- During the 1968 federal election campaign, I remember Diefenbaker giving one of his typically mesmerizing speeches comparing the experienced business and political pro and former premier Robert Stanfield the PC leader and the relative political neophyte but also charismatic Pierre Trudeau the Liberal leader. The choice, intoned The Chief, "is between a leader with proven experience and a guy who can do two summersaults in the pool".
- As you will recall, Canadians opted for the guy who could two summersaults in the pool and who managed in the next 16 years to increase the national debt by over 1100% and bring the country to the brink of bankruptcy.
- In 2015, the choice and the contrast between the two major leaders will be even more clear and stark inasmuch as Harper has even more extensive and successful governing experience than Stanfield did and Just-In Truedope has considerably less experience and accomplishments and attributes than his daddy Pierre did in 1968.
- There may prove to be enough gullible low information voters and greedy public teat sucking high entitlement voters for the totally underserved Just-In Truedope to beat the accomplished leader of purpose, substance and expertise Stephen Harper.
- But I wouldn't bet on it and neither would one of the chaps who served with Harper in his first cabinet, Monte Solberg.
- Here he explains why "Harper is still in the game".
SOLBERG
No-nonsense Harper a man of action

Say what you will about Stephen Harper (and you do), but you can’t accuse him of coasting. Eight years into his mandate and he is as busy as ever.
Last fall he signed a free-trade agreement with the Europeans, the world’s largest market. Last week it was a free-trade agreement with South Korea, Canada’s first free-trade agreement in Asia, and another huge opportunity for Canadian exporters and consumers.
Yes, but Stephen Harper lacks vision, or so say his critics. People say these things so often it’s sometimes worth asking what they mean, just to see if they actually know. True, Stephen Harper doesn’t go in for soaring rhetoric. He’d be self-conscious about using a slogan like Justin’s “hope and hard work.”
He’d ask himself, do people in Canada, one of the world’s most prosperous and fair countries, really lack for hope? Isn’t Canada the place people come to so they can find hope?
But remember too that Justin isn’t bringing hope to just anybody. His hope is for the middle class, meaning he’ll somehow need to get his freedom march and his message of hope onto the big screen TVs in places like Mississauga, or McKenzie Towne in Calgary. Sure, not exactly Selma, Alabama in the 1950s, but close enough for that popular TV drama, Hope and Hard Work, starring Justin Trudeau.
But, back to Stephen Harper. Where some leaders can’t make decisions, or lose their guts after a few years in office, Stephen Harper still moves relentlessly forward, and in a direct line to where he wants to go. True, sometimes that line takes him directly over critics, opposition leaders and the media. He might even back up and roll over the media one more time, just to make sure, but he does have a destination in mind. Some might call it a vision, though that would make him cringe.
No, he won’t stand before an audience, point and smile at people in the room, summon a tear to his eye or look wistfully into the heavens as he speaks of children because, as you may have heard, children are our future. He won’t do any of that, but he does tell us what he wants done. He wants free trade deals, a Canada Jobs Grant, a balanced budget, regulations cut, programs trimmed. You might hate the things he wants done, but you can’t deny that he is a doer.
Remember, there is another approach, and we glimpsed its frightening face a few weeks ago. If you read the Liberal policy resolutions, you can’t help but see that the resolutions weren’t actually resolutions, because they had no resolve.
Instead, they committed to collaborate and cooperate. They promised to assemble plans and cobble together strategies. Of course these strategies must be “national” strategies, requiring respectful and thorough (read endless) taxpayer-funded consultations at expensive hotels. It’s a recipe for years of gridlock and billions of dollars spent to no useful end.
Suddenly, the Harper approach of plowing forward through the phony consultations and the talk-shops has appeal. It’s also why he’s still very much in the game
