Lorimer (September 2014), 288 pages, $22.95. Reviewed by Frank Bayerl

While it may sometimes seem the Harper government’s policies are an ad hoc mixture of right-wing populism, poll- driven opportunism and economic austerity (with a dash of nationalism and military swagger thrown in), a new book by Donald Gutstein argues that Conservative policy development is more calculated than that, and heavily influenced by the work of think tanks.

The shared objective is neoliberalism, the political philosophy that sees economic freedom as the highest good—over and above political freedom. To right-wing think tanks, the role of government is simply to bring about the conditions that will allow markets to flourish, unhindered by regulatory and social constraints. In Harperism, Gutstein offers a clearly written explanation of how this political philosophy continues to guide the actions of the current government.

Achieving a free-market utopia first requires a change in the climate of ideas, and this is where think tanks play their role. Gutstein, an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University’s school of communications, takes the reader through a brief history of the post–Second World War founding of neoliberal thinks tanks in Britain and North America, under the influence of such key thinkers as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

Hayek and Friedman were co- founders of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, whose ideas can be directly linked to the victory of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Other influential neoliberal think tanks include the London- based Institute of Economic Affairs, founded in the 1950s, and the American Heritage Foundation, dating to 1973. A publication by the latter, A Mandate for Leadership, became a blueprint for the Reagan administration when it came to power in 1981.

Here in Canada, the Macdonald- Laurier Institute has come to occupy a similar position of influence within the Harper government. Despite being established as late as 2009, the institute has already had an impact on government policy in the areas of “tough on crime” legislation, immigration policy, and securing Aboriginal support for the Northern Gateway pipeline. The institute also endorsed the idea of refocusing the Canadian Museum of History (formerly the Canadian Museum of Civilization) so that it featured prime ministers and wars instead of human civilization in a broad sense.

Harperism reveals the close and often hidden connections between Canada’s right-wing think tanks (e.g. the Fraser and C.D. Howe institutes) and such neutral-sounding institutions as the University of Calgary’s School for Public Policy, which is actually a neoliberal think tank embedded in a university, and Sustainable Prosperity, a project of the University of Ottawa’s faculty of law that counts Preston Manning on its board of advisers.

The Fraser Institute is perhaps best known for its annual world economic freedom index. The fact that Hong Kong has consistently held first place in this index tells us much about the kind of society the institute desires. (Hong Kong also leads the developed world in income inequality and has been much in the news lately for its notable lack of democratic freedoms.)

As Gutstein explains, a neoliberal propaganda system has now become established in Canada. Think tanks transform the ideas of Hayek, Freidman and their followers into research.

“Sympathetic academics provide research studies compatible with the think tank’s goals; corporate executives and the foundations of wealthy businessmen finance the research; and sympathetic media owners and commentators disseminate the research to target audiences. It’s a package deal.”

Gutstein devotes a series of chapters to illustrating how this system operates to advance various policy objectives, including weakening labour unions, encouraging the privatization of land on First Nations reserves, eviscerating environmental protections in the interest of giving a free hand to industry, preventing the free circulation of scientific knowledge by muzzling government scientists, denying income inequality by muddying the statistical waters, and promoting a narrow nationalism by emphasizing Canada’s history as a warrior nation rather than its peacekeeping tradition.

He offers two especially poignant examples of co-operative reframing exercises in the environmental field: one in which “dirty oil” becomes “ethical oil,” the other, spearheaded by former natural resources minister Joe Oliver, where environmentalists are transformed into foreign-funded radicals far outside the mainstream.

In four months, “Ethical Oil” went from being the title of a book by Ezra Levant to an official government talking point. Support for the deeply flawed concept came first from newspapers of the Sun Media chain, which employs Levant and published excerpts from his book, giving it national exposure. This was followed by a column by the author attacking Greenpeace, then more favourable coverage, also in Sun papers, of a speech he gave to the Economic Club of Canada.

Ethical Oil—the book but more importantly the talking point—was given further exposure in the National Post. Levant also appeared at least four times on CBC radio and television, and was offered prominent appearances at The Vancouver Club and Fraser Institute events.

