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Stephen Harper is a driven man, all agree, consumed by searing resentment and anger against Eastern Canada. So everyone knows what he is. But no one knows why he is that.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. In his new book, called definitively Stephen Harper, journalist John Ibbitson writes: “The government is autocratic and secretive because it reflects the personality and world view of the Prime Minister.” And again: “The government is autocratic and secretive because it reflects the personality and world view of the Prime Minister.”

So it’s perfectly reasonable to say that what drives our Prime Minister is much less important than the fact that he is driven, and in a direction that’s largely bad for the country. When you read the recent memoirs of Messrs. Mulcair and Trudeau, as I’ve reported in recent weeks, one learns disappointingly little about Justin Trudeau and quite a bit about Tom Mulcair. From Mr. Ibbitson’s book, you learn that even conservative-minded writers find much that is either mystifying or unpalatable about our Prime Minister, or both. And that includes both his personality and his works.

Still, curious people inevitably like to know why people believe and act as they do. We believe in cause and effect. As everyone knows who’s read any of the many books written about the Prime Minister, he was raised in placid, privileged suburban Toronto by doting comfortable parents. How he emerged as a mean-spirited, paranoid Albertan, deeply angry at the elites of Eastern Canada but yet perfectly at home with their powerful Albertan tar-sands counterparts, still remains inexplicable.

But those who expected that Mr. Ibbitson would present a much-needed tribute to Stephen Harper, there will be serious disappointment. In fact, Mr. Harper’s opponents could spend millions in their advertising just repeating the harsh assessments of close former Harper colleagues like Tom Flanagan and conservative writers like Mr. Ibbitson.

Here’s Mr. Flanagan on working with Mr. Harper:

“He can be suspicious, secretive and vindictive, prone to sudden eruptions of white-hot rage over meaningless trivia….I feared, as I still do, that he might some day bring himself down Nixon-style by pushing too hard against the network of rules constraining authority in a constitutional government….[Like Richard Nixon, he] believes in playing politics right up to the edge of the rules, which inevitably means some team members will step across ethical or legal lines in their desire to win for the Boss.”

To which Mr. Ibbitson adds:

“There are disagreeable aspects to Stephen Harper’s personality…He can fly off the handle….He is suspicious of others….this closed, repressed personality is capable of lashing out from time to time….his legendary temper. He can descend into rages, sometimes over trivial things….His personality also comes out in the tactics that the Conservative Party uses against enemies — which are, in a word, ruthless.”

There is, of course, a debate among the political class about whether Mr. Harper has seriously dismantled the architecture and institutions of Canadian democracy. A considerable amount of literature — from many books to several well-documented reports from civil society groups — documents what seems to me a very strong case for the affirmative. No, Canada is not Mussolini’s Italy. But our democracy has taken many strong hits by the Harper government in the past decade.

The “no” side concedes that there have been some dubious actions by the government but that it’s a vast partisan exaggeration to claim democracy itself has been undermined.

Mr. Ibbitson works awfully hard to be judicious on the subject. He insists the anti-democratic claims are “nonsense.” But if I were on the hustings in the next few weeks, I’d have great fun hoisting Mr. Harper with John ibbitson’s petard. After all, he cites many (though by no means all) of the reasons Mr. Harper’s critics claim that he has undermined Canadian democracy. Indeed, Mr. Ibbitson himself questions whether the Harper government has been “autocratic, secretive and cruel,” and answers: “Yes, sometimes,” giving as an example that “The omnibus bills were bad bills. They abused the parliamentary process.”

Then I’d share with my audience Mr. Ibbitson’s outrage at Mr. Harper for: one, his government’s decision to deep-six the long-form census, a decision he attributes to the Prime Minister alone; and two, the PM’s gratuitous attack on the integrity of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Any opposition audience would be on their feet cheering when hearing Mr. Ibbitson’s conclusion that in his criticism of Beverley McLachlin “the Prime Minister had set a dangerous precedent, undermining the separation of executive and judiciary powers on which the whole democratic system of government is based.”

So this latest election-time book may well end up finding a more prominent place in the actual campaign than either of the memoirs of the leaders of the opposition. With his legendary terrible temper, Mr. Harper will not be amused.

 

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Gerry Caplan

Gerald Caplan has an MA in Canadian history and a Ph.D. in African history from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He is an author, teacher, media commentator,...