Harper's post-Thanksgiving election looking like a turkey for Tories

Don Martin
Canwest News Service

Stephen Harper's majority dream appears to have died in Quebec. (Chris Wattie/Reuters)

TORONTO - He never technically panicked. But with the polls turning sour in the final week of this craziest of volatile campaigns, Stephen Harper's invocation of his rival as a potential prime minister was the closest this headstrong leader will ever get to a political anxiety attack.

This election was to be the Conservative vindication, a return to the golden age of majority control as a pan-Canadian party, strong in every region and all-powerful in Parliament. Any reference to Prime Minister Stephane Dion would only qualify as a lame joke.

But, unless every poll is wrong, that won't happen Tuesday. A minority government that forced an election to win big seems, as much as anyone can foreshadow a result amid so much poll fluctuation, poised to end up another minority government within 10 seats, give or take, of its 129-seat count at dissolution.

That would make this modest change a mighty expensive seat-swapping exercise given the $300-million-plus cost of this election.

But for a well-prepared campaign with a leader towering in credibility over his rivals, even a solid win will be an emotional loss if it doesn't give the Conservatives half the Commons seats and thus sufficient control to end the procedural dysfunctionality Harper claimed was handcuffing Canadian democracy.

The majority dream appears to have died in Quebec. With all other regions showing incremental gains or losses, the rebounding strength of the Bloc Quebecois put on ice Conservative hopes for a 20-seat gain.

For that, the Conservatives can only blame themselves.

After investing enormous personal and political capital into wooing Quebec, pushing through the mostly-symbolic notion of a Quebecois "nation" and making almost every decision through the prism of ensuring a positive impact on that province, Harper appears set to suffer severe suitor rejection en francais.

Incredibly, it seems a minuscule $45 million arts cut - a single percentage fraction of the total arts spending - was enough to undo 32 months of goodwill to that province.

Also cited for the reversal of Conservative fortunes was a tough-love youth sentencing provision, which would've allowed judges to impose adult sentences on 14-year-olds if the province agreed.

With Quebec now seemingly a writeoff for the Conservatives, the brass ring became southern Ontario, where the outcome is still in play.

Still, having election predictions swing between gains or loses for the Conservatives this late in the game is a major head-scratcher.

There really were no defining turning-against-Harper moments of this campaign, where the Conservative's modest platform promises were a prudent fit with bad times.

He was riding a war machine that was a steamroller of meticulous preparation and planning that should've flattened a hapless Liberal campaign running on borrowed funds and lacking even a campaign jet at election takeoff.

Before forcing the vote, his government had covered all the important bases. They invested heavily in ethnic outreach and apologized profusely to offended minorities.

They gave a dignified resolution to the native residential school tragedy. They delivered significant tax breaks to selective demographics with vote-getting potential and continued to roll out fat fiscal surpluses.

And then came the pinch-me-I'm-dreaming Liberal development for Stephen Harper. At the precise moment the economy started to tank, the Liberals announced they'd stand for re-election on a carbon tax platform, which Harper figured had everything but a trap door and a noose for that party's election chances.

Harper would've loved a referendum on the Liberal Green Shift, but no government could have anticipated how external factors would rewrite this election script so profoundly.

Ironically, the first signs hit just as the prime minister was visiting the Governor General to force the election a year ahead of his fixed date.

Word landed during his coffee chat that U.S. government-sponsored mortgage agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had been placed under the control of the U.S. Treasury.

Unfortunately, those sub-prime mortgage casualties were merely the distant sound of bad news waves hitting the outer breakers.

The campaign trail quickly paled by comparison as global bank bailouts were unleashed, the market crashed, the dollar collapsed and oil prices fell down a deep well.

Harper's don't-worry-be-happy approach couldn't last. He was forced to abandon his natural aloofness and invoke his mother's stock market misfortunes to prove he was not a cold political rock in a sea of public pain and confusion.

His government, which had planned to stick with a hands-off plan, scrambled Friday with a $25-billion mortgage prop-up for the banks and warn the country to brace for another year of economic sluggishness.

Even so, a simple question of voting for the best leader for a lousy economy should've given the Conservatives advantage enough to give them the majority.

But once again, the trivial stuff intervened, in a repeat of those tactical mistakes late in the 2004 and 2006 campaigns that sent voters scurrying back to the Liberals.

A culture of self-defeat seems to be embedded in the DNA of Stephen Harper, whose small misspeaks have big electoral ramifications.

He shouldn't have defined his arts funding reallocation as a cultural battle against snobbery and galas. His exuberant Conservative backroom straddled the lines of good taste several times and put the most unlikely phrase of "puffin poop" into the headlines.

He made callous-sounding references to the market crash as having decent "buy" potential in a scrum. And then Harper's crowning boo-boo - an unfortunate sneer at the hapless Dion as he stumbled with English incomprehension through out-takes of an interview this week, which suggested a hard heart still beats inside the cultivated sweater-vest image makeover.

There's no denying the Conservatives have delivered a steady, disciplined government that gave critics precious little ammunition to target them as driven by hard-right ideology.

But if the polls accurately foreshadow Tuesday's results, Quebec is a lost cause for Conservative gains, with only modest swings in Ontario, Newfoundland and British Columbia.

People sitting down for their family dinners this holiday weekend have the power to declare Stephen Harper a one-term wonder or render Stephane Dion a single-election loser.

In the end, this election will be a referendum on the character of the two contenders for prime minister and their ability to serve as the comforting, competent face of a government amid economic ruins.

Only one of those men will survive the post-Thanksgiving vote to fight another election. The other will become a turkey stuffing footnote to political history.