Stephen Harper
Stephen Harper was prime minister of Canada for nine years, from 2006 to 2015, the economist from Calgary who merged the Reform-descended Alliance with the old Progressive Conservatives in 2003 and led the result to three election wins, two minorities and a majority in 2011, governing through the financial crisis with a deficit he had promised never to run, cutting the GST, abolishing the long-gun registry and the long-form census, recognising the Quebecois as a nation within Canada by motion, apologising for the residential schools in 2008, keeping the troops in Kandahar until 2011, and losing in 2015 to Justin Trudeau after a campaign in which a niqab and a barbaric cultural practices hotline were the issues. He had prorogued parliament in 2008 to avoid a confidence vote and been found in contempt of the Commons in 2011, the first government in the Commonwealth to be. He was born in Toronto in 1959, the son of an Imperial Oil accountant, moved to Alberta at nineteen to work in the oil company's mailroom, took degrees in economics at Calgary, and was the Reform Party's policy chief and, from 1993, a member of parliament for Calgary West. He left in 1997 to run the National Citizens Coalition, wrote the firewall letter urging Alberta to wall itself off from Ottawa, and came back in 2002 to lead the Alliance. The sponsorship scandal of the Liberals gave him the election of January 2006. The government was disciplined and closed, the message controlled from the prime minister's office, the press gallery kept at the door, the scientists muzzled. It cut corporate taxes, signed trade agreements with Europe and Korea, backed the oil sands and the Keystone pipeline, and pulled Canada out of Kyoto in 2011. The crisis of 2008 was met with stimulus after the coalition of the three opposition parties in December had frightened him into it, and the banks, regulated as he had not wanted, did not fail. The Senate expenses scandal of 2013 reached his chief of staff, and the 2015 campaign of seventy-eight days, the longest since 1872, was lost to Trudeau's sunny ways by a wide margin. He resigned the leadership that night, left parliament in 2016, and runs a consultancy and the International Democrat Union.
- Lived: 1959 CE – ?
- Nationality: Canadian
- Roles: prime minister, politician
