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and muzzle others took root as he lived through several media meltdowns triggered by bizarre ideas or extremist outbursts from Reformers on the fringe. But another anxiety was eating away at Harper—the sinking feeling that as the election of 1997 approached, Reform was stagnant. He resigned his seat six months before the June 1997 election. “When Stephen left Reform, it was because he thought we were going to lose. In his view, we had made no progress east of Ontario. He was disappointed and discouraged,” Manning said. “I had more faith than Stephen did and we pulled it off. We had 150,000 members. This was a blow to Stephen; it tarnished him.”
    On the same January day that Harper resigned his seat in Parliament, he introduced himself to the staff at his new place of employment, the National Citizens Coalition. Although the lobby group claimed to be independent of political parties, they had hired a politician to become their vice-president. As for Stephen Harper, he ruled out a future run for the leadership of the Reform Party. Resorting to the cliché of frustrated politicians everywhere, he said he wanted to spend more time with his family. He also told reporters that he no longer wanted to be bound by party politics. Instead, he would push for public policies that were important tohim. The NCC was the perfect vehicle to practise the wicked game of wedge politics.
    Prime Minister Jean Chrétien had called a federal election for June 2, 1997. Stephen Harper and the NCC jumped into the fray, targeting MPs’ gold-plated pensions. Two Liberal MPs, Anne McLellan and Judy Bethal, were presented in ads as “pension porkers,” their heads placed on a pair of pigs guzzling champagne while wallowing in a trough filled with tax dollars. Pure Finkelstein. Bethel was defeated and McLellan won in a cliffhanger. The Liberals won a solid majority government and Reform became the Official Opposition, winning sixty seats.
    After the election, the only politics in Stephen Harper’s life took place at the office. As vice-president of the NCC, he shared an office in Calgary with the organization’s president, David Somerville. According to long-time NCC employee Gerry Nicholls, it was a case of two type-A personalities unable to play well together. Whether by design or disenchantment, Somerville presided over his last staff meeting as president on December 12, 1997, less than a year after the arrival of Stephen Harper. A pattern was beginning to emerge. Harper had a habit of undermining or replacing the people he had once worked for or supported: Jim Hawkes, Brian Mulroney, Preston Manning, and David Somerville. Now that he was his own man, fully in charge of an influential lobby group, the methodical autocrat popped out of the smooth-talking, unflappable media personality that Harper projected after joining the NCC. The new president didn’t like his authority challenged, and according to Nicholls, referred to the NCC as “a dictatorship fighting for democracy.”
    S TEPHEN H ARPER ’ S DIRECT connection to Republican Party political values and strategy was far deeper than the NCC and Arthur Finkelstein. Just after the Chrétien victory in June 1997, hegave a speech to the Council for National Policy (CNP). The New York Times described the CNP as “a little known group of a few hundred of the most influential conservative leaders in business, government politics, academia and religion in the United States.” The CNP meet three times a year behind closed doors at various locations—a sort of Bilderberg Group of the continental United States. Wealthy right-wing donors use the meetings to network with top conservative operatives to plan long-term strategy.
    The CNP was co-founded in 1981 in Dallas, Texas, by Baptist pastor Reverend Tim LaHaye, who was head of the Moral Majority, a group made up of conservative Christians who wanted to assist the political right in the United States. Political success on the right in the US