John Ivison: Stephen Harper’s legacy is being reconsidered; his new memoir reminds us why - National Post

Copy URL Facebook Linked In X (Twitter) Loading account options Sign In Manage Account Close account menu Sign Out Stephen Harper at a campaign rally in Windsor, Ont., in April 2011. (Ted Pritchard/Windsor Star/Postmedia) By John Ivison November 3, 2026 at 6:00 a.m. Winston Churchill once said that history would be kind to him because he intended to write it. And he did, producing 13 volumes of memoirs over the course of his long life.

More than a decade after leaving the Prime Minister’s Office, Stephen Harper’s memoirs have finally landed with a thump — all 656 pages of them.

Here for Canada makes the case that Harper was one of Canada’s significant prime ministers.

It’s an assertion that may have been controversial when he left in 2015, after an election campaign in which he came across as defensive, downbeat and unnecessarily combative.

But it is one that would be more broadly accepted today, after nearly a decade of Justin Trudeau’s experiment with social engineering. It’s proof that historical revisionism does not need you to be the greatest; it just requires you to be better than the guy who comes next.

I covered Harper from the day the Conservative Party of Canada was formed in late 2003, to the evening in the Calgary convention centre in 2015 when he stepped down. Yet there are still moments of revelation in the book.

Harper is more open about his vulnerabilities than he has previously been in public.

He says he was not a natural athlete as a child but was interested in sport, so turned it into an intellectual pursuit to make up for his lack of ability. The ultimate consequence of this was his 2013 hockey book: A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs and the Rise of Professional Hockey.

He speaks of finding religion in his 20s and a faith that is very real to him. “I have felt the presence of God often since my conversion — in good times, as well as bad,” he writes. “Knowing Christ has relieved me of much of the emotional turmoil I once had in my soul.”

He recounts how during the assault on Parliament Hill by a lone gunman in October 2014, he prepared for death as he and other MPs sheltered in a caucus meeting room.

“I knew then that if a gunman entered the room there would be little possibility of survival. It was a uniquely chilling moment. I said a little prayer and prepared myself to die, if things were going to come to that. With that prayer came a strange, peaceful acceptance I cannot describe,” he writes.

But, notwithstanding the repeated opposition claims he had a “hidden agenda” to outlaw abortion, there is little evidence of that faith surfacing in his legislative record.

In fact, Harper was never a religious or ideological zealot. He makes clear that from early on in his political career, he recognized the need to grow the political tent. “The point is to unite people around a program,” he writes.

He was first elected for the Reform Party in 1993 in the Calgary West riding that was held by his former boss, Progressive Conservative Jim Hawkes, having already spent time in Ottawa, working as legislative assistant for Reform’s first MP, Deb Grey.

He had an uneasy relationship with Reform leader Preston Manning that he admits “reflected my immaturity at the time.” It led to him leaving Parliament in early 1997.

As a result, he was not involved in the Canadian Alliance civil war of the early 2000s, under Stockwell Day, and was seen as a unifying force after Day was ousted.

He returned to Parliament after a by-election in Calgary Southwest in May 2002 as leader of the Canadian Alliance.

Harper is frank that he was not psychologically prepared for the task.

“My own performance was very spotty — very hit and miss (with more misses than hits),” he writes.

In terms of emotional stamina, mental toughness, formative vision and the energy needed to build and lead a team, he was in some cases, “simply inadequate,” he writes.

Yet he possessed sufficient vision to steer the Alliance into a merger with Peter MacKay’s Progressive Conservatives and was even prepared to accept the PCs’ leadership-selection process that granted all ridings equal weight.

Whatever his self-confessed shortcomings, he had already learned the art of the deal.

Harper recounts a conversation with confidante Gwyn Morgan, then Encana CEO, who persuaded him to consider: “Is the price of the compromises worse than the benefit you would get from reaching a deal?”

Harper won the leadership of the merged party in March 2004 and led the Conservatives into an election that spring for which they were unprepared.

“By voting day on June 28, we knew our chances of winning were slim. And there was a brutal reality behind it,” he writes. “Our lack of preparation showed, and indicated to the Canadian people that we were not ready to form a government. I could not disagree; we were not ready.”

He felt he could have done better and considered stepping down, but was persuaded to stay on and lead the opposition to Paul Martin’s minority government.

