Wildrose may be poised to defeat Progressive Conservative dynasty in Alberta

An article in the Globe and Mail argues that the Progressive Conservatives may go down to defeat because they have ignored a central tenet of the the party's success under Peter Lougheed who first brought the party to power more than forty years ago.

While Lougheed was moderately progressive as a conservative he paid attention to his back benchers. He consulted them constantly and on occasion even let them overrule cabinet decisions. It worked to keep harmony for the most part.

However in recent years some back benchers especially in some rural areas have felt left out. Even more dramatic some of the oil patch supporters have been miffed that a former premier Ed Stelmach raised royalties.

The problem as the Globe article sees it is that the Progressive Conservatives had huge support on the right so they tried to keep the left at Bay. In order to do so they adopted more liberal policies that alienated their base. This is a common tactic for parties to remain in power. In the U.S. the Democratic party moves right because the left in the Democratic party have no where to go. The Conservatives moved left slightly to attract and keep votes from going to the Liberals and NDP. However the tactic has backfired and disgruntled conservatives formed the Wildrose party.

While Peter Lougheed the patriarch of the Progressive Conservative party continues to support the party and its leader Alison Redford many federal Conservatives support the Wildrose. The former chief of staff for Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper Tom Flanagan not only supports the Wildrose Party but is manager of Danielle Smith's the Wildrose leader's campaign. We will know on Monday if the Wildroses are more than just a thorn in the side of the ruling Progressive Conservatives.

Tom Flanagan: Ignatieff repeats Harper's Errors

Although I am at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Flanagan most of his articles that I have read are far better than most of the fluff that passes for political commentary in Canada. His articles are almost always interesting and perceptive and in this case place Ignatieff's actions in a unique historical perspective. At one time Flanagan was a Conservative campaign manager and close to Harper. I am not sure what the situation is now.

Ignatieff needs a history lesson


Tom Flanagan

From Friday's Globe and Mail
Published on Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009 6:59PM EDT

Last updated on Saturday, Oct. 31, 2009 2:51AM EDT


.Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana

The leader of the opposition, after supporting the minority government's budget, decides that he would like to force an election after all. He publicly announces his intention to defeat the government, leaving the prime minister lots of time to react. Then the roof caves in at Stornoway.

The government whips up a storm of public opposition to an election, telling people that they will lose benefits that were in the budget but have not yet passed through Parliament. Helping the government to survive, Jack Layton offers crucial support in return for policy concessions that will please NDP supporters. At a major turning point, the unity of the opposition is threatened as the leader loses the support of a key member of the caucus.

Public reaction is savage. People say they don't want an election, and the opposition falls to rock-bottom standing in the polls while the government soars. Pundits indulge in a feeding frenzy over the badly wounded body of the opposition leader. They deride his strategy. They demand that he reveal the platform he will run on in the next election campaign. They speculate that his political career is over. In response, the leader replaces his chief of staff and contemplates further changes in his retinue.

A description of Michael Ignatieff's last two months? Of course.

But every word also describes what happened to Stephen Harper in the spring of 2005. After initially supporting Paul Martin's budget, Mr. Harper decided to defeat the government when embarrassing revelations started to trickle out from the Gomery inquiry into the Liberal sponsorship scandal.

Then everything happened as just described. The government mobilized public opinion against an election, the NDP changed sides, Belinda Stronach defected to the Liberals, Conservative poll numbers nosedived, Mr. Harper was savaged in the media and he reorganized his office.

A few conclusions seem obvious. First, it is useful to read history. Several recent books have described what happened to Mr. Harper in 2005, so it is hard to see why the Liberals would rush to repeat all the same mistakes. Although Mr. Ignatieff is a noted scholar, his job as leader means he doesn't have much time to read, but doesn't anyone on his staff read books about their opponents? When I published Harper's Team , Mr. Harper was peeved I was putting out too much information, but to judge from the Liberals' carelessness, he needn't have worried.

