The cause was given an exception boost this week

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The last week has been a turning point for the Conservative Party of Canada. Its devotees observed the 20th anniversary of the coming to office of Stephen Harper at the head of a reconstructed Conservative party that merged the old Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance/Reform Party. Stephen Harper thus became the only prime minister of Canada in history who had to assemble his own party to contest the election. This has happened in some provinces, such as Maurice Duplessis’s Union Nationale, René Lévesque’s Parti Quebecois, and Francois Legault’s Coalition Avenir Quebec, and the Social Credit parties of William Aberhart in Alberta and W.A.C. Bennett in British Columbia. It was a greatly more complicated achievement for Stephen Harper to patch together the fragments of parties across the country.

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His nine years in office were good ones for Canada. He continued the balanced budgets of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin until the banking crisis and market crack-up of 2008 forced some deficit spending. He reduced the GST, an almost unique achievement amongst advanced countries, on the theory that he was reducing public sector spending and capping the temptations to extravagance of his successors. He cannot be blamed for not foreseeing that his immediate successor, Justin Trudeau, would announce that “budgets balance themselves,” and that the country would then plunge into an orgy of incontinent........

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