Stephen Harper has always been as sleazy as Pierre Polievre, it's just that Harper is more extreme in his rhetoric and policy proposals now that he is no longer Prime Minister.
Both of them are wholly owned by the fossil fuel sector.
People in the US tend to underestimate just how deeply captive to fossil fuel interests Canadian politics is. It's not as bad as, say, whaling in Japan where there's almost literally nobody in the country taking the position that the rest of the developed world thinks is the moral no-brainer, but you'd be surprised at what uncommon knowledge it is that the Tories are essentially a continuation of oil sands lobbying by other means and the Grits are only slightly if at all better.