Second, if you're going to defeat the government, do it quickly. After three elections in five years, Canadians are tired of going to the polls. Governments have many means to excite public opinion against those who would force an election, and it's even easier to do so in the midst of a global recession. Mr. Harper learned the risks of giving the government time to react, so he dispatched Paul Martin quickly in November, 2005.

Third, if you're going to defeat the government, it helps to have a reason beyond thinking that you might be able to win the next election. The public knows that everything politicians do is motivated to a degree by partisan self-interest, but they also expect to see some concern for the public good. Having voted in the House of Commons for all of Mr. Harper's major policies, Mr. Ignatieff couldn't offer any cogent reason for saying on Sept. 1, “Mr. Harper, your time is up.”

Mr. Ignatieff has messed up big-time, but the outlook doesn't have to be entirely bleak. Since he has been imitating Mr. Harper so closely, he can take solace from the fact that the Conservative leader bounced back, winning the next election and becoming prime minister less than a year after his time of troubles in spring 2005.

Replacing a chief of staff won't solve anything (in politics, the person who is fired is seldom to blame for what went wrong), but it can be an occasion for starting over.

The key is self-interrogation. Someone who wants the ultimate prize of becoming PM has to accept responsibility for all the things that go wrong along the way and figure out how not to repeat those errors (while realizing he will inevitably make others). That's the most important lesson of Mr. Harper's annus horribilis of 2005: that a leader can rebound from disaster to triumph if he accepts responsibility for his mistakes and learns to avoid them in the future.

Tom Flanagan is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary and a former federal Conservative campaign manager.

Flanagan: Have the Liberals gone soft?

No doubt negative ads have a long history but there are negative ads and then there are negative ads. Many such ads give information out of context so as to lead people to incorrect conclusions. The Bloc Quebecois voting against minimum sentences for trafficking children under 18. The conclusion people probably would draw is that the Bloc is soft on the worst sort of criminals whereas their objection is simply that there are all kinds of cases and circumstances and judges should have the discretion over sentencing.
Flanagan notes that the Liberals too have used negative ads. This is a fine example of the tu quoque fallacy. Just because the Liberals do it too does not make the ads right.
Some negative advertising does indeed have significant informative functions. The attack ads against Ignatieff rightly point out that he was away from Canada much of his life and that he spoke of the U.S. as being his country but often attack ads are primarily emotive and the factual elements are often distorted or incidental to the intended emotive effect. Of course attack ads can go too far and have the opposite emotive effect actually causing people to feel more favorable to those attacked. Who knows maybe the Liberal righteous indignation at Conservative attacks ads may actually work. I doubt it though.



Have the Liberals gone soft? Why are they upset over attack ads?
Tom Flanagan
From Monday's Globe and Mail Last updated on Monday, Jul. 13, 2009 08:45AM EDT

See that your whole campaign is full of show, glorious and colourful; and see that your competitors are smeared with an evil reputation for crime, vice, or bribery.
- Quintus Tullius Cicero, 63 BC
These words come from the world's first campaign manual, reportedly written by the brother of the Roman statesman Cicero. Not much has changed since then. Election campaigns have always been, and always will be, both positive and negative.
Elections are an exercise in comparative judgment. Campaign professionals understand the need to give voters reasons to support their candidate and reject the others. It's pretty simple, really - about as obvious as the need for both running and tackling in a football game.
In modern Canadian politics, the Liberals have been the masters of negative campaigning. In 1988, they ran ads almost accusing Brian Mulroney of treason, of selling out Canada to the United States through the free-trade agreement. In 1991, Sheila Copps compared Preston Manning to David Duke, the former Louisiana Ku Klux Klan leader. In 2000, Warren Kinsella went on television to ridicule Stockwell Day's alleged (never demonstrated) belief in Young Earth creationism.
In 2004, the Liberals eked out a minority victory with wave after wave of negative ads about Stephen Harper's supposed “secret agenda” - hard to refute publicly because it was secret by definition. Showing the preternatural gift of prophecy, the Liberals also ran ads about the “$50-billion black hole” in the Conservative budget projections. There was no evidence for it in 2004, but it came true in 2009
Late in the 2006 campaign, the desperate Liberals released a suite of negative ads that backfired against them. Like every other tactic in politics, negative advertising is only effective if it is well executed. These ads were so far over the top that they were parodied by the late-lamented Frank magazine: “Is Stephen Harper the Antichrist? We just don't know. He refuses to talk about it. Now why would he do that?”
Since then, however, the tough-as-nails Liberal warriors have begun to sound like whiny schoolgirls, complaining about Conservative negative ads. Not only do they whimper when the Conservatives run their ads against Liberal leaders Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, but they complain when the Conservatives attack the Bloc Québécois for having voted in Parliament against minimum sentences for trafficking in children under 18.
All these Conservative ads belong to the most moderate and usually most effective genre of negative campaigning. They focus on the public record, repeating the words and recounting the deeds of political opponents. Mr. Dion said it's not easy being a leader; Mr. Ignatieff was out of Canada for decades; the Bloc voted against Bill C-268. The ads contain no invented allegations, no exposé of private affairs, no attacks on family members - just the recall of past news stories.
So why are the Liberals so upset? Have they really gone soft? Actually, I suspect their response is more cerebral. ........................... So-called negative advertising is an integral part of informing voters so they can make up their own minds.
Tom Flanagan, a former Conservative campaign manager, is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary.

