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As is their wont, some political scientists from the University of Calgary went fishing this week -- for salmon on Vancouver Island. Except this year, the guy who organized the trip couldn't come, because the Liberals called an election and Tom Flanagan is busy running the Conservative Party's national campaign.

As far as Barry Cooper is concerned, losing his fishing buddy "is just another reason to curse Paul Martin." As if he needed one.

Barry Cooper. Tom Flanagan. Rainer Knopff. David Bercuson. Robert Mansell. Ted Morton. Roger Gibbins. These men are known as the Calgary School -- or, irreverently, the Calgary Mafia.

These middle-aged white men, all in their late 50s or early 60s, have achieved what no other academic salon ever has. They have shaped, and now dominate, the thinking of the new Conservative Party. Leader Stephen Harper is their friend and their colleague. At one time, they were his mentors.

If he and his party come to power after Monday's election, they will exercise influence on the national agenda unmatched by any similar group of intellectuals at any time in the life of this nation. Their ideas, their policies, their passions will be mirrored in the government of Canada and in its prime minister.

But it's more, even, than that. The Calgary School is the voice of a new Canada impatient with the careful accommodations of the old central Canadian elites and their beloved creation, the Liberal Party.

This angry voice, although born of regional angst, speaks to everyone who wants to displace the status quo, fashioned and sustained by the oligarchs of Toronto and Montreal, with something new -- something raw, vital, optimistic.

And, for their opponents, something frightening.

The Calgary School "is a Canadian appropriation of American neo-conservatism," warns Shadia Drury, who taught with and fought with the Calgary School for 27 years before leaving the University of Calgary last year for the Canadian Research Chair in Social Justice at the University of Regina.

Their thinking represents, for her, "a huge contempt for democracy," and this election campaign, "the greatest stealth campaign we have ever seen," run by radical populists hiding behind cloak of rhetorical moderation.

Who are these men? Where did they come from and how did they shape each other? What, really, do they believe? How did they transform a geeky, gawky economics student into a potential prime minister? In the answers to these questions lies the key to understanding the mind of Stephen Harper.

In 1975, with the University of Calgary not yet a decade old, the landscaping not yet mature enough to soften the drab-slabs-of-concrete buildings, Anthony Parel was in search of bright young academics to anchor his fledgling political science department. As chair, he believed the future lay in finding solid scholars who could research and teach Canadian politics, but who also had a strong background in political theory.

That latter emphasis was fateful. Specialists in Canadian politics study elections, voting patterns, party formation -- the nuts and bolts of the system.

But theorists are more inclined to seek and question the meaning behind the system, and most members of the Calgary School are political theorists.

Most are also either American-born or American-educated. Mr. Flanagan, who had arrived at the university in 1968, improbably hailed from Ottawa. Only it was the Ottawa in Illinois, and he did his PhD at Duke University, where he became friends with Barry Cooper, a fellow doctoral student originally from British Columbia who talked him into chasing a job offer from Calgary, a place Mr. Flanagan knew nothing about.

In 1980, Mr. Parel also persuaded Mr. Cooper to join the university, having already recruited Rainer Knopff -- German-born, Canadian-raised and Canadian-educated. Mr. Knopff's friend Ted Morton arrived a year later. Born in Los Angeles, he had gone to school at Colorado College and the University of Toronto, where the two had met.

Already at the university were Roger Gibbins, a native of Prince George, B.C., with a doctorate from Stanford, who had arrived in 1973, three years after David Bercuson, who was a Canadian-trained historian but eventually fell in with the political scientists.

Although they never made up more than a quarter of his faculty, Mr. Parel, now retired, says his recruits were its "flagship." He explains: "There is a critical mass that you develop in any department. They formed a kind of intellectual fraternity."

Some arrived with a more conservative bent than others. But the place and the times shaped their thinking.

Robert Mansell, who, as an economist, is more an associate of the Calgary School than a charter member, believes that the political and cultural climate in Alberta, and particularly in Calgary, played a role. "You have a very young, dynamic population, very positive and can-do, that doesn't just take the status quo as the way it has to be," he says, describing a culture that is also more comfortable with the United States, thanks to its close ties and proximity, than with nervous, nationalistic Ontario.

The Alberta economy is based on agriculture and oil, both high-risk ventures that prosper or fail based on external forces, from the weather to the international marketplace, beyond anyone's control.

"People understand that the world changes," Mr. Mansell argues. "External markets change, national policies change, and you can't ask that someone will pay you not to adjust, which we've done in other regions."

