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House of Commons, the bastion of the Prime Minister’s power, the body that selects the prime minister, is an elected body.”
    But Harper warned his audience not to be fooled. Even though voters selected the members of the House of Commons, it was not like the US House of Representatives. What was it like, then? Harper asked his audience to think of the Commons in terms of the US Electoral College. In the United States, the Electoral College chooses the president and then disappears. But the Commons continues sitting for the next four years, having the power to vote on every issue. To Stephen Harper, Canadian parliamentary democracy was the political version of the movie Groundhog Day . It was an extraordinary description. Harper reduced the work of Parliament to being simply a rubber stamp of the prime minister’s legislative agenda: “The important thing to know is that this is how it will be until the Prime Minister calls the next election. The same majority vote on every issue. So if you ask me ‘What’s the vote going to be on gun control?’ or on the budget, we know that already.”
    In strikingly simple words, Stephen Harper again declared to his American audience his personal view of Canadian governance.Between elections, the House of Commons was the property of the prime minister. If you were a member of the opposition, your business was restricted to going through a token exercise of voting on outcomes that were inevitable—the government always winning, the opposition always losing. Missing from his analysis was the opposition’s role in bringing out public information in Question Period, and the work of all-party committees in amending legislation and holding the government to account when it breaks its promises or misleads the people.
    If Harper’s view of how Canada’s parliamentary system works was inept, his view of the country’s other political parties was grossly dismissive. He described the NDP as a socialist party, “proof that the Devil lives and interferes in the affairs of men.” It was only partly an attempt at humour. He was hitting the perfect tone with his audience, just as he had done ten years earlier at the Reform Party’s founding convention. He articulated what they despised. The NDP, in effect, represented the opposite of what everyone in the room believed with regard to social value issues. Having dismissed the NDP with the perfect Finkelstein word “socialist,” Harper added the other hot-button epithet of abuse—“radical.” The NDP was a branch of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), which was “explicitly radical.”
    His description of the Liberal Party was carefully designed to stir just as much revulsion in his audience but in a different way. To Christian-right American conservatives, Bill Clinton, the sexual libertine and great deceiver, was the devil incarnate. So when Harper described Canadian Liberals as a type of “Clinton pragmatic Democrat,” it was the end of the conversation: the Liberals were a degenerate political party, full stop.
    That left just two other parties to describe. Harper damned the Progressive Conservatives by calling them “liberal” Republicans, which meant to this audience that they weren’t Republican at all.Only the Reformers qualified as conservative Republicans. Preston Manning was populist in the same, leader-driven way that Ross Perot had been. And then Harper’s final sales pitch on behalf of Reform: “It’s the closest thing we have to a neo-conservative party.”
    Harper could not finish his Montreal speech without offering his audience a précis of the Quebec separatist movement, and what he called “the appeasement of ethnic nationalism.” For a moment, he was back in that Volkswagen ten years earlier heading for Winnipeg, full of anger at Brian Mulroney’s catering to Quebec. In making a passing reference to the referendum that included distinct society status for Quebec, he frightened his audience by talking about