Stephen Harper's experience makes him the right person for the job: The new leader of the Conservative Party of Canada has served for many years in the political trenches.

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

I'm glad that Stephen Harper has won the new Conservative Party's leadership race. He has served for many years in the political trenches: a former Progressive Conservative, he was a founding member of the Reform party and was first elected to Parliament in 1993.

After one term in the House of Commons, Harper headed the National Citizens' Coalition, the taxpayers' lobby group, from 1998 to 2001. He returned to active politics and assumed the leadership of the Canadian Alliance in 2002, when the party was divided, wracked by dissension and in big trouble.

And, finally, against much opposition in both camps, he's the one who finally brought the two conservative parties, the Alliance and the Tories, together last year.

Maybe Tony Clement is more 'electable', and carries less political baggage, in central and eastern Canada. Had he been chosen, that would have been fine, too. (A Belinda Stronach win, on the other hand, would have been simply a function of delegate buying and little short of a travesty.) But Harper has really earned this victory.

In the mid-1990s, when I was doing academic research on the Reform party, I interviewed Harper a few times and also attended the annual Christmas/Chanukah party in Calgary that he co-sponsored with Ezra Levant, another Reform/Alliance activist and now publisher of the new right-of-centre Western Standard magazine. Some of Harper's advisers and confidantes teach political science at the University of Calgary and I know them very well.

I came away in those days with the impression that Harper was an intelligent and decent person, very earnest and policy-oriented. He's basically a social libertarian and fiscal conservative who doesn't want money squandered all over the place by bureaucrats and politicians whose cures are worse than the disease.

This doesn't mean he'll get an easy ride in the next election, though. On the contrary. He is not at all the social conservative ogre or religious nut that the Liberals will paint him as. (I met plenty of those when writing about the Reform Party). Nor is he an "Alberta nationalist" who wants to shove Atlantic Canada into the ocean. But that won't stop Liberal spinmeisters from trying to define him as such.

Ironically, he will also be taken to task for being "soft on separatism," even though he was the Reform party's chief spokesperson on the issue during the 1995 Quebec referendum and saw his hard-line suggestions become the basis for the Liberals' own Clarity Act, passed in 2000.

How will the Liberals manage to accomplish this political sleight- of-hand? Some analysts now paint a scenario whereby a minority Liberal government might be forced from power after the next federal election by a combined Conservative-Bloc Quebecois coalition bringing it down in a vote of non-confidence.

Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe has stated that the Bloc and the Conservatives have the same enemy in the Liberals, and could conceivably support each other in the Commons.

The Liberals have wasted no time trying to portray the Conservatives as nation-wreckers. "The raison d'etre for the BQ is to tear apart the country," declared Nova Scotia Liberal MP Scott Brison, a former Tory, recently, implying that Harper would help them achieve this goal.

But isn't Paul Martin the one who has made Bloc co-founder Jean Lapierre his senior Quebec lieutenant and who accepted former Bloc MP Robert Lanctot into his party? Isn't Martin the one who supported distinct society status for Quebec during the Meech Lake accord debates in the 1980s and is now cosying up to "soft nationalists" in the province? So, we might reasonably ask the Liberals, who's afraid of the big bad Bloc?

Many voters' perceptions seem completely subjective. I know people who detest Harper and yet had no trouble condoning the bullying, chicanery, lies, and just plain arrogance that Canadians have been on the receiving end of for the past decade, from Jean Chretien and former cabinet ministers like Elinor Caplan, Sheila Copps, Art Eggleton, Hedy Fry, Alfonso Gagliano and Allan Rock.

When pressed to the wall, and forced to rationalize the scandals revolving around 'Shawinigate', the sponsorship program, the boondoggles at Human Resources Development Canada, the gun registry, and much more, many such people will tell you that "everybody steals," "buys votes" and "wastes money."

Yet they will then go on to insist that "things will be different" now that Paul Martin -- scion of a prominent Liberal family and finance minister in the Chretien government for nine years -- is prime minister.

Do people like this live on a different psychological planet from me? Sometimes it seems that we don't inhabit the same cognitive universe.