One of the signature moments of 2005 in Parliament was the debate over same-sex marriage, which Harper opposed. He concedes in the book that the legislation’s passage did not result in an attack on family or religion and that it has “unambiguously been a good thing” in the lives of gay people.

But if the Harper of 2026 is more reflective and generous of nature than the conventional wisdom would hold, he becomes more defensive when discussing much of his time in government.

The Conservative campaign that ended in January 2006, orchestrated by the late senator Doug Finley, brought Harper to power as Canada’s 22nd prime minister.

He recalls that the institutional memory in his party’s ranks was slim and it was initially reliant on the federal bureaucracy.

Harper writes that he didn’t start out with a mindset suspicious of the public service.

But his time in office quickly disabused him of the notion that their interests were aligned. In particular, the Department of Foreign Affairs was at odds with Harper’s determination to emphasize hard power and stand up for Canadian interests, even if it proved unpopular. He says that the senior ranks of the public service never forgave him for cutting bonuses and reducing the size of the bureaucracy by 30,000 in his later years.

A significant legacy issue that he inherited from his predecessor was Canada’s responsibility to provide security in Kandahar, the Afghan heartland of the Taliban, the enemy in a war that Canada had joined in 2001.

He visited there almost immediately after taking office, to reassure the Forces there that the new government was behind their mission. He even spent a night outside the safety of the base camp at a forward operating base, with the JTF2 special forces.

But he admits he was already feeling uneasy about the broader aims of nation-building in Afghanistan, a rural, tribal Muslim society not designed for “Jeffersonian democracy.”

His misgivings would only grow over the course of his time in office, leading to him ending the military mission in Afghanistan in 2011.

By 2006, he says he was in much better shape psychologically than he had been three years earlier, able to put things out of his mind, sleep more soundly and control his emotions.

“My approach is you pick your spots, map out a game plan, concentrate on your areas of strength and try to shore up your weaknesses and those of your team …” he writes.

He was blessed with a party that did not have deep ideological cleavages and that obeyed the cabinet ground rules of keeping debates and arguments internal.

He proved to be an adept parliamentary strategist, able to pry one opposition party or another away to support his government in confidence votes.

He credits the relative calm of the first year in office to a tight agenda built around clear electoral commitments on which his party had received a mandate.

But it was a political dynamic that grew more difficult over time, as opposition parties became loath to support the government on a sustained basis.

His critics were unfailing. Michael Ignatieff, who butted heads with him as Liberal leader in the 2011 election, says in his memoir Fire and Ashes, that Harper was “a transactional opportunist, with no fixed compass, other than the pursuit of power.”

That is a harsh assessment of the man who delivered the residential schools apology in summer 2008. “For me (whether others could see it or not) that day was an emotionally draining experience,” Harper writes.

He was a perhaps unlikely champion for Indigenous progress and was distraught when his efforts to revolutionize First Nations education foundered in 2014. He had backed the Assembly of First Nations chief Shawn Atleo to “move beyond the politics of grievance” to transfer jurisdiction of education to First Nations, backed by $2 billion in federal funding. But it transpired that First Nations leaders did not want to move beyond the politics of grievance and they ousted Atleo. They suggested to Harper that he give them the money anyway, without committing to reform, an offer he spurned. “I still grieve over this. It was all so cynical and sad,” he writes.

While Harper was often more sensitive than people assumed, there was more than a grain of truth to the suggestion that he was also more antagonistic than the median voter was comfortable with.

After winning the 2008 election, and in the midst of the financial crisis, he announced that the government was ending the per-vote subsidy payments to political parties — an existential threat to the Bloc Québécois in particular.

That unforced error led directly to the coalition crisis that nearly unseated him. In the absence of any convincing evidence, he maintains in the book that the opposition parties were intent on forcing another election.

“The opposition was determined to defeat us one way or another,” he writes.

Perhaps, but not within a couple of months of losing the October vote. Harper himself points out that the Conservatives enjoyed a sizeable lead in every opinion poll throughout this period.

He writes that he thought the effort by Liberals, NDP and Bloc to replace him with Stéphane Dion was a bluff. But it wasn’t, and Harper admits he was unsure how to fight back, at least until the coalition leaders appeared together publicly and told the country that they would make the hapless Dion prime minister.

Harper realized that English Canada would never support an arrangement where the Bloc was pulling the strings. He obtained the governor general’s agreement to prorogue Parliament before the coalition members could engineer a vote of non-confidence and allowed the alliance’s internal contradictions to orchestrate its collapse.

