Related Links: Wikipedia: Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada Official Website: PM Stephen Harper
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Conservative Leader Stephen Harper’s long journey to spiritual and political clarity — and to being comfortable in his own skin — began in the leafy Toronto suburbs of Leaside and Etobicoke. First of three leader profiles.
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper traces his roots to Toronto, where he grew up in what he describes as a suburban idyll. In high school, as a lanky teenager, he was an academic ace and long-distance runner.
The impulse to seek clues
and draw inferences about a political leader who stubbornly avoids
self-revelation is all but irresistible.
To those plumbing the
personality and shifting moods of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a traumatic
moment from before his birth offers at least some explanation for what may have
helped shape him.
In Moncton, N.B., in 1950,
Harris Chapman Harper, a local community pillar, was married, raising two sons
and serving as principal of Prince Edward School.
Harris Harper was
descended from an Englishman who set sail for Canada in 1774. Harris served in
the militia, was a crack shot and had established a cadet corps at which he
spent his summers happily drilling recruits.
On Jan. 21, 1950, a frigid
Saturday in Moncton, Harris Harper left home after lunch to walk to his
doctor’s office less than a kilometre away for a vitamin B injection.
After receiving the shot,
Harper was seen going down the steps of the office on Highfield St. The person
who saw him said the 47-year-old man seemed disoriented. Harris Harper was
never seen again.
Police were alerted, a
massive search mounted and cross-Canada alerts issued. Five years later, no
trace found, Harris Harper was declared legally dead.
Naturally, speculation
abounded. Was it foul play? A dreadful accident? Had Harper committed suicide?
Had he merely run off for a new life? But without his wallet? And with an
uncashed paycheque on his dresser?
Whatever the reason, the
impact on Harris Harper’s family was profound. In August 1951, upon finishing
his chartered accountancy studies, Harper’s oldest son, Joseph, perhaps wishing
to put some distance between himself and the scene of such heartbreak, left for
Toronto.There, he found work. And six months later, at a dance at Danforth
United Church, he met Margaret Johnston.Eighteen-year-old Margaret, who also
traced her roots back to an English ancestor who left for Canada, was from a
large family in Ontario’s rural Grey County and had grown up poor during the
Depression.
In truth, Margaret, who had come to Toronto to
attend secretarial school, was hardly bowled over that first night by the young
man from New Brunswick. She intended to give him the slip. But fate had other plans.
Joe and Margaret married
in 1954. They would have three sons: Stephen, Grant and Robert.
When Joe Harper moved west
to Ontario, he found love, prosperity and a peaceful life. Still, he seems —
from what little is known about the Harpers — to have carried both the effects
of his family trauma and the influence of his vanished father with him. No mere
geographical move frees one of that.
Whether by nature or
circumstance, Joe Harper was cautious, wary, reserved. Stephen Harper would one
day say that Harris Harper’s disappearance had left his dad with an indelible
sense of the impermanence of love, security, happiness.
Joseph Harper with his three sons, from left, Grant, Robert and Stephen.
“It made (my father) appreciate that all the good things in life, all the best things in life, in work and play, in friendships and family, are still just passing things,” Stephen said in a eulogy at Joe Harper’s funeral in 2003.
Joe Harper prized prudence, security and the self-contained consolations of home. He was a teetotaller who found all the adventure he needed cocooned in a happy marriage.
“Before I met your mother, I had never been a really happy person,” Joe once told his oldest son. “After I met her, I have never really been unhappy since.”
Stephen Harper once told the Star that his father was “a person of scrupulous integrity. He was a stickler for following the letter and spirit of all rules.”
The words were said in praise. But it’s not difficult to imagine such a stance as the search for order in an unruly world, not difficult to imagine that life under such a patriarch might have been stifling.
Joe Harper immersed himself in military history, which he took to with an obsessive’s zeal. He spent years researching and writing monographs on the history of regimental flags.
“It was really the thing, I think, of all the work he did in his life (that) he took the most pleasure from,” his son the prime minister would say.
At work, in his accounting ledgers and innovative work in computer systems, Joe Harper found comfort in the immutable logic of facts and figures.
