OTTAWA -- Until Stephen Harper, prime ministers from Western Canada haven't recently been all that successful.
Kim Campbell, elected in Vancouver, lasted about four-and-a-half months. Joe Clark, the MP for Alberta's Yellowhead riding, made it nine months. You have to go back to John Diefenbaker, who represented two Saskatchewan ridings over his 39 years as an MP, to find one who lasted anywhere near as long as Harper. Diefenbaker made it six years in the Prime Minister's Office. Harper spent nearly a decade there.
It would be easy to underestimate what that means to western Canadian conservatives, who built their new party based on cries of "the West wants in." In Stephen Harper, they had not only a voice in Ottawa, but in Langevin Block, the building that houses the PMO.
Shuvaloy Majumdar, who served as policy director to two Conservative foreign affairs ministers, said Harper's success was profoundly important.
"This is a man who ended both the notion of western alienation and curbed the sentiment of Quebec separatism as part of a decade long government," said Majumdar, now a Munk senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
"He certainly knew what his values and convictions were, and he was never driven by ingratiating himself to the public. He was driven by the public interest and what was good for Canada," he told CTVNews.ca.
Harper grew up in Toronto, but moved to Calgary after quitting university. (He later completed both a B.A. and an M.A. in economics at the University of Calgary.) He has spent much of his adult life in Calgary and is set to leave it as his base, with his new consulting company sprouting there.
Harper is very much a man of the west, despite being a Torontonian by birth, says Howard Anglin, Harper's deputy chief of staff from the summer of 2014 until the Liberals took office.
That geographic grounding "did a lot to address the problems of western alienation, which certainly I think have always been present since the West joined Confederation, but [were] exacerbated in the 70s and 80s," Anglin said.
Harper's immediate predecessors -- Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin -- were all "largely supported by the interests of the power elites of Toronto and Montreal," Anglin said. Throughout their time in office, the term "western alienation" was a commonly used phrase in the prairies. But Anglin, who now lives in Calgary, says the phrase doesn't come up anymore.
"It's not one you've heard since Stephen Harper was prime minister," he said.
Harper's supporters point first to his economic and foreign policy as his legacies -- limiting government spending to maximize tax cuts and making strength of conviction a cornerstone of Canada's international relations.
Those policies are unquestionably controversial outside conservative circles. Harper's government faced repeated criticism by subject matter experts over mandatory minimum sentences, refugee policy, cutting the GST, boutique tax credits and more. But for those who hadn't felt their views reflected in Ottawa until then, it was something to celebrate.
Harper "had a view for what the job was all about and for him it wasn't about making people like him. It was about taking difficult decisions that were in the best interests of the country," said Jason MacDonald, Harper's director of communications from the fall of 2013 to the spring of 2015.
"Sometimes people aren't going to agree with those decisions. They're going to cast it or characterize it as mean-spirited. Well, so be it."
The theme of what was best for the country is a thread woven through interviews with Harper's supporters. The western prime minister, they say, wasn't only concerned about his own region, but about holding together a country built despite its differences.
"The focus that we had all the time was national policy," said Calgary Conservative MP Michelle Rempel, who served in Harper's last cabinet.
"I don't think one person could argue that he ever favoured one region of the country more than another. And that is significant."
Harper's disdain for being popular may have contributed to the party's loss last fall. The Liberal leader, who campaigned on optimism and who is clearly at ease greeting hundreds of strangers at a time, overtook the long-serving prime minister. Justin Trudeau also had 10 years of policies to criticize - policies Harper's supporters are upset to see being rolled back under the Liberals.
For now, they want to celebrate the former Conservative leader who took his leave Friday from federal politics.
"He served genuinely, he did it to the benefit of the country," Majumdar said. "Even I -- as a bit of a partisan -- I have a lot of respect for anybody from any party whose name is on the ballot and [who] serves their country."