Conservative senators Nicole Eaton and Linda Frum soon jumped on the ethical oil bandwagon in a Senate inquiry into the oil sands, and Levant later testified on the subject before the House of Commons standing committee on natural resources. Soon the Harper government took full ownership of the dubious concept, using it in the Prime Minister’s speeches, and otherwise making “ethical oil” the linguistic weapon of choice for avoiding discussions about Canada’s dirty oil project.

Gutstein provides equally clear analysis of the Harper government’s attempts to limit dissemination of scientific knowledge and research by cancelling the long-form census, abolishing the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, the First Nations Statistical Institute and the National Council on Welfare, and severely cutting funding to departments with an environmental mandate.

With a truly spectacular misunderstanding of the purpose of independent research, the Prime Minister is said to have asked a reporter on one occasion why his government should fund these agencies when they offer solutions that differ from government policy.

Harperism makes for dispiriting reading and the author sees a difficult path ahead for progressives. The changes already in place will make it hard to reverse many Conservative policies, he says, adding that the effort must still be made to imagine a new role for government that doesn’t treat everything as an offshoot of the economy.

Gutstein is a bit vague as to how this is to be accomplished, but certainly it must involve changing the conversation in as profound a way as Hayek, Friedman and friends did half a century ago.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan so transformed the politics of the countries they governed that new political orders were named after them. In Harperism, Donald Gutstein attempts to make the same case for current Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper.

For Gutstein, Harper’s rise marks a culminating point in the successful bid of neoliberal think tanks and right-wing media personalities to define the conventional wisdom in Canada. Harper’s success is a product of neoliberal politics, then, and not their source. Following thinkers like David Harvey, Gutstein gives a helpful account of the emergence of neoliberalism in the postwar world, charting the rise of intellectuals like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and their role in creating the Mont Pelerin Society, which laid the intellectual foundations for a new era of free market ideology.

Gutstein is careful to dispel the myth that neoliberal governance means a small state. It’s just that the neoliberal state is committed to creating new markets and ensuring their success, no matter the cost, in place of providing social services. Gutstein understands that neoliberalism had penetrated the thinking of Canada’s political class long before Harper’s ascension to the leadership of the Conservative Party.

Far too many people in the anti-Harper camp lay all of Canada’s problems at Harper’s feet, avoiding a more systemic and historical understanding of how we got to this place. Gutstein highlights the Mulroney government’s push for free trade, the deep cuts of the Chretien years, and how even the NDP has been largely unwilling to challenge the neoliberal framework. Harper and his ideological comrades simply come off as the most committed and ruthless of the modern neoliberal political class.

Gutstein’s chronicling of the workings of Harper and his allies in think tanks and the media is the real strength of Harperism. Gutstein charts how the rise of think tanks like B.C.’s Fraser Institute emerged across the West in a strategic assault on social democracy. And think tanks would mean little without accomplices in media and journalism. Hayek understood that there needed to be a class of “professional secondhand dealers in ideas” to communicate neoliberal ideas to the public in an accessible way. Slowly but surely this renewed free market ideology was disseminated through major media outlets.

Far from an indictment of a lone politician, Harperism lays out the incestuous neoliberal nexus of Canadian think tanks, media, and governance.

Gutstein’s fourth chapter, “Liberate Dead Capital on First Nations Reserves,” shows how Tom Flanagan and co-authors Christopher Alcantra and André Le Dressay’s 2010 book Beyond The Indian Act: Restoring Aboriginal Property Rights was successfully pushed by neoliberal think tanks like the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. The book’s reception and its thesis – that creating private land title on reserves would usher First Nations into the modern capitalist economy and allow them to lift themselves from poverty – was soon being discussed across major media outlets.

Beyond the Indian Act draws heavily on economist Hernando de Soto’s work in creating land title for Indigenous peasants in Peru. Following the book’s publication, Canadian think tanks and foundations played host to numerous events with Soto, promoting private ownership (fee simple title) as the answer to First Nations poverty. Soon, government officials and MPs were signaling their support to reforming the Indian Act to allow land title. The federal government’s reforms to the Indian Act were derailed in the short term by the massive groundswell of Indigenous activism that became known as Idle No More.

Gutstein also shows how the discussion around right-wing polemicist Ezra Levant’s book Ethical Oil followed a similar path of embrace from think tanks to reviews in the media to official government talking points.

