Read Party of One for Free Online Page B

other changes on the table that “would just horrify you,” such as “putting universal Medicare in our Constitution, and feminist rights and a whole bunch of other things.” Harper ended by telling his American audience that the trouble with Canada was political, not social. Arthur Finkelstein had taught the NCC the value of humour in spreading one’s message, and Harper ended with a very clever line, especially given that the audience was the inner sanctum of the Christian right: “As long as there are exams, there will always be prayer in schools.”
    Though Harper had protested that he was happy to be free of the constraints of party politics, another possibility was more plausible. He simply wanted to be party leader—partly because he didn’t like having to live with other people’s compromises, as his former boss Jim Hawkes had noted. So when Jean Charest resigned the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party in the spring of 1998, Harper listened when he was approached by party members to run for the top job. He was young and spoke French, and since he had once been a member of the Progressive Conservatives, his bid could be presented as a homecoming of sorts.
    Harper mentor Tom Flanagan told The Globe and Mail what he thought it would take to get the lapsed Reformer to run: “Harpercould be persuaded to run on a platform of bringing together under one umbrella, the two right-of-centre parties.” Interestingly, when that idea was floated at the Winds of Change conference in 1996, Harper himself thought it would never happen because of deepseated differences between Canada’s main strains of conservatism.
    On April 7, 1998, Harper called Gerry Nicholls, a senior staffer at the NCC, to say he would be giving an important speech in Calgary to the Home and Mortgage Loan Association. Although he wanted a media advisory flagging the event, no interviews would be given until the speech was delivered. Senior CBC journalists including Don Newman, Jason Moscovitz, and Julie Van Dusen bombarded the NCC with calls, suspecting that Harper intended to use his Calgary speech to announce that he was running for the Tory leadership.
    The day after the speech, Harper was featured in a front-page story in the Globe , in which he said that he would not be a candidate for the leadership because his candidacy “would burn bridges to those Reformers with whom I have worked for many years.” But just ten days later, Harper was back in Toronto planning to attend a very important meeting. A group of PC party activists was looking to Harper to become the Blue Tory candidate they wanted to run for the leadership against Red Tory Hugh Segal.
    For a man who supposedly wanted to spend more time with his family and enjoyed the freedom of being a lobbyist for right-wing causes, Harper spent a lot of time politicking behind the scenes. He asked American pollster and political consultant John McLaughlin to attend the meeting with him. McLaughlin, who worked at the NCC, was one of Finkelstein’s “boys.” His clients included Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger; Iain Duncan Smith, the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK; multiple incumbent US senators and members of Congress; governors and mayors; and the Republican National Committee itself. Despite Harper’scoy public denials, McLaughlin knew from previous conversations that Harper wanted to be prime minister.
    The meeting took place on April 21, 1998, at the Toronto law office of Bob Dechert, who headed up the so-called “Blue Committee,” composed of Ontario backroom boys looking to make peace between Reform and the Progressive Conservatives so that the Liberals would not be in power forever. Conservative MP Jim Jones also attended. The committee laboured to convince Harper to enter the leadership race, impressed with his demeanour and his ability to speak French. McLaughlin was enthusiastic about the prospects of a Harper candidacy—Harper, less so. During the