Politics & Power Quote by Stephen Harper

Harper’s sentence reads like a civics lesson, but the intent is tactical: it’s a map of how power survives in a chamber designed to make power conditional. The phrase “if it wants to govern for any length of time” isn’t just a qualifier, it’s the threat. In parliamentary politics, longevity is never a given; it’s rented, vote by vote. Harper frames governing less as a mandate than as a continuous negotiation with the people who can end you.

The most revealing choice is “third parties.” Not “the opposition” in general, not “other MPs,” but the specific actors who don’t sit in the binary of government-versus-official-opposition. That’s a wink to minority-government reality: the decisive audience isn’t the loudest adversary; it’s the smaller blocs with leverage disproportionate to their seat count. “Appeal primarily” suggests a reordering of priorities. Your messaging, your policy concessions, even your calendar get built around persuading swing partners - or at least neutralizing them.

There’s subtext, too, about legitimacy. Harper avoids romantic language about consensus and instead treats support as instrumental: you “get them to support it.” It’s a clean, unsentimental view of parliamentary arithmetic that matches his brand of disciplined governance. Contextually, it echoes Canada’s recurring minority eras, where budgets double as confidence tests and “governing” means always campaigning - not to the whole country, but to a handful of MPs who can turn the lights off.