After failing to bring down the Martin government last spring, Stephen Harper disappeared. He didn't just disappear from public sight. His staff couldn't reach him either. He wouldn't return calls, avoided meetings. He was sulking, and he was thinking.
And then he came back. "He decided he was willing to give it one more shot," as someone who was there describes it. The Conservative Leader threw himself into preparations for the election campaign to come; he subjected himself to a barbecue-circuit pre-election tour; he made changes to his staff, resolved to control his notorious temper, and hammered out a detailed policy platform that aimed to put to rest Liberal accusations of a secret Conservative agenda.
It was worth the effort. Some time in early February, unless the plurality of you who now support him change your mind, Stephen Harper, at the age of 46, will become the 22nd prime minister of Canada. You probably know his policies and his priorities, though some of you still suspect his motives and his agenda.
But voters don't cast a ballot based exclusively, or even primarily, on the platforms of competing parties. They vote for the guy they trust most, or distrust least. It is probably fair to say that Stephen Harper is winning this election because he is less distrusted than Paul Martin.
But the question still hangs out there: Who is Stephen Harper? What is he like? Is he really that cold and remote? How would he react in a crisis?
What kind of a prime minister would Stephen Harper make?
One clue to an answer might lie in his asthma.
Mr. Harper has suffered from asthma since childhood. Even today, it can hamper his performance, bothering him for weeks at a time, and then abating. When Mr. Harper was young, asthma limited his ability to play team sports, especially his beloved hockey (although he has never been comfortable playing on a team).
He compensated by taking up track and field in high school. One person who has watched him suspects asthma might contribute to a tendency Mr. Harper has to fade in the final stretch of a long campaign.
Mr. Harper is an avid reader of biography (and history and economics and politics and philosophy; as for fiction, not so much), so he will know that a common denominator informs the early lives of most prominent figures. Something -- some disability, some circumstance -- removes exceptional people from the pack at a young age, leaving them isolated, but also leaving them able to assess objectively, from the outside, what others inside the pack simply take for granted.
This may be reading too much into a common ailment. "Asthma has been a factor, at times," acknowledges John Weissenberger, one of Mr. Harper's oldest friends. "But I wouldn't make too much of it. It comes and goes."
Whether it was asthma or something else, Mr. Harper arrived in Calgary after a middle-class, suburban Toronto upbringing a formidably intelligent but very introverted young man, attracted to the outsider mythology of the West, angry at the centrist, central-Canadian consensus of this country's political and intellectual elites, and impatient to shake that consensus.
"What drove him into politics was indignation, outrage," argues commentator William Johnson, who has written a biography called Stephen Harper and the Future of Canada. It was ideology, not love of the game, that Mr. Johnson believes pushed Mr. Harper into public life.
"One thing that I would say about him, with great conviction, is that he's a straight arrow," Mr. Johnson believes. "What you see is what you get. He's not good at acting or pretending. He doesn't weep with widows and hug every orphan in sight, and he won't wear a hundred hearts on his sleeve. By character and by principle he opposes all the photo ops and false sentiments" that are part of political theatre.
(This has contributed to the ongoing tension, sometimes shading into mutual hostility, between Mr. Harper and the media, which he considers too often biased, ill-informed and lazy. It has been said that one of the great transformations of this election campaign is that Mr. Harper no longer displays open contempt for the press gallery. Now he hides his contempt.)
