Up until the writ for the 2006 election was dropped, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper was widely viewed outside his home province of Alberta as a sullen and condescending policy wonk.

Many believe it was this image of a strident right-wing ideologue that helped seal his party's defeat in 2004.

But in 2006, the voters saw a new and improved Harper, one who is more centrist, more polished, a party leader who has been made over both professionally and politically.

Gone is the helmet hair-do. Gone is the petulant Harper with the legendary simmering temper.

Gone is the 'Scary Stephen' who hit the ceiling when fellow Conservative Danny Williams, the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, was pressuring Tory MPs on the Rock not to defeat the Martin government last spring, in order to preserve the hard-won revenue-sharing pact between St. John's and Ottawa.

"What's the next thing?" Harper exploded back then. "We're going to have a bunch of Mafia people working for the government because it might give Danny Williams money a week earlier?"

The new Harper, who mocks his own lack of charisma, was photographed flanked by visible minorities, holding chubby-cheeked babies, and throwing a snowball at photographers.

This Harper, Canada's next prime minister, was moved to tears in his campaign speech.

"To those that did not vote for us, I pledge to lead a government that will work for all of us. We will move forward together, our national identity was not forged by government policy, it does not flow from any one program, any one leader, or any one party," Harper said in an emotional speech.

"Our Canada is rooted in our shared history and in the values which have, and will endure," Harper said.

While some pundits argued Harper's rise in the opinion polls was owing to Conservative strategists and advisers, Harper himself suggested he has undergone an evolution in the 12 years since he was first elected to Parliament.

"Over the course of a decade people's views evolve somewhat -- and situations change," Harper told a news conference nearing the end of the campaign.

Pre-empting the suggestion that this was but a political strategy, Harper noted it was his duty to be open to change.

"We always, as political leaders, have to respect the fact that circumstances change and you have to deal with the real concerns of people and the real situations that are before us," he said.

"And that's what we try to do."

Indeed, biographer William Johnson, who has written a book called Stephen Harper and the Future of Canada notes Harper is "willing to accept things which he would not be accepting otherwise but which don't violate his fundamental principals."

Consider the pro-American Harper who once wrote flatteringly of the "calibre and experience of the Bush cabinet," charging "the Canadian equivalent is an embarrassment" in contrast to "even the worst American cabinet in recent years." In recent months, Harper reproached Liberal Leader Paul Martin for not being tough enough with his Washington counterparts.

The media spotlight

Harper's makeover is all the more noteworthy following an entire summer on the barbecue circuit, during which he couldn't shake off the image of being stiff and disconnected.

When Harper donned an ill-fitting cowboy suit at last summer's Calgary Stampede, critics were vicious.

University of Toronto political analyst Nelson Wiseman told CTV.ca Harper's efforts to seem more personable failed at the time because he didn't appear genuine.

"Is that how you walk around, in cowboy hats?" Wiseman wondered aloud.

Indeed, Harper, an intensely private man, is the first one to say he can't stand the media spotlight.

Robert Mansell, a University of Calgary political science professor, got to know Harper during his graduate studies in the 1980s. He says Harper may come off as aloof and icy because he is not comfortable in big crowds.

"In my experience, he can be a bit shy and isn't very comfortable being the centre of attention," says Mansell.

Still, while the Liberal advertising campaign designed to paint Harper as a fanatic backed by American right-wingers seemed to have backfired, it left open the question of how he will govern as prime minister.

Although the electorate is now likely well-versed in Harper's policies and priorities, there are also some who may suspect his motives and his agenda.

Harper's platform and speeches focused on tax cuts and measures to increase government accountability.

But he avoided his resistance to the Kyoto climate protocol, his past support for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and his opposition to same-sex marriage.

Indeed, this strategy could be what served to make Harper a more palatable alternative.

The Strategic Counsel's Managing Partner Timothy Woolstencroft suggests Harper's position against legislation sanctioning same-sex marriage created discomfort among Red Tories in the 2004 election, causing them to wonder if "he was a prisoner of social conservatives."

Despite the detractors, Johnson believes Harper is not a social conservative.

