Stephen harper prime minister how long

He quit Parliament in late to move to Calgary with his wife, Laureen, and start his business, but now his private life is increasingly coming into public view.

Along with having something to say, Harper also has something to sell. He controls his pace, with time to kick back this spring at the World Curling Championships in Las Vegas, and is more easygoing at the office, too. Harper declined requests for interviews. There, the Harpers are building a new home on a wooded two-acre lot they purchased in , when he was still in government.

His interest in money-making extends beyond the personal. The party sent out a fundraising email in his name in late June, touting a Quebec by-election win. At a talk Harper held at Stanford University in February—a heavily Canadian crowd turned up—he discussed how he wanted the Conservative party to endure after him. While the Liberals would argue their purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline project puts money behind their rhetoric on oil industry support, Harper argues they have killed past pipeline projects and have no intention of building this one, either.

He told the business crowd Scheer is doing a good job. His feet are on the ground. Doug is not a wild guy. He is a businessman. In a memo to consultancy clients obtained last fall by the Canadian Press , Harper criticized Trudeau for negotiating with Mexico on NAFTA and pursuing his own goals on gender and the environment. The people who would come after them if they fail, the Jeremy Corbyns and the Bernie Sanders, are people who want to destroy democratic capitalist systems.

Preston Manning told The National his read on the minority government situation was that "Canadians want it to work. Keeping that in mind, the former Reform Party leader said he thought the new Conservative government would probably need to permit "freer voting, less intense partisan discipline, allowing temporary coalitions to form to get things done and cross-over voting.

Conservative MP Peter MacKay said the party would need to bring forward a budget that reflected some of the things the Tories had campaigned on. But Monte Solberg, a Conservative MP for the Alberta riding of Medicine Hat, warned against seeing the party behave "in an arrogant way" after sitting on the outside of governance for some time.

Deborah Grey, a former Reform, Canadian Alliance and Conservative MP, said she thought Harper would learn from having seen how Martin, his Liberal rival, fared in a minority government setting. The minority parliament would prove challenging for the Conservatives at times in future, but Harper and his party would continue to hold power for nearly a decade. They would win a second minority government in and finally, a majority government in He was under fire for his low spending, low taxes policies, and was at odds with his political opponents over the bombing campaign against Islamic State in Syria.

A lone gunman attack on the parliament building in Ottawa proved to be a pivotal moment. Mr Harper pushed through Bill C, which increased policing and surveillance powers despite an outcry from civil liberty campaigners. He lost the election to the fresh-faced, energetic Justin Trudeau, and resigned as Conservative leader.

Ten months later, he quit his seat in Calgary, signalling the end of his decades-long association with politics, to focus on business interests. Conservative Party of Canada. Image source, AP. Hardliner to progressive. In , Harper ended 13 years of Liberal rule. Image source, Reuters. His critics say he has taken Canada too far right.