Stephen Harper’s tightly controlled campaign to win a majority government is a classic front-runner strategy: Protect the leader and you protect the lead.
But the lengths to which the Conservative election machine is going to cocoon Mr. Harper from risk are pushing the Tory tactics into the spotlight.
A handful of incidents in which party operatives have asked people to leave rallies – based on checks of Facebook pages and bumper stickers – have fuelled opposition criticism that Mr. Harper is campaigning in an overprotected bubble defended by partisans. The Tories play down the incidents as aberrations, and argue that Canadian voters care little about such “process” stories.
Pollsters suggest the Tories are right for now. They say such incidents won’t hurt Mr. Harper unless they continue.
There is no question Conservatives are closely controlling access to their leader. Those attending Mr. Harper’s rallies must pre-register and then produce identification at the door. Mr. Harper is not doing any door-knocking or main-streeting, where he might meet voters who don’t support him. National media travelling with Mr. Harper on the tour are limited to asking him roughly four questions each morning, with a fifth allocated for a local reporter in whatever city or town he’s visiting.
But the campaign incident that drew the most attention occurred at a Harper rally in London, Ont. on April 3. Awish Aslam, a 19-year-old University of Western Ontario student, said she and a fellow student had registered to attend the event with the help of her friend’s father, a card-carrying Conservative. But 30 minutes after it began, an official asked her and her friend to accompany him outside.
“He said, ‘We know you guys have ties to the Liberal Party through Facebook and you’re not welcome here,’” Ms. Aslam said. “Then he just ripped the blue Conservative tags from our chests and tore them up.”
Ms. Aslam said she is not a Liberal Party member, but she has a Facebook photo of her and Michael Ignatieff taken when she attended a Liberal rally in London a week earlier. “Honestly, it’s bit stalker-ish and a huge turnoff for voting Conservative,” Ms. Aslam said of the Tories’ scanning her Facebook page.
A second-year political science student, Ms. Aslam said her goal has been to attend Liberal, Conservative and NDP rallies in London and study their election platforms. She’s “liked” – a Facebook term for expressing an interest in something – all of the parties’ Facebook pages.
“Considering all that we hear about student and youth voter apathy, you would think they [the Conservatives] would be glad to hear someone is engaging in the news and trying to listen to them,” she said.
Dimitri Soudas, the chief spokesman for Mr. Harper on the Tory campaign, has apologized for the incident through the media and asked that Ms. Aslam contact him. He later told media on the Harper tour that he was “not aware of such things” when asked if Tories are combing through registered attendees’ Facebook pages and backgrounds.
The case of Ms. Aslam isn’t the only example. Organizers of the same Harper rally in London reportedly asked Ali Aref Hamadi to leave the Four Points Sheraton because he had an NDP bumper sticker on his vehicle that read: “Don’t blame me, I voted NDP.”
On Monday, in Guelph, Ont., University of Guelph students were reportedly asked to leave a Harper rally after participating in a demonstration outside to encourage youth voting.
On Tuesday, Mr. Harper sidestepped questions on why people are being expelled from his campaign events, saying he leaves the operations of rallies to Conservative Party workers. “The staff runs our campaigns and I can’t comment on individual matters like that,” he said.
