The Man Behind Stephen Harper

This is about half of a longer article in the Walrus. Unfortunately, I haven't read Flanagan's work on Riel. It actually sounds quite interesting. The idea that the masses need to be lied to for their own good goes back to Plato and his Republic and Strauss is just following the Platonic tradition in this. Plato's critique of democratic politicians and of the cognitive capacities of the general public is often right on the mark. Harper, Flanagan, et al. however unlike Plato accept democracy but use in effect the wisdom of the Sophists about how to influence the masses in order to package themselves or their clients as good democratic leaders. On getting elected they can then by degrees introduce their policies i.e. The Truth. Many of their policies will be hidden or at least not stressed. This sort of public manipulation is hardly a preserve of Conservatives. It seems standard for all parties. Policies that attract votes will be stressed and other views that may be even more strongly held but do not have mass appeal will be donwplayed or even denied. Even where there is not a big lie, as in advertising there will be a big stretch in the claims for one's products.

The Man Behind Stephen Harper
The Walrus Magazine, October 2004

by Marci MacDonald?



Consternation rumbled across the country like an approaching thunderhead. For aboriginal leaders, one of their worst nightmares appeared about to come true. Two weeks before last June's federal election, pollsters were suddenly predicting that Conservative leader Stephen Harper might pull off an upset and form the next government. What worried many in First Nations' circles was not Harper himself, but the man poised to become the real power behind his prime ministerial throne: his national campaign director Tom Flanagan, a U.S.-born professor of political science at the University of Calgary.

Most voters had never heard of Flanagan, who has managed to elude the media while helping choreograph Harper's shrewd, three-year consolidation of power. But among aboriginal activists, his name set off alarms. For the past three decades, Flanagan has churned out scholarly studies debunking the heroism of Metis icon Louis Riel, arguing against native land claims, and calling for an end to aboriginal rights. Those stands already made him a controversial figure, but four years ago, his book, First Nations? Second Thoughts, sent tempers off the charts.

In it, Flanagan dismissed the continent's First Nations as merely its "first immigrants" who trekked across the Bering Strait from Siberia, preceding the French and British et al by a few thousand years -- a rewrite which neatly eliminates any indigenous entitlement. Then, invoking the spectre of a country decimated by land claims, he argued the only sensible native policy was outright assimilation.

Aboriginal leaders were apoplectic at the thought Flanagan might have a say in their fate. Led by Phil Fontaine, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, they released an urgent open letter demanding to know if Harper shared Flanagan's views. Two months later, Harper still has not replied. For Clement Chartier, president of the Metis National Council, his silence speaks cautionary volumes. Martin's minority government could fall any minute, giving Harper a second chance at the governmental brass ring. "If Flanagan continues to be part of the Conservative machinery and has the ear of a prime minister," he worries, "it's our existence as a people that's at stake."

That protest provided a wake-up call about Harper's agenda for others too -- not least among them disenchanted Tories who found themselves shut out of the election campaign. At a time when Harper remains vague about his agenda and the Conservatives' first policy convention has been postponed, some have been stunned to discover that the party's course may have already been set by Flanagan and a handful of like-minded ideologues from the University of Calgary's political-science department.

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 also 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.

They also share one beef not confined to Alberta: exasperation at Ottawa's perennial hand-wringing over Quebec. In a 1990 essay in the now defunct West magazine, Barry Cooper, Flanagan's closet departmental pal, advised Quebec separatists that if they were heading for the federal exit, they'd better get on with it -- or, as he now sums it up, "The sooner those guys are out of here the better." Cooper and David Bercuson, now director of the university's Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, promptly followed up with Deconfederation: Canada without Quebec, a polemic that rocketed to the top of best-seller lists and sent shock-waves across the country.

Cooper's article was entitled "Thinking the Unthinkable," a headline that might have been slapped on most of the Calgary School's work. Revelling in their unrepentant iconoclasm, its members take pride in airing once verboten ideas that they have helped to convert to common currency in the national debate. "If we've done anything, we've provided legitimacy for what was the Western view of this country," says Cooper, the group's de facto spokesman. "We've given intelligibility and coherence to a way of looking at it that's outside the St. Lawrence Valley mentality."

