Stephen Harper

Former prime minister of Canada (2006–15)

• Born: April 30, 1959
• Place of Birth: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Born on April 30, 1959, in Toronto, Ontario, Stephen Joseph Harper moved to Alberta at the age of nineteen to work for the petroleum industry. He attended both college and graduate school at the University of Calgary. He and his wife, Laureen Teskey, and their children, Benjamin and Rachel, later made their home in that city.

In 1993, Harper was elected to the House of Commons as the Reform Party's candidate for the Calgary-West riding. His first taste of national elected office did not last very long, as in 1997 he left Parliament in order to become the vice president of the National Citizens Coalition, a conservative advocacy group; he would later become the group's president. In 2002, he returned to the House of Commons, this time as a member of the Canadian Alliance and as the minister representing Calgary-Southwest. In 2003, Harper cofounded the Conservative Party of Canada, merging the Progressive Conservatives and his own Canadian Alliance, and the new party selected him as leader. Only one year after his ascension to the party's leadership, he led the Conservatives to an additional twenty-five seats in the House of Commons. In January 2006, he led his party to win 124 seats. One month later, he was sworn in as the twenty-second prime minister of Canada.

Economic and Infrastructure Issues

While the world waited in late 2007 for word on whether the United States was on the cusp of recession, Harper's budget for 2008 included a number of provisions designed to help Canada not just weather what could be a major storm but hopefully avoid recession altogether. Before talk of recession reached a fever pitch, the Conservative Party's budget featured $12.3 billion in business and personal tax cuts. In early 2008, Harper announced the creation of a $1 billion fund to protect the communities that rely on industries that have been hardest hit over the years, such as forestry. Following the resulting worldwide economic downturn, taxpayer and municipal relief became a major issue for the Harper leadership.

In early 2008, Harper introduced a budget that included an expansion of the gas-tax fund, which uses fuel-tax revenues to provide billions of dollars in road maintenance, water-system modifications, sewage treatment, and transit upgrade. He also appropriated $500 million to help improve a number of transit systems across the country and allocated $1 billion to bolster workforces produced by the countless universities and colleges across the nation. In the prior year, Harper had introduced the Building Canada plan, which included $33 billion over seven years for infrastructure improvements.

Harper's greatest challenge was the fact that Canada's infrastructure is in need of repair. A 2008 study by one municipal organization pegged the amount of money that is needed to address each city's infrastructure issues at $123 billion, far more than what the federal government was able to offer. Harper's approach to supplying these funds was to target provinces rather than municipalities. For example, he provided $2.2 billion to British Columbia, which in turn used the funds to improve the ports and infrastructure around the coastline. He also worked with premiers in Nova Scotia and British Columbia to establish frameworks by which they might repair their own municipal roadways and systems. For a province to obtain funds from the Building Canada program, it must demonstrate that the funds will be used to satisfy one or more of fifteen principles, including transit, highways, wastewater treatment, and tourism.

While Harper's federalist approach was successful in building closer working relationships and accessibility between premiers and Ottawa, he had more difficulties dealing with municipal leaders. His approach to appropriating funds from the federal budget was to allocate them to provincial leaders, who in turn utilized them at their own discretion. While he helped some provinces develop a framework for infrastructure improvements, he largely left the responsibility for targeting budget monies to the provinces themselves, which consequently expected the municipalities to put into place a plan for using the funds.

The Oil Industry

While provinces and territories sought federal monetary assistance for infrastructure improvements in order to assist in their quests for greater autonomy, they also looked to Harper to leave a larger portion of the money their economies generate within their own borders. With the majority of provincial governments citing energy and oil as their largest industries, the conflict over the percentage revenues that Ottawa retains versus what the provinces and territories keep represented a daunting challenge for Harper and his government.

On one side, the provinces, which retain some of the royalties paid by oil companies for the right to do business in their territories, were seeking a higher percentage of those royalties. On the other side, Ottawa stood to lose a considerable amount of revenue should this percentage relationship shift in favor of the provinces. On a third front were the oil companies themselves, which stated concerns that larger royalty payments to the provinces and Ottawa would negatively impact their business.

Harper worked to address this complex issue. When Alberta premier Ed Stelmach called for royalties paid to Alberta to be increased by $2 billion, oil companies warned of a disastrous response by the industry. Federal ministers worried about a loss of revenues. Stelmach, however, changed his policy response, instead seeking only $1.4 billion and opting not to limit the exploration and extraction of oil deposits. Harper took a political risk and welcomed Stelmach's proposal, even though it meant that Ottawa would lose almost $420 million a year as a result.

