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Greg Lyle (former chief of staff for premiers Gary Filmon and Gordon Campbell): Stephen Harper has a simple problem. Even if the right answer to the financial crisis is to do nothing, he has to look like he is doing something.

The public perceives leadership as actions. When there is a crisis, leaders do ... something. So what can Mr. Harper do that will make him look busy, without doing any harm?

The most important thing is to think about Mr. Harper's audience. His key audience right now lives primarily in Liberal seats in the Greater Toronto Area. I know B.C. and rural Quebec also matter, as does Ontario outside the GTA; there are also battles being fought for a handful of seats in Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. But the GTA offers by far the largest numbers of potential Conservative gains in one place.

There are two groups Mr. Harper needs to appeal to in the GTA, both mostly Liberal: besieged middle-class voters and business liberals. The business liberals will be interested in traditional policy statements such as what the government is doing to ensure our banks and financial services companies avoid the problems of their U.S. peers. The besieged middle class wants to know what the government is planning to do to give them a break. The Tories have been pretty good at going after besieged voters, but not so good with business liberals.

However, the answer is not just to fill the airwaves with busy economic announcements. Elections are about choice, so the Tories need to draw a winning contrast as this campaign draws to a close.

One issue can capture the attention of both groups at the same time: the carbon tax.

It is time for the Tories to put that tax front and centre again. To the business liberals, it is a dangerous experiment in difficult times. To the besieged middle class, it is the government solving its problems by putting its hands in their pockets.

The vehicle for this is some sort of comparative ad like the Mike Harris T-bar ads that contrast Tory positives against Liberal negatives. This allows voters not just to be pushed from the Liberals, but pulled to the Tories.

It's a negative way to answer the question. But if there is one lesson that has been repeated over and over again in this election, it is that negative works.

Scott Reid (former communications director for Paul Martin):He can't. And that's the hell of it.

Not without confessing that his argument for the past few days has been utterly incorrect. Which doesn't much sound like Stephen Harper, does it?

Mr. Harper has taken the position that things will be fine and that now is not the time for a new, activist plan. And he defends that position with the passionate recitation of comparative statistical data.

The question, of course, is not how we're doing relative to other jurisdictions. It's about how we're doing, period. How are people feeling as their savings are eaten by a record market collapse? How are the families of those who lost one of the 176,000 manufacturing jobs that have disappeared since January faring? How do retirees feel when they see their RRIFs and RRSPs disappearing?

When Mr. Harper tells those people that they're doing fine, they get angry. They feel unheard. They feel they're being lectured rather than helped by their government.

The result has been a swift and nearly inconceivable loss of advantage by Mr. Harper to his primary adversary on the issue of economic management. Remarkably, some polls now show Mr. Harper tied with Stephane Dion when it comes to the tricky question of who should guide us out of this economic mess. With only a few days left to campaign and Canadians saying the economy will dictate their vote, that's a risky turn of events for the incumbent prime minister.

What Mr. Harper should do is admit he was wrong — hard as that might be. He should launch his platform by saying that his analysis of the Canadian economy — its resiliency and its sturdiness — was correct. But he should rush to condemn his own implied prescription that doing nothing would be the best tonic of all.

Mr. Harper is bleeding — not profusely, but more than he would like. He needs to cauterize the wound. Saying he believes that a more animated response would best protect Canadians may cause some embarrassment. But it could have save him a lot of seats. And winning tends to nurse the ego nicely.

Gerald Caplan (former NDP campaign manager): No one has any good advice to give, because no one anywhere has the slightest idea how to stop the global financial crisis. With Europe and Asia now joining the devastation, with panicking leaders everywhere calling for emergency meetings with each other for no apparent purpose other than misery loving company, it would be the height of incredulity for the Mr. Harper - or any other leader--to pretend they suddenly have something constructive to offer. But with election day imminent, they must say something that at least doesn't look risibly fatuous. Problem is, they can't even figure out how to do that.

What we're witnessing is the chickens of globalization coming home to roost. The anti-globalization movement had it right before 9/11 stopped it dead in its tracks: The spread of a completely unregulated, unrestrained venal capitalism based on endless debt was never sustainable. It just took longer to implode than was expected.

Mr. Harper can't accept this truth. He's a true believer in the neo-liberal economic dogmas introduced by Thatcher and Regan and reaching their logic with Bush. Nothing his platform will introduce on Tuesday will offer any comfort to rightfully anxious Canadians. He's trapped by his own convictions, and it's time to stop prattling about what a smart guy and smart economist he is.

Stephane Dion may have an inkling of what's going on. But he's stuck with his gimmicky little debate proposal to bring all the experts together to figure out - what? They don't have a clue either, as they reveal each passing day. And he's trapped by the reality that it was the Chretien-Martin government, in which he long sat as senior minister, that actually introduced large-scale neo-liberalism to Canada, above all in terms of deregulation and reduced social spending.

Jack Layton, if memory serves, actually marched in anti-globalization demos, and I'd be awfully surprised if he didn't see the tie to today's deepening crisis. But he's trapped, too. The great failure of the anti-globalization marchers was the absence of any agreed program to replace the policies they knew were so destructive.

So we all share the same failing; no one, of any ideological stripe, knows how to stop the downward spiral. That's why today we find political leaders of all stripes - from progressives like Mr. Layton and Gordon Brown in the UK to centrists like Barack Obama and Mr. Dion to screwball conservatives like John McCain and real ones like Mr. Harper - all united in pretty well total ignorance.

Of course, Mr. Harper has the greatest challenge over the next few days. With his reputation already becoming tattered, he must try to inspire confidence while not either down-playing the situation or causing further panic. But "inspire" and "Harper" are not words that fit easily together. He shares no one's pain.

Imagine the angst of the Liberals - if only they had a real leader to whom Canadians could now turn for hope and comfort, they could pick up this campaign and race home with it. If only...

If I were Mr. Layton, I'd hammer the deregulation theme to bits. In every area, from Bay Street to food inspection to water inspection, first the Liberals, then the Conservatives, allowed the foxes to take over all the hen-houses. Those chickens have come home to roost, and we don't yet know the political consequences either here or down south.

On the other hand, maybe the losers are the lucky ones. They won't have to pretend any longer they have answers that they're just not yet ready to share with the rest of us.