But what has put the Calgary School on mainstream radar is not merely its academic rabble-rousing, it's the group's growing influence on Canadian realpolitik -- first through Preston Manning, whose Reform Party tugged the ruling Liberals inexorably to the right; now through Stephen Harper, who commands the best parliamentary showing for any combination of conservatives in a decade -- and sits only a vote of confidence away from toppling the government. In both cases, the linchpin has been Flanagan, once Manning's right-hand man, who masterminded Harper's campaign and remains his closest confidant.

Little is know about the shadowy, sixty-year-old professor who is staying on Harper's post-election payroll as a senior advisor from Calgary. Flanagan declined to be quoted in this story. In Ottawa, where he has refused to interviews for the last three years, some journalists regard him as a modern-day Rasputin manipulating a leader sixteen years his junior. But in Calgary, one of his former students, Ezra Levant, publisher of the eight-month-old Western Standard magazine, cautions against generational cliche. These days, Levant sees Flanagan and Harper more as "symbiotic partners." But he does not disagree with a Globe and Mail report that once referred to Flanagan as the original godfather of the city's conservative intellectual mafia. "I call him Don Tomaso," Levant says, "He is the master strategist, the godfather -- even of Harper."


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The first clue that the University of Calgary political science department is not quite like any other stares out from Room 748 of the Social Sciences tower -- the book-crammed cubby-hole that serves as Barry Cooper's office. Above a visitor's chair hangs the mounted head of a black-tailed deer, academic conference credential dangling from its antlers. Cooper didn't bag the deer himself, but that doesn't mean he would have had qualms about doing so. One of the ties that binds the members of the Calgary School is their macho derring-do in the wilds.

Cooper's bulletin board is littered with snapshots chronicling their hunting and fishing trips. Flanagan, who declines to hunt, is an avid hiker and fisherman who for years led Cooper, Bercuson, and assorted others on an annual angling expedition to the Northwest Territories, where they flew in by Twin Otter to a cabin on Hearne Lake. As airfares soared, Flanagan decreed a change of venue. "Tom said, 'This year we've got to go for meat fish,'" Cooper recalls. "Then he cancels out because of the bloody election."

Harper himself has never been part of the Calgary School's rollicking outdoorsmanship. But their tales provide grist for an image mill meant to set it apart from the Eastern academic establishment, which Cooper scorns for its timorous "garrison mentality." As a disgruntled voice of the West in his weekly Calgary Herald columns, Cooper plays his own role to the hilt. He loves to recount how his great-grandmother shot an Indian intruder in her Alberta ranch house and his uncle announced the Calgary Stampede for forty-two years. He is less quick to admit that, growing up as the son of a wealthy doctor in Vancouver, he went to Shawnigan Lake School, one of the country's more elite private boarding schools, north of Victoria.

In fact, Cooper didn't come to U of C until 1981 -- the last of the group to arrive -- after ten years teaching at York University, where Jack Layton was one of his students. His friends from those days can't recall him showing any interest in politics until he moved west. "Barry's ideas were shaped by Alberta," say Edward Andrew, a political-science professor at the University of Toronto, who dismisses his old pal as "a poseur. Partly he just likes to be a bad boy," Andrew says. "The only influence on Cooper was that he didn't get a job at U of T, despite my best efforts, so he became a Western chauvinist."

Andrew is not so indulgent about Flanagan, whose flinty reserve and dry wit often earn him the label "chilly." Unlike Cooper or Bercuson, Flanagan appears never to have strayed from a conservative path. As he likes to point out to startled Canadians, that path began in Ottawa -- Ottawa, Illinois a blue-collar town 130 kilometres southwest of Chicago. What he seldom mentions is Ottawa's chief claim to fame: on August 21, 1858, ten thousand people gathered to hear the state's young senatorial candidate, Abraham Lincoln, square off against his rival Stephen Douglas in the first of their legendary debates on slavery.

Flanagan shrugs off the Lincoln-Douglas debates as meaningless in shaping his political world view -- just a plaque in the park. Shirley Hiland, a fellow student at Marquette High, is not surprised. Hiland recalls that the nuns on the Roman Catholic school's teaching staff avoided such potentially charged chapters of history. Instead, they focused on the heroic feats of the French missionary who gave the school its name: Father Jacques Marquette who teamed up with the voyageur Louis Jolliet to become the first Europeans to discover and trace the Mississippi. "The emphasis was on Father Marquette," Hiland says, "and how he brought Catholicism to the Indians."

