Western Standard - November 11, 2026


Harper, Trump and the Problem With Political Legacies

Let the Kids Play Hockey, Keep Politics Off the Ice

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

159.36

Word count

476

Sentence count

14


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Stephen Harper's book on his time in power was released today.
00:00:03.700 Needless to say, I was down there at the front of the queue with my money, you know.
00:00:09.260 And didn't have a lot of time to go into it, but he makes a very interesting point towards the end
00:00:14.820 where he addresses the question of whether he is disappointed that so much of the work that he did
00:00:21.100 in the nearly 10 years that he was in office was very quickly undone by the liberals.
00:00:27.160 And he says, obviously, it's a bit disappointing, but he did what he thought was right.
00:00:36.780 And that's his contribution to Canadian government and democracy.
00:00:42.000 The other guys have to do the same, don't agree with what they did.
00:00:45.620 But this is the way the system works.
00:00:47.980 Now, you take somebody like Trump, who, in my view, has a list of accomplishments,
00:00:54.500 things that he actually quietly got done which have hugely benefited the American people.
00:01:02.100 And he would be entitled to bridle at the ingratitude of an electorate
00:01:08.740 that turns him down at the midterms. But the lesson that I took from my own experience in
00:01:15.300 Ottawa is that you have to, if you're going to be engaged in politics, you have to do it
00:01:22.340 because you believe in it and you do the best that you can and that is all you can do you're not
00:01:29.220 you're not rewriting history or resetting the the stage forever if you did what you thought was right
00:01:38.020 and it was successful for as long as you were there and he will be saying the same thing to
00:01:42.980 himself then you then you can congratulate yourself if nobody else does they're very
00:01:49.460 different leaders though that's for sure i mean stephen harper was very much a modest man and
00:01:54.260 and uh you know not looking for those sorts of things president trump is anything but modest
00:02:00.500 he's as vain as we've ever seen and if anybody's gonna have a a legacy focus perhaps in his last
00:02:06.820 two years as you said you know harper accepted well unfortunately a lot of things got undone
00:02:10.980 but i did what i could uh i think president trump's gonna want to put in a lot of things to
00:02:15.220 make sure they're as hard as possible to undo after he leaves. As a matter of fact, I mean,
00:02:20.020 our liberal government is doing the same thing now. The next conservative government, if in fact
00:02:26.020 there ever is another conservative government, is going to walk into a lot of things that have been
00:02:32.020 set in concrete and extremely difficult to undo. If you're a destructive government,
00:02:39.540 it's a lot easier to break things than it is for a constructive government to make them.
00:02:45.220 you know it's uh it's just it's just it's just the way things are