Majority Government

On May 2, 2011, Harper's Conservative Party won a parliamentary majority for the first time during his tenure as prime minister. In what was considered a historic defeat of the Liberals, the Conservatives won 164 of the 308 parliament seats, affording the Harper administration a political majority.

In July 2011, Harper was made honorary chief of the Kainai Nation in recognition for his official apology on behalf of the Canadian government for abuses committed against First Nation peoples in the residential school system. The following year, in September 2012, he was awarded the title of World Statesman of the Year by the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, a US-based interfaith organization.

One of Harper's major focuses during this period of his administration was international trade. In 2012, he announced that Canada would join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, aimed at creating an extensive free trade zone in the Asia-Pacific area, and in 2013, he concluded a historic free-trade agreement with the European Union, eliminating 98 percent of tariffs on trade between the two entities. The Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement was signed in 2016.

Two attacks apparently motivated by Islamist extremism in October 2014 led Harper's government to push for stronger antiterrorism legislation. The result was the passage of the controversial Bill C-51, which authorized the sharing of information between seventeen government agencies and enabled the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to take preventive action. Many on the left considered the legislation a violation of civil liberties and privacy rights.

2015 Election

In early August 2015, Harper began campaigning for a fourth term in what would become the longest federal election campaign Canada had seen since the nineteenth century, arguing that consistency of leadership would be beneficial to the country and that his main opponent, the Liberal Party's Justin Trudeau, was too young and inexperienced. However, under Harper's stewardship, Canada had entered a recession, and the national budget had posted deficits for six years in a row. Also harming Harper's reelection chances was the fact that he was perceived as anti-immigration, particularly due to his reluctance to take in Syrian refugees because he felt the threat of some of them being Islamist terrorists was too great. After an early lead by the New Democratic Party, led by Thomas Mulcair, that party's popularity dropped off sharply, leaving the Liberal and Conservative parties in a close race for much of the campaign cycle. In the last weeks before the election, however, the Liberal Party took a strong lead in the opinion polls, and on election day, the Liberal Party took 39.5 percent of the vote to the Conservatives' 32. Trudeau became prime minister, and Harper resigned his position as the head of the Conservative Party.

As Harper had still won his seat for the Calgary-Heritage riding in the election, he served as a backbencher in the House of Commons until he announced his resignation and departure from politics in 2016; he planned to focus on his consulting business. In May of that year, he was named a board member for the Conservative Fund, the fundraising arm of the Conservative Party.

Following his political career, Harper served as chair and CEO of the consulting firm Harper and Associates Consulting. In February 2018, Harper became the chairman of the International Democrat Union. Later that year, he published the nonfiction book Right Here, Right Now: Politics and Leadership in the Age of Disruption (2018), which discusses his time and experiences as prime minister.

In 2021, during the COVID-19 global pandemic, Harper attended a virtual meeting requested by the Conference of Defence Associations Institute. He notably remarked that the United States and China had begun the Second Cold War and speculated on Canada's involvement in it. In 2023, Harper addressed a conservative conference in Ottawa, True North Strong and Free in Ottawa. The Canada Strong and Free Network had organized the conference. Harper railed against those he called liberal elites, whom he accused of favoring corporations. He also criticized the Trudeau government's response to the Chinese government's interference in Canada's federal elections in 2019 and 2021.

Bibliography

Brown, Ian. "Where's Stephen? How Harper's Trail Has Gone Cold since the Election." Globe and Mail, 28 Mar. 2016, www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/where-is-stephen-harper/article29272985/. Accessed 3 Oct 2024.

Flanagan, Tom. Harper's Team: Behind the Scenes of the Conservative Rise to Power. 2nd ed., McGill-Queen's UP, 2009.

Geoghegan, Tom. "Canada Election: Five Things Stephen Harper Got Wrong." BBC News, 20 Oct. 2015, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34583753. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.

Gollom, Mark. "Stephen Harper Leaves a Mixed-Bag Legacy for Those on the Political Right." CBC News, 6 Nov. 2015, www.cbc.ca/news/politics/stephen-harper-political-right-1.3306516. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.

"Harper Honoured by Alberta's Blood Tribe." CBC News, 11 July 2011, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/harper-honoured-by-alberta-s-blood-tribe-1.1088181. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.

Parry, Tom. "Stephen Harper Accepts World Statesman of the Year Award." CBC News, 27 Sept. 2012, www.cbc.ca/news/politics/stephen-harper-accepts-world-statesman-of-the-year-award-1.1258743. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.

Woodside, John. "Stephen Harper Defends Populism, Takes Aim at 'Liberal Elites' at Conservative Gathering." National Observer, 23 Mar. 2023, www.nationalobserver.com/2023/03/23/news/stephen-harper-populism-liberal-elites-conservative-gathering. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.