Tom Flanagan: Mr. Harper's Canada

This is from the Globe and Mail.
I must admit that Flanagan is a good writer, much better than some better known columnists for sure. Even much of the substance of what he writes is quite correct. However, it is also clear that the content is given a certain spin which is hardly surprising given Flanagan's conservative leanings.
As Flanagan points out, Harper will have little wiggle room as far as spending is concerned. Although Flanagan admits that running deficits is a possibility and not to be rejected out of hand he plainly thinks they are dangerous and to be avoided. No doubt Harper channels Flanagan on these issues! What he does not say because it might upset the audience is that this will be an opportunity to restrict spending on some social programs. Flanagan rightly points out that there will be lower revenues with an economic slowdown. If the budget is not to go into a large deficit programs will need to be cut. Cuts won't likely be in military spending as Flanagan regards the military as underfunded.
Flanagan recommends a speak softly and carry a big stick or whip policy for Harper. This is no doubt already evident in Harper's conciliatory words after his victory. However, the same rhetoric followed his last minority victory. As long as he can wheedle the Liberals or someone else into supporting him he will not need the threat of confidence votes but if that policy fails out comes the whip. In either case the main opposition, the Liberals, are likely to be co-operative or supine, sitting on their hands again. Harper himself maintains that even if he got a majority he would govern on his platform and as if he had a majority. On this Harper will probably keep his word for a change.



Mr. Harper's Canada

TOM FLANAGAN
From Friday's Globe and Mail
October 16, 2008 at 9:59 PM EDT
To every thing there is a season.
-Ecclesiastes 3:1
Prime Minister Stephen Harper invoked these words from Scripture in his election-night speech not to announce a social conservative theocracy but to signal a strategic shift. The Conservatives won this election by polarizing against a divided centre-left, but the way to govern for the next couple of years will be to tack back and forth between the opposition parties, using the arts of conciliation and compromise to build support for each piece of legislation as needed. Mr. Harper will use the coalition-building talents he showed when he reunited the fragmented Canadian Alliance, then pursued the successful merger with the Progressive Conservatives.
It is essentially the way Mr. Harper operated in the first half of his previous minority government, before the Liberals became more combative under their new leader, Stéphane Dion. Thereafter, Mr. Harper switched to intimidation, using confidence votes and the threat of dissolution to pursue his agenda. It worked well in terms of passing legislation, but it also encouraged the opposition to fight back by hijacking parliamentary committees. If Mr. Harper eases up on confidence votes, it should encourage a more co-operative spirit among the opposition. If not, he can always go back to the lash.


