A few weeks ago, a wolf in sheep’s clothing prowled the White House lawn. The Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited Washington, D.C. to sign a boring trade agreement with President Barack Obama. The details of the deal aren’t important—they’re so staid and sensible that I’ll leave it to the reader with a masochistic bent, or severe insomnia, to Google them. A quick glance at their mildly laudable contents will probably reinforce the American predilection to view Canada as a sleepy enclave of bureaucratic good government and tepidly left-wing policies. Canada is the place American liberals are always threatening to move to when Republicans become president, right?

But in six years under Harper, Canada has been moving steadily to the right on issues like diplomacy, abortion, and—crucially, to Americans—oil and the environment. Running on that platform, the Conservatives were handed their first majority government of the Harper era in elections this May. Canada is no longer your cheerful, liberal neighbor of yore.

It all starts with Harper, a churchgoing evangelical, who has perhaps the most doggedly right-wing temperament of any twentieth-century Canadian prime minister. A veteran of the conservative movement, Harper has been president of a prominent Canadian libertarian lobbying group and helped get the insurgent, Western Canada-based Reform Party off the ground in the late eighties by arguing for the deregulation of oil prices and lowered taxes, and against gay marriage and abortion. He’s an admirer of Friedrich Hayek and William F. Buckley. And he has devoted his life to pushing Canadian politics to the right.

Take war resisters. For some American baby boomers, Canada’s liberalism is still tied to its role as a haven for Vietnam-era draft dodgers. And, indeed, to this day Toronto and Vancouver are full of aging, Birkenstock-clad conscientious objectors who came here in the late sixties and early seventies, when the laid-back, anti-war Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau was still letting them in. When Iraq began, another Liberal government opposed the war, and deserters began trickling across the Canadian border again. But Harper, then leading the opposition Canadian Alliance party (later to become the Conservative Party of Canada), supported the war, and when his Conservatives came to power they began deporting Iraq war deserters with glee. In September 2010, the Conservatives led the charge in defeating a bill that would have stopped the deportations on humanitarian grounds.

On the environment, Harper is stridently conservative, moving Canada away from its traditional green stance with a tireless defense of the Canadian oil industry and efforts to squirm out of international climate deals. Recently, the Conservatives pulled out of the Kyoto Accord, which mandated Canada to reduce its emissions by a modest 6 percent below 1990 levels. This didn’t come as much of a surprise: Harper’s home base is in Alberta oil country, home of the tar sands, a sprawling patch of land in eastern Alberta where they extract a thick, sludgy, bitumen-based crude—a process that creates unusually large amounts of carbon emissions.