OTTAWA—Two things tend to happen when prime ministers have been in office for a long time.

One, they get very interested in foreign affairs. Two, they get preoccupied with their legacy — how the history books will remember them.

Stephen Harper has been in office a long time: seven years and seven months, to be precise.

By the next election in 2015, he will be the sixth-longest-serving PM in Canadian history — just behind Jean Chrétien, who served 10 years in office, and just ahead of Brian Mulroney, who logged eight years and 281 days in power before resigning in 1993.

Harper’s growing interest in foreign affairs is obvious. When he attends G8 or G20 meetings, as he did this week in Russia, he is one of the more experienced leaders at the table.

But what about his legacy? How will Harper’s time in office be marked in the history books?

Not that long ago, a former Progressive Conservative politician (he stressed the “progressive” part) told me Harper will not be remembered for building anything, but rather for what he’s dismantled while in power.

Or, as this veteran Conservative put it: “These guys only know how to tear stuff down.”

There’s a case to be made for that point of view.

This fall, for instance, we’re fully expecting Harper to start talking about abolishing the Senate. He’s been hinting since 2006 that scrapping the Senate may be easier than reforming it, but the months and months of scandal surrounding the Senate seem to have galvanized Harper toward abolition.

(It’s worth noting that the PMO also seems to have been neck-deep in this “Senate” scandal, but Harper isn’t talking about abolishing his office. That’s a whole other story, though.)

Nevertheless, if Harper does manage to pull off Senate abolition by 2015 (highly unlikely, in my view) it would be one more item on the tear-down list of this Conservative government.

Here are some others:

The long-gun registry: As soon as Harper got his majority in 2011, his government set about fulfilling its promise to scrap the registry so hated by many gun owners since it was set up by the Chrétien government in the 1990s.

National child care: Yes, there was a program in 2006, cobbled together with province-by-province deals with Ottawa. It was dismantled, in favour of $100-a-month cheques to parents.

The mandatory, long-form census: No one is really sure why this bugged the Conservatives so much; they certainly didn’t campaign on the issue. But it’s now becoming clear that by making it OK for citizens to opt out of completing the long-form census, we have a poorer statistical picture of the country — in an era when more sophisticated use of data is proving to be crucial for businesses and politicians.

The goods and services tax: OK, it still exists, but in much-diminished form since Harper followed through on his plan to cut the tax from 7 per cent to 5 per cent. Once a powerful source of revenue for the government, many economists have argued the GST cut helped plunge the Conservative government into the debt that has lingered from 2007 until today.

Speaking of budgets and debt, the Conservatives have also done away with budget surpluses that were the hallmark of Liberal governments from 1997 to 2005. That’s not entirely the government’s fault — the world was in the midst of an economic meltdown in 2008. It is true, however, that debt has become the rule, not the exception, in Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s budgets.

Media relations: Of course, being part of the journalistic tribe, I have to point out how much the Harper government has retreated from any serious contact with reporters. Ministers no longer do scrums after cabinet meetings; prime ministerial press conferences or interviews are brief or non-existent; and the PMO has instituted any number of ways to detour around the national media (putting cabinet appointments on Twitter first during the July shuffle, for instance). This might have happened no matter who was in power — Barack Obama is doing much the same media-avoidance in the U.S., for instance — but it seems unlikely that any successor government would return political-media relations to the state they were 10 years ago.

Meanwhile, it would take too long to list all the other programs, services and funding that have disappeared or been scrapped during Harper’s time in power.

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But the question remains: what has Stephen Harper’s government built? Beyond the splashes of blue across government websites and facilities, and those Economic Action Plan posters and ads, what will be known as Harper’s signature achievements in office?

Historians may well describe Harper as the PM who made the Canadian government smaller. And that may have been the idea all along.

Susan Delacourt is a member of the Star’s Ottawa bureau.

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