Dealing with the international liquidity crisis is not Parliament's responsibility; it will depend mainly on the regulatory authority of the Bank of Canada and executive actions of the Department of Finance, not new legislation. Mr. Harper's softer approach should be sufficient for the parliamentary task at hand – which is to pass whatever parts of the not very ambitious Conservative election platform that the government thinks it can afford under deteriorating economic conditions.
Indeed, the government's main challenge will be to deal with these new conditions. It is obvious that the next two fiscal years will be a period of slower or even negative growth, in which federal revenues are bound to level off, if not decline. This situation will provide the first real test for the incremental conservatism that has brought Mr. Harper to power.
Since forming the Conservative Party of Canada in 2003, Mr. Harper has won elections and maintained support in government by disbursing the federal budgetary surplus. Conservatism in power meant a piñata of tax cuts and popular new programs such as the child-care allowance, while also transferring more money to the provinces and addressing the long-neglected needs of the Canadian Forces. But the party is over because there will soon be little, if any, federal surplus to distribute.
After doing the easy and popular part of incremental conservatism, Mr. Harper now has to tackle the hard and unpopular part – wrestling the annual growth in federal expenditures back down to a combination of inflation, population increase and real economic growth, which amounts to about 4 per cent a year. In contrast, four years of minority government have put federal expenditures on an unsustainable growth track of more than 7 per cent a year.
Moving back from 7 per cent to 4 per cent may not sound like much, but it means immediately reducing program spending by $6-billion a year – not an easy task when most federal spending consists of monetary transfers to people and provinces that are fixed by legislation and can only be reduced by changing the law. In fact, some federal expenses are bound to go up in hard times. Think of employment insurance (more people will be unemployed) and pensions (more people will retire as an alternative to unemployment). The discretionary part of federal spending is really quite small in proportion to the size of the whole budget.
In theory, running a deficit in periods of economic slowdown is a good idea as along as the budget is balanced over the business cycle but, in practice, has proved impossible to do responsibly. It's like an alcoholic saying, “One drink won't hurt.” Canadians learned this lesson when we went through 20 years of chronic deficit spending from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s.
Another easy way out is dodgy accounting. It might be tempting, for example, to use the $4.2-billion from the Advanced Wireless Spectrum auction to cover a deficit. But that really won't work, because it is a one-time windfall, whereas spending has to be reduced for the long term.
Mr. Harper spoke during the campaign of gradually making Canada a more conservative country, and he has made some progress on that score. For example, his family-oriented tax cuts and grants have proved an effective substitute for the publicly financed institutional child care proposed by the parties of the left. But the fiscal surplus gave him something to work with; he could put money in parents' pockets to replace the allure of a state system.
It will be harder in the next few years to sell the merits of conservatism without money to spend – harder but not impossible. It is a question of leadership. Mr. Harper ran and was re-elected on this strength of his leadership; now it will be put to the test.
Tom Flanagan is a p rofessor of political science at the University of Calgary and a former Conservative campaign manager

Bankrupting the bankrupt Liberals

This is an interesting and well written article by a well known Conservative strategist. Flanagan makes some excellent points. Note that Flanagan assumes that lack of funds will be a millstone around the Liberals' neck. Other things being equal this is probably true but there are times when voters become so disgusted with a ruling party that a Mickey Mouse poor as a church mouse could win. The Liberals have done nothing to merit voter support but yet they remain close to the Conservatives at the polls. It is a race to determine who is the least disgusting.
There are no doubt many reasons for the Conservatives to call an election now but Flanagan puts a new spin on the election call and his reasoning is not without some merit. However Harper also probably wants to avoid possible poor results in byelections, further digging up of dirt by committees, and worsening economic times. Dion will have his opportunity to show that he has been underestimated by his opponents. If Dion does very well and is able to form his own minority or majority government I wonder if Harper will fade from the scene.

