OTTAWA - Stephen Harper has long been home on the range in Western Canada, but a new survey suggests it's time to turn in his Stetson.
The Canadian Press-Harris/Decima poll, an online survey of 1,400 residents from the four western provinces, found that 42 per cent said they thought of the prime minister as a western Canadian, but 58 per cent did not.
When asked if they considered him more of a central Canadian, 44 per cent said yes and 56 per cent said no.
Deborah Grey, the former trailblazing Alberta Reform MP who once employed a young Harper as a speechwriter and adviser, figures he's simply facing the same challenge as any prime minister -- balancing competing national concerns.
"Maybe some people feel he's selling out hither and yon, but he's doing what he feels he has to do to bring the country together and look nationally at things,'' Grey said in an interview.
"To me, I'd be one of the 42 per cent.''
Harper was born in Toronto but cut his political teeth in Calgary, where he got his education in economics and started out by working behind the scenes for the Reform party. He is the current MP for Calgary Southwest.
Alberta is where the kinship with Harper is strongest, the poll suggests. Among Alberta respondents, 55 per cent said he's still one with the West. In Manitoba, it was 49 per cent, in Saskatchewan 36 per cent and in British Columbia 33 per cent.
Almost half the men surveyed (48 per cent) saw Harper as a westerner compared with 37 per cent of women.
The poll, conducted Sept. 10-12, is considered accurate within 2.6 percentage points 95 per cent of the time.
Tom Flanagan, a former key adviser and campaign manager to Harper, says that any claim Harper has disillusioned Westerners suggests wrongly that he foisted an illusion on them to begin with.
"It was pretty clear from the time he was elected leader of the Canadian Alliance that he wanted to be perceived as a national leader, not a leader from the West,'' said Flanagan.
"He has spent a lot of effort in speeches talking about his ancestry from New Brunswick and the fact he was born in Toronto. He wanted to make the point he had roots in different parts of the country.''
Harris/Decima also asked how good a job Harper's government is doing at helping to manage growth in the provincial economy. Overall, 23 per cent of respondents gave it a rating of excellent or good, but that number dipped to 19 per cent in Alberta and Saskatchewan, where energy development is driving an unprecedented boom. In British Columbia, 25 per cent rated the federal government's performance as excellent or good, and in Manitoba the figure rose to 29 per cent.
Flanagan said the Conservatives have aided the West through specific programs: in British Columbia, it has been Olympics initiatives and helping it battle the pine beetle infestation; for Alberta, it has included pursuing Senate reform and appointing Bert Brown, an elected Senate candidate in Alberta, to the upper chamber.
He said Conservative efforts to help other regions can always be "cherry-picked'' by critics as lack of concern for the West.
"It's probably not a bad thing if voters don't perceive Stephen as a western prime minister. I don't think he wants to be.''
While the West has traditionally been good to Conservative politicians at election time, Harper has found it to be a boon and a curse.
He gained popularity in 2001 by being one of the co-signers of a public letter that proposed putting "firewalls'' around Alberta to create a separate pension plan and restrict federal encroachment on provincial programs.
But as Conservative leader in the federal election of 2004, he was hurt in the late stages of a close race by Liberal suggestions that he and then-Alberta premier Ralph Klein were secretly scheming to dismantle medicare.
Doreen Barrie, a political scientist at the University of Calgary, says westerners don't have the numbers to deliver political clout and suggests that politicians don't need a western pedigree, just a sympathetic ear.
"Maybe they just have to demonstrate they feel for the West and understand the problems that the West has and that it's been shortchanged in the past,'' she said.
Rod Scarlett, executive director of the Wild Rose Agricultural Producers, an Alberta umbrella organization, says when it comes to food production in the West, Harper's Conservatives have tried to balance competing interests.
They help farmers with safety nets but favour central Canadian railway interests on transportation issues, he said.
"He's had to spread himself thinner. He's had to appease everybody a little bit, so you don't get anybody really mad.''
"But you don't make anybody tremendously happy easier.''
