Stephen Harper has always seemed most comfortable as a self-styled “outsider,” no matter how oxymoronic that might sound from someone who lives at 24 Sussex Drive.

Depending on his needs, he can find elites in courtrooms or newsrooms to rally his troops and he likes to tell us he avoids the trappings of office, from power lunches to black tie soirees.

But now that he is campaigning against provincial premiers, Harper has added another chapter in the saga of the outsider, giving the early days of his 2015 re-election bid a hint of scorched earth.

It’s starting to look like Harper against the world and he appears to like it this way.

But it also reveals a glaring blind spot for this man—his inability to accommodate anyone who does not share his ideological bent.

It is one thing to take swings at NDP Leader Tom Mulcair and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, but Harper is now bringing into the fray two of the most popular female premiers in the land, representing two of the most populous provinces: Ontario’s Kathleen Wynne and Alberta’s Rachel Notley.

It is no surprise that Harper would take on Wynne — that has been a plan all along and the swipes at the provincial Liberal’s fiscal policies from the prime minister and his front benches did not abate as the federal election approached.

The surprise might have been how aggressively and quickly Wynne, seen by Conservatives as a Trudeau surrogate, went after Harper in this campaign.

She and Harper have clashed over the Conservative leader’s refusal to work with her on pension reform and she all but created a countdown clock to illustrate how long she had been snubbed by Harper until they finally met one-on-one last January.

Over the past weekend she said his pension reticence was “mean-spirited, in a pretty big way.’’

She said his funding of Ontario infrastructure projects was “disrespectful,” that Harper was being “almost petulant” in refusing to fill Senate vacancies and had been dismissive to the needs of provinces in his time in office.

There was a day when Ontario premiers were expected to operate on a different plane, and an element of nation-building was expected from the leader of the country’s largest province.

Perhaps that is merely a quaint notion from a bygone era. Or perhaps the well is so poisoned between these two that there can be no other way to operate than hammer-and-tong.

Harper characterized his relationship with Wynne this way, during a campaign stop in Toronto’s Eglinton-Lawrence riding: “I think I will observe what a senior official told me when I took office. They said your best relations will be with the premiers who are doing a good job in their own jurisdiction.’’

He went on to argue Wynne’s provincial pension plan is a tax on workers and small businesses, reminded voters that Ontario’s credit rating had been downgraded, and said Canadians value the need for a balanced budget.

Without prompting, he went after Notley, accusing the new Alberta premier of not understanding that a sector in downturn should not be taxed. He had earlier called her plan an “absolute disaster.’’

Premiers have campaigned against Harper in the past, most notably former Newfoundland and Labrador premier Danny Williams’ Anyone But Conservative campaign in 2008, which successfully shut out Harper in that province.

Even today’s Newfoundland premier, Paul Davis, the lone Conservative premier (in name) in the country, is not a particular fan of Harper’s.

After the two met to discuss promises made to Newfoundland as part of the give-and-take on the proposed trade deal with the European Union, Davis told reporters Harper could not be trusted.

British Columbia’s Christy Clark, a political soulmate of Harper’s, clashed with his government this spring over Ottawa’s response to an oil spill on English Bay.

Premiers have taken Harper to task for inaction on climate change, Senate reform, health-care funding and lack of response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools.

If Harper wants to take them all on, perhaps the length of this campaign can be explained by the length of his list of adversaries.

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Harper, of course, is responsible for the frostiness of his provincial-federal leaders. He may have logged hundreds of phone calls with premiers, as he said Tuesday, but he has refused to sit down with them to discuss issues of the day.

Given his truculence on the trail, those looking for more civil federal-provincial relations in the future will have to look somewhere other than the man seeking four more years.

Tim Harper is a national affairs writer. His column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. tharper@thestar.ca Twitter:@nutgraf1

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