Not only were his campaign’s tight controls over questions from reporters gone, but Mr. Harper even returned to the lectern twice after aides had declared the session over.
And instead of offering only terse, tightly scripted answers, Mr. Harper joked and even mildly mocked himself at points.
He had good reason to be upbeat and relaxed. After the two previous elections had left him short of a voting majority, Mr. Harper was returned to office on Monday with his Conservatives holding 167 of the 308 seats in the House of Commons. The party, which had relied on its power base in Western Canada, also boasts significant representation in Ontario, the most populous province, for the first time in years.
And with the exception of the New Democratic Party, which made a significant breakthrough in Quebec, Mr. Harper left the opposition reeling.
The Liberals, once Canada’s most powerful party, were reduced to 34 seats, a historic low. The election was the first in which the Liberals had not finished first or second. Their leader, Michael Ignatieff, lost his own seat in Toronto and announced his resignation as head of the party on Tuesday morning.
The separatist Bloc Québécois, the dominant federal party in Quebec for two decades, was reduced to only four seats in the House of Commons. It no longer meets the official standard for a political party, which requires at least 12 seats. The New Democrats won 102 seats, which made the party the official opposition for the first time in its history.
Because Canadian leaders hold a tight grip over their caucus members, Mr. Harper’s majority means that his new government’s agenda can pass through Parliament more or less unchallenged.
Two questions have emerged from the election: How will Mr. Harper govern now that he has a majority? And did the election results represent a fundamental altering of the political landscape?
Mr. Harper has already said he would reintroduce measures that had previously failed to muster opposition support when his party governed without a majority, including a series of law-and-order bills. But he was also careful to emphasize that his now powerful government will keep to the same path it followed during its minority days. He flatly ruled out substantial change to Canada’s public health care system, a program that is not universally popular on the right.
“One thing I’ve learned in this business is that surprises are generally not well received by the public,” he said at the news conference in Calgary, Alberta. “Even as a majority you have to, on an ongoing basis, keep the trust of the population.”
Perhaps tempering Mr. Harper’s ambition is the fact that his party captured only about 40 percent of the popular vote. And while the Conservatives worked to build ties to members of ethnic communities in and around Toronto, Canada’s largest city, many of its election victories there came because the Liberals and New Democrats split the left-of-center vote.
During the campaign, the opposition parties warned voters that Mr. Harper would use a majority to bring enormous changes to Canada. But several Conservative supporters said that they did not expect him to introduce a far-right agenda.
“His goal is to destroy the Liberal Party by becoming the Liberal Party,” said Gerry Nicholls, a communications consultant in Oakville, Ontario, who worked for Mr. Harper when he ran a group that lobbied for smaller government and lower taxes. “He’s stealing all of their oxygen; he’s trying to suffocate them.”
While Mr. Nicholls is among those who want to see Mr. Harper adopt a more radical agenda, David J. Bercuson, a historian at the University of Calgary, said the prime minister was more interested in maintaining and building his majority.
“He washed his brain of ideology a long time ago,” he said.
Even so, Mr. Harper has already made it clear that he will move swiftly on several matters that were unpopular with the opposition, including shutting down a disputed registry for rifles, ending direct government subsidies of political parties and maintaining previously scheduled corporate tax cuts. It also seems unlikely that his government will take any significant steps to curb greenhouse gases; such curbs are very unpopular in Western Canada, home to the country’s large oil and gas industries.
Mr. Bercuson expects Mr. Harper to follow the lead of Brian Mulroney, the last Conservative to govern with a majority, in the 1980s. Mr. Mulroney negotiated a controversial free-trade agreement with the United States that later became Nafta. Mr. Bercuson said he thought Mr. Harper would probably move to create a common border perimeter around Canada and the United States to ease travel between the two countries. Such a step is bound to be contentious, because it may require Canada to align its immigration laws with those of the United States.
Several analysts said Mr. Harper has long hoped that the two parties left standing in Parliament would be the Conservatives and the New Democrats, a labor-backed group that is to the left of the Liberals. Many Conservatives believe that if Canadians were given a straightforward left-right voting choice, their party would become the country’s dominant political force.
