In 2007, about a year after he became prime minister, Stephen Harper shared some thoughts on his progress in office with Rex Murphy, then the host of CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup. “Probably the most difficult job—you know, [a] practical, difficult thing you have to learn as a prime minister—and ministers, our ministers as well—is dealing with the federal bureaucracy,” Harper said. “It’s walking that fine line of being a positive leader of the federal public service, but at the same time pushing them and not becoming captive to them,” he added. “I could write a book on that one.”
Ever since then I’ve wished he would write that book. Harper was an outsider, by temperament and ideology, to a lot of common Ottawa assumptions. He had already made it clear, before he became prime minister, that he didn’t view the federal public service as a neutral enabler. In the last days of the 2006 campaign, he had sought to allay fears of a Conservative majority...
Paul Wells is a senior writer for Maclean’s magazine. He wrote two books about Stephen Harper.
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