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This may be hard for Canadians to understand, but Stephen Harper has become a guru of sorts.

He has always had an air of mystery, to be sure. But here at home, even the average Conservative has ceased to believe that it shrouds a preternatural strategic genius.

From afar, apparently, he looks quite different. Nearly nine years in office have given him a shimmering glow to conservatives around the world; this week, Australia’s newly-minted conservative prime minister, Tony Abbott, came to bask in it.

Abbott has called Harper an “exemplar” and a “beacon for centre-right parties around the world”.

There was a time when Harper sat at the feet of an earlier Australian prime minister, John Howard. Many of the Conservative party’s tactics under Harper — including its narrowly-aimed tax cuts designed to pry middle-class and working-class Canadians from the Liberal party — were borrowed from Howard. Harper was even caught plagiarizing a speech from Howard — word-for word, in some passages.

So who, then, is Tony Abbott, who now looks to Stephen Harper for wisdom?

The man is no dummy. He is a Rhodes scholar and studied for the Catholic priesthood for a time. He still has an almost Chrétien-like propensity for verbal gaffes — referring briefly to “Canadia” before correcting himself when he landed in Ottawa this week.

More important is how deeply conservative he is.

Just a few years ago, he remarked that the “idea that sex is kind of a woman’s right to absolutely withhold, just as the idea that sex is a man’s right to demand — I think they both need to be moderated.”

He famously denounced the carbon tax imposed by his Labor predecessor Julia Gillard in front of signs with slogans such as “Ditch the Bitch”.

Abbott is joining Harper in forming a cabal of nations trying to slow efforts to contain emissions. As chairman of the G-20 meeting slated for November in Brisbane, Abbott is resolute in keeping climate change off the agenda.

Which brings us to the true matter of concern for Canadians. More than anything, Abbott admires Harper because he sees him as a world leader in the fight against doing anything meaningful to contain global warming.

Like Harper, at one time Abbott was close to being an outright climate change denier. “The argument (behind climate change) is absolute crap,” he once remarked.

Nowadays, Abbott, like Harper, could best be described as a “skeptic”. He acknowledges that climate change is occurring but doubts the role that carbon emissions play in it. He got into a scrap with a UN climate change official and Australia’s own Climate Council over the possible link between climate change and his country’s unusually severe wildfires last October.

(Abbott took a page out of Harper’s book by abolishing the state-funded Climate Council, whose mission is to provide independent scientific information; it has carried on with private funding.)

Like Canada, whose economic dependence on dirty tar sands oil has grown under Harper, Australia has an emissions problem. In fact, Abbott seems bent on increasing the growth of his country’s coal industry, which is closely linked to China’s economic expansion.

That’s why Abbott is joining Harper in forming a cabal of nations trying to slow efforts to contain emissions. He is trying to repeal the carbon tax imposed by Gillard. And he has been an outspoken critic of President Obama’s recent climate-change initiative.

As chairman of the G-20 meeting slated for November in Brisbane, Abbott is resolute in keeping climate change off the agenda.

After meeting with Abbott, Harper remarked: “No matter what they say, no country is going to take actions that are going to deliberately destroy jobs and growth in their country.”

In other words, anyone saying they will take real measures to combat climate change is a hypocrite. No wonder Abbott admires Harper so.

I hesitate to finish with a cheap shot. But in this context, I can’t resist repeating one of Abbott’s most famous verbal gaffes.

“No one,” he once said, “however smart, however well educated, however experienced, is the suppository of all wisdom.”

Deep thoughts for would-be gurus.

Follow Paul Adams on Twitter @padams29

Paul Adams is associate professor of journalism at Carleton and has taught political science at the University of Manitoba. He is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail and EKOS Research. His book Power Trap explores the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties.

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