After growing disillusioned with Brian Mulroney’s ...

By Adam Thomas

Tuesday September 9, 2008

After growing disillusioned with Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives, he switched to Preston Manning’s nascent Reform movement, gaining attention in 1987 as the insurgent party’s brainy young policy chief. As an economist and a methodical platform architect, he was pegged as a smart, if rather dry, up-and-comer. But this pat assessment missed the passion he claims is behind what pulled him into politics — how much he despised Trudeau.

That negative inspiration has stayed with him. Shortly after Trudeau’s death in 2000, Harper wrote revealingly of his feelings toward the dominant political figure of his youth. He recalled running into the former prime minister by chance on the streets of Montreal in 1999. “There I came face to face with a living legend, someone who had provoked in me both the loves and hatreds of my political passion, all in the form of a tired out, little, old man,” Harper wrote in a newspaper column that stood out from the flood of Trudeau tributes. “It was an experience at once unforgettable, nostalgic and haunting.” He went on to denounce that old man’s legacy in the bitterest terms. Not only did he rebuke Trudeau’s policy mix of “centralism, socialism and bilingualism,” he even indicted him for failing to serve in the Second World War or oppose the Soviet Union. “In those battles,” Harper wrote, “the ones that truly defined his century, Mr. Trudeau took a pass.”

-ok so not the most impartial source but we did come up with a slogan:

Stephen Harper: He’s a dink.

Viralaway