On Thursday, October 11, 2018, I was scheduled to sit down with former Prime Minister Stephen Harper for an interview to be published in Report on Business Magazine. The interview was timed to coincided with the publication of Harper’s new book on conservative politics, Right Here, Right Now. We knew that Harper wasn’t doing many interviews in Canada, so this was a minor coup.
On the Monday before the interview, Harper’s representative contacted the magazine to redraw the terms of the interview. “I just wanted to connect and reiterate the scope of the interview being offered is around the book and its broader themes,” she wrote. “I know Mr. Harper has done limited media domestically and that is largely because we are really not interested in talking about the domestic political scene (past issues, assessing Trudeau or Scheer, etc).”
While those demands were new (this was no “reiteration”), we agreed to stick to questions regarding “the book and its broader themes.” That meant I had to throw out the 40-odd questions I had prepared having to do with matters outside the scope of the book. Which was fine because that still left me with dozens of questions I wanted to ask.
But Harper’s apparent qualms about the interview were a foreshadowing of what was to come. On Wednesday, his representative contacted the magazine to say that Harper had decided to cancel the interview altogether. According to my editor, “because there is the possibility of you even asking questions outside the direct scope of the book, he won’t do it.” (His team also rescinded its invitation to the media to attend his speech at the Canadian Club of Toronto.)
The idea that a former Prime Minister of Canada would be afraid to sit down with a journalist because he feared even “the possibility” of having to field questions on the current political scene is astonishing. In fact it’s impossible to imagine any other former political leader, particularly one with a book to flog, being so timid. (I had, as it happened, recently interviewed two other former Prime Ministers, Brian Mulroney and Paul Martin Jr., neither of whom seemed to quail at the prospect.)
But it was done. Harper had scarpered. And all that was left was a whirl of dust and the sound of rushing wind.