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Conservative Leader Stephen Harper's contemptuous attitude toward high culture has earned him a furious reaction from Canada's artistic community, including a scathing commentary in yesterday's Globe by Margaret Atwood. But it should be nearly as upsetting to fellow Conservatives, who may be seeing their party's chance of a majority slip away.

Even with the Liberals in apparent collapse through much of English Canada, the key to a Tory majority is likely a breakthrough in Quebec. Mr. Harper has worked diligently toward that outcome, attempting to forge ties with soft nationalists who have previously supported the Bloc Québécois. And at the outset of the current election campaign it seemed to be working, with the Conservatives challenging a flagging Bloc in much of the province outside Montreal.

It is no coincidence that the Bloc has this week enjoyed a resurgence, mostly at the Tories' expense. That Gilles Duceppe's party has risen several points in the polls to hover around 40 per cent in the province is partly owing to opposition to the Conservatives' anti-crime strategy, which has helped light a fire under Mr. Duceppe. But in Quebec, unlike elsewhere in the country, arts funding is widely viewed as an essential component to maintaining a unique cultural identity. Even fairly small cuts of $45-million to that funding, accompanied by Mr. Harper's sneering about "ordinary people" not caring about the arts, have allowed Mr. Duceppe to play to previously waning nationalist impulses.

From a federalist perspective, the Bloc's resurgence is a highly disappointing turn of events. But it perhaps serves Mr. Harper right. His low-brow attempts to appeal to rural and suburban Canadians, whom he underestimates, overlooks the fact that many members of his own party are among this country's strongest and most generous patrons of the arts. Had he consulted with them, they might have told him that thumbing his nose at cultural investment is equally ill-advised as public policy and as political strategy.