In hobbies, he immersed himself in the fixed, reliable facts of the past.
And in the suburban redoubts where he raised his sons, he found what safety and security there was in a world that could shatter lives over a lunch hour.
Reaching for the top in his own way
When he speaks of his childhood, Stephen Harper describes an idyllic family, safe neighbourhood and a life so happy it would have made the heartwarming art of Norman Rockwell look like Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
In the affluent Toronto communities of Leaside and Etobicoke, problems were few and minor, his mother ceaselessly loving, his father unfailingly wise, his two younger brothers his closest pals.
TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO
Stephen Harper talks to students at his former elementary school, Northlea Public School in Leaside, in 2004.
Stephen Joseph Harper was born just as the well-tended gardens of Bessborough Dr. were blossoming in the spring of 1959. The turbulent ’60s were arriving to rock the continent, but seem to have bypassed Leaside.
Harper has told no stories of childhood stress, trial, need or crucible.
“When I was a boy here, you felt safe; you knew people were looking out for you,” he once said. “You felt you could knock and did, in fact, knock on any door at any time if you were in trouble or you needed something.”
It’s telling that the anecdote is delivered in the distancing second person, the prime minister retailing nostalgic images and homey verities more than the particulars of his own history.
Still, if the Harper family of Bessborough Dr. sounds like something out of a 1960s sitcom, such a portrait seems to have the merit of being largely true.
Young Steve Harper’s first foray into public affairs reportedly occurred in 1964 as debate raged over proposals for Canada’s new flag.
The 5-year-old polled everyone on his street to see what they thought. Emotions ran high, he would recall. Some neighbours even stopped speaking to each other.
Steve remembers the chosen flag being raised outside his kindergarten class at Northlea Public School in 1965 and Bessborough Drive returning to its untroubled ways. “Very quickly, peace came back to the neighbourhood.”
Steve had most of the privileges of affluence, spending summers with relatives in New Brunswick, travelling with his family when he was 11 through Western Canada. He was active in wholesome activities like Cubs and Scouts. He took piano lessons, played hockey, had a paper route for the Toronto Telegram.
Not long after he sold the Tely route, just before the paper failed, the Harpers moved to Etobicoke.
At St. Luke’s United Church, which the family attended, Harper took confirmation classes. But he quit those. Rev. Jim Moulton would tell the United Church Observer that young Steve was still wrestling with “the concept of God.”
In 1972, Steve Harper’s true religion was hockey. The Canada-Soviet Summit Series was on. And in the yard at John G. Althouse Middle School, it was all anyone talked about.
Steve watched the opening game with his father and brothers in the basement family room, watched in horror as the Soviets stunned Canada with a lopsided victory.
BERNARD WEIL
A photo of Stephen Harper now hangs inside the office at Leaside Memorial Community Gardens, where he played ("very poorly," he said) for the Leaside Lions.
“I remember sitting there like the people in the Montreal Forum just in disbelief,” Harper later said.
But as the nation reeled, Joe Harper reportedly noted to his son how Britain was similarly shocked after the shambolic retreat from Dunkirk at the outset of the Second World War, but rallied to meet the challenges of the times.
It can’t be every Canadian boy who had such an analogy made for him. But it was in keeping with Steve Harper’s understanding of the distinct roles of mothers and fathers.
He once told the Star that “from your mother you always get love … From your father you get initiation to the world.”
Persistent asthma as a child kept Harper out of seriously competitive sports. But as it waned, he did play hockey. And in high school at Richview Collegiate Institute he took to long-distance running.
By then, tall and skinny, he had the appropriate frame and loping stride. He also had the will. And not least of the sport’s attractions was likely its solitude.
“It’s a treat being a long-distance runner,” Alan Sillitoe wrote in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. “Out in the world by yourself with not a soul to make you bad-tempered or tell you what to do …”
Stephen Harper and his cross-country team, from the Richview Collegiate Institute 1978 yearbook. Tall and lanky, Harper took up running during his high school years in Etobicoke.
