Читать книгу Full Circle: Death and Resurrection In Canadian Conservative Politics - Bob Plamondon - Страница 16

Not much is known about the childhood of Stephen Harper. That in itself says something about Harper’s approach to public life. Harper declines to be interviewed on such matters, and he has yet to write an autobiography. Most of what is known publicly is gleaned from interviews with family members, boyhood friends, and political associates in whom Harper has confided. The most penetrating examinations of Harper’s youth are found in the biographies by William Johnson and Lloyd Mackey.

Most people think Harper grew up in a dynamic and prosperous Alberta. Yet Alberta is one of the few places in Canada where you don’t have to be born and raised there to be from there. You’re not an islander if you were not born and raised in P.E.I., but Alberta is different. No one would doubt that Stephen Harper is an Albertan through and through. But that’s not where he was born and raised.

Born April 20, 1959, Stephen Joseph Harper is the son of Joseph and Margaret Harper. He has two younger brothers, Grant and Robert. His mother and father met at their local church. His father was a chartered accountant who worked most of his life for Imperial Oil. Stephen grew up in the Toronto area, in Leaside and Etobicoke, within a loving, supportive, and happy family. He has family roots in Atlantic Canada, where he spent many of his childhood summers with his in New Brunswick. He was a quiet and thoughtful child, and it would have been unimaginable for him to come home from school with any- thing but an A+ in his report card. Nevertheless, one of his teachers noted that he was a difficult student to teach and perhaps hard to be led. Given his academic success, we can imagine that Harper’s intelligence and impatience posed a challenge to his teachers.

Failure is an outcome Stephen does not accept easily. Combine his top grades, strong work ethic, diligence, discipline, love of cats over dogs, and interest in politics, and you have the makings of a classic nerd. It is unlikely that many of Stephen’s classmates are surprised he has risen to the highest office in the land.

Stephen won the gold medal for top high school marks when he graduated from Richview Collegiate Institute. While excelling at academics, he suffered from asthma, which limited his ability to compete in certain sports. Nonetheless, Stephen was active and a member of his school’s cross-country running team. Like most high school students in Canada at the time, he was not a political activist, although he did join the Liberal party at the urging of his friend Paul Watson. This was more a matter of convenience than conviction. The local Liberal youth club Watson led needed at least twenty members to attract the local MP and Liberal cabinet minister Alastair Gillespie to attend a meeting. “Stephen Harper was a friend at the time, but definitely not a Liberal. I roped him in because I needed the numbers.” According to Watson, Harper was anything but intimidated when he met the Liberal heavyweight in person: “I can’t remember what Stephen asked, but I do recall how much he seemed to enjoy sparring with a Rhodes scholar and cabinet minister. And as usual, Stephen was probably the smartest person in the room.” Although he thought and talked like a conservative, Harper had a certain intellectual admiration for Trudeau, Watson claims. Stephen’s first political campaign as an activist came under the Liberal banner: he supported Alastair Gillespie’s re-election campaign. But Harper’s flirtation with the Liberal party would not last.

Spiritually, Stephen Harper appears to be the product of his own thinking and experience, rather than something rooted in childhood. In 1995 Harper remarked, “I’m not the person who was born with a particular set of values and has held them my whole life. I like to think that the values I hold today are in the process of a life of education.” Reflecting on his teenage years, Harper noted, “I would have been an agnostic, central Canadian liberal. And my life experiences have led me to come to other conclusions about both life and political values . . . both intellectually and spiritually.”

With high expectations, Harper enrolled at the University of Toronto to study business. Shocking many, including his family, he dropped out of university after only two months. Claiming he didn’t know what he wanted to do, Harper ended up in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1978, where he landed an administrative job at Imperial Oil, the company for which his father had worked. After a few years in the workforce, he returned to university, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in economics at the University of Calgary. In speeches, Harper has said, “I didn’t have the personality to become an accountant, so I became an economist.” Not a comment on his father’s chosen occupation; it’s a rare display of humour from a very serious and determined man.

His degree was in economics, but his passion was politics. Academically he was aligned with conservative leaders of the present and conservative intellectuals of the past. But it took Pierre Trudeau and the National Energy Program to convert Stephen Harper from academic conservative to partisan activist. The NEP’s intrusion into areas of provincial jurisdiction also inspired him to study the constitution and the separation of powers between the federal and provincial governments. You could say he was an economist who often thought like a lawyer.

With limited experience but great fervour, Harper and his girl- friend at the time, Cynthia Williams, signed up as volunteers in the 1984 campaign of Calgary West Progressive Conservative candidate Jim Hawkes. Not that the incumbent MP needed the help: he had won each of the two previous elections by more than 17,000 votes and would win in 1984 by 31,816 votes, with more than six times the number registered by his second-place Liberal opponent. However, even in a sea of volunteers and an atmosphere of over- whelming confidence, Harper stood out. So much so that, when Harper graduated from university the following year, Hawkes brought him to Ottawa to work as his legislative assistant. Recalling his early encounters with Harper, Hawkes remarked, “He demonstrated interest and competence. He had good skills and a good mind. When I had a vacancy, he was the first person I thought of.” Harper would be returning east, but he hardly felt as if he were going home. Although raised in Ontario, he had evolved into a western Canadian, a transformation that was made complete by the NEP. Harper went to Ottawa, not with cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat, but with an intellect with a can-do western attitude. He was ready to take a hard look at the current political realities and exercise all the discipline required to bring fundamental change to national government.