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Yet as Maclean’s magazine’s Paul Wells has argued at some length, Harper’s agenda was to a large extent about simply being in power. The longer he was in power, the longer Canadians had to get used to the idea of a Conservative government, and to get used to the changes he had made, to the point where they would eventually seem like just part of the furniture of the world. And so while it might be all champagne and high-fives in the salons of the Laurentian Elites right now, it will take more than a census and sunny ways to roll back the clock on the Harper decade.

For the Liberals and their supporters, the key to undoing the Harper agenda is understanding just what that agenda was in the first place. And here’s a hint: It wasn’t social conservatism. It wasn’t neo-con militarism. And it wasn’t economic libertarianism. Nor was it to merely torment the Eastern swells (though that was probably a pleasant after-effect). No, to see what Harper was up to, and to grasp how effective he was, it’s necessary to go back to the most important document he wrote before become prime minister: the infamous “firewall letter.”

The firewall letter and its failure

The firewall letter was conceived in the aftermath of the 2000 federal election, in which Jean Chrétien won a third majority principally by convincing Ontarians that Albertans were untrustworthy.

Addressed to Alberta premier Ralph Klein and signed by six people (including Harper and his adviser at the time, Tom Flanagan), it was a plea for Alberta to take charge of its own future. The goal was for Alberta to carve out a place for itself in Confederation, using its existing constitutional powers, that would insulate the province from an “increasingly hostile government in Ottawa.” The letter’s proposals included creating a provincial pension plan (like the QPP); a provincial police force (like the SQ or OPP); collecting its own provincial income tax (as Quebec does); forcing Senate reform back on to the national agenda; and taking over complete provincial responsibility for health care.