Gutstein’s documentation of the neoliberal idea pipeline leaves the reader with a horrible impression of what passes for journalism in Canada. Gutstein shows how columnists like Andrew Coyne and Terence Corcoran are hopelessly compromised by their membership in various neoliberal think tanks and foundations – ties never disclosed when they write about policy issues. And the media’s role as neoliberal mouthpiece isn’t confined to publications that wear their ideology on their sleeve like the National Post and the Sun newspapers (recently bought by Postmedia). The Canadian Press, Globe and Mail, and even the liberal Toronto Star act as conduits that keep policy debate within neoliberal parameters.

Do all of the examples contained in Gutstein’s book make the case for something we can name Harperism? There’s a revolving door of individuals who all pass through think tanks, media, and government that have supported Harper’s policies and the Conservative Party itself. The case for Harperism is strong.

Gutstein also shows how an incremental approach has been a major factor in Harper’s governance. A cut here, a new policy there – the monolith emerges incrementally. Take raising Old Age Security eligibility to age 67. It doesn’t affect Canadians immediately, as they reckon with the immediate challenges of a discouraging job market, runaway housing costs, and private debt. Likewise, few Canadians feel the immediate effects of Harper’s climate crisis obstructionism.

It took the Reform and Conservative parties many years to shake off the public fears that they would introduce a two-tier healthcare system. But sure enough, we see Harper reducing federal health care dollars over the next several years at a time when many provinces are struggling to close their budget deficits. This resulting crisis may only come to a head after Harper has left office.

Given the tight policy window Harper has created, introduction of private care into Canada’s healthcare system, like the use of public-private partnerships throughout the public sector, can seem a fait accompli. Meanwhile, Gutstein sees a Liberal Party that seeks to distinguish itself from Harper in style, through the sheer force of Justin Trudeau’s personality, but not in substance, while Thomas Mulcair’s NDP seems as reticent to raise taxes on the rich as any dedicated neoliberal. Canadians should recall that when Margaret Thatcher was once asked what her greatest accomplishment was, she replied, “New Labour.”

As Gutstein notes in his conclusion:

“The Institute of Economic Affairs, the first neoliberal think tank, established the guiding principle for all its publications: make no concessions to existing political or economic realities, but stick to neoliberal doctrine. Neoliberalism’s enemies must do the same if they ever hope to forge the ideas that will eventually replace neoliberalism. Otherwise, Harperism will remain intact for years to come.”

A key weakness in Harperism is Gutstein’s analysis of neoliberalism as a movement. He notes that funding to promote neoliberal ideas comes from wealthy capitalists like Canada’s Thompson family. But Gutstein still portrays the neoliberal offensive of the last 40 years as a movement of right-wing Jacobins responding to the economic crisis of the 1970s.

There is no explicit talk of neoliberalism as a broader class offensive. For neoliberalism isn’t just a reflection of the desires of right-wing ideologues but of a capitalist ruling class that has thrown off the very modest and incomplete regimes of regulation and redistribution found in Western economies after World War Two.

It is neoliberalism’s success that shows the limits of democracy within a capitalist system. And that’s an issue that Gutstein does not address.

Gerard Di Trolio is a freelance writer and an editor at rankandfile.ca. He lives in Toronto.

A man and his economic dogma is quietly – and steadily – transforming Canada profoundly, perhaps beyond repair as well as recognition.

From glorifying past wars to ongoing assaults on parliament, the federal public service, science and the environment and from a thinly veiled war on the poor to endless gifting to the rich and the ultra-rich, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s tenure in office has largely been a route map to a nation where only the rich and the Right have any genuine claim to full human rights and citizenship.

Harperism: How Stephen Harper and His Think Tank Colleagues Have Transformed Canada by Donald Gutstein, an adjunct professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University and co-director of News Watch Canada, is a stinging wake-up call to Canadians to the social and economic revolution wreaked on their country in less than a decade.

All indications point to the Harper government’s determination to push Canada back to the pre-World War Two era of clear class divisions, widespread economic hardship and vestigial social programs.

Pivotal to achieving this almost total recasting of Canadian society away from its post-war social democratic era of national social programs, pursuit of equity and equality, social justice and human rights, has been an ever-growing phalanx of increasingly well-endowed think tanks.

