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Last year, in anticipation of Canada’s 150th anniversary celebrations in 2017, the Heritage Department conducted an online survey asking participants to name the most inspirational Canadians since Confederation.

For the Harper government — an administration that has toiled for almost a decade to reshape Canadians’ vision of themselves and their history — the exercise was a catastrophe. Topping the list of Canadian icons was none other than the Antichrist himself, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Number 2 was Terry Fox. Tommy Douglas, the socialist father of medicare, came in third. Lester Pearson, father of the wishy-washy UN peacekeeping tradition, was fourth. Environmentalist David Suzuki and the late NDP leader Jack Layton came in sixth and seventh, respectively.

The only Tory on the list was Sir John A. Macdonald, who punched in at No. 8. Wayne Gretzky, whose ill-timed entry into the current election campaign at a Harper rally makes him an honorary Conservative, was ninth.

When asked what national accomplishments made them most proud, the respondents’ answers were every bit as depressing from a Harperite point of view: medicare, peacekeeping and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Nobody seemed to care about the War of 1812, income-splitting or the founding of the Tim Hortons donut chain.

The Heritage minister, Shelly Glover, quickly dismissed the whole exercise, saying the government “will not be telling people whom they ought to be celebrating” — news to those of us in Ottawa still getting used to those frequent CF-18 flypasts.

As we contemplate what looks increasingly like the final weekend of the Harper era in Canadian politics, it’s worth looking at what the Tory leader has accomplished, and how.

Above all, Stephen Harper succeeded brilliantly in taking a fractious group of right-wing Canadians — an uneasy alliance of Christian fundamentalists, libertarians, socially-conservative New Canadians and suburban small businesspeople — and fashioning them into a winning electoral machine.

As hard as Harper tried, this country hasn’t really come around to his way of thinking — something the ‘experts’ had been telling us for years was bound to happen. As hard as Harper tried, this country hasn’t really come around to his way of thinking — something the ‘experts’ had been telling us for years was bound to happen.

He did this largely through sheer force of will, a discipline backed by bully tactics and intimidation that compensated for his poor persuasion skills. Mixed in with this was the successful importation of Republican polling and fundraising tactics which the Tory machine honed in successive campaigns. Meanwhile, the hapless Liberals and New Democrats looked on cluelessly — at least until recently, when they realized that these tools were not monopolies of the Right.

But as hard as Harper tried, this country hasn’t really come around to his way of thinking — something the ‘experts’ had been telling us for years was bound to happen. The core Conservative base remains somewhere around one-third of the population, having hit a high-water mark of 39.6 per cent for the Tories in the 2011 election.

More than 60 per cent of Canadians have always rejected Harper’s vision for the country. Conservatives have been virtually wiped off the electoral map in the provinces, with the exception of Newfoundland/Labrador and Saskatchewan, where Tory-like Brad Wall is premier.

“The values and attitudes of ordinary Canadians have not shifted notably,” said pollster Michael Adams, who has done extensive work on social and political views in Canada and the U.S. On foreign policy, Canadians still value the Pearsonian concept of peacekeeping as much as they honour the military legacy of Vimy Ridge. At home, Canadians don’t want to see their federal government dismantled and they still favour carbon taxes to fight climate change.

Despite his inability to change minds, Harper has enjoyed a remarkable run of luck — both in the poor quality of his opposition and the state of the economy. The Liberals served up an unconvincing list of leaders, from Paul Martin through Stéphane Dion to Michael Ignatieff. As for the NDP, repositioning themselves to the electable middle of the political spectrum was always going to be a challenge, even with strong leaders.

On the economy, Stephen Harper must have borrowed Jim Flaherty’s Irish horseshoe. Harper inherited a string of surpluses and a well-regulated financial sector from the Liberals, which allowed Canada to ride out the Great Recession of 2008 with much less damage than the United States suffered. Strong resource prices and a sharp drop in interest rates prompted Canada to sail into recovery on the back of a surging Alberta oil sector and a carefully-nurtured national housing bubble.

But Harper’s fabulous luck has clearly run out. Justin Trudeau has shown himself to be a convincing retail politician — and not the vacuous dummy of the Conservative attack ads. His campaign offered a credible, middle-of-the-road alternative to Harper’s unceasing negativity. As for the economy, boom turned to bust in the oilpatch — as it always does — and the housing markets in Toronto and Vancouver are already dangling with one toe off the precipice.

So take the blue berets out of storage. Stop humming God Save the Queen. Start taking French lessons again. A former resident of 24 Sussex may soon be moving back to the old house.

Alan Freeman is a Senior Fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. He came to the U of O from the Department of Finance, where he served as assistant deputy minister of consultations and communications. Alan joined the public service in 2008 after a distinguished career in journalism as a parliamentary reporter and business journalist for The Canadian Press, The Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail. At the Globe, he spent more than 10 years as a foreign correspondent based in Berlin, London and Washington.

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