Who is the Real Stephen Harper?

Canada's commentariat pries open the helmet-hair to see who the man living at 24 Sussex really is.

After six months of majority rule, we are getting a clearer picture of just who Stephen Harper is. Barbara Yaffe of the Vancouver Sun, for one, welcomes the arrival of a prime minister who isn't constantly in attack mode and seems to be set on becoming a true statesman. "The real Stephen Harper has emerged, with a broad smile and a big swagger," she notes, as the Tories have relentlessly pursued a legislative agenda that had a snowball's chance in hell back in the minority days. Being able to pass whatever the Tories please has freed up Harper to travel the world ("Harper has jetted in the past six months to France, on three occasions; New York, twice; Greece; Afghanistan; Brazil; Colombia; Costa Rica; Honduras; Italy; and Australia"), with a strut in his step owing to Canada's relatively sound economic footing.

And it's true, Stephen Harper 2.0 is a somewhat more likable incarnation than the previous instalment. But Yaffe loses us entirely when she notes "Harper has not been inclined to unleash hyper-partisan attack dogs on his political opponents, as in the past. As a result, he looks a lot more collegial, less mean." The PM might, but the same can not be said of the rest of his government, for which he ultimately bears responsibility. John Baird's smiling a little more, but ask Justin Trudeau what he thinks of being called a "bad Catholic" by Harper acolyte Dean Del Mastro. Or any NDP MP what they think of Tony Clement refusing to answer any questions about his role in the G8 spend-a-thon. We doubt the word they'd use is "collegial."

That same sentiment is shared in the National Post by Keith Beardsley, who was a former adviser to Harper and his one-time deputy chief of staff. Beardsley calls on his former boss "to start acting like a mature, responsible government, which is why people elected them in the first place," instead of one obsessed with turning the screws on the Liberals and NDP. Regarding the Tories' decision to limit debate in the House on just about every major piece of legislation, Beardsley suggests voters see "an undemocratic government that is unnecessarily stifling debate, not exactly the image the Conservatives should want ingrained in voters’ minds." The same could be said of Del Mastro's treatment of Justin Trudeau, and for the Tories' decision to bar Elizabeth May and a Bloc Quebecois MP from paying tribute to veterans on the House floor. The last election gave the Tories "an opportunity to make sure that swing voters and first-time Conservative supporters realize they made the right choice," says Beardsley. "You won’t keep those voters on side if you act like a bunch of school kids fighting over a sand box." While we enjoy Beardsley's columns, we'd prefer if he was busy bringing that kind of sensibility to the PMO.

Michael Harris goes one step further on iPolitics and suggests the Harper government is beginning to look a lot like the Alberta Progressive Conservatives under "King" Ralph Klein:

Klein believed that when he won an election, the work of crushing the opposition had just begun. You’d think they’d all come down from the mountains with explosives in their underwear. In a nutshell, they were not the representatives of the people who didn’t vote for Ralph, but the enemy.

As premier, Klein banned opposition members from sitting on policy committees. The poor devils from the Liberals and the NDP weren’t even allowed to use government facilities paid for by the public. Everything belonged to Ralph.

As for the legislative process, Klein used closure more times that Moe poked Curly and Larry in the eyes. Anyone who opposed the government’s agenda got the treatment, from being labeled commies to being publicly worked over by Klein’s enforcer-in-chief, Rod Love.

Replace Love with Baird or Del Mastro, and Klein's banning of opposition MLAs with the Tories' penchant for ignoring opposition member's amendments (and boy, do some of those bills ever need them), and it looks a lot like King Ralph is residing in 24 Sussex. Just about the only difference we can spot is that Klein also had a little thing called "a surplus" that afforded him an awful lot of cover for some of his more spiteful tendencies. Harper, well, isn't quite so lucky. It's easy to forgive a leader when he's throwing oil dollars around his domain like they're going out of style. When that leader's cutting budgets in a time when economic protests have sprouted up across the country, voters might not be so inclined to overlook his hubris.