To be honest a lot of why Canada did ok through the 2008/09 recession came down to dumb luck.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think either Harper or the the previous governments (Martin, Chretien and Mulroney) did anything wrong.  Quite the contrary they together put us in a position to benefit from some dumb luck, but they weren't entirely responsible for it either.

Take banking regulation.  While Mulroney/Wilson did a solid job in writing our banking regulation it is VERY tough to point a finger at any policy that helped us through the recession.  Certainly preventing bank mergers did *NOT* help in any way, that myth is a total fallacy not backed by any evidence (quite the contrary countries with more consolidated banks, like Canada and Australia, did better than countries with more diversified banking like the U.S.).

Having low debt certainly helped, though our total government debt was higher than Spain, for example, who did worse.