“They aren't too bad (they aren't too good either),” a source close to the Mr. Harper wrote in an e-mail.
The source confirmed that the Tory Leader plays regularly, something Mr. Harper himself called a dangerous attraction.
“I've always been torn on music and piano in a way because I actually get a great deal of satisfaction out of when I do it, but I get so wrapped up in it. I've always had that problem with the artistic things I've enjoyed doing – I've played piano, I've sung a bit, I used to write poetry – I've always found with these kinds of things that they draw me in and I can't let them go. I find it difficult to do it just on the side, a little bit here and now,” he said.
This fascination manifested itself early in Mr. Harper's childhood, although he can't remember how he came to choose the piano.
“For the first half year I was in lessons, we didn't have a piano and I would actually practice for my lessons on a cardboard keyboard, so I would only hear it for the first time when I actually sat down and had the lessons,” he said.
The conservatory's president, Peter Simon, has seen the focus that compels a young boy to play a silent keyboard firsthand. When he met Mr. Harper at a fundraiser, he said the Conservative Leader quickly launched into a discussion of his studies and his frustration with the results of a Grade 3 musical theory exam on which he scored poorly, despite studying hard.
“It obviously meant a lot to him. It was the intensity of his feelings [that struck me], that to someone who is in effect a stranger he would be that intense about it,” Mr. Simon said.
The conservatory's board chair, Florence Minz, has also met Mr. Harper and said flatly, “This is no Philistine.”
For those wondering why a man of such long-standing artistic interest and curiosity seems so comfortable axing substantial funding from Canada's cultural milieu, Mr. Harper's answers continue to be rooted not in an ideology about the arts, but a philosophy that stresses the need to trim government spending.
“If you don't do that, what you have over time, and frankly what we inherited, was growth of government spending without any resulting improvement in government programming overall. It's just a discipline you have to maintain and it doesn't mean you're slashing some artist or you're slashing farmers or whatever. It simply means that you are constantly reviewing your spending,” he said.
