
2. His “personal assistant” Ray Novak used to live in Harper’s backyard above the garage… FOR YEARS… what wife would put up with THAT?
3. Member of the fundamentalist Christian Alliance Church (they don't like gay people)
4. Member of the Northern Foundation (I think they don't like black people)
5. Member of the Calgary School of Political Science (they don’t like science)
6. Leader of the Reforma/Alliance Party (they don't like women)
7. Former Head of the National Citizens Coalition (they want to kill our national health care)
8. Supporter of The Canadian Taxpayers Federation (AstroTurfers who want to kill Canada’s social safety net while running a pyramid scheme cheating taxpayers out of revenue from wealthy corporate donors)
8. He’s not a real Red Tory Conservative; he’s a Reforma Alliance CRAP Party thing
9. His grandfather (Harper’s family is from Moncton, New Brunswick) either offed himself after becoming mentally ill or ran off with a woman, the truth is never talked about for some reason
10. The asthmatic Harper wears a $3,000 weave on top of his head (he's obsessed with his own image and has a special salt & pepper one for elections, brown other times)
11. Steve hates to travel and didn’t get a passport until he could travel at the public’s expense
12. Steve hates being a politician, is uncomfortable in groups, really dislikes glad-handing
13. Steve Harper was president of his high school's Young Liberals Club at Richview in Toronto; he also appeared on Reach for the Top t.v. program. Harper is not dumb, he just works for the interests of rich corporations / big business instead of for you
14. Spends every second of every waking moment plotting his scorched earth policy against Canada’s Natural Governing Party, The Liberals

Shouldn’t Steve Harper be working on other things? Like help for struggling families.

C.R.U.S.H.
- Canadians Rallying to Unseat Steve Harper
Multi-Partisan Discussion Group of 7,500+ People
http://www.facebook.com/groups/292671928599/

www.shitHarperdid.ca.ca

The Man Behind Stephen Harper

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