Harper's three strikes

It wasn’t so long ago that everything looked to be coming up roses for Stephen Harper and the new Conservative party. With the assistance of Peter McKay and Belinda Stronach, the split between the Reform party and the PC’s was sealed by McKay’s willing duplicity in dealing with the David Orchard wing, and by Stronach’s clear-headed negotiations that helped merge to the two parties back into a single Conservative force. The new alliance went through the election with a united ‘right wing’ option for voters to consider as an alternative to the Liberals – and speculation was that they might even be able to form the government if they got the long sought after breakthrough in Ontario.

A divided minority parliament quickly emerged from the election and while Harper didn’t have the seats to form the majority, he clearly looked like he held the upper hand. All he would need to call another election is to get the Bloc and independents to side with the Tories and they could bring down the government at their leisure.

Enter Harper’s first major mistake – Belinda Stronach.

After defeating Peter McKay to take his seat at the head of the party, Harper should have found a way to roll the moderate voice of Stronach into the party machinery. He should have found a way to capitalize on her personal popularity with Southern Ontario voters. He should have found a way to use her as the poster child for a ‘non-threatening’ brand of Conservative policy making that would offer a principled alternative to the Liberals and ND’s. Instead – he gassed it. Big time. Instead of embracing her, he ridiculed her in front of other key Tories. Instead of milking her qualities for the good of the party, Harper marginalized her. And when their single biggest vote came upon them, the chance to bring down the Liberals and launch the party forward with a new election, Harper’s miscalculation of Stronach’s ability to stomach his abuse lead her to walk across the floor to vote against him. Stronach’s jump to the Liberals wasn’t the death blow to the election Harper wants so badly (in retrospect the mortal wound might have been delivered by the idiot who failed to endorse Chuck Cadman as a Tory), but it was definitely a serious injury.

Whit the by-election in Labrador removing another opposition member in favour of another Liberal into caucus, the possibility for Harper's Tories to turf the Liberals became much less imminent.

Harper’s 2nd Mistake – know thy Parliamentary procedures

Harper’s gaff takes place when the Liberal/NDP coalition takes its budget to the floor for a vote. Long experienced in the minutiae of parliament, the Libs find an obscure procedural motion that allowed them to invoke cloture on the budget debate, and send it to the floor as a late evening surprise. The Tories are caught flat-footed as they race to get their members in to the house in time to vote the bill down. They don’t make it and the budget passes. As mistakes go, this isn’t a major one in terms of the actual error made, but it’s overall effects are devastating. Not being able to punt the coalition on the budget effectively reduces the options the Tories have for getting the election they crave – and so long as the coalition between the ND’s and Libs holds, they could conceivably continue to govern for almost the full term. Harper is left to rant to the National media about how craven the Liberals are in consorting with ‘socialists and separatists’, while trying not to swallow his own tongue at how bad things are turning for him.

Harper’s mistake #3 – the GM debate

Harper’s latest error is unlikely to be remembered as being anywhere near as bad as the previous two, but it strikes at what is wrong with his political radar. The Conservatives have a holdover of Reform members and policies that frankly, aren’t popular outside of Western conservative strongholds. In particular, the opposition to gay marriage is one item that Harper has consistently sought to use as a tool both to pander for support, and as a weapon against the Liberals. I find this position in general to be a monstrous error. First because he is standing at the foot of the sea and screaming for the tide to stop rolling in – GM is inevitable for Canada, given our Charter freedoms contain the specific ‘gender’ and ‘sexual orientation’ clauses that GM is built on. But Harper insists on hitching his wagon to the cause of stopping GM, knowing full well it is only playing to his base vote and isn’t making him any in-roads elsewhere.

Which leads us to the situation we have now, the GM bill is going to be passed this summer by the coalition and yet Harper continues to push his poker chips in to the pot in a bid to win with what is surely a losing hand. His latest efforts have Harper visiting a conservative Mosque where surrounded by deeply religious Moslems he rails against the Gm initiative. At the same time a record number of participants in Toronto’s gay pride festival hit the streets in celebration. Could the contrast be any more stark for the public to see? With Harper calculatedly playing to the surly Moslem opposition to gay marriage while gays, lesbians and their supporters engage in joyous public revelry?

His mono-vision efforts to fight GM have painted himself and his party into a tight corner, one where only the most somber, and reactionary religious leaders welcome him while everyone else parties in the street.

It’s time for the Conservatives to consider that Harper’s strengths; his anti-tax stance, his popularity within the West, his public speaking ability, and his innate intelligence, are not being played to. Instead, his image handlers place him in photo-ops with angry Moslem clerics hostile to Canadian pluralism, and he seems genuinely shocked that his party continues to plummet downward in the polls.

He’s taken a furious beating for his callow treatment of Stronach, he’s bungled the possibility of holding a new election that might fracture the Liberals further, and now he has swallowed the bait the Liberals offered on GM. With this hook lodged firmly in his throat, it only remains to be seen whether his political career will eventually choke to death on it.