WATERLOO—Prime Minister Stephen Harper is building a Conservative coalition in Canada that will probably be more enduring than Brian Mulroney’s conservatism of the 1980s, according to Ipsos pollster Darrell Bricker.

Bricker, delivering his election analysis to a Canadian political scientists’ convention last week, said he believes Harper’s brand of conservatism is built on a stronger base than Mulroney’s.

The big difference, says Bricker, is that Mulroney built his Conservative party out of regional grievances, while Harper is forming a Conservative party around individual voters’ values.

“The interesting thing about what happened in this (May 2) election . . . is that they actually put together a values-based national coalition of Tories — the first time we’ve had it in this country,” Bricker said at a luncheon session of the Canadian Political Science Association, which held its annual meeting at Wilfrid Laurier University last week.

Bricker, who worked in the Prime Minister’s Office during Mulroney’s reign, said Conservatives were united in the 1980s largely around their disaffection with Liberal rule. The West, outraged over the Liberals’ national energy program, came together with Quebec, aggrieved over Pierre Trudeau’s patriation of the Constitution.

But according to Bricker, Harper is building his Conservative base on stronger stuff.

He rattled off the typical values of a Harper Conservative voter: “smaller government, law and order, pro-military, pro-trade, pro-U.S., economically focused and fiscally prudent.”

Bricker said: “It is essentially a coalition of taxpayers . . . They’re demographically older, the mean age is 50. They’re more male, they’re more affluent, they’re less educated, they own guns — higher than the rest of the voters — they’re churchgoers, they’re more rural but increasingly suburban.”

Bricker says Harper may become a modern-day Mackenzie King — Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, a Liberal who dominated Canadian politics from the 1920s into the 1940s.

It is, however, Mulroney who holds the record for the biggest-ever majority in Canadian history. In 1984, his party won 211 out of 282 seats.

Mulroney, in fact, is one of the few Canadian prime ministers in recent decades to have won with more than 50 per cent of the popular vote. He went on to win a second majority in 1988.

Harper, meanwhile, has three election victories, but only one majority to his credit now. Though his 167 seats don’t come close to Mulroney’s majority in 1984, Bricker believes Harper’s Conservative base is in less danger of blowing apart, as Mulroney’s did in the 1990s.

In 1993, angry Westerners, former Conservatives largely, banded together behind the fledgling Reform Party, while former Quebec Conservatives migrated to the new Bloc Québécois. Mulroney’s old Conservatives were reduced to two seats in that election.

“Brian Mulroney’s Tory coalition was never united on values, . . . never got along,” Bricker said. “It was an impossible coalition to hold together.”

“But Harper now has a coalition that is possible to hold together because they’re united by values, not just by geography or just by hatred of the Liberal party.”

The challenge now in Canadian politics, according to many attendees at last week’s conference, is to assess what’s going to happen on the left of Canada’s political spectrum.

The once-dominant Liberals have been reduced to third-party status, with only 34 seats and small pockets of strength, mainly in Ontario and the Atlantic region. The New Democratic Party is on the rise, but with a new, untested base in Quebec, whose MPs form nearly half of the 102-member official Opposition.

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Very few academics attending last week’s conference were willing to forecast whether the NDP’s new strength would hold. Bricker believes this Liberal-NDP fight for the left will be the political story to watch in coming years. And like the Conservatives, the trick will be in finding values around which to unite a base of support.

“I would say that, through this election, the right side of the dialectic has been sorted out,” Bricker said. “The battle is now actually for what I would say is the progressive side of the agenda.”

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