CALGARY — 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."
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