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Carney’s Latest Weapon Against Poilievre? Stephen Harper

His embrace of the Conservative icon is making life awkward for the party’s current leader

Ever the savvy political operator, Prime Minister Mark Carney has found a new mark to use against Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre—and another Conservative happy to comply for reasons of his own.

This time, it’s a big feather in his cap: not just an Erin O’Toole or a Chris d’Entremont but the Conservative base’s beloved Saint Stephen Harper figuratively crossing the floor and handing Carney another opportunity to undermine the Conservative leader. In Harper’s favour, he might finally be getting the legacy he’s wanted. Unfortunately for Poilievre, it appears to be arriving at his expense.

For more than a decade, Harper’s main role in Canadian political memory has been to serve as the boogeyman Justin Trudeau supposedly rescued us from. Harper wasn’t just a former prime minister whose record was open to debate. He was the monster under the progressive bed, often accused of pulling strings from retirement whenever a Conservative stepped up to the microphone.

This is where Carney enters the story. Harper wants recognition as a respected former prime minister, and Carney understands the political value of providing it. Whatever Harper’s private motives, the arrangement offers him something Poilievre can’t easily supply: recognition and approval from the same political establishment that spent years vilifying him.

Opposition to Harper became a powerful organizing force in the 2015 election. Strategic voting wasn’t new, but efforts to unite voters behind whichever candidate had the best chance of defeating a Conservative became a defining feature of the campaign. For much of the left, the priority wasn’t simply electing Trudeau. It was removing Harper from office.

He’d committed the usual assortment of progressive sins: cuts to scientific and environmental programs, fiscal restraint, and a failure to show Ottawa the affection it felt it deserved. Then, during the election campaign, came the proposed “barbaric cultural practices” tip line—a contribution from his own campaign to the case against him.

Canadians were to be given a way to report practices such as forced marriage and honour-based violence. Those are serious problems, but the obvious question was why conduct already covered by criminal law needed to be packaged as a special category of culturally exotic wrongdoing. Canada already had police, abuse hotlines, and a substantial problem protecting people from violence inside their own homes. Was the missing ingredient really the word “barbaric”?

In a multicultural country, it wasn’t difficult to predict how that would land. Plenty of voters heard something less like “we’re going to protect vulnerable women” and more like “we’ve established a dedicated complaints department for your relatives to call in about you.” Whatever its intended purpose, the proposal became a campaign gift to Harper’s opponents.

Harper then lost his majority to Trudeau, a comparatively inexperienced politician whose résumé wasn’t exactly buckling under the weight of executive achievement. Legalizing marijuana certainly helped Trudeau sell the promise of a younger, less uptight country. Canadians also wanted a broader change after nearly a decade of Harper. Trudeau offered it, with a carefully cultivated image that often did more work than his policies.

Harper stepped down as Conservative leader after the election defeat but remained a convenient reference point for Liberals looking to warn voters about his successors. He was still mentioned but often as someone “lurking” behind the Conservative Party, as though he spent retirement in a revolving chair stroking a cat. It wasn’t a hard sell.

Harper didn’t have Brian Mulroney’s personality or the same collection of unmistakable legacy projects. Mulroney left office deeply unpopular and later carried the baggage of scandal, but his reputation also had room for affection, friendships, and consequential achievements. Free trade, later expanded through the North American Free Trade Agreement, was something concrete to point to. Even Meech Lake remained a major national undertaking rather than a vague recollection that the government had once seemed reasonably normal.

Harper’s popular legacy was harder to summarize beyond “Good with........

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