In a town where almost everybody worked for Libby Owens Ford, Flanagan's father had a white-collar job, managing the outlet of an auto-parts chain, that put the family a notch up the social ladder. The defining influences on the household were the Roman Catholic Church and the Republican Party, two forces that did not always mix. Most U.S. Catholics then voted Democrat, but the only time Flanagan's father made that radical gesture was in 1960 when a fellow Irish Catholic named John Kennedy ran for president

Popular and known for taking on any teacher that he thought had made a mistake, Flanagan graduated from Marquette in 1961 as class valedictorian, winning a $500 scholarship from the Retail Clerks of America -- more than half his college tuition -- a reward for his after-school labours at the town A&P. His father wanted him to go to Harvard, but he opted for the Catholic bastion of Indiana's Notre Dame, where political science meant Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas.

On every side, the social glue of America was coming unstuck: Kennedy as assassinated, Martin Luther King marched on Washington, and protests against the Vietnam War were breaking out like wildfires. But at Notre Dame, Flanagan found a haven of tradition and certainty. There he met his first wife and was captivated by another figure who would shape his career: Eric Voegelin, a German-born philosopher who had fled Hitler and blamed a flawed utopian version of Christianity for spawning totalitarian movements like Nazism and Communism. In Voegelin's complex Weltanschauung, Flanagan found a philosophical framework that reconciled his Roman Catholic faith with his family's conservative politics. He confided later that he felt he'd been drifting leftward. Suddenly, Voegelin pulled him back from that perilous course.

Flanagan went on to pursue his PhD at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where John Hallowell, one of Voegelin's disciples, presided over the political science department. Among his fellow grad students was an ebullient Canadian with whom he found himself sharing real estate at the campus library. "I show up in the carrel I've been assigned," Cooper recalls, "and Flanagan's in it."

They worked out shifts -- Flanagan, by then married, got the cubicle by day, Cooper at night -- laying the foundation for a forty-year friendship. In 1996, at the height of Flanagan's notoriety for Riel-bashing, Cooper thumbed his nose at his pal's critics by nominating him to the Royal Society of Canada. "I don't think I disagree with Tom on anything," Cooper says, "Political or intellectual."


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In Durham, a North Carolina radio host named Jesse Helms was constantly denouncing desegregation on air, cloaking his rage in the mantra of federal decentralization: states rights. But classmates can't recall Flanagan or his Duke pals ever debating lunch-counter sit-ins or other Sixties' hot-button issues when they met for barbecue and hush puppies on Friday nights. "I don't remember any discussion of the civil-rights movement or the draft," says Elliot Tepper, a Carleton professor who was Cooper's roommate. "We were not into sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll. We were into witty exchanges of bons mots."

The closest brush Flanagan had with the hurly burly of live politics was the friendship he struck up with one of Cooper's professors, Allan Kornberg, Duke's expert on decoding the statistical mysteries behind voting patterns -- a science then still in its infancy. A native of Manitoba, Kornberg was celebrated on campus for financing his academic career not only as a lineman for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, but as a professional wrestler, the "Kosher Krusher." He was a key influence on Duke's Canadian studies program, and since 1964 has charted the political winds in Canada, including those that swept through the last election. Now, at 73, the self-confessed "registered Republican" applauds Flanagan and Cooper's increasing clout. "Given the left-of-centre intellectual climate in Canada," he says, "I'm delighted. It's good for debate."

Kornberg has been periodically seconded to ply his expertise on Canada for the U.S. government, probing the risk of a destabilizing crack-up on America's northern flank. Before the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty, he was on loan to Washington's National Science Foundation, constantly measuring Lucien Bouchard's pequiste troop strength. Later, he took the pulse of Reform Party voters. Beneath the yawn-inducing titles of his studies -- A Polity on the Edge: Canada and the Politics of Fragmentation -- his work has surveyed the national psyche through every tremor that might send U.S. bureaucrats scrambling for a foreign-policy Plan B. Those governmental gigs are listed on Kornberg's curriculum vitae, along with consulting stints to the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon. But in a phone interview, he adds one detail: during the Vietnam War he was "a consultant on psychological operations and counter-insurgency" -- a rare intelligence assignment for a political number cruncher.