And there is the first motif of the Calgary school: Entrepreneurial, risk-taking, successful Alberta subsidizes older and poorer parts of the country that stubbornly refuse to adapt to market realities.

Working separately and in various combinations, members of the school began to develop their own themes.

"We all sort of struck out at about the same time, within two or three years on different issues, and it all sort of came together," Mr. Bercuson recalls.

The national energy plan and the Meech Lake accord convinced them that Central Canadian elites were either ignoring or actively opposing the best interests of Alberta and the West.

The accommodations to Quebec after the 1980 and 1995 referendums convinced them the province was being pandered to, and should be told to shut up or get out.

The Canadian political structure, especially the obsolete Senate and autocratic Supreme Court, convinced them that unaccountable institutions failed to represent western interests and flouted popular will.

The deterioration of the Canadian military, and the latent anti-Americanism harboured by some in the Liberal Party, convinced them that Canada was surrendering its international responsibilities and betraying its closest friend.

Worst of all, a government controlled by a party they considered corrupt, alien and ignorant of or hostile to the West used Alberta tax dollars either to prop up inefficient economies in Quebec and Atlantic Canada, or simply gave the money to its friends.

"Being in Alberta in the 1980s, if you were politically aware, you could be very frustrated, because the wealth was there, the place was beginning to grow, but it had no political impact on anything," Mr. Bercuson explains.

"It was impacting a number of us here who were becoming more and more . . . vociferous about things like guarding provincial jurisdiction, safeguarding provincial rights, trying to restrict the role of the federal government to what it had been constitutionally defined as -- that sort of thing."

These weren't simply rants. Members of the Calgary School, as an American academic dubbed them in 1996, were respectable academics with solid scholarship. But it was their popular writings -- books, newspaper and magazine articles, manifestos -- that brought them national attention and, from many of their Eastern counterparts, contempt.

Mr. Morton achieved national prominence in 1998, when he won one of the two Senate seats chosen through elections held in Alberta, elections that prime minister Jean Chrétien refused to recognize. (Having abandoned his hopes for the Senate, he is running for the Conservatives in the Alberta election expected this autumn.)

By the late 1990s, the names Bercuson and Cooper, Flanagan, Morton and Gibbins (who left the university in 1998 to become head of the Canada West Foundation, a regional think-tank) were well known in political circles. In 2001, Mr. Flanagan, Mr. Morton, Mr. Knopff and several others created a national controversy by penning a manifesto, quickly dubbed the Firewall Letter, that called on Premier Ralph Klein to create a separate Alberta pension plan, replace the RCMP with a provincial police force, instigate new talks on Senate reform and, if necessary, withdraw from the Canada Health Act.

One of the signatures on that letter was that of Stephen Harper.

He arrived at the University of Calgary in 1981, a nerdy kid from Toronto who had dropped out of university there and come out to Alberta to work as a computer programmer before returning to school for an undergraduate and then master's degree in economics. He was already obsessed with politics, theoretical and practical. And as a graduate student, he impressed Robert Mansell no end.

"Not only was he bright, and not only did he have very good ideas about fundamental economics, he had some really good ideas about how you go about implementing them," the economist remembers.

At his urging, Preston Manning hired Mr. Harper in 1987 to do policy research for the nascent Reform Party. "He was the only one among the graduate students who had the smarts, the interest, the experience, the drive," Mr. Mansell recalls.

After the 1988 election, Mr. Harper joined Mr. Flanagan and other members of the Calgary School in periodic blue-sky sessions with Mr. Manning to plot Reform's future course. In 1993, he was elected to Parliament for Calgary West, and was counselled by Mr. Flanagan and others as they all grew increasingly impatient with Mr. Manning's populist emphasis, his flexibility on policy issues and his power lock on the party apparatus.

In 1997, Mr. Harper left politics to run the National Citizens' Coalition, an advocacy group closely affiliated with the Calgary School, as is the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, the country's leading conservative think-tank.

Through the rest of the decade, led by more than one Moses and perhaps a false Messiah or two, conservatism in Canada painfully fractured. The factions reunited only last December under the command of Mr. Harper, who had wrested from Stockwell Day the leadership of Reform's offspring, the Canadian Alliance, and then absorbed the remnants of the Progressive Conservative Party.

