So the die is cast and there will be 4 years of Conservative rule now that Harper has been “deeply honoured” by a “majority mandate” (his 55% of seats in parliament, thanks to a winner-take-all electoral system, is due to only 39% of the vote). In light of this, it is perhaps worth taking the time to remind ourselves of some features of Mr Harper that are even more dubious than his palling around with Chad Kroeger and his narcissistic desire to plaster the government lobby of the House of Commons with photographs of himself.

The Harper government’s ability to finesse its image is outstanding. This is some grade-A dissembling, folks. Despite the rhetoric of moderation, there can be no doubt that Harper hews to a deeply socially-conservative perspective of the world. Often, in an exemplary adherence to naked-emperor lockstep, a narrative is trotted out that either sees Harper himself as fiscally, not socially, conservative or that maintains that Harper government initiatives that go “too far” will always be hamstrung by some congenital liberalism allegedly innate to Canadians. While the latter is up for debate (I don’t buy it), the former is highly suspicious. While he may not hold forth on such convictions regularly, when happily enveloped in Sanctum Sanctorums of conservative symposia, surrounded by like-minded bedfellows, he sounds off with such nuggets as “Serious conservative parties simply cannot shy away from values questions.” I don’t mean here to overlook his economic conservatism, which also tends to be obscured beneath lip-service paid to “centrism,” especially when framed by the likes of the National Post, but rather to suggest that, where Harper is concerned, the two are intertwined. “Values questions” inform social policy and, of course, have an undeniable economic underpinning. A reconfiguration of what is understood to be a “public good” is bound to happen when policy decisions reorient what constitutes “responsibility” and attempt to shuffle said responsibility from the state to the market and the family unit or “individual” (as if the “individual” exists as a purer iteration of itself under market conditions). Are our responsibilities to our communities and the greater social fabric or are they to ourselves and our atomized familial units, floating in disaggregated so-called neighbourhoods? Public goods become understood to be private goods as collective social solidarity dissolves.

A look at some elements of Harper’s past makes his (sometimes) concealed conservatism as transparent as melting glaciers: