CALGARY—How can you tell when a man whose background is as Big Smoke as it gets is a true Calgarian?

For consultant Rod Love, über Conservative and chief of staff to former Alberta premier Ralph Klein, it’s an easy riddle. His litmus test for Prime Minister Stephen Harper came a few years ago on the biggest night of the biggest day of the Calgary calendar. It was the president’s reception and ball following the Calgary Stampede’s opening parade — an event considered more sacred rite than frolic.

Harper and his wife Laureen arrived at the reception on the Stampede grounds where she let it slip they had to fly back to Ottawa that very July night because of an upcoming summit overseas.

“Holy Jeez, that tells you something,” Love said, on the morning after last week’s English-language leaders’ debate. “It tells you he’s one of us and that he’s a Calgarian. He’s not some guy from Ottawa.

“It was something,” continued Love, who served Klein during Jean Chrétien’s years as PM, and added: “I can just hear Chrétien. ‘You know, Ralph, I’d love to come but I’ve got to go (overseas) tonight.’ ”

Therein lies the irony of the campaign for Harper. Hungry for a majority after five minority years, he’s wrapped himself around the GTA like a prodigal suitor come to woo with showier bouquets and sweeter promises. The region teems with Conservative bigwigs.

No longer do we have the Harper of 2008 who sneers at a “bunch of people at rich galas.” He has stopped calling Michael Ignatieff the “most centrist Liberal leader in the history of the country,” as if uttering a dirty word.

Nor is his trusted minister John Baird talking about “Toronto elites” who try to muscle rural voters into opposing the long gun registry.

Instead, our PM has come a-courting.

But is his heart really in it? Does the child of Leaside and adolescent from Etobicoke really care about us? If not, can he fake it and, at 51, convince us he does?

He was a Young Liberal at Richview Collegiate Institute who wrote in his 1978 graduating yearbook that he was “off to the U of T for commerce of law.” Instead, he dropped out at 19 after two months and lit out for Alberta to work in the Edmonton offices of Imperial Oil and, three years later, enrol at the University of Calgary to study economics. (His late father Joseph was a Toronto-based executive for Imperial.)

For Torontonians to understand what shaped Harper politically — and perhaps where his heart lies — it’s important to understand Alberta and its evolution from the searing western alienation of 30 years ago and his not insignificant role in its diminution.

It didn’t take him long to fall in love with Alberta. For a few years it even looked as if he’d hardened his heart against Ontario.

Consider his co-authorship of the infamous 2001 “Firewall Letter” to Klein with its “Alberta Agenda” for greater provincial autonomy that included dumping the Canada Pension Plan and getting Ottawa out of health care. It urged the creation of firewalls around Alberta to limit the extent to which “an aggressive and hostile federal government” can encroach upon provincial powers.

Things have changed. As Love put it: “We’re the economic engine of the country. We have an Alberta PM, we’ve got a Conservative government dominated by Westerners ... I haven’t heard the phrase ‘western alienation’ in a decade.”

Asked whether he would work in the campaign, he replied: “We’re going to elect 28 Conservatives with margins over 10,000 votes in every riding. What’s to work? You put up the lawn signs, have a barbecue and go vote. It’s not complicated.”

Harper arrived in an Alberta whose best and brightest felt patronized by smug Easterners. The kid from Toronto got it. He understood the anger, frustration, hurt and sense of betrayal in western Canada.

Frank Atkins, University of Calgary economist and adviser for Harper’s MA thesis, remembers an academic conference years ago in central Canada. He stood up to talk about monetary policy and explain that soaring interest rates to cool down an overheated Ontario economy “were killing us in Alberta.” A former economist at the Bank of Canada, he understood his subject.

It didn’t matter. “The immediate reaction from the central Canadian academics was, ‘Oh, there’s that damned regional stuff again.’ ”

Calgarians think Easterners are stuffy. The city is still on a high over newly elected Muslim Mayor Naheed Nenshi. “On election night he said something like, ‘This is Calgary. Nobody cares where you’re from or who your daddy is. Nobody cares about your last name,’ ” said Love, of the October 2010 vote. “He spoke for all of us.”