The Grits won't die - they'll just fade away
And if they're not careful, they could end up in a financial pit
TOM FLANAGAN
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
August 28, 2008 at 9:11 AM EDT
Carthago delenda est.
- Cato the Elder
Although the looming fall election seems mired in technicalities about election dates, the stakes are very high for the party leaders, especially for Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion. He has to do much better than Paul Martin did in the last election. He has to lead his Liberals to victory, or at least to such an improvement that the Conservative minority government is destabilized.
Anything less, and Liberal supporters, who have long been accustomed to winning, will be clamouring for his scalp.
But the party's precarious financial state makes the stakes even higher for the Liberal Party as an institution than for Mr. Dion as a leader.
Here's what we know about Liberal finances:
Their fundraising stinks. They raise only about $5-million a year, barely ahead of the New Democrats and less than a third of what the Conservatives can muster. They are surviving on their government subsidy - currently about $9-million a year, based on the 4.5 million votes they received in 2006.
They have borrowed $2-million from the banks to cover operating expenses. The national party's credit rating was so poor that wealthy constituency associations had to guarantee the loan.
Candidates from the last leadership race still owe about $2-million from their campaigns. Elections Canada has given them another 18 months to pay off those loans, but that is diverting fundraising efforts from the party to the candidates.
The Liberals can borrow the money they need to run a fully funded, $19-million national campaign - but loans have to be paid back. Their 50-per-cent rebate from Elections Canada will provide $9-million, but how will the rest of the loan be repaid? Here's where things get really dangerous for the Liberals.
Suppose Dion-o-mania fails to materialize and the Liberals get fewer votes than they did in 2006. Then their subsidy, already down to 86 per cent of what it was when the new system started in 2004, will fall even further. Yet, much of this declining subsidy will be dedicated to repaying their bank loans because Liberal fundraising will also fall; people don't like to give money to losers. And the banks can't agree to write off the loans or substantially soften their terms because that would constitute an illegal corporate donation.
Moreover, Mr. Dion - never very popular in his party - will be facing calls to resign. But that means a new leadership race, even before the debts from the previous one have been repaid, as the big boys - Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae - square off for an expensive final slugfest.
The Liberal Party will undoubtedly survive the coming election, but it may emerge financially crippled, with the banks laying claim to much of its (now smaller) public subsidy, and fundraisers working to pay off debts from leadership races past and present.
The first order of business for any new Liberal leader will be to restore the party to financial health. Over four years, John Tory succeeded in doing that for the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, but provincial law allowed him to draw on corporate and high-end individual donations. Under federal law, however, the Liberals are confined to grassroots fundraising, which they have not yet learned how to do.
Against this backdrop, the Conservatives would appear to have a viable long-term strategy: force the Liberals to exhaust their limited resources in repeated battles.
Do you remember your ancient history? From a Conservative point of view, this is a rerun of the Punic Wars, with the Conservatives starring as the rising Roman republic and the Liberals cast as the evil empire of Carthage. In the first Punic War, the Romans took Sicily from Carthage; in the second, they took the rest of the Carthaginian possessions in Europe; and in the third, they defeated Carthage totally, razed the city to the ground and sowed salt in the fields so nothing would ever grow there again.
In the first Canadian Punic War, the Conservatives brought the Liberals down to a minority government; in the second, they pushed the Liberals out of government altogether, although they not did get their own majority. What will happen in the impending third Canadian Punic War?
Destruction of the Liberals is not at hand; there will be further sequels to this movie. But if the Liberals are not careful, they, like the federal Progressive Conservatives of sainted memory, could be pushed into a financial pit they can never climb out of.

Conservatives "tightening the screws on the federal government"

This is from straightgoods. Flanagan is one of Harper's key advisors on strategy and part of the "Calgary School". Part of the strategy is to make Harper look to be a moderate while skilfully introducing right wing policies by degrees. As this article shows Harper has made it difficult if not impossible to introduce new federal programs. Of course NAFTA also makes many new programs impossible if the involve nationalisation since investors would have to be compensated for lost profits. This makes new public auto insurance programs virtually impossible.


Harper's "nation of shopping centres"

Conservatives have re-engineered the budget to prevent any future government from introducing new national programs.

Dateline: Monday, April 21, 2008

by Frances Russell for the Winnipeg Free Press

Tom Flanagan, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's longtime confidant and former chief of staff, is delighted at the Conservatives' success in "tightening the screws on the federal government" to dramatically reduce its significance in the daily lives of Canadians.

