Come on, get angry

The danger facing Harper is precisely that he is in this election because his version of the truth is often at variance with his opponents’, and with the record. The most spectacular instance came during a hectic Monday when two different preliminary drafts of Auditor General Sheila Fraser’s investigation into funding of last summer’s G8 and G20 summits suggested the government mis­informed Parliament about funding for fancy infrastructure far from the summit site.

John Baird, a favourite Harper stand-in, told reporters that Fraser’s final report was much more lenient than the first draft. Out came a new revelation: Fraser has written to a parliamentary committee saying the Conservatives misquoted her on another file to make it seem she’d lauded the government’s performance, when in fact she’d done nothing of the sort.

The details of that little nested set of apparent scandals had no chance of being aired properly inside the echo chamber of the Ottawa Conference Centre on debate night. The best the leaders could do was to hurl fragments of accusations and offer bits of defences.

It was a challenging night for Ignatieff, who has impressed observers with his performance on the road. Here he had more competition for the spotlight. Sometimes he had to get chippy to get a word in, and when challenged, especially by Layton, he was briefly at a loss for a rebuttal. What he did manage to do was to get a word in for some of his platform’s signature programs—modest aid packages for students heading to university and families caring for elderly relatives. His success will depend on whether viewers remember the Ignatieff who has a program out of the many Ignatieffs who were on offer.

Perhaps the most agile combatant onstage was Layton. The polls so far suggest he’s in some danger of losing seats and declining in his share of the popular vote, for the first time since he became NDP leader in 2003. Here he was able to act out the role he claims is his: more principled than Ignatieff in his opposition to Harper, yet somehow better able to work with any party that wants to play. “Mr. Harper thinks the idea of people working together is somehow a bad idea,” he said. “He calls it names.”

The name Layton referred to was “coalition,” the spectre Harper has preferred to brandish at every stop. Oddly, Harper didn’t talk about a coalition here until an hour into the debate, and only then in response to accusations from Duceppe and Layton, who said Harper was perfectly happy to scheme with them in 2004 against Paul Martin.

Harper has lately talked a little less about a formal, contract-on-paper “coalition” to usurp the power he feels is his, and a little more about some looser arrangement of opposition parties against him. That saps his argument’s ability to scare but increases its plausibility. Duceppe turns out to be a keen student of parliamentary democracy: “When you say that the party with the most seats forms the government,” the Bloc leader reminded Harper, “you forgot something: that party has to have the confidence of the House, with the Speech from the Throne. Otherwise, there is no democracy at all.”

Ignatieff made a similar argument. “If you get more seats than any other party you get to try and meet the House of Commons,” he said. And indeed it’s so. In a news release right after the debate, the Conservatives hammered the point: “Opposing Stephen Harper’s reintroduced budget, which Michael Ignatieff, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe have all vowed to do, will be a confidence vote,” the Conservative release said. “Rejecting it would clear the way for Michael Ignatieff to become prime minister with the support of the Bloc Québécois and the NDP.”

That’s actually true. It’s not how things are guaranteed to turn out, but how they may well. It’s why Harper decided two years ago his only guarantee of keeping power would be to win a majority government. Short of that, the game-theory possibilities are endless. You’ll note that this article makes no attempt to name a winner from Tuesday’s debate. What’s more intriguing is that even after the votes are counted on May 2, it may not yet be clear who’s really won.