Suddenly, French debate pivotal for Harper

By Don Martin
Canwest News Service

The French-language leaders' debate Wednesday night has taken on epic importance for Stephen Harper's ambition to land a "strong mandate". (Tom Hanson/Reuters)

OTTAWA -He's still a pariah, but the man's got a hard-to-ignore record as a prophet.

Former prime minister Brian Mulroney called the Conservative election bus in the middle of the 2006 campaign to guarantee a nine-seat gain in the party's Quebec dead zone. We laughed at such poll-defying optimism.

Two weeks later, they won 10 seats.

Now ostracized by Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government until an inquiry over his business links to former arms dealer Karlheinz Schreiber wraps up, Mulroney is still spinning his blue-chip Rolodex to take the province's political pulse. A week or so ago, he started telling friends the Conservatives would claim at least 20 more seats in Quebec.

There you have it: with an easy six-pack of seat pickups from the rest of Canada, the Stephen Harper majority was in the bag.

But in the last few days, a big `whoa-there' was slapped on Mulroney's bold prediction and loyalists have moved to downplay talk of the Conservatives being Quebec-handed the keys to the parliamentary kingdom.

Forget the big gains, they confide, there may even be current seats at risk. Yikes.

That's why the French-language leaders' debate Wednesday night has taken on epic importance for Harper's ambition to land a "strong mandate" to enact a youth-crime agenda, perhaps cut some more arts funding and generally rule Canada as he sees fit.

The Conservatives' promise to impose adult sentences on 14 year olds and their pledge to shave $45 million from arts fundingare the sort of twin initiatives that would elect 50 Conservative MPs from Alberta, if only the province wasn't limited to 28 ridings.

But in the twin solitude of Quebec where the results are still in flux, it's turned into the double-whammy of electoral setbacks.

Quebec singer Michel Rivard's hilarious art-censorship satire, available for viewing on YouTube, has done more to reverse Harper's momentum than all the French attack ads by the Bloc Quebecois and Liberals combined. And Harper's thus-far refusal to appear for the requisite humbling on the Tout le monde en parle Sunday television phenomenon is viewed in Quebec with furrowed brows and wrinkled noses.

The good news for Conservatives is that they have two weeks and two debates to reverse their sudden sagging in Quebec.

The bad news is that Harper is not entering the debate in peak form, despite the restful pace Tuesday when his campaign was limited to the painfully contrived photo-op of the prime minister walking his daughter to school and saying goodbye with a nice shoulder pat (is a fatherly hug really too much to ask?).

That pesky plagiarism charge is the sort of saved-up dirt the Liberal war room had been promising to throw for weeks. A lazy speech writer on the Canadian Alliance payroll in 2003 grafted great gobs of then-Australian prime minister John Howard's clarion cry supporting the Iraqi invasion into a Harper speech, delivered two days later in the House of Commons.

The lifted lines were angrily dismissed as "old news" and "gotcha politics" by the Conservatives, which is bit rich, given how eager they've been to drag out decades-old quips and quotes, the better to choke rivals on their own stale-dated words.

When veteran political operative and Globe and Mail writer Owen Lippert volunteered to be the sword-falling speech writer later in the day, he shielded Harper from a lot of sticky Liberal mud.

But the substance of the address may resonate louder in Quebec than the fact the lines were lifted. The last thing Conservatives wanted is anyone's memory jogged about Harper's aye-aye-sir support for joining the United States in the mother of all futile wars in Iraq.

If there's a good news glimmer for Harper in both debates, it's that he successfully argued that more time had to be spent on the economic crisis.

Good for him, bad for the Liberals whose leader, Stephane Dion, is weakest in discussing financial matters.

Still, given the choice of watching Wednesday night's showdown with anybody on the planet, I'd pick a living room watching Brian Mulroney's reaction to the debate.

There's nobody better than a former Conservative prime minister from Quebec to decipher if a current Conservative prime minister from Alberta has talked himself into a majority - or big trouble.