The Globe and Mail

Stephen Harper has made two contributions to changing Canadian politics.

First, Mr. Harper reunited the right, driving the union of two parties to produce a strong and effective Conservative Party that has won two minority governments. Today, the Conservatives remain competitive with the Liberals, no mean feat in a recession.

Second, Mr. Harper introduced negative television advertising between elections as a staple of Conservative politics.

Parties had deployed attack ads, very personally aimed at other party leaders, during election campaigns. That they should now be featured between elections is Mr. Harper's contribution.

The ads are not universally popular, even in the Conservative caucus. Some MPs hear from Conservative constituents that they reinforce the party's image under Mr. Harper for thuggishness and excessive partisanship.

But Doug Finley, the party's national director, and Guy Giorno, the Prime Minister's chief-of-staff, tell squeamish MPs that the ads are “working” to frame negatively Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, just as the party's previous televised assault on former leader Stéphane Dion framed him as a nerd and a weakling with crazy ideas.

The current ad campaign costs around $3-million. The ads appear on radio and television, with target “buys” on sports programs, including the Stanley Cup playoffs. Only a party that raises large sums of money can afford television ads between elections, and the Conservatives are the masters of fundraising.

The ads reflect the Harper idea/ideal that politics is a never-ending war in which no quarter is asked or taken. No stoop is really too low for the Harper Conservatives.

You can see this in the ads that question Mr. Ignatieff's patriotism, motivations, integrity and background. You can also see it in the Commons, interviews and speeches, where Conservative ministers seize any opportunity, however tangential, to attack Liberals, past or present. The latest twist is an attempt to discredit former finance minister Paul Martin's slaying of the deficit in the 1990s, claiming his success came at the expense of the poor and the sick.

Are attack ads successful? Political operators, including those in Liberal ranks, concede that they usually are, within defined limits.

Attack ads aren't designed for the entire audience, but rather only a small slice of the electorate that might be dislodged from traditional political moorings. They are planned with enormous care through extensive polling and focus groups, down to testing every word and image before the ads appear. They are designed to create or exploit doubts about the core values and competence of the target.

They are not targeted at editorial writers, policy wonks, committed partisans or well-informed voters, but rather at people who do not follow public affairs closely and vote with their guts, mostly based on images of leaders formed on television.

Hence, the attacks on Mr. Ignatieff centre on his years living outside Canada and his motivations for returning. They criticize him for being “cosmopolitan” and for being in politics “only for himself.” Inferentially, they raise doubts about his patriotism and motivation.

The Conservative politicos admire and are sometimes advised by U.S. Republicans. These latest Conservative ads are therefore very Republican in their conceptualization. Republican ads tried to raise subliminal questions about Barack Obama's “Americanness,” Conservative ones implicitly doubt Mr. Ignatieff's attachment to Canada and his understanding of mainstream values.

A poll to be released Monday shows the ads have not stopped the incremental Liberal momentum. Liberals worry, however, that the ads are only the first volley in a sustained campaign against Mr. Ignatieff that, over time, will damage his image. After all, the campaign against Mr. Dion went on for months.

The ads, according to the poll, will show the impact greatest among hardcore, right-wing Conservatives but also among anti-American New Democrats for whom Mr. Ignatieff's years in the United States raise concerns.

Obviously, the Conservatives wanted the attack ads to appear before Mr. Ignatieff had fully presented himself to Canadians. Framing him negatively before he framed himself was the objective.

The ads are running, however, while the Conservatives are also trying their announcement-a-day strategy flowing from the last budget. That's the government's positive message: We have a plan for the recession and we are proceeding to implement it.

The negative attack ads run counter to the positive message. They remind people that part of Harper politics is über-partisanship, where just about anything goes. It might cause a few people to wonder why during a serious recession, the Conservatives want to play such partisan games.

The Harper strategists sneer at the tut-tutting about these ads, since the tut-tutting comes from their political adversaries, smart sets who order white wine at cocktail parties, and those who do not understand that politics is war. Attacks ads, properly done, advance the greater cause of the Conservative Party.

As such, they are already one of the Prime Minister's legacies to the practice of Canadian politics.