Stephen Harper and His Friends
If you didn’t see it, you are one of the few. Last week I woke up to the fact that our Prime Minister Stephen Harper had been doing some crooning at the National Arts Center in Ottawa. With the encouragement from his wife, Mr. Harper surprised to gala crowd and wowed them with the Beatles song “Getting By With a Little Help From my Friends”. I was surprised by it but quite pleased. I’ve never thought Mr. Harper was the sour puss he is so often portrayed as in the media.
I must admit I watched it more than once because I like seeing one of our politicians out of his element a guy that seemingly would take a chance on falling flat on its face. I also thought after it was over there might be some political ramifications down the road. It didn’t take long, my twitter page lit up with comments from some of my female friends telling me that now they liked Stephen Harper. This was translated later in the week into boosted poll results that seemingly put Stephen Harper close to majority territory.
It has been quite a transformation for our Prime Minister. If you look hard in the CBC archives you can find some tape of him as “an angry young man” helping to forge a reform movement in Western Canada. The Stephen Harper who at one time was the President of the right-wing National Citizens Coalition seems to have been washed away. The new Stephen Harper is running large federal deficits, hanging around with Barack Obama at G-20 conferences and shaking a leg with Yo-Yo Ma in Ottawa. It’s a real transformation.
I’ve had the opportunity to meet Stephen Harper on two different occasions both when he was leader of the opposition. The first time was at a small farm rally in Chatham Ontario. At the time I was doing radio commentary in Chatham and I had heard that there was a farm rally near the radio station. So one thing led to another and I showed up at the farm rally. Little did I know that Stephen Harper was across the road attending some type of conservative gathering.
None of this registered with me at the time but after a few speakers got up on a wagon talking about Canada’s agriculture policy, rumors stirred in the crowd that Stephen Harper was going to meet with us. I thought my goodness this is really something he’s going to come talk to this group of farmers. However it didn’t quite work out that way, the next thing I knew the group of farmers were crossing the road to meet with him, hopefully. A few minutes later opposition leader Stephen Harper walked in the room and held a meeting with farmers gathered.
I was quite impressed that he would do that and I was also impressed with the local farmers who had arranged it. It seemed they were not going to take no for an answer. It seemed everybody got to ask a question except me and for whatever reason that led to me being invited in after to speak with him privately. So there we were Stephen Harper and I talking for about 20 minutes specifically about economics and our similar academic backgrounds doing graduate work in the economics.
The next time I met him was when I handed him a DVD of the Wallaceburg farm rally during the 2006 federal election. It was a time of much tumult in our agricultural policy world and farmers were holding protests across Ontario. I’d taken pictures of the rally in Wallaceburg and farmers sold the picture DVD to raise money for a local food bank. By happenstance, I was able to hand Stephen Harper a DVD and the rest is history. In fact that January I also got to hand one to Prime Minister Paul Martin and NDP leader Jack Layton. I wonder where those DVDs are now?
At the time farmers were very angry with the Liberal government over their agricultural policy. Stephen Harper had a friendly audience at that time in Ontario farm country and there were some who said that support helped him get over the top in 2006. There are also those in 2009 that say that support has evaporated in the same Ontario farm country where he first sought it. So when I saw him singing that song about “getting by with a little help from my friends” at the Ottawa gala, it took me back. It’s been a long time since Stephen Harper has been at a farm rally.
What happens next to Stephen Harper? I dunno. Politics tends to gobble people up if they stay too long and polls are as fickle as they come. It looks to me Stephen Harper is looking for a little help from his friends in the next federal election. It also looks that maybe some of those friends have changed. We’ll see what happens.