Back in the late 1960s, wealthy insurance salesman Colin Brown set up the National Citizens Coalition as part of his campaign against public health care in Canada.

It was a losing cause. Despite Brown’s dogged efforts, Ottawa proceeded in 1967 with a national medicare program whose principles of equality and inclusiveness have been wildly popular, even considered by many Canadians to represent the very heart and soul of the country.

During the following decades, Brown’s National Citizens Coalition (NCC) remained a marginal, although well-financed right-wing voice, yapping from the sidelines of Canadian politics.

But now the NCC seems about to achieve a dramatic breakthrough, to score something beyond even the wildest dreams of its founder — to see one of its own become prime minister of Canada.

In one of the stranger twists of Canadian political history, a country that almost universally reveres public health care appears poised to elect as leader a man who ran an organization that once waged a fierce campaign against public health care.

It’s not a secret that Conservative party leader Stephen Harper was president of the right-wing National Citizens Coalition in the late 1990s. But it might as well be.

In a carefully crafted campaign, Conservative party handlers have kept the focus off Harper’s background in the trenches of right-wing movements and organizations. This has been no small feat. Harper’s strikingly thin CV consists almost entirely of his involvement in the backrooms and front rooms of right-wing politics.

In addition to his presidency of the NCC, Harper was a founding member and first chief policy officer of Preston Manning’s Reform party — a party that was consistently rejected by Ontario voters as too extreme.

But Harper is being offered up to voters in this campaign as a mild-mannered family man who’s mostly interested in scandal-free government. Hard to find fault with that.

Of course, there have been plenty of accusations that Harper has a “hidden agenda,” particularly on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. Harper has made clear he would allow a free vote on these issues in Parliament and allow Charter rights to be overridden.

But in addition to any “hidden agenda,” many of Harper’s stated positions are also extreme — and certainly at odds with positions Canadians routinely tell pollsters they support.

Yet the deeply radical nature of Harper’s platform hasn’t really come across in the campaign, largely because the media have failed to turn the spotlight on it.

National Post columnist Andrew Coyne has faulted the Conservatives for their “failure to advance and defend their platform.”

But this has clearly been a deliberate strategy, and it explains why Ontario voters don’t seem to realize that this is the old Reform party coming at them once again, just with a softer manner and a fresh hairstyle.

In fact, Harper has long advocated putting a moderate face on radical right-wing policies to make them palatable to Canadians. In 1989, he urged the Reform party to offer “a modern Canadian version of the Thatcher-Reagan phenomenon.”

There’s no mistaking the Thatcher-Reagan nature of Harper’s program. He advocates dramatically reducing taxes — to even below U.S. levels — and at the same time sharply increasing military spending.

This formula produced massive deficits in the United States, which were then unabashedly used as justification for deep social spending cuts. That was the essence of the Reagan revolution, and it ushered in the current era of raging inequality in America.

As for public health care, Harper has been careful to endorse it, although advocating private delivery of services within the public system. Roy Romanow, after his exhaustive royal commission, argued strongly against such private delivery. But then, Harper didn’t have much use for the widely praised Romanow report, dismissing it as “entirely wrong.”

Harper also wants to pull Canada out of the Kyoto Protocol, to adopt a tough-on-crime, three-strikes-you’re-out justice policy, to reject a national gun registry — even though Canadian police chiefs support the registry and Canadians widely favour gun control.

But the media have said little about the radical nature of the Conservative positions, and how far outside the Canadian mainstream they lie.

Instead, the focus has been largely on the election as a horse race. Even last week, with the public clearly confused about how to vote, the media continued to offer little help with the issues, zeroing in instead on questions about the mechanics of minority government.

And so it is that Canadians may well elect a radical rightwinger to be their prime minister, without even realizing that that’s what they’re doing.

Colin Brown would have been impressed.

Linda McQuaig

Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989...