EDITORIAL: Stephen Harper's Protégé: The Authoritarian Apprenticeship of Pierre Poilievre

In politics, the legacies of leaders are not measured only in the policies they enacted, but in the habits they leave behind, the instincts they nurtured, the rules they bent, and the young protégés who carry forward their example.

Few Canadian leaders illustrate this more clearly than Stephen Harper.

For nearly a decade as Prime Minister, Harper governed with a style that was secretive, combative, and transactional. He left behind a record not only of policy choices, but of democratic erosion. In 2011, his government was found in contempt of Parliament, the first time, and only time this occurred in Canadian history, and indeed, in the history of the Commonwealth.

It was the culmination of years of practices that watchdogs, journalists, and scholars catalogued as dozens of attacks on democratic norms: the silencing of scientists, the proroguing of Parliament to avoid accountability, and the use of power not as a trust, but as a weapon.