He did manage to run the longest Conservative-led government since Sir Robert Borden. Arthur Meighen was just in office a couple of very short times, Richard B. Bennett's government lasted five years, Diefenbaker was in power for about six, Clark was voted out of power after only eight months and Mulroney made it to 8 years, 9 months before retiring and turning over the office to Kim Campbell.
I guess he can always say he was the longest-serving Tory Prime Minister in a century, because it doesn't look like he'll get much love and credit for a whole lot else.
As I said before, the word "Tory" has traditionally been applied to the real Conservative Party - the Progressive Conservatives, which ceased to exist in 2003 when this mutated abomination was created in a sleazy backroom deal.
Stephen Harper was never a real Conservative. He was a Reform Party member, which later became the Canadian Alliance (the Reform Party with a name change), and then there was a "Unite the Right" movement that resulted in a hideous mashup of the Canadian Alliance and
some of the old Conservatives.
Back when they were trying to figure out what to call this new party, one suggestion was the Conservative Reform-Alliance Party. That was met with some enthusiasm... until one of them realized that it would result in their party's acronym being CRAP. So they eventually settled on the Conservative Party of Canada. However, those of us who have kept this party's history firmly in mind have never been under the illusion that it's anything but the old Reform Party under yet another alias. And to this day it still gets referred to as the CRAP party by a fair number of people on the CBC comment boards.
As for "love and credit"... some of his loyal sycophants are still posting on CBC, but it's hilarious to see how many formerly-pro CPC posters have not only stopped posting, but their profiles have disappeared. The sheer number of paid posters was staggering (and exhausting to keep up with).
As for the rest of us, about the politest that anyone has wished him is a life of complete obscurity. Quite a few people think he belongs in prison.
I noticed that NDP is back to being the third party after making a huge surge in 2011 and becoming the main opposition party for the first time ever. How come they fell back down to Earth so hard? Did they do that poor of a job? It would have been cool to see the Conservatives get trounced as badly as the Liberals did in 2011.
They didn't do a bad job. The problem is that some ridings were so close between support for Liberals and NDP that there was a risk of splitting the vote and allowing the Conservatives to sneak up the middle and get in again. I myself was conflicted for most of the campaign on which party to support - even in a riding where it's a foregone conclusion that a Conservative will win. The ridings where a non-Conservative was either an incumbent or had a really good shot at unseating the Conservative incumbent are the places where people had to choose which way to go to ensure that the Conservative candidate did not win.
For many people in Quebec, that shift happened with the niqab issue. A Muslim woman wanted to take her citizenship oath while wearing her niqab, and Harper and his cronies had tried to put legislation in that would prevent that. The Supreme Court struck that down, and she was allowed to take the oath as she wanted to - with her face covered. This did not sit well with a lot of voters in Quebec, and when the NDP leader publicly supported this woman's wish to wear the niqab, that was enough to shake some Quebec voters out of their quandary on whether to vote Liberal or NDP.
The ironic thing is that the Liberals also supported the woman's right to wear the niqab during this ceremony, but they didn't make a huge public statement about it. They also didn't have as many incumbent seats on the line in Quebec as the NDP did.
There were other reasons for the shift from NDP to Liberal, of course, and there was also a shift in a few Quebec ridings from NDP to Bloc Quebecois. But the niqab issue is one that had people distracted and arguing for quite some time until they realized that they really had to buckle down and make a hard decision if they wanted Harper out. So a lot of the Liberal support that was received this time isn't because the people genuinely support that party. It's because it was the only way to rid ourselves of a corrupt government that was dragging the country in a direction in which most of us did not want to go.
You do realize that you would have been a supporter of the most hated Prime Minister in our history? Actually, the way some people phrased it was thus: "Stephen Harper, how does it feel to know you're the most hated person in Canada?"
Everyone supports the candidate of their choice. No one should feel obligated to care how many people supposedly hate that candidate. You vote for who
you like, not for who everyone else likes.
You say you're Republican, but are you the Tea Party kind of Republican?
No.
Just pointing out that you're declaring support for a corrupt narcissist who was so full of himself that he ordered the media to refer to the Canadian government as "the Harper government" - like it was his personal property.