There’s no doubt among Calgarians that Harper is one of them. And it seems perfectly natural he considers Calgary home. Laureen Harper is from a ranching family in Turner Valley, southwest of Calgary, and revels in her Alberta heritage.

Harper took his place in a long line of populist politicians (although he’d balk at the term) who stormed out of the West to change Canada, including Louis Riel, Tommy Douglas, John Diefenbaker and the PM’s mentor Preston Manning, the first leader of the Reform Party. He largely founded the national party in 1987 with the message Westerners had had enough. Within a decade of his arrival in Alberta, Harper was Reform’s policy director and author of its 1988 federal election campaign slogan: “The West Wants In!”

It’s unlikely any other place in the country could have produced such a politician — one whose ultimate national significance remains unclear. He was the right person in the right place at the right time, like a character thrown up by Tolstoy’s great rivers of history to play a singular role.

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The alienation of the West, rooted in perceived inequality of federal fiscal policy and parliamentary representation, shaped his political persona. Atkins told the Star: “I’m from Ontario but I should have been born a westerner. It’s the same for Stephen. He’s a very conservative individual in the sense of believing in individual choices, less government and in that sense, he’s a lot like me. But I believe these roots go deeper with him.”

Harper appears to be the ultimate outsider: quiet, self-possessed and routinely described as brilliant. Perhaps he needed the geographic equivalent of the outsider to feel at home.

“We never really talked about his past. He could have been from the moon,” said political scientist Tom Flanagan, a former Harper adviser and member of the seminal “Calgary School” of academics who believe in free-market economics and demanded a better deal for the West.

According to Flanagan, Harper’s core political/economic beliefs were already in place when they met in 1991 “and he never told me how he’d gotten to that place.” Moreover, Harper doesn’t talk much about himself. Flanagan learned he plays the piano when he saw him perform onstage with acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma during the ’08 campaign.

Three decades ago, the West was about to ignite. In 1980, Trudeau’s Liberal government introduced the National Energy Program, which Manning describes as “having destroyed an entire generation in the oil patch.”

Barry Cooper, another Calgary School alumnus, likens the National Energy Program to “a blatant robbery by the Liberal party of Canada based in Quebec.” Atkins says: “You can talk to people out here and even the thought of a Liberal government still gives them the heaves.”

Economist Robert Mansell argues it’s better for Alberta with Harper’s Conservatives. But, he added: “With net annual fiscal contributions to other regions already amounting to over $20,000 per family of four, it is probably understandable that many, if not most Albertans, don’t feel they get a very good deal in Confederation.”

In 1986, the Brian Mulroney Conservatives awarded a $100 million CF-18 fighter jet maintenance contract to Quebec over Manitoba. “We knew Trudeau was going to screw the West but to be betrayed by Conservatives?” Love said. “It was the final straw.”

Soon after, Manning asked Mansell for advice on a research assistant for a new party. He saw in the choice of Harper someone “with a national perspective and enormous strength in economic policy.” His recruit dove into Reform politics and, after various career twists and turns, took a leading role in uniting the fractious and previously self-defeating right into what culminated in the new Conservative party, with Harper as leader.

Manning eventually parted ways with his prodigy and didn’t sign the firewall letter. But during an interview in his downtown Calgary Manning Centre for Building Democracy, he said he understands the “sense of frustration when you’ve done a great deal to try and change the federal scene and all you get is a snail’s pace in response.”

For an hour, he reminisced about early days in Reform, cautioning his wife Sandra joked he has insufficient insight into Harper because they talk policy 90 per cent of the time and “there’s more to life than policy.” True, he admitted, reminiscing about evenings at Harper’s small Calgary apartment talking about economic policy over pizza and beer.

Good times. Isn’t that what makes Harper tick?

Shortly after the interview, the English leaders’ debate aired on TV. Harper, polished to a high gleam by his handlers, seemed far removed from the young Calgary academic. Repeatedly, he steered the debate back to the economy, no doubt mindful of party pollsters whose research showed Canadians worry about the future.

Still, it’s easy to see in this life a straight line from one economic policy debate to the next, the only difference being the scope of the stage and size of the audience.

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