Dion hasn’t changed since school (in Paris!). Still employed by taxpayers; same (French!) attitude.

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Joel Johannesen
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Maclean’s magazine has a blurb on the first jobs of Prime Minister Harper and the Liberal Frenchman Stephane Dion.

Chances are, one of these men will be your Prime Minister

Macleans.ca staff

FIRST JOB

Harper: In 1978, Stephen Harper heeded the call of the West and abruptly left Toronto for Edmonton, where he found a low-level job with Imperial Oil (his father, an accountant, worked for the same company). According to William Johnson’s biography, Harper started off working in the mail room, but his skill with computers helped him move up the ranks—within two years, he was running the Calgary office’s computer system. Harper’s political involvement began in earnest at this time (despite a brief fling with the Liberal party as a teen). He went to work for Calgary Tory MP Jim Hawkes, eventually accompanying him to Ottawa, where he got his first taste of the capital (running on the Reform ticket, Harper would go on to beat out his mentor in the 1993 elections).

Dion: After returning from school in Paris, Dion and his wife, political scientist Janine Kreiber, got teaching assistant jobs at New Brunswick’s Université de Moncton. After his Paris days, dealing with wet-behind-the-ears undergrads “was a shock,” Dion admitted to The Globe and Mail in 2006. “A student asked me if Machiavelli was Scottish.” After just one semester, the two decamped to Montreal where Dion secured a teaching job at the Université de Montréal (Krieber got a job teaching at Université Laval in Quebec City). While Dion made a popular professor at U de M, he was a polarizing figure, his colleague Louis Balthazar told The Globe and Mail back in 1996: “What I don’t like about him is that his attitude is very provocative. I’m right, you’re wrong. I understand, you don’t.” —Kate Lunau

(Hat tip to Maureen)

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