Harper's gamesmanship has Liberals at brink of failure

You’ve got to hand it to Stephen Harper.
In another life, the man might well have had a promising career as a bespectacled chess nerd, because his ability to master feints, launch gambits and manage momentum would make even a grandmaster blush with envy.
Right now, the Conservatives are about to succeed in having an underdog Opposition push for an election that only the Conservatives want, and only they can benefit from, without at all seeming like they had anything to do with the event.
Let’s put things in perspective: the Bloc Quebecois has nothing to gain from this election. A few seats here or there, won or lost, won’t make a wisp of difference to the separatists’ larger mission to milk the federal tax dollar for their province. Quebec has, and always will be, an overly large player in federal politics. The Bloc will not win more seats in the next election, they might lose, and at the worst, they will be a bit player in a majority. No, their greatest power is now, where they can try to play kingmaker in a dysfunctional Parliament.
The NDP will only lose in the next election. Jack Layton, perhaps the most likeable of all the federal leaders, is on the limp. His party has no traction, and has somehow lost the traditional support of the Prairie provinces (how?) and left-leaning voters in urban B.C. (how?) while utterly failing to gain any traction amidst the impoverished and working-glass Maritimer. (How, again?) Given the NDP’s propensity for tax-and-spend fiscal incompetence, and given the obvious financial instability of the world, voters won’t be willing willing to give the NDP any power to spend money we don’t have. The next election will be a bloodbath for the NDP, and anything close to losing only a half-dozen seats will be about the best the party can hope for.
The Liberals are hoping to strike it lucky by challenging the Tories on issues of morals and ethics. But here’s where the utterly un-prime ministerial Michael Ignatieff has fallen for a clever trick. The Tories have polls – they spend more of your dollars and theirs than any other government in history on such things – that show the Canadian people just don’t give a damn about a staggering litany of scandals. Part of this has to do with the Tories’ overloaded coffers, which allows the Tories plenty of pre-election election ads. Michael Ignatieff will never be prime minister.
But Stephen Harper will, again. He might not achieve many more seats than he has, but he will retain power.
Now, it’s not clear an election will give the Tories the majority they crave by positing the current governing party as a better option than the Liberals. But there's another way to victory: not by being better than the other guy, but by making the other guy appear less viable. In that light, Harper has allowed Ignatieff and company just enough room to think they have a chance – while also being certain that the Canadian public have little confidence in Ignatieff and the Liberals as a whole. The fact that Ignatieff decided the budget wasn’t his cup of tea (even though it was more Liberal than some Liberal budgets of years past) without even reading it will be portrayed by the Tories as evidence Ignatieff isn’t here for us – just himself – as all those quasi-slanderous Tory attack ads suggest.
The only fly in the Tory ointment is the departure of veteran (and likeable) MPs Stockwell Day and Chuck Strahl. But both B.C. politicians come from areas rife with die-hard Conservative roots. Short of a meltdown by the candidates in that area, both seats will be blue the next election. So what if Harper loses a few veteran ministers? It’s not like most of the government has any power other than to heed what comes out of the Prime Minister’s Office anyhow.
But even against that backdrop, Harper retains a master-stroke: people didn’t want an election, and if one is forced, he has the power to point out how the nasty Liberals and evil Socialists are responsible for this spring inconvenience. The message from the well-oiled Tory machine will be a simple one: “Don’t blame us. We had a wonderful budget that would have helped seniors and the poor and help build jobs, and now we’re just stuck trying to govern the country as best as we could despite those meddling kids.”
In the game of electoral chess, Stephen Harper has masterfully shuffled the political pieces on Ottawa’s checkered board such that regardless of whoever moves first, the Conservatives win.
If Ignatieff forces an election, he will lose. Alternately, the Opposition could cave and allow the Harper regime another year of life. Either way, the Conservatives are the only party that stand to gain from the current political turmoil, regardless of its outcome.
And that’s got much to do with the machinations of Harper: he hasn’t piloted a less-than-spectacular minority government to the greatest longevity in history by luck alone. Come Friday's non-confidence vote, the Liberals may well have allowed Harper to trick them into securing a Tory majority.
- Vern Faulkner is the Courier editor.