Harper's Team: Behind the Scenes in the Conservative Rise to Power.

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

Throughout most of the 1990s, Canadians who believed in the two-party system despaired that they would ever see it back. After the disaster of the Mulroney years, which saw the once-mighty Progressive Conservative Party riven in three, it seemed that the Liberals would go on forever. Even Liberals believed that—who can forget Paul Martin’s acceptance speech, after he succeeded in turfing Jean Chrétien, in which he laid out his plans “for the next 10 years”?

And yet, by 2006, Stephen Joseph Harper, a Conservative, had beaten Martin at his own game. Tom Flanagan, a professor of political science at the University of Calgary and, for much of the period, Harper’s chief campaign organizer, has done everyone a huge favour in explaining, at least from the Conservative perspective, how this all came to pass. His backstory starts in the 1991 when Flanagan and Harper first met, and it goes on until 2001, when Stockwell Day’s leadership of the Canadian Alliance imploded, drawing Stephen Harper out of private life into that party’s second leadership contest. In the next seven chapters, Flanagan takes us through Harper’s triumph in that contest, his work in uniting the Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties, his election as leader of the new Conservative Party in 2004, followed immediately by his first federal election and then the second election in 2006, which led to him becoming Canada’s 22nd prime minister.

While the book has a little of an “inside baseball” feel about it—Harper had a pretty big team behind him and not everyone will know immediately who such people as Ken Boessenkool are—that little drawback is more than counterbalanced by the Flanagan’s insights. Readers will particularly appreciate his honesty in explaining failures that occurred along the way—but more, they will learn much about how a political party becomes successful. In fact, if they haven’t figured it out, Flanagan’s final chapter supplies a splendid overview of the Ten Commandments of Conservative Campaigning. Liberals take especial note.