Prime Minister Stephen Harper

Not quite a hatchet job, the newly published book by Ottawa-based newspaper columnist Lawrence Martin, but certainly a repeat on the much spoken-of and disapproved- penchant for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to maintain a firm control over his Cabinet and his government. Well, in fact, he's not the first nor the last prime minister to exert that kind of vigilance over performance.

No government enjoys being embarrassed by untoward moves and statements made on behalf of the government by some of its elected officials. It could be said that Mr. Harper is simply minimizing the opportunities for embarrassing situations to surface. While at the same time he is comfortable enough with accusations of being cold and controlling. His intelligence and capable handling of Canada's affairs are beyond dispute.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper at a photo op in his office on Parliament Hill in Ottawa this week with Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Transport Minister Chuck Strahl, right. A new book examines Harper's steps to control his government and its message.

From the very moment he took office at the PMO, he made it abundantly clear that he had no trust nor particular affection for the media. And that has not endeared him to the reporters on Parliament Hill who resent the lack of opportunity to interrogate him, to scrabble around for media "scrum" opportunities, simply because the Prime Minister feels them to be repugnant in nature and disrespectful of the office and the office-holder.

Lawrence Martin's Harperland: The Politics of Control, with its many and varied interviews with former PMO staffers, revealing Mr. Harper's purported fixation on controlling not only his MPs, but any potential advantages that the Liberal Party, and particularly its leader might seek is what politicians do. And that's fair enough; this is an opposition that is itself fatally fixated with the current Conservative-led government, so utterly painful to the Liberals given past history of too many Liberal-led governments.

This academic intellectual Leader of the Official Opposition leaves no opportunity wasted to declare his contempt for the Prime Minister. He and the Liberal party assiduously look for any opportunity to claim Conservative initiatives in government are egregiously at fault. Michael Ignatieff went so far as to do his best to scupper Canada's opportunity for election to the temporary, revolving Security Council.

Previous Prime Ministers, most particularly Jean Chretien, were linked to scandals and corruption. Not so Prime Minister Harper; he is resolutely and dependably honourable. In him we trust. At least a goodly proportion of the electorate, albeit not in sufficient numbers to bring in a Conservative majority. Not yet, at any rate.

Yet a recent Postmedia poll revealed that over one third of Canadians (35%) feel the Prime Minister is more attuned to family values and needs than his opposition. And the same poll led by Ipsos Reid, appears to reveal that the Liberals have lost yet another of their traditional constituents. Mr. Harper is more trusted by a greater number of voters for his handling of the country's economy.

And for all those voters who succumb to the belief that Stephen Harper does not embody the talents, intelligence, and understanding to present as a superior leader of this country, it is fascinating to read an account by another journalist, one rather more famous than Mr. Martin for his reportage as a war correspondent for the Toronto Star, whose Pulitzer-prize award for that infamous "Black Hawk down" photo of an American airman in Somalia, mark him as extraordinary, and his memoirs make for interesting reading.

"Harper always took the conservative side of the debate and I the liberal. He was straight(sic)-laced and bookish. I was a drug user and a big talker. But Richview Collegiate (Toronto) didn't have the impermeable teen cliques that would normally keep a nerd and a dope freak far apart. We used to talk current events and argue politics for the fun of it. I'm not sure what Stephen got out of it, but I liked the mental exercise of trying to score points against brilliance.

"We sat near each other in Ed Warda's Grade 10 geography class, where I learned the difference between truth and education. Mr. Sarda gave weekly tests to see how well we had memorized the latest slew of facts. He handed the marked papers back in order from top grade to bottom, and Harper's name was always called first, with a perfect ten out of ten - until one day, when Mr. Warda's quiz included the question: How many moons does Jupiter have? The answer Mr. Warda had taught, the one in the textbook, was eleven, and that's what he expected his students to repeat back to him. But Harper had read the latest issue of Science magazine, which reported the discovery of a twelfth moon, and that's what he wrote on the test. "Class, what's our best answer?" Mr. Warda asked when Harper politely protested his first and only error. "The answer in the text", Mr. Warda replied to his own question. Had it been me, the injustice would have been answered with intemperate words, followed by a trip to the principal's office. But Harper always looked at the long term. He took the hit quietly, returned to official perfection the next week, and left no doubt who was the smartest person in the room.

"I had so much respect for Harper's intelligence that I never would have thought he would become a politician and make a profession of debating hypocrites and charlatans. I actually thought I was the bull-shit artist who would become prime minister, and Stephen would become a scientist working on the cure for cancer, or doing something else productive with his mind."

Paul Watson: Where War Lives