In 1967, Flanagan's burgeoning friendship with Kornberg spawned his first scholarly paper: a joint study of the ultraconservative voters who backed Barry Goldwater's abortive 1964 bid for the White House. Even then, Kornberg regarded Flanagan as one of Duke's most conservative students. "He believes many people want a risk-free society," Kornberg says. "He is sort of like Goldwater: he believes people have to take care of themselves."

What brought Flanagan to Alberta where that bootstrap ideology would find such fertile ground? He says only that he needed a job: he and his wife had already started a family (last year his oldest daughter, Melissa, retired from a twelve-year communications career with the U.S. Army). At the time, new Canadian universities were hatching across the country, prompting a hiring spree that outstripped the national crop of PhDs. But Flanagan didn't apply for the post. In the spring of 1948, when he was offered an assistant professorship -- just as Pierre Trudeau came to power -- he was researching his thesis on an obscure German novelist in the turbulent compound of the Free University of West Berlin, a U.S.-funded institution briefly shuttered by anti-American protests. When the offer arrived in the mail, Flanagan had to go to the library to look up Calgary on the map.

The invitation came from E. Burke Inlow, another American, and the first head of U of C's political-science department. An expert on Iran and the Far East who died last year, Inlow himself had been recruited directly from an assignment with the Pentagon. There, according to his son, Brand, a Calgary lawyer, he was engaged in "cultural work -- providing intelligence to people we (the U.S. government) were sending to the Middle East."

For Inlow, Flanagan's conservative inclinations were no coincidence. He and his successors set out expressly to counter the prevailing leftist currents on the country's campuses. "Canadian universities were almost the fiefdom of Karl Marx," says Anthony Parel, a Jesuit-trained expert on Machiavelli, whom Inlow hired from Radio Vatican in Rome. "We wanted balance." Balance is always in the eye of the beholder. Soon critics charged that the department had leaned too far to starboard. "They said we were all right-wing reactionaries," Parel winces. "Very offensive epithets were used." Radha Jhappan, now an associate professor at Carleton, remembers concluding it was pointless to apply for a more senior post in what she now refers to as the "department of redneckology." At U of C, "I realized they would rather hire a chimpanzee than me," she says. "I was perceived as leftist, feminist -- everything they can't abide."

Still, it wasn't until the spring of 1996 that Flanagan bounded into the department brandishing a paper from a scholar at John Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. "He said, 'Hey guys, guess what? We're a 'school!'" Cooper recalls. That twenty-page treatise entitled "The Calgary School: The New Motor of Canadian Political Thought" reported that a band of Alberta academics had "given birth a new form of nationalism, that in turn is changing the terms of debate in English Canada."

Today, its members can't seem to decided whether to bask in their ongoing celebrity or shoot down the notion entirely. "It's an external construct," scoffs Cooper, rhyming off the group's internal differences, then diving into his filing cabinet to unearth proof of their shared crusades. But it seems no accident that the group's first nod of recognition came from an American. Not only are Flanagan and Morton U.S.-born, but Cooper is a member of the Bohemian Club, a fraternity of Republican movers and shakers who fork out a $10,000 initiation fee to gather every year in the redwoods outside San Francisco for a policy version of summer camp. In a crowd that has included Henry Kissinger and Vice-President Dick Cheney, Cooper gives a regular talk on Canadian politics -- one reason the Calgary School's views many hold more sway in Washington than Ottawa.

For the Calgary School, in turn, intellectual inspiration has always run north-south, not east-west. Its papers are studded with admiring references to the most controversial figures on the U.S. conservative landscape. In his argument for aboriginal assimilation, Flanagan repeatedly cites Thomas Sowell, a black Republican who became the darling of the Reagan-Bush right for attacking affirmative action. Not surprisingly, most of the group's policy prescriptions -- from an elected senate to parliamentary approval of judges -- would have one effect: they would wipe out the quirky bilateral differences that are stumbling blocks to seamless integration with the Unites States.

But Shadia Drury, a member of the U of C department until last year, accuses her former colleagues of harbouring a more sinister mission. An expert on Leo Strauss, the philosophical father of the neo-conservative movement, Drury paints the Calgary School as a home-grown variation of American Straussians like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who share their teacher's deep suspicion of liberal democracy. Strauss argued that a ruling elite often had to resort to deception -- a noble lie -- to protect its citizens from themselves. To that end, he recommended harnessing the simplistic platitudes of populism to galvanize mass support for measures that would in fact restrict rights. Drury warned the Globe's John Ibbitson that the members of the Calgary School "want to replace the rule of law with the populism of the majority," and labelled Stephen Harper "their product."

