That same month, Reform gained its first seat in Parliament, winning a by-election in the central Alberta riding of Beaver River. Manning prevailed on a reluctant Harper to suspend his studies for a year in order to assist the new member, schoolteacher Deborah Grey. Once again back in Ottawa, he witnessed the death throes of the Meech Lake Accord and the attendant surge of separatism in Quebec. Later, he devised Reform’s strategy for opposing the 1992 referendum on the Charlottetown constitutional accord. As with Meech, the establishment denounced and derided Reform’s opposition, but most Canadians supported the party’s stance.
When the 1993 federal election was called, Harper again ran in Calgary West, again expecting to lose. But the country turned mid-campaign against the new government of Kim Campbell, who had inherited Brian Mulroney’s legacy of distrust — a country polarized, region against region. The Mulroney government had also run eight deficits in a row and more than doubled the national debt.
Harper had warned for years that the nation was at risk of hitting a wall, and now led the team that crafted Reform’s chief policy plank for the election, called Zero in Three. Its central proposal was to eliminate the $36 billion deficit within three years by cutting $18 billion in federal spending. Jean Chrétien’s Liberals accused the Reformers of a slash-and-burn policy that would drive the country to ruin, and promised instead to merely diminish the deficit rather than eliminate it.
The election reduced Campbell’s party to two seats. The Liberals took power, and fifty-two newly minted Reform MPs, including Harper, took their seats across the aisle. Soon, the Liberals became aware that the country was in danger of a fiscal crisis. As Paul Martin recounts in his memoir, Hell or High Water, international investors, spooked by the Mexican peso crisis, “began looking around for other vulnerable countries with unresolved fiscal problems, and we were near the top of the list.” Martin’s 1995 budget brought the deficit down to zero in three years, and subsequently produced budget surpluses. He made deeper spending cuts than Zero in Three had proposed, without spinning the country into turmoil. This would be the Chrétien-Martin government’s proudest achievement — but it was Reform that had first foreseen the crisis and proposed the solution. And it was the party’s support in the Commons that made eliminating the deficit politically feasible. Martin’s greatest success in fact implemented Stephen Harper’s earlier vision. This was the country’s first big step toward what Harper stood for from the start.
The other imminent threat to the country was the ascent to power of the Parti Québécois on a pledge to hold a referendum on secession. On December 6, 1994, Premier Jacques Parizeau unveiled a draft bill that stated in section 1, “Quebec is a sovereign country.” Unlike René Lévesque in 1980, Parizeau was going for unilateral secession. Immediately, the Reformers challenged the referendum’s constitutionality. That very evening, Harper declared on a CBC television panel, “The Parliament of Canada and Canadians cannot be stripped of their power, and a province cannot redefine its constitutional status as Mr. Parizeau asserts, without any reference to the rest of the country or its legal rights and obligations. I think it’s very important that a clear message be sent out that that will not happen.”
And yet Prime Minister Chrétien evaded, wavered, and waffled. He objected primarily to the formulation of Parizeau’s referendum question, not its legitimacy. On referendum night, October 30, 1995, Parizeau carried more than 49 percent of the vote, coming within a heartbeat of precipitating the worst existential crisis in Canada’s history. Harper soon introduced Bill C-341, the Quebec Contingency Act (Referendum Conditions), which laid down stringent conditions for Quebec to secede. Years later, in 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada delivered its response to the reference on secession, spelling out a doctrine that vindicated Harper’s vision. When the Chrétien government finally passed the Clarity Act, in 2000, it fell short of Harper’s bill, failing to lay out what the government would do if Quebec passed a unilateral declaration of independence — the most likely path of secession.
