JLM, when Harper was the president of Canadian Taxpayers Association, or even before that when he was a politician in Alberta, he was very much a right wing politician. He along with Kline talked of building a firewall around Alberta to keep gay marriage out.
Later when he came to federal politics, he still held right wing views. But slowly he moderated when he realized that was the only way to win seats in Ontario and Quebec (e.g., when he removed abortion from the platform of the Conservative Party, or when he promised not to use the Notwithstanding Clause to ban gay marriage). And I have no problem with his economic views, they are centre right views. His budgets have been pretty much what a Liberal government would have proposed (with a few changes).
But I don’t trust Harper.