What DID Harper Say?

By Tom Barrett

Stephen Harper once told an Alberta magazine that his motto is “don’t listen to what politicians say, watch what they do.”

With a national election about to be visited upon us, we’ll rightly be hearing a lot about what Stephen Harper has said in the past. After all, he’s never been afraid to express opinions that would be regarded as unconventional at best outside southern Alberta.

He’s said parents should be able to pull their children from “union-run” public schools, he’s argued that Canada should adopt a U.S. congressional-style system of government, and he’s said Canadians are content to live in a “second-tier socialistic country.” He’s urged Alberta to build a “firewall” to preserve its values against a hostile federal government, he’s alleged a federal government conspiracy to stack the courts in favour of gay marriage, and he’s said human rights commissions amount to “totalitarianism” and an “attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society.”

It’s those kinds of comments that have earned Harper an image in the media as an inflexible ideologue – a phrase that pops up in virtually every media portrait of the 45-year old Conservative leader.

If you look at what this politician has done, however, a different picture emerges. Despite the reputation for inflexibility, Harper was responsible for pulling together a badly divided Canadian Alliance party. He then united the right with a merger with the Progressive Conservative party.

The man who once said there were only two kinds of Tories – red ones and yellow ones – has welcomed red Tories into the new Conservative party. After running for the Alliance leadership as the moderate who would preserve the party from the moral crusaders clustered around Stockwell Day, Harper reached out to social conservatives and took a tough stance against gay marriage.

More recently, Harper has tried to stake out the middle ground in the health care debate, advancing a policy that not only mimics the Liberals’ stance, but goes beyond the governing party’s plans in terms of expanding the publicly funded system.

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