The Conservatives' three budgets have left Ottawa financially incapable of offering any new national social program like affordable housing, higher education or day care. Although overall spending went up, mostly on the military, measures were taken to deplete revenues to the point future governments' hands will be tied unless they raise taxes or run deficits, both prescriptions for political suicide.

By 2010, federal revenues as a share of GDP will fall to their lowest level since John Diefenbaker left office in 1963. Three years before national medicare, revenues were 14.9 per cent of GDP. They rose to a peak of 19.5 per cent in 1974-75 but are projected to drop to just 15.3 per cent in 2009-10.

In fact, the federal Finance Department's fiscal monitor, released at the end of March, shows that revenue growth came to a sudden halt in January, shrinking that month's surplus to a mere $600 million as the GST and personal income tax reductions started eating into Ottawa's tax take

"They've gradually re-engineered the system. I'm quite impressed with it," Flanagan told The Canadian Press in an interview last month. "They're boxing in the ability of the federal government to come up with new program ideas... The federal government is now more constrained, the provinces have more revenue and conservatives should be happy."

Harper "really didn't have the option of the cataclysmic approach because you can't do that without a majority," Flanagan continued. "So he's made the incremental approach work — all the time having the insecurity of a minority government. It's really quite a performance, I think... Over a period of a few years they've got all this in place and they never appeared to be making a radical shift. But the cumulative impact of all these together is creating a new profile."

Not only have the Conservatives boxed in the federal spending power in general, he said, but "they're also boxing in the Liberals from being able to campaign on expensive promises."

Flanagan is impressed that Harper managed to execute his stealthy revolution in Canadian public policy with barely a whimper from the public. But that, too, was the strategy according to the University of Calgary professor and Reform party founder....

For the whole story, please go to the related site below.

Frances Russell is a Winnipeg-based freelance journalist and author. She is a regular contributor to the Winnipeg Free Press and is the author of two books, Mistehay Sakahegan — The Great Lake, a historical "biography" of Lake Winnipeg which won her the 2000 Manitoba Historical Society's Margaret McWilliams Award for popular history, and The Canadian Crucible — Manitoba’s Role in Canada's Great Divide, an examination of how French-English relations in the "Keystone" province affected the course of Canadian history. It received the 2003 Manitoba Historical Society's Margaret McWilliams Award for popular history.


Related addresses:

URL 1: www.winnipegfreepress.com/subscriber/columnists/top3/story/4161048p-47...

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."


----

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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Tom Flanagan : Harper's Team

This book sounds as if it is an informative and rather revealing account of how the Harper Team managed to get Harper elected. The advice contains a lot of plain common sense but little principle. Hiding one's real views is more important than revealing them. You are selling yourself rather than your policies in order to get elected. Once elected you can promote your real policies to the extent that you are able to. With a minority Harper is rather constrained but he has already sabotaged any sort of universal day care plan just as an example. He also has managed to boost military funding substantially. This is from the Harper Index.

Flanagan, Tom - One of Stephen Harper's closest advisors explains and predicts him

Harper's Team provides a manual on Conservative strategy and tactics for friend and foe.

One of Stephen Harper's closest advisors has published a new book that details how Harper rose from lobbyist and policy wonk to Prime Minister and his strategies for doing so. It is striking how much Harper's Team (McGill, Queens University Press, 2007) contains about Conservative strategy and how much daily events reflect Tom Flanagan's advice.

Flanagan has been an important mentor to Stephen Harper. He was Harper's national campaign director in the 2004 federal election and a senior campaign advisor in the 2006 election. He is a senior fellow of the right- wing Fraser Institute and is a member of a group of like-minded ideologues from his university's political-science department known as the "Calgary School."

Flanagan, the ultimate political insider, traces the steps and the personalities involved with the Canadian Alliance Party and its merger with the PC Party. It concludes with a candid "Ten commandments of Conservative Campaigning" that explain what Stephen Harper has done and possibly predict what's in store.

