No one else appears with him: not a minister, not an aide, not even a taxpayer. The ad is airless, joyless, illuminated only by images of terrorism and economic chaos. At the end, the prime minister turns out the lights and trudges wearily down the hall, his back to us. Alone.
The Conservative Party in its current incarnation was in many ways Harper’s creation. The government he leads exists more or less as an extension of his index finger. But recent months have left the impression of a prime minister who is increasingly isolated, cut off not only from the public he rarely sees and the media he will not talk to, but from his own party.
It isn’t just the half-dozen ministers who have, just months before the election, announced their retirements, in some cases (John Baird) without so much as a day’s notice, in others (James Moore) without a word of acknowledgment from the prime minister. It isn’t the two dozen other MPs who will not be running again, or the notable absence of star candidates among the new recruits.
It is the palpable sense of other ministers maintaining their distance, in rhetorical terms at least, unwilling to indulge in the harshly partisan attacks he demands of his subordinates. The undying loyalists, the ones whose careers he promoted on just this basis — the Pierre Poilievres, the Chris Alexanders — will stick with him to the end. But that is pretty much all that remains, a dwindling palace guard of zealous staffers and the callower ministers. “The Harper government” used to be a branding exercise. It is now an almost literal description.
If the prime minister is alone in the ad, then, it is perhaps not accidental. Who else is there to appear with him? What minister remains that would be considered a significant political asset? The finance minister, the cloth-tongued Joe Oliver? The foreign minister, the saturnine Rob Nicholson? There’s always Jason Kenney, the defence minister and heir apparent. But Kenney’s stock has always been tied to his remoteness from Harper, his willingness to be his own man. I doubt he would put that at risk. Not now.
In the past, it would be easy to see why the party would put Harper front and centre. Such was his reputation as a “strong leader” in the 2008 election that the New Democratic Party made explicit reference to it in its own ads: Harper is a strong leader, they ran, but so, in his own way, is Jack Layton. But now? The leader on whom the Tories are betting their campaign has an approval rating, according to the EKOS polling firm, of just 32 per cent, versus a disapproval rating of 62 per cent. This is by far the worst of any party leader: by contrast, the numbers for NDP’s Thomas Mulcair are almost exactly the reverse, 60-30, while the Liberals’ Justin Trudeau rates roughly equal levels of approval and disapproval.
But if the numbers are bad for Harper, they are horrid for the party. Averaging the polls together, the ThreeHundredEight.com poll-tracking website shows the Tories sliding steadily all through the last two months, from a pallid 32 per cent at the beginning of May to a dismal 29 per cent at the end of June. Worse, only about five to seven per cent of non-Conservative voters would consider them as their second choice. 60 per cent of voters tell EKOS the government is moving in the wrong direction, versus just 32 per cent for the contrary.
What must be particularly dismaying for the Conservatives is that there is nothing they can readily blame the poor poll results on. The economy had a rough first quarter, it is true, as you’d expect following the oil price collapse, but in the broad strokes remains relatively strong: unemployment at 6.8 per cent, median real wages, household incomes and net worth at all-time highs, and so on. Moreover, the Conservatives have shot most of their policy bullets, in the form of those expensive family-friendly tax breaks in the recent budget. Maybe these will start to move the numbers once voters start receiving their cheques this summer. Maybe not.
The brains trust around Harper will tell you all is going according to plan. The strategy is to stay the course, make no sudden moves, until voters return to their senses. Yet there are distinct signs of jitters in Conservative central command. Recent days have witnessed a pro-Harper political action committee launching and shutting down in the space of a week, followed by the production of an anti-Trudeau attack ad so grotesquely over the top — it features photos of ISIL victims just before their execution — it had even stalwart Tory supporters denouncing it.
There are, of course, more than three months to go before election day. The Conservatives retain a huge fund-raising advantage over their two main rivals, which they can deploy over what looks to be an unusually long writ period, perhaps 60 days or more. To that add the benefits of incumbency: the ability to set the agenda, the prime minister looking prime ministerial, plus the public’s historic reluctance, outside a recession, to take a risk on a new government. And they have proved themselves in the past to be formidable campaigners.
But consider that some of their most potent attack lines in previous elections — on Liberal corruption in 2006, on the Liberal “tax on everything” in 2008, on the coalition threat in 2011 — would seem to have less potency this time out. Millions of dollars in anti-Trudeau ads have dented his appeal but not broken it. And the economy, the government’s great strength until now, may soon be sideswiped by a euro crisis. No wonder the prime minister looks so tired.
Original Article
Source: news.nationalpost.com/
Author: Andrew Coyne
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