Reddit reviews Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them

I read her "Shopping for Votes and highly recommend it. It's very eye opening to see how campaign strategy is changing to be more and more marketing like.

I lost the comment I was writing through an accidental click, but I want to address two of your questions.

>why has he won 2 elections?

Harper won three elections in 2006, 2008, and 2011 because he was able to win over key groups of voters from other parties. The Conservatives' highly successful marketing strategy is described in the currently hot book Shopping for Votes, which is worth a read. The thing is, the groups of voters who have supported Harper don't overlap very much with the groups of people who use Reddit or who fall in the age range 18-25, so the people with whom you most often talk about politics are probably not representative of the "average" Canadian voter. If you want to see some Harper-supporters explain their support in their own words, you might find something of interest in the letters section of a right-leaning newspaper, like this, for instance.

>What has he done for Canada?

There are three major shifts in Canadian policy that Harper has overseen.

1. The contraction of the federal government. Harper has shrunk the federal government in two ways: he reduced the amount of tax money that it collects, mostly through a cut to the GST of two percentage points, reducing the federal government's ability to fund large programs. Program spending has therefore shrunk or grown more slowly than it would have been able to with a larger tax base.
But it's not just in the amount of the money it's collected that the federal government has gotten smaller. It is also a core part of the Conservative movement that the federal government not concern itself with "national strategies" on matters that fall under provincial jurisdiction, such as child care. With the exception of the Canada Job Grant, the federal government has shown a serious lack of interest in taking on the role of steward of national programs negotiated with all the provinces. If the provinces want to start up programs of their own and raise the money to fund them, the federal government is totally fine with that, but it doesn't want to be a leader or coordinator of these things. This attitude from the federal government means that Stephen Harper's Canada is one of greater regionalism than it had been before.

2. An economic pivot away from manufacturing and toward resource extraction—away from Ontario and toward Alberta. No matter who governed Canada right now, manufacturing would be in decline as a source of employment. This is a trend in all rich countries. But the Conservatives have shaped Canada in the particular way they’ve decided to respond to this trend. The Conservatives have been champions of the resource sector—particularly of the oil sands—and have worked tirelessly to promote it as the engine of Canada’s economy for the 21st century. They have removed regulatory barriers to new resource projects, welcomed foreign investment in resource extraction (although not in a very consistent way), resisted carbon taxation, and championed the Keystone XL pipeline to the government of the United States. This approach has had an impact on the distribution of the fruits of the economy in Canada that is nowhere more evident than in men’s earnings in the labour market. Another party might have taken a different approach to resource development or tried to foster growth in other industries (say, the IT sector, or manufacturing of high-tech medical equipment, or financial services). It's the particular approach to further economic development taken by Harper that makes his vision distinct.

3. The expansion of free trade with other countries. Harper has pushed for free trade like no previous prime minister. The scale of his ambitions is nicely captured in this graphic from a couple of years ago. But that graphic precedes his biggest free trade achievement so far: the conclusion of a free trade deal with the European Union, which is an even bigger economy than the United States. If the Trans-Pacific Partnership is successful, that will also be huge. Harper’s achievement here is not only in making imports cheaper for Canadians or our exports cheaper for other countries to buy, but also in developing partnerships between Canada and regions of the world other than the United States. The impacts of Harper's achievements will be not only economic, but geopolitical as well.

edit: typo