Characteristically, Harper didn’t complete his first mandate as a member of Parliament. In January 1997, he dropped out to take a position as vice-president (later president) of the National Citizens Coalition, where he could agitate for policies concordant with the organization’s slogan: “More freedom through less government.” His decision stemmed mainly from differences between his and Manning’s visions. He had gone public with his views in the spring of 1995, in a Globe and Mail article with the headline, “Where Does the Reform Party Go from Here? To be credible as the logical alternative to the Liberals, says a Reform MP, the party can’t just fight elections on the popular protests of the day.” When his plea to Reform’s rank and file failed, Harper quit.
He returned to electoral politics only when his conservative vision was threatened by the leadership of Stockwell Day. Manning morphed the Reform Party into the Canadian Alliance in 2000, attracting a fringe of Progressive Conservatives. But in 2001, thirteen Alliance MPs left the caucus to sit with Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservative MPs. Day called a leadership convention to settle the strife, but most of the candidates favoured uniting the Alliance with the PCs. This would have meant a shift to the left, as long as Joe Clark, a Red Tory, was their leader.
So Harper ran for the Alliance leadership, and on March 20, 2002, took over a party that was battered, broke, and discredited. In the Toronto Star, Richard Gwyn dismissed him as “yesterday’s man.” Edward Greenspon, now editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail, described him as an ideologically displaced person in Canada: “Stephen Harper: A Neo-con in a Land of Liberals.” The Vancouver Sun wrote, “He presents himself as unbending, unwilling to make the compromises to appeal to the middle-of-the-road voters and traditional supporters of the Progressive Conservatives.”
Perhaps so, but in just two years Harper restored the Alliance’s unity and finances and merged the party with the Progressive Conservatives. He won the leadership of the new entity, then was thrust almost immediately into the 2004 election, which was called by Paul Martin before the new party could get organized. Lacking the time to hold a policy convention, the Conservatives couldn’t craft a ratified program, and Martin was therefore able to define the party as he chose.
He portrayed their leader as scary. Harper had a hidden agenda. He was an American-style conservative who would destroy medicare and demolish the social safety net that protected the poor, the unemployed, and the disabled. He would strike down women’s right to abortion and probably bring back the death penalty. This complex of messages was compressed into one slogan: “Harper is another George Bush.” It didn’t help that other Conservative candidates affronted progressive public opinion during the campaign — one, for instance, equated homosexuality with pedophilia.
In reality, Harper was not a social conservative, and had differed on social issues even with the Reform Party. During Reform’s annual assembly in October 1994, the party had tabled the following motion: “Resolved, that the Reform Party support limiting the definition of a legal marriage as the union of a woman and a man, and that this definition be used in the provision of spousal benefits for any program funded or administered by the federal government.” Manning supported the resolution, and the convention voted 87 percent in favour. But Harper protested: “Those are not partisan issues; those are moral issues. People have to be able to belong to political parties regardless of their views on those issues. It’s perfectly legitimate to have moral objections as well as moral approval of homosexuality, but I don’t think political parties should do that.” His judgment was far-sighted. Had he prevailed, Reform and its successors would have been spared much future strife and public distrust.
Despite the obstacles, the Conservatives reduced the Liberals to a minority. At the party’s first convention, in 2005 in Montreal, Harper urged it to adopt a moderate program. A resolution condemning abortion was subsequently defeated, and Harper promised never to introduce a bill on the issue. After the convention, he insisted on strict adherence to the official program — nothing more, nothing less.
During the 2006 election campaign, he imposed an unprecedented control on his candidates: if they spoke publicly, they had to stick to the program. Harper knew he was mistrusted, and that the Liberals would again paint him as scary, so he focused his campaign not on himself, but on a daily unveiling of goodies that targeted broad clusters of voters. The Martin Liberals had expected him to announce a platform of spending cuts. Instead, he matched their cornucopia of spending promises with policies that were as much populist as conservative. He countered the Liberals’ pledge to cut income taxes by offering to reduce the GST by two points, for example, and countered their program of subsidized public daycare with a subsidy of $100 a month for every child under the age of six. The policies were designed to appeal to as many Canadians as possible, and they succeeded.
And so it was that on January 23, 2006, Stephen Harper became prime minister.
