Stephen Harper has resigned as Conservative party leader, but although he won his Calgary Heritage riding I doubt he will be content, given his controlling nature, to serve as foreign policy critic or sit in the backbench. So here are some thoughts about what the former prime minister might do once he becomes Citizen Harper.

Puppeteer: No longer pulling the strings from 24 Sussex Drive, Harper can turn his creative instincts to puppeteering itself, and the perfect place for Harper to get his feet wet will be right down the road from his former home in Ottawa: the Puppets Up! Festival in Mississippi Mills, Ont. There are workshops for all level of puppeteers, taught by practitioners from around the world – no trouble there since he was once considered a world leader. Harper should be warned though: some marionette handlers mask themselves except for a slit for the eyes.

Hockey announcer: The former prime minister’s love for our national sport is no secret. Harper wrote A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs and the Rise of Professional Hockey (ranked No. 12,896 on Amazon.ca). Looking for a new challenge, perhaps Harper can turn his attention to broadcasting. Unwelcome on CBC, he can do play-by-play for TSN. Play-by-play? Sure. Can you imagine him doing colour commentary? “Colour” and “Harper” don’t fit in the same sentence.

Singer-songwriter: Harper has sung and played keyboards at political functions and there are versions of “Sweet Child of Mine” and “Call Me Maybe” on the Internet. His vocals are a little thin, but that’s nothing Auto-Tune can’t correct. The great thing about this career option is name recognition. Harper won’t have to busk or go the self-pressed EP or indie-label route. He can go straight to Columbia (Colombia wouldn’t be so bad either) with his rewrite of Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues”: “They call Justin Trudeau the Crimson Tide; call me Deacon Blues.”

Newspaper columnist: Every retiree I know ends up writing cranky letters to the editor of their local newspaper. But since Harper is the former Conservative prime minister and his local rags are the Calgary Herald and the Calgary Sun, now both owned by the right-wing Postmedia boss Paul Godfrey, Harper can skip that step and go straight to writing a weekly column. (But why stop there? The oil-and-gas guys would love to see a thrice-weekly opinion piece by their man.)

Retiree: Then again, Harper could want to live out his retirement in the short hills outside Calgary. He’ll be able to start collecting a hefty old-age security allowance (on top of his pension) at age 65 even though OAS kicks in for we normals only at 67. That’s not enough to kick-start a Stephen Harper Prime Ministerial Library, but there’s no such tradition in Canada anyway, and Harper was never much a fan of libraries, given the cuts they’ve taken over the years. I wonder how he did all that hockey research.

Raymond Beauchemin is a novelist and an editor at the Star.

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