1. UNITY. "The Conservative Party contains libertarians, social conservatives, populists, Red Tories, Quebec nationalists, and Canadian nationalists, plus many people who don't care much about any of these 'isms.' The all need each other. They can never win unless they try to understand each other and reach compromises..." The way Harper has managed to keep his sectarian factions quiet, despite disappointments - such as gay marriage, which has become a fait accompli Harper showed no interest in opposing - is one of the untold stories of his government.

2. MODERATION. "Canada is not yet a conservative or Conservative country," Flanagan warns. "We can't win if we veer too far to the right..."

The new Conservative party was created specifically to contest with the Liberals for power, so overt displays of ideology will be avoided. The Conservatives famous campaign promises of 2006 were almost entirely free of ideology. Opponents will only succeed by exposing true motives and ideology.

3. INCLUSION. "The traditional Conservative base of Anglophone Protestants is too narrow," Flanagan advises. "The key to the long-term success of the Liberals has been their cultivation of minorities. We have to take that advantage away."

The Conservatives have organized effectively in many ethnic communities and have recruited successful visible minority candidates. Several ethnic groups are being courted through policies such as promoting human rights in China or courting Jewish voters through support for Israel. Opponents need to remind new Canadians of what they may not like about the Conservatives, such as militarism and counter-terrorism policies that lead to racial profiling.

4. INCREMENTALISM. "We have to be willing to make progress in small, practical steps. Sweeping visions... are toxic in practical politics." Neither Flanagan nor Harper have forsworn long-held ideals. They have simply accepted these will take time. Their opponents would be well advised to remind the public of those ideals.

5. POLICY. "Politics is less about logic than it is about getting support," he advises. "Polices must be formulated so that they can be communicated to the general public and win the support of voters who spend little time studying and thinking about public policy." Protesting veils in polling places and offering child care credits parents that may only meet a fraction of costs are two very different examples of policies that are emotionally easy to grasp regardless of their logic.

6. SELF-DISCIPLINE. "The media are unforgiving of conservative errors, so we have to exercise strict discipline at all levels," he advises. A complete plan is needed "so the leader is not forced to improvise."

This advice explains the lack of access Harper has allowed reporters. Forcing Harper to improvise has repeatedly hurt him and can again. 7. TOUGHNESS. "We cannot win by being Boy Scouts," Flanagan warns, advising Conservatives to do thorough opposition research and use it to go for the jugular.

The Dion attack ads are good examples. Flanagan says whining looks bad on Conservatives: "leave the whining to the utopians." Getting Conservatives to whine could be a useful strategy for opponents. "People expect Conservatives to be tough. They look ridiculous if they go around snivelling."

8. GRASSROOTS POLITICS. "...The grassroots model of fundraising has built the Conservative Party into a financial powerhouse," he boasts, with justification.

That financial advantage has enabled the party to hone its organizational and technical skills in order to get out supporters and win close races in the last two elections. Opponents need to organize as effectively in ways that get messages directly to swing voters and turn them around.

9. TECHNOLOGY. Flanagan says the Conservatives have tried to stay at the leading edge of every technological trend from predictive dialers to Blackberries, bloggers and podcasting. Dozens and dozens of websites and blog sites inhabit the "Tory Blogger" universe, compared to a small handful on the left. With a few exceptions, and only partially due to expense, the left has rarely used the new technologies as effectively as the right.

10. PERSISTENCE. "Politics is a tough business, and mistakes are frequent. We have to correct our errors, learn from mistakes, and keep pushing ahead," he writes.

Stephen Harper, like his mentor Flanagan, is willing to look objectively at what works and what doesn't and modify his behaviour accordingly. Harper's tone and rhetoric have become, steadily more moderate. Even his position on Afghanistan has become nuanced in response to his realization that many Canadians do not share his views. And Canadians never hear anything of his opposition to the public sector of which he spoke so frequently in the past; Harper realizes this kind of thing is a mistake.

Unlike many political memoirs, Flanagan's book offers solid useful information from which allies or adversaries can learn, and to which opponents need be mindful. He appears to make it straightforward to predict what Canadians will see from Stephen Harper in the run-up to the next election: moderation, inclusion, focused communications, and the odd sucker punch.