Tristin Hopper: 20 years ago, Harper was the first leader to lead the Conservative Party of Canada to victory. When he left office, he issued a warning

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Twenty years ago, Stephen Harper was the first leader to lead the Conservative Party of Canada to victory. He was sworn in as prime minister on Feb. 6, 2006. The nine years of his time as prime minister were very much like the man himself: Unexciting, yet reliable.

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The highs weren’t particularly high and the lows weren’t particularly low, but most of the metrics under Harper’s purview got incrementally better over time. Crime, productivity, the federal deficit, even the share of the House of Commons held by Harper’s Conservatives; each of these was in better shape when Harper left than when he started.

But if there is one trait that marks Harper out above his predecessors, it’s the ability to seem increasingly prescient with time. Harper left office on Nov. 4, 2015, amid a flurry of warnings that were dismissed as sensationalist, and with a policy record that was enthusiastically reversed by his Liberal successors.

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Over time, many of those warnings proved to be underestimates of what was actually to come. And much of the discarded policies immediately yielded the precise consequences it had been implemented to avoid.

Harper has even taken to claiming as much behind closed doors. In a 2024 video surreptitiously recorded by a supporter, Harper can be seen telling a gathering “unfortunately, literally everything I said would happen in 2015 has now come to pass.”

Below, a summary of just how much Harper was right about.

He predicted debt would explode

In the campaign for the 2015 general election, the Liberal line was that they would reverse the Conservative government’s policy of a balanced budget, but only by a little. They’d run $10 billion deficits for three years to “build infrastructure,” and then they’d snap right back to a balanced budget by 2019.

Harper’s counterpoint (which obviously wasn’t enough to win him the election) was that the Liberals were simply lying. “Trudeau’s deficits will not be small.........

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