Notwithstanding his running, and fondness for the Beatles, Steve Harper was seen — in the remorseless caste system of high school — as a member of the straitlaced geek camp. He wasn’t “what I would call one of the opinion leaders in high school,” a former classmate would put it.
While his peers might have been experimenting with sex and drugs, Harper joined the Liberal club, starred on the Reach for the Top team and won the academic gold medal at graduation in 1978.
His well-ordered life seemed on track. That August, a Richview teacher led six graduating students on a weeklong canoe trip to Algonquin Park. In the fall, Steve was to start at the University of Toronto.
But after a few weeks, he quit. His parents were aghast.
Steve Harper, chafing perhaps against parental authority and his claustrophobically cosy Toronto boyhood, was bent on building his own muscles by pushing back against expectations.
In 1978, uninspired and unfocused, the 19-year-old headed west to a menial office job in Alberta, and the serious business of finding himself.
Stephen Harper's accomplishments as recounted in the Richview Collegiate yearbook.
Old stomping grounds
Some of the landmarks of Stephen Harper’s early life in Toronto:
Stephen Harper spent his first 12 years in a red-brick, two-storey house with a bay window and small fireplace in the living room and a fenced backyard. He liked to say he “grew up in a small town in Toronto.” Some of his fondest memories are of walking to the old Leaside station with his father to watch trains come and go. In 1971, Joe Harper sold the Bessborough house for $39,500 — “probably not the wisest financial transaction they ever made,” Harper joked a few years ago about his parents, given that the property is probably now worth 30 times that much.
BERNARD WEIL
332 Bessborough Dr., Stephen Harper's first home in Leaside.
In an era when the 1972 Canada-Soviet Summit Series made the normally hockey-crazy nation more rabid than ever, Harper found his patch of ice at Leaside Arena, where he probably got his skates sharpened by Frank Mahovlich’s father. He played — “very poorly,” he said — for the Leaside Lions, a blond, gangly left-hand shot. A photo from his playing days was hung on the wall after he became PM. “It wasn’t there at the time I played, believe me,” he said. (Harper also assured Leaside residents that he had paid for the framing himself and hadn’t used taxpayers’ money.) More recently, Harper donated $1,000 to the arena’s construction of a second ice pad.
KEITH BEATY
Leaside Memorial Community Gardens, where Harper played hockey as a child.
From Leaside, the Harpers moved across town to Etobicoke in 1971 to a ranch bungalow with big picture window, three fireplaces, a large lawn and two-car garage. It is the setting for Harper’s adolescence and coming of age, and the reason he is referred to as Canada’s first suburban prime minister.
MICHAEL STUPARYK
The former Harper home at 57 Princess Anne Cres., Etobicoke, seen during the 2008 election campaign, when it was clearly inhabited by a Conservative-friendly family.
Like so many Canadians of a certain age, Stephen Harper remembers exactly where he was on the afternoon of Sept. 28, 1972. Harper watched the final game of the Canada-Soviet Summit Series on TV in his school gymnasium, rising along with the nation when, as Foster Hewitt put it, “Henderson has scored for Canada!” to win the game and the series. “Teachers had long ago given up trying to teach us during these games,” he recalled. “We can all remember Paul Henderson’s goal. Who could forget it?” The passion for hockey endured, resulting in Harper’s 2013 book on hockey history — the first, it’s thought, by a sitting prime minister — called A Great Game.
RENÉ JOHNSTON
John G. Althouse Middle School.
In high school, Stephen Harper was an academic star and the bespectacled, plaid-bell-bottom-wearing ace of the school’s Reach for the Top team. (Richview lost to Vincent Massey Collegiate 445-160 — half of those points produced by Harper.) Still, former classmates do not recall him as an opinion leader. In fact, had Harper not gone on to become prime minister, it’s a reasonable guess that, come the school’s 50th anniversary — which he attended in 2008 — few of his former classmates would have had much more than a foggy memory of the gawky brainiac. At that reunion, the Richview Saint who became PM got to live every nerd’s dream. “I guess you’re not wondering what happened to me after high school,” he said.
BERNARD WEIL
Richview Collegiate Institute in Etobicoke, where Stephen Harper attended high school.
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