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"Indeed, the most important characteristic Mr. Harper has shown over 33 months in office is a capacity to grow. There is no reason to think he won't continue along the same trajectory if re-elected — a good thing, too, since there is much more for him to learn."

So said this newspaper less than two months ago in its endorsement of Stephen Harper's Conservatives. Without speaking too much for my colleagues, I think it's fair to say none of us were anticipating what's unfolding today.

It takes a special kind of immaturity to look at an economic crisis - one that has people worried about their jobs and their homes and their life savings - and consider only how it might be turned to your advantage. But then, for all his ideological roots, Harper has demonsrated time and again that nothing interests him so much as cementing his hold on power. He may have evolved in terms of openness to pragmatic policies when they suit his political interests. But this is a leader who very clearly sees politics as a game, and who sees government - rather than what you do with it - as the ultimate victory.

You could say the same thing, to somewhat lesser degrees, about many who've come before him - not least Jean Chretien. But even Chretien, who clearly enjoyed elections more than he enjoyed actually governing, never devoted his time in office to rigging the rules to ensure that he'd win the next campaign, and the one after that - something he could have done rather easily, with a majority government and a divided opposition. And it's hard to imagine him - or Brian Mulroney, or Pierre Trudeau, or any other prime minister of any signficance - looking at a fiscal update in the middle of an economic meltdown as a chance to put the boots to his opponents.

The problem for the opposition is that it won't be difficult for the Tories to spin their outrage with the proposed elimination of public funding as the naked self-interest of people reliant on the public purse. "We're prepared to give up our public funding and rely solely on grassroots support," they'll say. "Why aren't the Liberals?"

Rhetoric like Pat Martin's "war" cry - even if for once his hyperbole was justified - won't help counter that case. What the opposition parties need to do - in addition to attacking the Tories for being interested solely in their own political fortunes rather than the well-being of Canadians - is rationally explain why it means war.

It really shouldn't be that hard, because what the Tories are proposing is fundamentally undemocratic. To scrap public funding without lifting the ban on corporate and union donations (and raising the cap on personal ones) means there's simply not enough money in this country for a multi-party system. The governing party might be able to cobble together enough to spend the limit during a campaign, but nobody else will.

That's a somewhat ironic argument for the Liberals to make, given that it was Chretien who introduced rigid donation rules in the first place. But the only possible compromise on this legislation would be a concurrent loosening of the contribution limits - or, I suppose, a much lower limit on how much parties are allowed to spend during campaigns.

The likelihood of the Tories agreeing to either of those measures, though, seems pretty minimal. So unless the Liberals and the other opposition parties are prepared to sign their death warrants, or public pressure compels the Tories to back down altogether, the opposition may have little choice but to bring down the government - triggering either yet another election or, depending what the Governor-General thinks, a weird and very unstable coalition government, presumably led by a party that's basically between leaders.

The timing of either of those chaotic situations would be absolutely awful, given what's going on in the world right now. But such is the potential consequence of having a prime minister who evidently hasn't grown very much at all.

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Update: I wonder how some of the commenters below felt about the $84-million John McCain received in public financing south of the border this year. Or, more to the point, how they'd feel if Barack Obama - whose campaign was funded entirely privately - built his response to the economic crisis around a ban on his opponent in the next election getting any of those public funds.