Obviously this is the analysis of Conservatives, who are predisposed to see their man Harper as the winner in any confrontation. But it matches the early findings of pollsters and the private concerns of Liberals.
A weekly large-sample Ekos poll of voter preference showed that the Liberals’ lead over the Conservatives shrank from 4.7 points before the EI deal to 1.3 points afterward. On the single day that Harper and Ignatieff were meeting behind closed doors, Ekos tracking showed the Liberals taking a fleeting but terrifying nine-point dip.
Ignatieff has the summer to pick up his game. The consensus in Ottawa is that he’ll need it. And Harper has the summer to plan for the next confrontation. For a guy who was on the ropes just two weeks ago that’s a good place to be. Here’s how it all happened.
“He’s had a roller-coaster year,” the Harper adviser said. “But it’s been that way with Stephen since the beginning.”
Ever since Harper returned to electoral politics in 2002, he has moved from crunch to crunch. He won the Canadian Alliance leadership and brokered the merger between his party and the Progressive Conservatives. In 2004 he won that party’s leadership and went straight into electoral battle against Paul Martin’s Liberals, finally winning in January 2006. From there he had two luxurious years of something close to stability while he set about defining his new Conservatism in power.
In the 2008 election he cut Stéphane Dion’s Liberals to their lowest share of the popular vote since Confederation, and their lowest seat total in 24 years. Then, leading a larger caucus against a headless opposition, Harper had Finance Minister Jim Flaherty deliver a November economic update that proposed to eliminate public funding of political parties. The Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc Québécois depend on taxpayer subsidies for a bigger fraction of their war chests than do the Conservatives, whose Reform branch has spent 20 years raising money from large numbers of individual donors. It would have been a devastating move.
But Harper riled the opposition instead of asphyxiating them, and though he survived the three parties’ attempts to build a parliamentary coalition to replace him, Conservatives were left badly rattled by it all.
When the dust settled in January, Ignatieff had replaced Dion in a bloodless coup. The Liberals saved the money and energy they would have spent fighting among themselves. And the Conservatives kept stepping in cow pies. Harper had his communications staff put out word that Brian Mulroney, who faced a public inquiry into his dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber, was estranged from the party. This merely succeeded in infuriating former Progressive Conservatives who were still loyal to Mulroney. Then Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt’s assistant mislaid a briefing book and a digital recorder. Reporters divulged the embarrassing contents of both items.
All the while, Ignatieff had Harper on this pesky leash. As his price for supporting the Conservative budget in January, Ignatieff put the Conservatives “on probation.” He demanded they deliver updates on the implementation of the budget in March, June and September. Each time the government would face a confidence test in the Commons. Each time, if it lost there would be an election. Missteps and mini-scandals had the Conservatives reeling. A fresh new Liberal leader held the whip hand. Even the Just Visiting ads weren’t keeping the Liberals from creeping into a lead over the Conservatives.
Harper made the best show he could of what, to him, seemed the inevitable crisis. He released his second “probation” report in an elaborate show in Cambridge, in southern Ontario. The report claimed 80 per cent of stimulus measures were being spent or on the way to being spent—a comically broad measure of success. Now, the Conservatives were sure, Ignatieff would force an election, while seeking to put the blame for it on Harper.
Instead the Liberal leader stalled, clumsily. In an endless, disjointed Montreal scrum, Ignatieff gave non-answers to question after question before telling reporters he would read Harper’s report overnight and get back to them.
