Courtesy of David Bercusson and Barry CooperDavid Bercusson, left, is the director of U of C’s Centre for Military and Strategic Studies; Barry Cooper and Ted Morton, right, with a black lab named Spook, pose with their trophy Canada geeseChimp behaviour convinced Flanagan he’d been too rigid in his first foray into the political arena. In de Waal’s Dutch colony, savvy chimps built coalitions and bided their time. Over the next years, Flanagan and Harper might not have been on Reform’s main stage, but they were far from inactive. A new intellectual infrastructure was taking shape on the Canadian right, echoing the web of conservative foundations and think tanks that paved the way for Reagan’s 1980 ascension to the White House. Flanagan became an activist in Civitas, a network of 300 conservative thinkers spawned by the 1996 Winds of Change conference that Levant and fellow National Post columnist David Frum had organized in Calgary. Toronto’s C.D. Howe Institute — whose researcher, Ken Boessenkool, would later become Harper’s policy chief — and Vancouver’s Fraser Institute, which opened a Calgary office under Cooper, were routinely proffering policies once considered too radically right wing for mainstream consumption.
In 1997, Flanagan and Harper made their media debut in the short-lived Next City, arguing coalitions were the only route to conservatives seizing national power. One combo they proposed might make compelling bedtime reading now for Paul Martin: an alliance with the Bloc Québécois, whose core rural Quebec voters “would not be out of place in Red Deer,” they noted. “They are nationalist for much the same reason that Albertans are populist — they care about their local identity . . . and they see the federal government as a threat to their way of life.”
Flanagan and Harper’s writing collaboration would last four years. Flanagan was the chief wordmeister, spinning out a snappy first draft at one sitting, then handing it over to Harper to refine. As Flanagan explained later, his verbal wizardry allowed Harper to get his thoughts into the media more quickly — and with more pizzazz.
Meanwhile — perhaps not coincidentally — the drum rolls of disenchantment with Manning were building. His image might no longer be a problem — Sandra Manning had shelled out for his laser eye surgery and he’d thrown away the glasses and Brylcream — but there were mounting questions about his appeal outside the West. No sooner had Manning tried another kind of makeover, rebranding Reform as the Canadian Alliance, than Flanagan paint him with the same brush that had once tarred Riel. Manning was imbued with a quasi-religious “mission” to unite the right, Flanagan told a Globe reporter, and seemed to be saying, ‘This is the manifestation of God’s will.’”
Two months later, when Manning agreed to what he regarded as a pro forma leadership race for the new party, Flanagan promptly announced he was putting his money on another horse: Alberta Treasurer Stockwell Day, who had introduced a flat tax. Day went on to win, leaving Manning’s national dream in shreds. But Flanagan’s infatuation with the new leader proved short-lived. Within a year, Day had become a national joke, mired in scandal and immortalized in comic monologues as an evangelical airhead in a wetsuit. “You’d have to be a moron,” Flanagan told Ted Byfield’s Alberta Report magazine, “not to see that the chances of the Alliance winning soon are not very great.”
In fact, Flanagan — a man now known for his aversion to the media — proved decidedly verbose on the subject of Day’s shortcomings. So busy did he seem leaking news of the tribal revolts within Alliance ranks that Rick Anderson wondered publicly “what Prof. Flanagan is trying to achieve.” In September, 2001, the answer became clear. As Day was forced to call a leadership review, a website suddenly appeared: www.draftharper.com. Flanagan turned out to be national co-chair of the movement to woo his co-author back into the political limelight.
The first clue to that scheme had surfaced nearly a year earlier. In one of their last joint literary efforts, Flanagan and Harper co-authored a public missive to Alberta premier Ralph Klein — co-signed by Boessenkool and two other members of the Calgary School — calling on him to build a political “firewall” around Alberta. That firewall letter, as it became known, demanded Klein use the muscle of Alberta’s oil wealth to sieze control over health care, opt out of the Canada Pension Plan, and send the rcmp packing in what would amount to quasi-secession from the federal bosom.
At the time, Ted Byfield thought he saw a plot: the group was positioning Harper to take on Klein in the provincial arena. In fact, their aim was more ideologically ambitious. Alberta was to be a test case in their push to untie the Big Government bonds that knit Confederation. It was only when Day’s leadership imploded that Harper and Flanagan shifted their attention back to the national stage and another means to that libertarian end.
In Harper, Flanagan finally had his dream candidate to carry the neo-conservative torch: an alter ego whose benign boyish good looks belied the radical agenda they shared. Says Cooper: “Tom understands that Stephen is a guy who has the capability of changing what the country looks like.”
Flanagan took a leave of absence to join the three-year campaign that began with Harper’s takeover of the Canadian Alliance and ended with his annexation of Peter MacKay’s Tories and his ultimate face-off against Martin last June. Some friends were astonished Flanagan opted for a role as Harper’s chief of staff, not one that would tap the sort of risk-calculating he’d honed in his 1998 text, Game Theory and Canadian Politics. But in fact Flanagan and Harper had already spent years together pondering every possible policy and tactic. “Stephen has an incredible strategic sense,” Cooper says. “It’s like playing chess: he can always see five or six moves ahead.”
On Sunday, December 7, Jean-Pierre Kingsley, Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer, went to the office. He almost never worked weekends, but Harper and Progressive Conservative leader Peter MacKay persuaded Kingsley they couldn’t wait to register their new Conservative Party of Canada, forged from a merger that had been ratified by MacKay’s members in a vote only the night before.
Already, challengers were poised to block their pact. A month earlier, after they had unveiled their deal, David Orchard, the Saskatchewan farmer whose support had clinched the Tory leadership for MacKay — and with whom MacKay had signed a written agreement not to embark on merger talks — had filed a suit to block the union. Former Tory MP Sinclair Stevens had also threatened to contest the new party’s legality — which he later did in a separate lawsuit. By rushing to register their offspring on Sunday, Harper and MacKay hoped to circumvent any process servers who might try to stop the official baptism the next business day.
MacKay makes no apology for their move. “There wasn’t any dark conspiracy,” he says. “We had ratification from our memberships that was over 90 percent.”
Orchard denounced the new party as “conceived in betrayal and born in deception.” He was not alone in his feelings of unease. For many, its furtive beginnings were a bellwether of the secretive climate that promptly descended over the Conservative election campaign. From the first, the merger was billed as a marriage of equals, and in star turns for the camera, MacKay, the deputy leader, was invariably caught in Hallmark moments of unity, applauding wildly just over Harper’s left shoulder. But behind that sunny façade of team spirit, a different reality has been unfolding. According to well-placed sources, MacKay was shut out of the party’s inner circle and given virtually no role in the election campaign.