It does not reflect well on the former prime minister that he still cannot accept that it was a crisis entirely of his own making.

“Yet I think my real mistake was not preparing the ground for the measure… it caught too many people by surprise,” is as far as he is prepared to go.

By 2009, a change in the guard of international heads of government meant Harper was one of the most experienced western global leaders.

He recalls president Barack Obama’s visit to Ottawa in February, his first foreign foray. He says the new president was surprised and “perhaps taken aback” when Harper shared his impression that the Afghan mission had already failed in its original intent to turn the country into a democratic, secular nation, and that any attempts to salvage it needed new, more limited objectives. It turned out to be a prophetic assessment.

Much of the latter part of the book is dominated — as was the prime minister’s time — by an alphabet soup of summits, from the G8 and G20 to Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the Francophonie, Commonwealth Heads of Government and UN climate meetings. Harper had little interest in a “pointless talking exercise” and was willing, indeed happy, to rock the boat. “I have many weaknesses but one is not a fear of saying no,” he writes.

That translated into domestic policy, as the government pivoted to deficit reduction, after the worst of the financial crisis had passed. “I was determined not to create the legacy of structural deficits that usually plague governments after Keynesian ‘short-term’ borrowing,” he writes.

He was ably assisted by his finance minister, Jim Flaherty, who was even more determined to stop emergency stimulus and to limit spending growth after the crisis had passed.

By 2011, Harper was leading Canada’s longest-serving minority federal government and he was justifiably touting a record of competent fiscal and economic stewardship. The divisive issues that had festered under the Liberals, such as western alienation and Quebec separation, had receded. There was a sense that Canada was a substantive force internationally.

It gave Harper the confidence to campaign for a “strong, stable, national, majority Conservative government” in the election of that year.

I recall the last stop of the 2011 election campaign in Abbotsford, B.C., where the members of the Press Gallery had declared themselves off-duty somewhere over the Prairies, all deadlines having passed in the East. It was only when news of Osama Bin-Laden’s assassination by U.S. special forces emerged that the over-refreshed reporters found themselves back on duty. It was a measure of Harper’s maturity as a politician that he proved adept in his response. He expressed his feeling of “sober satisfaction,” a perfect reflection of how most people in the country felt. “My emotions were not conflicted but they were nuanced,” he writes.

Many Canadians who had previously felt reservations about Harper and his party finally gave him a vote of confidence and his coveted majority. “Yet I felt a sense of relief more than anything. For one thing, I now knew I would have some real runway to govern, without the need—and the constant energy drain—of trying to plan election contingencies,” he writes.

Harper is expansive about the need to guard against hubris in office; about how he looked in the mirror every so often to keep things in perspective. “Do not pretend that the other guy is evil and you are pure as driven snow,” he writes.

Yet the longer he was prime minister, the more convinced he became in his own righteousness — and the less patient he was with any obstruction, be it from the opposition parties, the bureaucracy or the media.

Despite the fact that every major newspaper in Canada, except the Toronto Star and Le Devoir, endorsed him during the 2011 election, Harper considers that the press was opposed en masse to his agenda and was “storing up their venom” to use against him. That was initially a false assumption in my experience, but it became an emerging reality he helped to foster by his outright hostility.

His majority government allowed him to run Canada as an executive or administrative democracy, rather than a parliamentary democracy.

If much of the scorn in the book is directed at the mandarins and pundits, there is a healthy amount of disdain directed at his successor, which contrasts with his tacit approval for the current Liberal government of Mark Carney.

His depiction of his government’s commemoration of the war of 1812 as the seed-bed for Canadian nationhood offers an example of this enmity.

“Allow me to confide that I despise the alternative way of looking at our past —the ‘black armband history’ that has been practised by some (though certainly not all) Liberal governments… It is done so that Canada can be conveniently described as some kind of post-national phenomenon whose only virtue rests in the individual prime ministers who express it. It is self-serving, arrogant, and historically baseless,” he writes, clearly alluding to Trudeau.

By contrast, he says he was pleased that Carney highlighted the role of the 1812 war in one of his “forward guidance” videos. Harper is said to consider Carney’s government as the real heir to his own, in terms of its ambitions to thin regulation, attract investment and become an energy superpower. That is no great surprise. Both men have told me privately at different times they consider themselves classical liberals: supporters of individual freedom, private enterprise, free trade, religious tolerance, limited government and the rule of law.