If so, there's no mystery of the appeal of Strauss' theories to Flanagan or Cooper, who edited Strauss' thirty-year correspondence with Voegelin, Faith and Political Philosophy. "Strauss believed that good statesmen have powers of judgment and must rely on an inner circle," the University of Chicago's Robert Pippin told Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker last year. "The person who whispers in the ear of the King is more important than the King."

From his summer home outside Washington, Kornberg scoffs at charges that his proteges are ultra-rightists masquerading as anti-establishment eggheads. "Their extremism has been greatly exaggerated," he says. "It wouldn't be surprising if it came from the University of Toronto or McGill?. It's the fact that it's a provincial university out West that people find outrageous -- how dare they ?!"


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At first, Flanagan had no plans to stay in Calgary. His wife was homesick -- she eventually left the country, and the marriage, with their two kids -- and he'd never had the slightest interest in Canadian politics. But once he decided to apply for citizenship, he volunteered to teach a summer class in the subject to force himself into a crash course. In the midst of that reading blitz, he stumbled on Louis Riel, the Metis firebrand hanged by Sir John A. Macdonald's government in 1885 for treason.

What intrigued Flanagan was not Riel's contentious place in history, but scattered references to his claims of prophecy. For Flanagan those allusions were the equivalent of a scholarly smoking gun. Suddenly, he saw Riel's Metis rebellions as an attempt to found one of those misguided messianic movements against which Voegelin warned. In Riel's diaries and the obscure archives of Roman Catholic orders, he found evidence of his suspicions.

The result was Louis "David" Riel: "Prophet of the New World," his 1979 profile of a man driven by ecstatic visions to raise a purified North American version of the Catholic Church with its papal seat in St. Boniface outside Winnipeg. According to Flanagan, not only did Riel view himself as its chief prophet -- an heir to the Biblical King David -- but he went to the gallows convinced that, Christ-like, he would rise again on the third day. "Riel did not see himself as a tribal soothsayer," Flanagan writes. "He was the voice of God to a sinful world."

Historians applauded Flanagan's research, excavating Riel's unsuspected religiosity, and the University of British Columbia awarded him its biography prize. But Metis and aboriginal scholars were appalled. Flanagan's Riel wasn't merely a stressed-out leader who'd had a mental breakdown; he was a delusional religious crackpot. "He turns nearly every interpretation of Riel into megalomania," say Regina writer Maggie Siggins whose best-selling biography of Riel appeared five years later. To make him that kind of crazy is to say that aboriginal people who followed him have no claim on land."

It would take Flanagan another four years to get around to the subject of land claims. Along the way he became a one-man Riel industry, turning out a flood of books and papers, then constantly updating them with new research that spurred him to increasingly damning conclusions. In his 1983 preface to Riel and the Rebellion: 1885 Reconsidered, Flanagan confessed that earlier he'd taken for granted that the Metis had justified gripes. Now he was recanting. "I concluded that the Metis grievances were at least partly of their own making," he wrote. Flanagan admitted he was rushing his revised opinions into print with a motive: to block lobbying for a posthumous pardon that would exonerate Riel in time for the 1985 centennial of the Northwest Rebellion. A pardon, he declared, "now strikes me as quite wrong."

By the 2000 edition, he was even more adamant. Rehabilitating Riel's reputation, he warned, could cost Canadian taxpayers billions in Metis land claims. What seems most striking about the revised text is it notched-up adversarial tone. Flanagan's closing argument reads not like a measured scholarly assessment, but political scare-mongering. In establishing his Metis provisional governments, Riel had twice issued unilateral declarations of independence from the federal government, Flanagan pointed out -- exactly what Ottawa feared from Quebec.

What had happened to provoke not only Flanagan's hardened line, but his rush to man the federal barricades? He said he simply had a chance for more research -- an exercise that turns out to be financed largely from federal coffers. Between 1972 and 1994, he received nearly $620,000 in research grants on the subject from the Canada Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. That largesse includes a rare scholarly bonanza: $500,000 for a five-year project with four other academics co-editing the collected writings of Louis Riel.

