Reply #20: Already Progressing [View All]

The Man Behind Stephen Harper

That neo-conservative agenda may read as if it has been lifted straight from the dusty desk drawers of Ronald Reagan: lower taxes, less federal government, and free markets unfettered by social programs such as medicare that keep citizens from being forced to pull up their own socks. But their arguments also echo the local landscape, where Big Oil sets the tone -- usually from a U.S. head office -- and Pierre Trudeau's 1980 National Energy Policy left the conviction that Confederation was rigged against the West.

They also share one beef not confined to Alberta: exasperation at Ottawa's perennial hand-wringing over Quebec. In a 1990 essay in the now defunct West magazine, Barry Cooper, Flanagan's closet departmental pal, advised Quebec separatists that if they were heading for the federal exit, they'd better get on with it -- or, as he now sums it up, "The sooner those guys are out of here the better." Cooper and David Bercuson, now director of the university's Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, promptly followed up with Deconfederation: Canada without Quebec, a polemic that rocketed to the top of best-seller lists and sent shock-waves across the country.

Cooper's article was entitled "Thinking the Unthinkable," a headline that might have been slapped on most of the Calgary School's work. Revelling in their unrepentant iconoclasm, its members take pride in airing once verboten ideas that they have helped to convert to common currency in the national debate. "If we've done anything, we've provided legitimacy for what was the Western view of this country," says Cooper, the group's de facto spokesman. "We've given intelligibility and coherence to a way of looking at it that's outside the St. Lawrence Valley mentality."

But what has put the Calgary School on mainstream radar is not merely its academic rabble-rousing, it's the group's growing influence on Canadian realpolitik -- first through Preston Manning, whose Reform Party tugged the ruling Liberals inexorably to the right; now through Stephen Harper, who commands the best parliamentary showing for any combination of conservatives in a decade -- and sits only a vote of confidence away from toppling the government. In both cases, the linchpin has been Flanagan, once Manning's right-hand man, who masterminded Harper's campaign and remains his closest confidant.

http://victoria.indymedia.org/news/2004/10/31934.php