OTTAWA — For Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Alberta Premier Alison Redford, all roads lead back to Calgary’s west end.
Their paths took different turns along the way. Harper’s route to 24 Sussex Drive veered more to the right, while Redford’s tilted slightly left as a Red Tory who would become premier of the country’s most conservative province.
But there is no suggestion they will get caught up in the tangled threads of their political past when they meet in Harper’s office Thursday afternoon.
“It all revolves around the sacred ground of Calgary West,” said University of Calgary professor Tom Flanagan, a former adviser to Harper.
That is the riding where a young Harper got his start in the mid-1980s as top aide to Progressive Conservative MP Jim Hawkes.
The future prime minister lasted a year in the job. But his brief stint in Ottawa soured him on Progressive Conservative politics. Harper left the party in 1986 over what former Reform leader Preston Manning has called “profound disillusionment” with the PC government of the day, and joined the upstart Reform party.
In the 1988 election, Harper ran against Hawkes in Calgary West and lost.
Redford, meanwhile, has deep ties to the Hawkes clan.
Her late mother, Helen, once worked for Hawkes. For a time, Redford was married to Hawkes’ son, Robert, a Calgary lawyer who headed up her transition team after she became premier.
Harper and Redford’s political paths would stop again in Calgary West.
In 1993, Harper unseated the elder Hawkes in the riding. He resigned three years later to head up the National Citizens Coalition, a right-wing lobby group, after a falling out with Manning.
Then in 2004, Redford challenged Anders for the federal Tory nomination in Calgary West. The splintered right had just been united under the Conservative banner with Harper at the helm.
One of Redford’s biggest backers in her battle against Anders was Ron Liepert, the provincial representative for Calgary West. Redford just picked Liepert to be her finance minister.