But Flanagan's views wouldn't have raised more than eyebrows if his telephone hadn't rung on a June afternoon in 1986. The Justice Department offered him a $103,000 contract as its chief historical consultant on one of the biggest land-claims cases before the federal courts: a suit by the Manitoba Metis Federation for 1.4 million acres promised to Riel and his followers in 1870.

Flanagan has gone on to reprise that role in a half-dozen other federal aboriginal disputes, including Victor Buffalo, et. al. vs. The Queen -- a landmark claim for more than $1 billion in damages by the Samson Cree Nation at Hobbema, near Edmonton, over Ottawa's handling of its oil and gas royalties. The Manitoba and Alberta governments have also hired him for their own battles over treaty rights. "What he's become is a very convenient tool for the government," says David Chartrand, president of the Manitoba Metis Federation.

Flanagan's expert-witness stints have not proved unrewarding, but friends insist he is driven not by money but ideology. "He's concerned that the state should not adopt people as wards," says Allan Kornberg. "It eventually has a corrosive effect on the entire society." That libertarian loathing of special rights for any group is the philosophical underpinning of Flanagan's most provocative work, First Nations? Second Thoughts, which unleashed outrage not only in aboriginal circles, but in the usually restrained corridors of academe. "These aren't second thoughts," says Joyce Green, an associate professor at the University of Regina and a Metis herself. "They're the same old first thoughts that the colonizers came with from Europe. It's a celebration of the original arguments that supported the subordination of indigenous peoples."

What ignited the most fury was Flanagan's contention that aboriginals were simply conquered peoples who'd been bested by Europeans with a higher degree of "civilization," as he termed it. That argument, peppered with references to "savagery," hadn't been heard in polite company for decades. "There's a fundamental racism that underpins his view," says Radha Jhappan. "It's an amazingly selective reading of history and it's driven by a particular right-wing agenda that wants to undermine the claims of collectivity."

But Flanagan's fans cheered the book as a brash intellectual ice breaker on a subject that has bedevilled Ottawa policy-makers for years. "What Tom was trying to do was demythologize a lot of stuff that needed demythologizing," says David Bercuson. "Political correctness had settled over the issue like a wet blanket."

When First Nations? Second Thoughts won the $25,000 Donner Prize in 2001, Flanagan's foes weren't surprised. The award is funded by the Donner Canada Foundation, which set out to promote a Reaganite agenda in this country. The foundation, in fact, funded Flanagan's basic research with a $25,000 grant.

But when the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA) awarded Flanagan's book its prestigious Donald Smiley Prize, all hell broke loose. Gurston Dacks, an expert in aboriginal rights who chaired the three-member jury, quit after finding himself outvoted. In a tense, closed-door session, the CPSA's board decided to keep Dacks' walkout under wraps and even today no one will talk about it. But in political-science circles the decision left lasting bruises. "It fractured the community," says Joyce Green, "because it implicated us all in rewarding something that many of us felt was deeply wrong."

Today, Flanagan's work remains an explosive topic, but few of his colleagues are willing to criticize him -- at least on the record. After an introductory political-science textbook he co-authored was dropped from Ontario's approved list of high-school texts because of its "racial, religious, and sex bias" against women and Jews, he became active in the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, an aggressive lobby of professors fighting political correctness, on whose board he now sits.

Certainly, by last June there was no lack of opinion that Flanagan's own writings were controversial, if not right off the mainstream map. As the Conservatives' campaign director, he seemed perfect fodder for the sort of Liberal attack ads already depicting Stephen Harper as a scary extremist with a hidden agenda. The mystery is why Paul Martin's admen didn't jump on that tailor-made target.

One reason for their reluctance may well have been case #C1-81-01--01010. After twenty years, the Manitoba Metis' land claims were still in federal court and the stakes for Martin's government are high -- vast tracts of prime Manitoba real estate, including slices of Winnipeg, and cash reparations that could run to billions of dollars. In that battle, as in at least two others, the Department of Justice is still pinning much of its defence on Flanagan's expert testimony.

The Liberal's silence not only left him untouchable, but it may have allowed Harper to sidestep the question posed by aboriginal leaders: does he share Flanagan's views? Rick Anderson, who has worked with both Harper and Flanagan in the Reform Party, has no doubts. "I'd be astounded if it were otherwise," he says, "They're intellectual soulmates, philosophical soulmates."


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