Stephen Harper, Andrew Cohen writes, hasn't changed. Even though he
has been out of office for four-and-a-half years, but he can still draw a crowd of conservatives and a chorus of critics. And nurse a hell of a grudge.
No one says former Canadian prime ministers must gently fade away, once the way of American presidents. What we do expect, though, is a measure of honesty, generosity and self-reflection.
Harper offers none of that. He is elder but no statesman; he has second thoughts without sobriety. He cannot help himself.
An interview Harper did with the American conservative talk show host Dennis Prager has surfaced after two years. And it reveals that Harper is as mean and nasty as ever:
Blaming the liberal media conspiring to defeat him in 2015 – his big allegation – is so silly that even Andrew MacDougall, Harper’s former head of communication, calls it “crap.”
No right-wing media in Canada? Has he checked the Globe and Mail, which endorsed his party, or the editorial pages of Postmedia News? Has he read John Ibbitson’s sympathetic biography? Didn’t Mike Duffy, as a broadcaster, destroy Stéphane Dion in a television interview in 2008?
Collusion? I must have missed the midnight conclaves of the College of Columnists, scheming “to bring down” the Conservatives (as Val Sears of the Toronto Star famously declared boarding John Diefenbaker’s campaign plane in 1962).
Who needed collusion when Harper was destroying himself in 2015 with his “snitch lines” and anti-immigration tropes? Which party had the most money and the advantage of government and then foolishly set an election date two-and-a-half months away, certain that a long campaign would undo the callow Justin Trudeau?
Perhaps it all goes back to his relationship with his mother:
He reveals, for example, that his mother never said anything to him “remotely praiseworthy”. After he became prime minister, she allowed: “Well, you’ve done well for yourself.”
That may explain his gnarled, flinty and vindictive public persona in 10 years in office. By 2015, Canadians had enough of his distemper, so acute that he shocked a visiting foreign leader with his burning contempt for the opposition.
In the Prager interview, Harper notes that no Canadian university had given him an honorary degree, even though “I was one of the best-educated prime ministers the country ever had.”
Does that sound like sour grapes? You bet. We should all be grateful that he's not in office now.
Image: The Rayfield