Today, the Conservative Party is Stephen Harper, the finest flower of the Calgary School. Tom Flanagan, having mastered the intricacies of running a political campaign, has left the university to manage Mr. Harper's. Ken Boessenkool, another alumnus, is director of policy, after working at the C.D. Howe Institute and for Stockwell Day, when he was treasurer of Alberta. Ian Brodie, a former student of Mr. Flanagan who went on to teach at University of Western Ontario, is now executive director of the party.

None of these three would agree to an interview with the campaign reaching its climax. But in Mr. Harper's close attachment to them and to the Calgary School can be found the root of his famous reserve -- his inability to glad-hand or back-slap, to work a room and charm a voter, qualities most people consider the sine qua non of a good politician.

After years watching politicians and being one, Mr. Harper has learned the gestures. But he will never master them because of his dark secret: He is an intellectual, most comfortable in the company of other intellectuals.

"Harper was always punching at our weight," Mr. Knopff recalls. "He was a very smart guy. He was doing an economics degree, but he was thinking politics all the time. He was very well read." More than once, the professor sent Mr. Harper drafts of his own scholarly articles, for analysis and comment.

Mr. Flanagan, himself both an academic and a political addict, is the leader's closest adviser. They have a common reserve (Mr. Flanagan is even more distant and unapproachable) and prefer the company of other political scientists and economists.

As well, Mr. Harper and those closest to him, in Calgary and in his own office, apply the same rigorous, bloodless logic to politics that is the hallmark of an academic mind.

"There are things that come out of economics that struck a chord with Stephen," Mr. Mansell says. "He is someone who is much more analytical than we've seen in a long time. I think he is someone who is prepared to confront some of the myths, who is prepared to anchor things much more in solid facts. Instead of having health care and Kyoto debated on emotional terms, either good or evil--and this is where the academic side comes in--he'd say, 'Let's have a meaningful debate based on facts.' "

Mr. Mansell sat on the committee that examined Mr. Harper's master's thesis (on the influence of political cycles in the formation of fiscal policy) and knows how his mind works. "You've got basic facts. You are trying to explain those facts with the simplest possible theory, and then you must test that theory, to see if it is correct. And what you often find is that the result is at odds with your initial thoughts."

New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, it should be noted, has a PhD in political science (he studied at York and McGill, two schools very different from Calgary), and Paul Martin has a law degree (from the University of Toronto) and ran the Finance Department. But it is difficult to imagine either of Mr. Harper's main opponents applying economic tools such as horizontal and vertical equity to issues of public policy. At least, not with the same enthusiasm.

But it's an enthusiasm he tries to hide, just as he never talks about what books he's reading, or never plays the piano in public despite the years he spent studying the instrument. It's all part of the legacy of the Calgary School. They are blue-collar intellectuals.

"One of the characteristics of the Calgary School is that they are very engaged in hunting and fishing and hiking and camping," Mr. Gibbins observes. When he was chair of the department, from 1987 to 1996, one of his big challenges was to manage the teaching schedule, because so many faculty members disappeared during hunting season.

"These are not metrosexuals. This is a hunting and foraging group."

Imagine a cocktail party held in a comfortable living room in Toronto's Annex district. Margaret Atwood is there, and a visiting professor from McGill University, a deputy minister from Ottawa, and perhaps an editorial writer from the Toronto Star.

They speak softly, but in horror, of the prospect of a Stephen Harper government: a radical, reforming government from out of the West, antithetical to everything they have fought for and everything they have achieved in forging the Canadian consensus.

"How would I console them?" Robert Mansell offers a slight grin. In truth, he's not interested in offering consolation. "I'm a bit amused by it." But Rainer Knopff thinks they really have nothing to fear.

"The world won't come to an end. Not all that much will change. What we are talking about here is a kind of debate that's been happening in many parts of the world, but very much within the liberal democratic consensus. We're not talking about someone coming in to establish a fundamentalist theocracy. We're talking about whether the taxes should be lower or higher."

And he points out that the school is hardly monolithic. Mr. Morton, for example, espouses a strong social conservatism. "Societies require, in my opinion, a certain self-generating ethical glue . . . that is generated most naturally and most effectively in the traditional, two-parent family," he argues. The state has an interest in protecting the traditional family because "anything that erodes that complicates the task of society."

Others, such as Mr. Bercuson, support the right to abortion and would get government out of the marriage business, gay or straight, because a truly libertarian government maximizes personal choice.

And where is Stephen Harper? "I think historically he's on the libertarian side," Mr. Morton says, although he suspects Mr. Harper's experience as a husband and parent may have sharpened his sympathies for so-called family values.

