News

The Conservatives made news with their gaffes, but they still gained ground in the campaign's first week. They goofed on the little things beloved of the media; they scored with their basic campaign strategy.

The Conservatives covered every region of the country with their leader's tour. They deliberately campaigned in ridings and areas where the party was weak, a sign of confidence and expected gains; the Liberals played it safe, largely campaigning in Liberal ridings before small crowds, a sign of concern. Without a plane for most of the week, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion covered much less territory than Conservative Leader Stephen Harper.

The Conservatives made mistakes that, in turn, made headlines: the pooping puffin, the dismissal of a leading press spokesman who accused a soldier's father of being a Liberal partisan, being on the wrong side of Green Leader Elizabeth May's participation in the televised debates. In the parlance of political insiders, these mistakes threw the campaign “off message,” and were undoubtedly infuriating to the Conservative campaign organizers.

None did any serious damage; in fact, they created opportunities that the Conservatives seized and the media largely misinterpreted. Most Canadians aren't following the campaign closely. It's too early for many of them to focus, if they indeed ever do. The gaffes reinforced anti-Conservative views of those who weren't going to vote for the party anyway. They provided grist for the media mill, and a little humour.

Conservative opponents regaled themselves at unexpected flashes of prime ministerial humility. They should have feared the Conservative Leader's apologies and changes of position, because these flashes fit with the Conservatives' effort to soften Mr. Harper's image, an effort that began with pre-election ads showing him in a sweater and talking about family.

The media played up and delighted in the gaffes, invested them with headlines and analysis, and largely missed the reasons that the campaign's underlying trends were swinging steadily toward the Conservatives. Harris/Decima, whose pre-election poll had the Conservatives and Liberals essentially tied, revealed Friday that the Conservatives had opened a cavernous 41-26 per cent lead, enough for a majority government. Conservatives were gaining in urban Canada, among women and in Quebec. Liberals were fading everywhere, except Atlantic Canada, according to Harris-Decima. A Nanos poll released Friday gave the Conservatives 38 per cent and the Liberals 31 per cent.

Mr. Harper campaigned with confidence and some humility at one level, while at another he flayed the Liberals, often misinterpreting the substance of Liberal policies. The double strategy of humility and haranguing worked. The Liberals had no answer for it, except to sputter about the Conservative Leader “lying.”

The Conservatives hammered the same themes: the dangers of the Liberals' Green Shift, whose “carbon tax” Mr. Harper said would “wreck the economy”; family-friendly policies; and, in Quebec, the Conservatives' welcoming attitude toward Quebec nationalism.

Then, the Conservatives pre-empted for political reasons any possible attack on their Afghanistan policy when Mr. Harper ruled out any extension of the Kandahar mission beyond 2011.

Distractions aside, the Conservatives know what they are doing, how to do it, whom they are targeting and with what messages. The campaign tour runs with paramilitary precision. Local candidates, as in previous elections, are prevented from speaking to journalists. The whole campaign revolves around Mr. Harper, as does the entire government. Ministers are pygmies in the campaign, as most of them are in the government, and it would appear nothing will change after the election, since the Conservatives have attracted almost no new candidates of great stature. As they paraded out their new candidates across the country, the most common reaction was: Who?

The Conservatives are trying (thus far successfully) to defang Mr. Harper among swing voters. The entire Conservative strategic effort – in which policy, speechmaking and advertising reinforce each other – is to make Canadians, or more precisely middle-class Canadians, feel comfortable with the idea of Mr. Harper and the Conservative Party as middle-of-the-road, pragmatic, non-ideological.

The Liberal and especially the New Democratic Party campaigns are predicated, in part, on scaring Canadians that Mr. Harper and the Conservatives are ideologues outside the Canadian mainstream, whatever that is. They yell and shout about the risks Mr. Harper poses. So far, the scary images they have painted of Mr. Harper aren't sticking, beyond their own core supporters. Instead, he gives an interview to The Globe and Mail about his love of piano and the years he spent playing it. The humanization of Mr. Harper is as calculated and strategic as the man himself.

As always, the campaigning was different in Quebec. The Liberals are all but irrelevant there – Harris/Decima gives them only 17 per cent, which means almost no French-speaking support – so the fight is now between the Conservatives and Bloc Québécois, with the Bloc clearly on the defensive. Mr. Harper started his campaign in Quebec City and was in Montreal on Friday. Expect to see him there a lot more as the campaign unfolds, since winning two or even three dozen more seats in Quebec is the Conservatives' single most important objective.

The Liberals were all over the map politically. Their campaign lacked a solid underlying theme. For all his best intentions, Mr. Dion still struggles to explain his Green Shift. It remains little understood, and a political loser with gas prices rising again. The mere word “tax” scares people. In the sound-bite world, the Green Shift takes too long to explain, as in 30 seconds instead of 10. (A survey of a recent U.S. election found the average length of a television sound bite was eight seconds.) Put crudely, Mr. Dion is not popular, and his principal policy is unpopular. Each drags the other down, the question now being how far.

Worse for the Liberals, nothing that Mr. Dion did this week suggested he could close the yawning gap – 25 points in some surveys – between the perception of his leadership skills and those of Mr. Harper. The bad news for Liberals is that the less interested voters are in politics, the more they are influenced if they vote by leadership perceptions.

Mr. Harper runs ahead of his party; Mr. Dion runs behind his. Unless those perceptions change, it's going to be a long campaign and an unhappy result for the Liberals when the undecided and loosely committed begin making up their minds, as they usually do toward the end of the campaign.

Liberals might now believe Canadians would rally to a call to stop the Conservatives from securing a majority. The Liberals hope that when their paid advertisements begin next week some opinions might change. Quite apart from this appeal being too late, it would be risky, since it would all but concede defeat, dishearten workers and, quite possibly, risk sending some voters fleeing to the NDP and Greens on the theory that, since the Conservatives are going to win, why not reinforce smaller parties and strengthen their voices against the Conservatives.

Liberals might also take early solace from the possibility of a leader exceeding expectations. A few Liberals are saying privately that since expectations are so low for Mr. Dion, he could surprise Canadians in the televised debates and so revive Liberal fortunes. Perhaps. But it is also true that low expectations usually exist for a reason, or a series of reasons, and that these are more easily reinforced than changed by more extended exposure.