None of those things were priorities during the Justin Trudeau years.

Harper notes explicitly that it is no coincidence that Canada’s decline in real per capita living standards coincided with Trudeau’s desire to “phase out” the energy industry.

While Harper avoids criticizing Carney, he does address the suggestion that he offered the current prime minister the job of finance minister in 2012. He says that when Carney was governor of the Bank of Canada, there were concerns that he was nurturing political ambitions, including running for leader of the Liberal party.

Harper says he decided to offer him the prospect of joining the Conservatives instead. “If Carney accepted the offer, it would be good for the government. But if he refused, he would have to say it was because the governor should not enter partisan politics. Indeed, he could not expect to maintain Liberal aspirations and remain governor for our government,” he writes.

Harper says he made a vague offer, given the finance minister job was currently occupied, but Carney decided to stay out of politics, and ultimately left to join the Bank of England.

“My government’s record in promoting trade and investment is unmatched in Canada’s history,” he writes.

But as the prime minister got more cocky, it is arguable that he became more disconnected from the average voter.

“The longer I was prime minister, the more comfortable I felt in the role,” he writes, which suggests he became rather too comfortable.

The Senate expenses scandal warrants barely more than a footnote in the phone-book-sized tome. He describes the expenses claimed by some Conservative senators as dubious and indefensible, but it was the kind of excess that would have had the young Harper demanding the Augean stables be thoroughly cleaned.

By 2015, the sense it was time for a change of government dominated the polling. Harper entered the election campaign knowing that sentiment was running against him, fanned by “media hostility that went beyond the normal antipathy.”

They were, he considers, just waiting for the Conservatives to make a gaffe, and pounced gleefully when one duly appeared.

The tipline for Canadians to report suspected “barbaric cultural practices” was launched in early October and was a death-knell for Conservative electoral ambitions.

“I was thus stunned when on October 2, it flashed across my screen that Ministers (and Conservative candidates) Kellie Leitch and Chris Alexander had announced the hotline. I was locked away in a Montreal hotel room preparing for the French-language leaders’ debate that evening. I had not been consulted,” he writes. “I was furious, but my options were limited. While I never wanted the policy in the first place, there would be serious questions about our campaign if I disavowed it.”

Former cabinet ministers beyond the two mentioned will no doubt raise eyebrows at the idea that this leader, of all leaders, was completely in the dark.

But it would likely not have mattered. Trudeau’s willingness to promise “small, temporary deficits” outflanked then NDP leader Tom Mulcair, and consolidated the change vote around the Liberals.

“The Liberal position was as clever as it was cynical,” Harper writes now.

The NDP vote collapsed, but that did not help the Conservatives. One resigned staffer told me at the time: “This is what happens when you’re mean to so many people for so long.”

Harper was not positive enough and had alienated many working-age women. Past success allowed him to seem imperious.

In the end, the Liberals won a majority of 184 seats, after offering the notion of a kinder, sunnier government.

Writing the day after the election, on the flight back from Calgary to Ottawa, I gazed down at a country that I judged was largely content with the result. Even Conservatives didn’t relish the messy business of trying to run another minority government.

Former cabinet minister Jason Kenney was sanguine then, telling me that the Conservatives had gotten the big things right: low taxes, balanced budgets and free trade. They had secured 5.6-million votes, more than when they won power in 2008, and elected 99 MPs.

The party had money in the bank and a strong base. It was not a great catastrophe, Kenney said, and he was right. If his successors had been Harper’s equal in gravity and strategy, the Conservatives would likely have been back in power by now.

Having covered his government as closely as anyone over its nearly 10-year lifespan, I cannot argue with Harper’s ultimate conclusion that he left the country in better shape than he found it.

Despite the financial crisis, the budget was balanced, there was regional peace, relations with the U.S. were much improved, taxes were down and household incomes were up.

Just as importantly for the historic record, it’s clear he left the country better off than did his successor.

After Harper’s defeat, then interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose joked at the annual Press Gallery dinner that the party’s new slogan would be: “It’s OK — the bad man’s gone.”

In laughter, there is truth. Yet, even before the publication of his memoir, there was a re-evaluation of Harper’s record. The emerging consensus appears to be that the bad man wasn’t so bad after all. Here for Canada will hasten that re-appraisal.

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