Ardent foe Shadia Drury isn't reassured. To her, neo-conservatism is the new Marxism. "Neo-conservatism, like Marxism, and unlike other ideologies, is made up of a set of very simple ideas that can be understood by people who are non-professional, non-philosophers, and that explain everything that is wrong with the world."

She sees the Calgary School as the new vanguard of the proletariat, offering simple and soothing nostrums that resonate with the public, especially recent immigrants from socially conservative and undemocratic countries.

But once the vanguard has power, she fears, it will exploit populist sentiment to strip away the rights of minorities and dismantle what is left of the welfare state. "They want to replace the rule of law with the populism of the majority."

And they won't even have to leave their university sinecures to do it, because they have created Stephen Harper. "They've already shaped him. He's their product. He is thoroughly immersed in neo-conservative ideology."

Roger Gibbins finds such alarm nonsensical. "There will only be changes at the margins," he predicts. "The cumulative effect, maybe not over one term but two, may be significant, but to argue that Canadians would not recognize their country is really excessive hyperbole. We're just not amenable to radical change in Canada."

For example, Tom Flanagan wrote a book arguing for radical changes in aboriginal policy that would start Canada down the road to eliminating the special rights of Indians and Métis, giving them status neither greater nor lesser than those of the general population.

But Mr. Gibbins cannot imagine a Harper government ever tackling such an issue in such a way. The institutional impediments would be insurmountable.

And yet Ms. Drury's warning is echoed in the harsh words of Barry Cooper, who sounds suspiciously like one of those antediluvian political scientists who wouldn't give an A to any student who didn't accept the fundamentals of Marxism.

In his case, Mr. Cooper would have a hard time giving an A to a student who defended the central Canadian consensus and the record of the Liberal Party. "Anybody who doesn't think the Liberals are corrupt has their head . . . well, in the sand, rather than someplace else, let us say."

Such arguments might have been defensible a decade ago, "but anybody who tried to make that case in the year 2000 or 2004, it would be an extremely difficult case to make," he says. "If you don't see it, then the question is, why don't you see it?"

The members of the Calgary School now face a contradiction. For more than 20 years, now, they have been arguing for fundamental changes to the Canadian state, changes that would realign the balance of federal-provincial powers and the relationship of government to the individual.

Yet now, with the prospect of 24 Sussex Drive so tantalizingly close, they must persuade Canadians, especially those suspicious, fearful central Canadians, that they can trust Stephen Harper, and trust letting the West get at least one hand on the levers of power.

"I don't think it's a case of Stephen Harper rhetorically moving toward the mainstream but having a hidden agenda," Mr. Gibbins contends. "I think that movement toward the mainstream is the reality in Canadian political life.

"If Stephen Harper is able to form a national government, it will be because he broadened the Conservative Party well beyond the Calgary School, and well beyond Western Canada. And his government will reflect that."

That may be true -- and this as well: The Calgary School, and the many Albertans and other westerners who share its beliefs, are giving central Canadian voters, especially those in Ontario, one last chance to prove that their loyalty to a sclerotic Liberal Party is not infinite, that they will leave the worried elites in their Annex living rooms to stew, and give a truly western and truly conservative leader a chance.

If they don't, if Ontario stampedes to the Liberals one more time, leaving the West out in the cold, the Calgary School will lead as the throng marches on Toronto with baseball bats.

Rhetorical ones, of course.

John Ibbitson is a Globe and Mail columnist in Ottawa and co-host of the CTV public-affairs program Question Period.

THE CALGARY MAFIA

Tom Flanagan

BA (Notre Dame), A.M., PhD (Duke), Fellow of Royal Society of Canada

Expertise: political theory, especially liberalism and conservatism; millenarian movements; aboriginal land claims; game theory and rational choice; biopolitics.

The tight-lipped native of Ottawa, Illinois, has punctuated his academic career with stints of political service, as director of research for the Reform Party in 1991-92 and now as the Conservative Party's national campaign director -- and Stephen Harper's closest adviser.

F.L. (Ted) Morton

BA (Colorado College), MA and PhD (University of Toronto)

Expertise: comparative judicial process; constitutional law and civil liberties in Canada, the United States and France.

On social values:

'Societies require, in my opinion, a certain self-generating ethical glue . . . that is generated most naturally and most effectively in the traditional two-parent family.'

Rainer Knopff

Professor of political science

BA (McMaster) MA, PhD (University of Toronto)

Expertise: public law, civil liberties and political thought.

