Canada's Harper Seen as Shrewd, Serious, Bland

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, January 25, 2006

TORONTO, Jan. 24 -- On March 20, 2003, as the United States launched its invasion of Iraq, Stephen Harper rose in the Canadian House of Commons and bitterly condemned his country's refusal to join the fight.

The government "has betrayed Canada's history and values," he thundered. "The government has for the first time in our history left us outside our British and American allies in their time of need."

It was a vintage performance for the Conservative leader: self-assured, serious, claiming the moral high ground, and caustically critical of the liberals then in power. Now Harper, 46, has reached the pinnacle of a political career. Following his party's victory over the ruling Liberal Party in parliamentary elections Monday, he will become the 22nd prime minister when Parliament reconvenes in the coming weeks.

On Tuesday, Canadians awoke uncertain whether Harper's customary role would change, and whether his history of opposition was well-suited for building the alliances he needs to support the new minority government.

Those who know Harper insist he will not change.

"I expect him to be straightforward," said Diane Ablonczy, a Conservative lawmaker who has known Harper for 19 years and is likely to join his cabinet. "We won't get a dizzying round of rhetoric. He will say what he means and mean what he says."

Despite Harper's years in public life and a long record of speeches, however, many Canadians feel they do not know him well. The political strategist has never been a warm, approachable public figure. He had to overcome a reputation for stiffness that left him at a disadvantage compared with his garrulous opponent, Prime Minister Paul Martin.

"He's not an extrovert. Clearly," said a longtime friend, geologist John Weissenberger, in an interview Tuesday. "He approaches his work in a very serious, professional way. I think he viewed some of the showmanship of politics as being beside the point."

In personality, though not politics, Harper is similar to America's 2000 Democratic presidential nominee, Al Gore. Both are smart, studious policy mavens who come across in public as somewhat wooden. Like Gore, Harper incorporated self-deprecating jokes about his blandness into his standard campaign speech.

"One lesson I have learned in politics is that dull works," he would say, usually the only laugh line in an otherwise policy-filled speech.

Policy and conservatism have been Harper's obsession. When he and Weissenberger were graduate students at the University of Calgary, they debated free-market theory and plotted political strategy over Chinese food at the mall outside campus.

"It sounds kind of incredible to have two guys in their twenties sitting down to say how should we change the way the government works," Weissenberger said. "But that's what we did. We were both kind of political junkies and policy junkies."

Harper's father was an accountant in Toronto, where Harper was born and raised in a white, middle-class neighborhood. Completing the Canadian portrait, Stephen and his two younger brothers were absorbed in ice hockey, and Harper still is a master of hockey trivia.

Childhood friends remember him as polite, studious and quiet. After high school, Harper set out to work in western Canada. He soon enrolled in the University of Calgary, where his political interests blossomed and he began a march through the conservative political ranks, according to the biography "Stephen Harper and the Future of Canada," by William Johnson.

On campus, he became immersed in the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. Young Republicans. Harper and Weissenberger were avid fans of intellectual conservative William F. Buckley's weekly television debate show, "Firing Line."

The students traded political tomes, debated political theory and hungrily followed the growing popularity of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States, according to Johnson. They wondered why the strident conservatism those leaders represented had largely bypassed Canada.

"We called ourselves the 'Tiny Tories,' " said Goldy Hyder, another college mate, who went on to be chief of staff to a Progressive Conservative leader, Joe Clark.

"I would describe Stephen then pretty much as I would describe him now," Hyder said. "He is a very serious person. He obviously enjoys his policy and his public policy musing. He's reserved, fairly quiet. There is no question of his smarts. He was often in a room full of persons and he was the smartest of them all."

Harper ran unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1988 and won in 1993, but left four years later to take a job as head of the National Citizens Coalition, a conservative advocacy group. There, he forcefully argued that Ottawa and the eastern power structure treated western Canada unfairly. In 2001, he signed a letter urging the Alberta premier to "build firewalls around Alberta" against a "hostile federal government."

It became a controversial letter. And it was not the only position that later caused Harper trouble after he returned to Parliament in 2002 as leader of the opposition party. In their first matchup, in the 2004 national election, the shrewd Martin used Harper's support for the Iraq war and other pro-American statements to portray the Conservative as too closely aligned with right-wing U.S. Republicans.

"It's a very difficult balancing act," said James Blanchard, a former U.S. ambassador to Canada who is now a lawyer and consultant in Washington. Canadian prime ministers do not want to be seen as too close to Washington, he said.

Harper learned the lesson. He avoided foreign policy and politically explosive social policy issues in this campaign, focusing instead on government reform, tax cuts, health care, crime and transferring more power to provinces.

Even detractors give Harper credit for rescuing his party. He engineered the merger of feuding conservative wings into a single party in 2003, applied lessons from their defeat in 2004, and then commanded a tightly disciplined campaign with no major mistakes leading to this election.

His supporters point to that accomplishment as evidence that Harper is a keen political strategist, not just an ideologue.

"Those are marks of leadership," said the last Conservative premier, Brian Mulroney, in an election-night television interview from West Palm Beach, Fla. "Reaching out to unify the party, then to move the party to the center, then to devise a campaign strategy and finally to execute it flawlessly."

Harper's campaign staff declined a request for an interview before the election, citing the load of campaign obligations.

His first step after the election seemed as careful as his campaign. In his late-night victory speech in Calgary, he graciously thanked Martin for his service to the country. He also sought to soften his stern image by appearing with his two children, Rachel, 7, and Benjamin, 9.

His wife, Laureen Teskey, a graphic designer, remained a constant figure by his side in the campaign. Both disdain the media, according to reporters who covered the campaign, though they made an effort in this election run-up to be more civil to the press.

But those who know Harper credit Teskey with helping to soften his hard edges.

"He also has changed a lot. He became more well-rounded after he became married and had children," said Monte Solberg, a Parliament member from Alberta. "He has learned how to compromise. A lot of people have called him an ideologue, but I think he has put that to rest."