Their names are legion everywhere in Canada’s mainstream media. Their boards and staff are daily commonplace faces and voices in the business press, radio, television and print.

Here are the most prominent: the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIM), the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI), the Mount Pelerin Society (MPS), the Fraser Institute (Fraser), the Manning Centre for Building Democracy (Manning), the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI), the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the Frontier Centre and the Institute for Liberty and Democracy. (ILD).

With only a few exceptions – the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the Council of Canadians, the Broadbent Institute – they are all neo-liberal mouthpieces, ceaseless and tireless advocates for ever-smaller government, ever-lower taxes and ever-freer trade.

Continuously and richly endowed by Canada’s scions of Big Business, these pressure groups are the wind in Harperisms’ sails. Endowed with multi-million-dollar bank accounts from corporate sponsors, they grind out a steady stream of editorials and op-ed pieces routinely published in most if not all of the mainstream media. Like a Greek chorus, they endlessly repeat the praises of ever-smaller government and ever-lower taxes.

It’s 24/7 public brainwashing.

These polemicists rage ceaselessly – and almost always successfully – against virtually every aspect of the post-war social welfare state, from unions and free collective bargaining to free education and from medicare, hospital insurance and adequate pensions to child care and equalization between have and have-not provinces, to name a few of the casualties so far.

Of course, the business community is always happy to put its shoulder to the wheel in the service of ever-lower taxes and ever-smaller government, not just to save money, but to speed up quick and easy corporate decision-making.

Gutstein states that there is “a direct link from Mont Pelerin to Harper via the IEA. The Fraser Institute and its allied think tanks today spend upwards of $26 million a year to promote neo-liberal ideas in Canada alone.”

One of Stephen Harper’s first acts upon becoming leader of the brand-new Canadian Conservative party was to remove its historic title as Progressive Conservative, reducing it to Conservative party, period. Next on his agenda was to slash the Goods and Services Tax from seven per cent to five per cent, denying the government $14 billion a year, every year, in foregone revenue into perpetuity.

Everyone knows the ever-watchful think tank chorus would be singing at High-C should any future government ever dare to replace that budget shortfall – ever.

When faced with his first major economic challenge – a yawning budget hole due to that deliberate downsizing of government immediately followed by the 2007-8 world financial meltdown – Harper didn’t look to raise taxes. Instead, he pumped up the austerity, seized yet another opportunity to cut programs and services and laid off 30,000 government workers.

That’s not surprising. Who can forget the prime minister’s frank confession to Eric Reguly of The Globe and Mail in 2009 that “You know, there’s two schools in economics on this, one is that there are some good taxes and the other is that no taxes are good taxes. I’m in the latter category. I don’t believe any taxes are good taxes.”

Ever since, the public service makes an annual march to place its collective head on the Harper Guillotine’s chopping block so that an ongoing stream of national programs and services – services that were once considered vital to the health, welfare, safety and prosperity of Canadians – can be lopped off with just one-line mentions in the Harper government’s annual 1,000-plus-page omnibus budget bill.

That novel development in modern parliamentary democracy, courtesy of Harper & Co., is so much faster and politically safer – and so much less bother – than actually having to kill off the nation’s vital programs and services one by one while your electorate watches.

Indeed, under the eager guidance of uber-fiscal hawk Treasury Board President Tony Clement – the man who spent $50 million in federal dollars to spruce up his riding for the 24-hour G-8 summit in 2010 – the trimming of Canada’s public service has been transformed into a ongoing 24-7 anti-government Whack-A-Mole.

Harper was accused of attacking environmentalists for obstructing resource development. But there’s more to it than that, Gutstein continues. “Eradicating scientific – and indeed, all centralized knowledge – by shuttering research stations and abandoning science laboratories is a more fundamental change,” he writes. “What’s unique here is the idea that environmental decisions should be based on market signals and not on accumulated scientific knowledge.”

Harper and his ever-loyal retinue of business think tanks enjoying instant access to almost every editorial page in the nation prefer to advocate a novel idea drummed up by the free market geeks: free-market environmentalism.

“What kind of Canada would that be,” Gutstein wonders.