If Mr. Harper is elected:

'The world won't come to an end. Not all that much will change. What we are talking about here is a kind of debate that's been happening in many parts of the world, but very much within the liberal democratic consensus. We're not talking about someone coming in to establish a fundamentalist theocracy. We're talking about whether the taxes should be lower or higher.'

David J. Bercuson

Professor of history

PhD (U of T), Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Specialties: modern (post-1914) Canadian political, military and diplomatic history; strategic studies.

On the Calgary School's roots:

'Being in Alberta in the 1980s, if you were politically aware, you could be very frustrated, because the wealth was there, the place was beginning to grow, but it had no political impact on anything.'

Barry Cooper

Professor of political science

BA (UBC), A.M., PhD (Duke), Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Specialties: Political theory and Canadian politics, political thought and public policy.

On the record of the party in power: 'Anybody who doesn't think the Liberals are corrupt has their head -- well, in the sand, rather than someplace else, let us say.'

Robert L. Mansell

Professor of economics (PhD, University of Alberta) and currently a special adviser to the university president and managing director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy.

If Mr. Harper is elected:

'I think he is someone who is prepared to confront some of the myths, who is prepared to anchor things much more in solid facts. Instead of having health care and Kyoto debated on emotional terms . . . he'd say, Let's have a meaningful debate based on facts.'

Roger Gibbins

Former chair of political science, now president, Canada West Foundation.

BA (UBC), MA, PhD (Stanford)

Expertise: regionalism, Western Canadian politics, comparative federalism and new social movements.

If Mr. Harper is elected:

'There will only be changes at the margins. The cumulative effect . . . may be significant, but to argue that Canadians would not recognize their country is really excessive hyperbole. We're just not amenable to radical change in Canada.'

The Calgary School:

What it believes

Here are the group's Top 10 tenets. Not all the members, or Stephen Harper, would necessarily agree with all the capsule summaries listed (alphabetically) below, but the net effect is a rough guide to the Calgary school of thought.

Defence: Canada has let its military degenerate to dangerous and irresponsible levels. Major and sustained investments in materiel and manpower are needed. No other federal spending program should have a higher priority.

The family: It is the foundation of society and should be protected, but not by coercion. So, tax credits for daycare rather than subsidized daycare programs; perhaps school vouchers to give parents choice in how their children are educated (although education is a provincial responsibility, so the federal role should be limited); and an end to federal promotion of minority rights that undermine the centrality of a husband, a wife, their children and their relatives as the true family unit.

Health care: Whenever a valuable product is provided free, demand will exceed supply. Governments should experiment with user fees, delisting and parallel private care to check waste and ease the load on the system.

International affairs: Canada should seek closer economic ties with the United States, perhaps leading to a full customs union, while working with its closest ally and other allies to fight terror and preserve the peace. Foreign aid should be used to encourage free trade and the rule of law within the developing world.

Meddling: The federal government does too much of it, interfering in personal choice through coercive programs, undermining provincial autonomy by abusing the federal spending power, eroding regional development by penalizing success and rewarding failure. Ottawa should stick to its knitting -- trade, defence, foreign policy -- and, when it must intervene in the social sphere, emphasize freedom of choice over redistribution of resources.

Regional development: There shouldn't be any. While the Calgary School grudgingly accepts that equalization transfer payments from Alberta and Ontario to other provinces via the federal government are necessary to preserve national standards in social programs, it opposes regional economic-development assistance, which distorts market forces and props up inefficient sectors of the economy. If it can't make its own way, shut it down.

The Senate: It's a worthless tool of political patronage that penalizes the West especially by awarding Atlantic Canada more senators than it deserves. The Senate should be more democratic and more regionally representative. Short of that, senators should be elected.

The Supreme Court: It has exceeded the role envisioned by those who framed both the 1867 and 1982 constitutions, by aggressively expanding the scope of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Court appointments should be subject to public scrutiny, issues referred to the court by Parliament should be discouraged and Parliament should be willing to invoke the Constitution's notwithstanding clause to limit court powers and protect parliamentary supremacy.

Taxes: They should go down, both to increase competitiveness and to compel the federal government to scale back on wasteful spending.

Tax points: In essence, this is the share of taxes the federal government takes in compared with that of the provinces. Right now, the Calgary School believes, Ottawa collects too much money for the responsibilities it has, or should have. Tax points should be transferred to the provinces, increasing their revenue-generating power and reducing federal intrusion into provincial affairs.

-- John Ibbitson