"He wants to appeal to social conservatives because he said, again consistently, that for the Conservatives to come to power, they have to have a coalition between the economic conservatives and libertarians, which he is, and the social conservatives," Johnson said, appearing on CTV's Canada AM.

"So he's not himself -- but his stance on same-sex marriage is related to appealing to the social conservatives as well, so they can all work together for power."

Chance meeting

Harper, who is often branded a westerner, was actually born and bred in a suburb of Toronto in 1959, son of an accountant.

He finished his high school at the top of his class and enrolled at the University of Toronto in 1978. Two months later, he dropped out and headed west to Edmonton where he worked in the oil patch. From then on, the West was his home and he later enrolled at a university in Alberta.

Initially, Harper had no intention of entering politics. The bright star of the economics department at the University of Calgary planned, instead, to pursue a PhD in economics.

"I think he probably finds it amusing that he's in this situation, because it is not anything he aspired to," says Mansell. "He would never classify himself as someone who wanted at the age of 10 to be prime minister of Canada."

Mansell says it was others who saw in him the talent and vision to bring people together, paired with his strong desire to serve the public, that pushed Harper to enter politics.

Preston Manning, who founded Canada's Reform Party, was one of the first to notice these qualities.

Manning would visit Mansell at the University of Calgary to bounce off ideas about policy.

During one drop-in, Manning asked him to recommend someone who could help develop a policy program for what was then the Reform Party.

"About that time, Stephen walked by and I said, 'Here's your guy'," says Mansell.

Manning was so impressed with Harper that he asked him to deliver a major policy speech at the party's founding convention in 1987. Harper is also credited with creating Reform's 1988 election platform.

But this wasn't Harper's first foray into public service.

In 1985, Harper worked as the parliamentary secretary to then-Tory Calgary MP Jim Hawkes.

Johnson notes that Harper struggled with the lifestyle, quoting a friend saying, "The whole Ottawa lifestyle, the glad-handing, the wine and cheeses, being with the right person, saying the right thing - that all seemed just too plastic to him."

Or, as Johnson himself writes, "There was something about Parliament Hill's atmosphere and political culture that (Harper) found repellent."

In Ottawa, Harper developed a distaste for the governing system that alienated westerners.

He left about a year later, disillusioned, and ready to immerse himself in more scholarly pursuits. But it was his encounter with Manning that prompted him to switch political allegiances.

Only a new party, he believed, could change the system, and that party was Reform.

Johnson reveals a significant influence was Peter Brimelow's book, The Patriot Game, in which the governing Liberals are condemned.

"The Liberal Ideology to a considerable extent," Brimelow wrote, "is the projection of internal Quebec concerns onto the national stage, so that Canadian politics in the Liberal era have been essentially those of Greater Quebec."

In the 1988 election, Harper ran against Hawkes under the Reform banner for Calgary West. He lost by a wide margin. That year, he served as parliamentary secretary to Deborah Grey, the first Reform MP elected to the House of Commons.

Harper managed to capture Calgary West in 1993, in the election that first propelled Reform into prominence, and held onto the seat until 1997. That year he left the party over a difference of opinion with Manning. Mansell said the two disagreed on how to direct the party.

"I think Stephen's view was that the party had to be much more mainstream. And Preston was very much more focused on having it a western party initially and believing it could become a national party from that base," says Mansell.

After departing political life, Harper became president of the National Citizens' Coalition, a conservative think-tank. But the pull of politics brought him back in 2002, when he beat out embattled Stockwell Day for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance Party.

By 2003, Harper had managed to bring some of the renegade MPs back into the fold, quell party infighting and negotiate a merger with former Progressive Conservative leader Peter MacKay. In March of 2004, he captured the leadership of the new Conservative Party and held onto it one year later with 84 per cent support from delegates.

Now, the challenge for Canada's next prime minister lies in working on his weakness, according to his old boss.

"The challenge for him is going to be able to … put a human face on that and if I have any advice it's to make sure that whoever does not make it into the cabinet is still a very valuable part of the team," says Grey.