Gutstein urges Canadians to think hard and long about their country when they consider its future under continued Harper rule.
“If you focus only on Harper, you can learn a lot about his ruthless control over his party and caucus, his disciplined messaging, his obsessive focus on the economy, his ability to move issues forward in the light of vigorous opposition.”

And his steely determination to change Canada so profoundly that Canadians won’t be able to recognize, remember, or rebuild it as a healthy democracy.

Frances Russell was born in Winnipeg and graduated from the University of Manitoba with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and political science. A journalist since 1962, she has covered and commented on politics in Manitoba, Ontario, B.C. and Ottawa, working for The Winnipeg Tribune, United Press International, The Globe and Mail, The Vancouver Sun and The Winnipeg Free Press as well as freelanced for The Toronto Star, The Edmonton Journal, CBC Radio and TV and Time Magazine.

Step by step, Prime Minister Stephen Harper is, according to author Donald Gutstein, turning Canada into a far-right economic and ultra-conservative social society.

Gutstein says Harper is doing this by following the lead of think-tanks set up to “research” and promote these policies, think-tanks that are funded by wealthy and powerful people. They also make excellent use of Canada’s leading news media organizations and columnists to give widespread public exposure to their proposals.

Harper’s economic policies are rooted in the philosophies of Friedrich Hayek and the members of the Mont Pelerin Society that Hayek co-founded, and the prime minister’s social policies are rooted in the writings of Leo Strauss, whose followers are called Straussists or neo-conservatives.

Gutstein makes a convincing case that Harper is devoted to these two philosophies – that he pursues principles rather than pragmatic and well-researched solutions, and that he is determined to so radically change Canada, it will be difficult to turn back.

For example, his government cuts taxes at every opportunity, starving the treasury so it can eliminate social programs, including foreign aid, services for refugees, labour unions and research and statistical data (i.e., from Statistics Canada) that might challenge the policies Harper wants to pursue, such as exploiting Canada’s oil and natural gas resources and increasing prison terms.

Gutstein says Harper is rewriting Canadian history by silencing references to peacekeeping and glorifying war, including the War of 1812 and the First World War. He cites the example of the rewritten booklet for immigrants and refugees, “Discover Canada,” and says it deals with Canadian history and culture in radically different ways than the booklet, “A Look at Canada,” which it replaces.

Whether you are or aren’t a Harper supporter, this is a book well worth reading before you cast your ballot in the 2015 federal election.

Jim Romahn is a Kitchener writer.

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Canada+made+shift+right/10298951/story.html#ixzz3HeA2cM32

Harperism: How Stephen Harper and His Think-tank Colleagues Have Transformed Canada
By Donald Gutstein
James Lorimer & Company Ltd.

No one has ever accused Stephen Harper of being dizzyingly charismatic. Few enthuse about how charming he can be in small group settings, or how naturally he manages the person-to-person challenges of retail politics, such as kissing babies or flipping flapjacks at the Calgary Stampede.

And yet, while he’ll never be counted as one of Canada’s most charming politicians, Harper has been a remarkably successful leader, painting Ottawa’s House of Parliament Tory blue since 2006 and leading his party to Canada’s first majority government in over a decade in the 2011 election.

How does he do it? And what has Harper’s unlikely ascendancy done to Canada? Donald Gutstein, Simon Fraser University professor and media critic suggests some answers to these questions in his new book Harperism: How Stephen Harper and His Think-tank Colleagues Have Transformed Canada. (Full disclosure. Like many B.C. journalists, I have known Gutstein and his work for decades, and we occasionally share space in the online newspaper The Tyee.) For Gutstein, Harper is only one of the political beneficiaries, together with Margaret Thatcher, Brian Mulroney, Christy Clark and George W. Bush, to name a few, of a worldwide network of right wing, “free enterprise” think-tanks, a sophisticated propaganda machine that promotes business-friendly policies and politicians and attacks labour unions, inconvenient scientific findings (such as evidence of global warming/climate change) taxes and government attempts to redress long-standing economic and social inequities.

