But he can fairly claim to have left them, as no Conservative prime minister since Macdonald has, with a decent shot at governing again. If his followers couldn’t make the case for his significance as prime minister, Stephen Harper wasn’t about to try. But the real and lasting legacy of Harper may be less as prime minister than as the modern Conservative party’s first leader. We might talk of how the party’s social conservatives were gagged, or how the party of democratic conservatism became the party of one-man rule. Its defenders point to all the things other governments might have done — a national daycare program, say — that Harper’s didn’t.

Source: National Post May 27, 2016 16:03 UTC