[Harper] once told a friend, “I think about strategy twenty-four hours a day,” and it was only a small exaggeration.

The conservatives had started bringing demagoguery to the table on the [Afghan] war issue the previous fall [fall 2006]. Whenever opposition members criticized the war policy, assorted Tories accused them of being disloyal and of...

As opposition leader, [Stephen Harper] wrote in the Montreal Gazette in the year before he came to power: ‘Information is the lifeblood of a democracy. Without adequate access to key information about government policies and...

Earlier in [2007] the [Prime Minister’s Office] had also drawn criticism for trying to muzzle the judiciary. The reproach came from Antonio Lamer, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court….’I must say I was...

Bill C-9 was supposed to be a budget bill, but it came with innumerable measures that had little or nothing to do with the nation’s finances. It was, as critics put it, the advance of...

[Stephen] Harper had said he would use all legal means, and what [John] Baird suggested was an option the prome minister was considering. If the governor general had refused his request, he could have replaced...

Attempts to thwart or muzzle the media continued as well. At a conservative caucus meeting in Charlottetown in August 2007, journalists assembled in the lobby of the hotel, as they usually do at such gatherings,...