These think-tanks, Gutstein argues in his deeply researched, thoughtful and (mainly) even-handed book, have played a significant role in swaying public opinion and votes toward Harper, and in return have seen Harper-led governments take huge strides toward fulfilling the agenda (known as neo-liberalism) that informs their work — lower taxes, smaller government, weaker trade unions, an end to First Nations collective control of reserves in favour of individual private property, an end to environmental regulations that might reduce corporate profits and an effort to re-cast Canada as a Northern Rambo, a “warrior nation.” Neo-liberalism, Gutstein says, despite being often referred to as a conservative movement, is really an attempt not to conserve but to radically restructure existing social arrangements by creating more and more unregulated markets in every domain.

The Canadian-based members of this think-tank network (locally represented by the Fraser Institute, founded in Vancouver 40 years ago, when business interests here were alarmed by the reforms instituted by Dave Barrett’s NDP government and turned to the U.K.’s Antony Fisher, a frozen chicken mogul who has played a key role in forming such right-wing idea factories around the world, for startup funding and counsel) spend over $26 million a year to influence Canadian public opinion and voting patterns.

For Gutstein, the story starts with Friedrich von Hayek, the émigré Austrian economist who is widely recognized as one of the key intellectual voices in the triumphant, revanchist return of right wing political power in the developed world in the last half of the 20th century. Hayek played a key role in forming the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, a body that Gutstein treats as the first right wing “neo-liberal” think-tank and the direct progenitor of the nearly 500 such organizations around the world. Harper based his graduate thesis at the University of Calgary on Hayek’s theories.

Harper, of course, was not the only one in Canada promoting Hayek’s enthusiasm for a return to an imagined golden age of free markets. As noted, t The Fraser Institute was founded here in 1974, joining a small group of already existing pro-business think tanks like the CD Howe Institute. By the 1990s, Gutstein says, a new cohort of right wing think-tanks began to appear across Canada, including Halifax’s Atlantic Institute for Market Studies in 1994, the Montreal Economic Institute in 1999 and Winnipeg’s Frontier Centre for Public Policy in the same year. More recently, gold mogul Peter Munk’s Aurea foundation (founded in 2006) has become an important funder for neo liberal think tanks. And in the Alberta heartland, says Gutstein, a neo liberal think-tank has been established within the University of Calgary in the form of the School for Public Policy in 2009.

All this expenditure (much of it subsidized in part by Canadian taxpayers, who underwrite the charitable tax deductible status claimed by corporate and high net-value individual donors to business friendly think-tanks in the country) has paid off in rightward policy changes and shifts in public opinion.

Gutstein argues that right wing think-tanks and their allies are made more influential by a mainstream media echo chamber. He says an examination of the 2013 Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies database shows that research from right wing sources like the Fraser Institute appears more often than papers released by left and progressive think-tanks like the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

The tax-and-service-cutting gospel promoted by bodies like the Fraser Institute seems to have the compelling power of constant repetition and this may be one of the reasons, as this book suggests, that Harper and his colleagues have been as successful as they have been at changing the face of Canada.

There are a few regrettable lapses of tone in this book, introducing an unnecessarily strident element to what is otherwise a calmly delivered and damning account that needs no such extra volume. But these are rare, and do no real damage to the sensible and quintessentially reasonable and Canadian tone of most of the text. In balance, this is one of the most important books on Canadian politics published so far this year, and required reading for us all before we vote in the next federal election. Whether you are persuaded by Gutstein’s arguments or not, you owe it to yourself to grapple with them before you vote.

Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. His home office has never been described as a think-tank. He welcomes feedback and story tips at tos65@telus.net.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Margaret Thatcher transformed British political life forever. So did Ronald Reagan in the United States. Now Canada has experienced a similar, dramatic shift to a new kind of politics, which author Donald Gutstein terms Harperism.

Among its key tenets:

• A weakened labour movement – and preferably the disappearance of unions – will contribute to Canada’s economic prosperity
• Cutting back government scientific research and data collection will improve public policy-making

These and other essential elements of Harperism flow from neo-liberal economic theories propounded by the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek and his U.S. disciples. They inspired Thatcherism and Reaganism. Stephen Harper has taken this neo-liberalism much further in many key areas.

The success of Harperism is no accident. Donald Gutstein documents the links between the politicians, think tanks, journalists, academics, and researchers who nurture and promote each other’s neo-liberal ideas.