“The North Star of Conservative Politics”, by Chet Scoville, TheVanityPress, November 27, 2008.

Not too many folks up here without bias, or at least an opinion. Caught a bit of As It Happens and they were making light of the story a bit: “The parties are raging — but no one’s having funds. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty cuts subsidies to Canada’s political parties — leaving dozens in-cents-ed.”

Meanwhile, I’m still in the “who is this guy anyway” zone. Here’s a still older backgrounder (but not as far back as this 1997 speech he’s supposed to have given). Marci’s long article reads like a counter-intelligence file.

“The Man Behind Stephen Harper: The new Conservative Party has tasted success and wants majority rule; if Tom Flanagan and his Calgary School have their way, they’ll get it without compromising their principles”, by Marci McDonald, Walrus, October 2004.

Who are these men – for they are, without exception, men – in Harper’s backroom brain trust, collectively dubbed the “Calgary School”? Flanagan won his conservative spurs targeting the prevailing wisdom on the country’s native people – what he calls the “aboriginal orthodoxy.” Others like Rainer Knopff and Ted Morton – Alberta’s long-stymied senator-elect – have built careers, and a brisk consulting business, taking shots at the Charter of Rights, above all its implications for the pet peeves of social conservatives: feminism, abortion, and same-sex marriage.

But what binds the group is not only friendship, it’s a chippy outsiders’ sense of mission. In a torrent of academic treatises and no-holds -barred commentaries in the media, they have given intellectual heft to a rambunctious, Rocky Mountain brand of libertarianism that has become synonymous with Western alienation.

That neo-conservative agenda may read as if it has been lifted straight from the dusty desk drawers of Ronald Reagan: lower taxes, less federal government, and free markets unfettered by social programs such as Medicare that keep citizens from being forced to pull up their own socks. But their arguments echo the local landscape, where Big Oil sets the tone – usually from a U.S. head office – and Pierre Trudeau’s 1980 National Energy Policy left the conviction that Confederation was rigged against the West.

“Has Harper Really ‘Evolved’?”, by Tom Barrett, TheTyee, January 16, 2006.

Sorry I couldn’t yet dig up the text of Steve’s April 25, 2003 Civitas speech (I think I saw it on the Liberal’s web site during one of the elections), but while you’re reviewing that great common-sense centrist David Frum I’ll amuse myself following up a couple of the hints here.

“Harper, Bush Share Roots in Controversial Philosophy”, by Donald Gutstein, Typee, November 29, 2005.
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UPDATE:

I dug this out of an April 4, 2006 e-mail I sent to Brian Flemming. No link unfortunately, but it would seem I’m getting warm. Goose just walked across my grave realizing with Dion neutralized we will likely get George Parkin Grant’s cute little nephew after all.

I think you are whistling past the graveyard calling Harper a “genuine conservative”.

The minority government party is really just the regional Reform with a few
odds and sods of PC deadenders for flavor. The PM literally parroted Bushisms
about cutting and running on his Afghan trip, and the reported 25Apr03 Civitas
speech was anything but Canadian conservative. With Michael Ignatieff leading
the Liberal party, we’ll have a configuration like Australia’s; that is, a decades
long holiday from democracy (bad time for it, too).