Suddenly changing the Conservative position on Afghanistan - a transparent move to win over some Quebec seats - is guaranteed to anger the core of the Conservative Party.
Coalition building is a tricky science, particularly for the Conservatives. It's relatively easy to be a party of angry Westerners, united in economic, social and foreign policy. It gets harder when you need to win seats in Ontario and Atlantic Canada, compromising on some social questions, muting earlier positions and changing others completely. And it gets darn near impossible when you are trying to win over pure laine working-class Quebecois in the Saguenay while holding onto members of the Petroleum Club.
That balancing and juggling is the test of a good leader. Brian Mulroney and John A. Macdonald were masters of this balance, which their successors proved unable to sustain.
Median voter theory says that politicians should try to maximize their votes by adopting the position of the median voter. It posits that politicians in two-party systems will adopt identical positions where those positions occur along a single dimension, resulting in voters being indifferent to the politicians on that issue. Basically, if you don't want to fight an election on that issue, you will cozy up to your opponents and adopt their positions.
The Conservatives and Liberals did this when they both supported the compromise resolution on extending the mission in Kandahar to 2011. Now, the Conservatives are not worried about taking the Liberals' position off the table; they are moving to take the Bloc position off it. Since the Bloc is Harper's real opponent in Quebec, that's a smart move.
Stephen Harper is gambling that losing a few votes in the West and rural Ontario won't cost him any seats, whereas this move will gain him not just votes but seats in Quebec. The voters who are most bullish on Afghanistan, and who may be tempted to take their votes elsewhere, are not material to his majority government calculus. None of the other major parties is to Harper's right on Afghanistan, and none of them can realistically get there. Voters angered by today's move will be left with the choice of staying home, voting for a minor party with no hope of winning, or sucking it up and staying with the Conservatives. Given those options, most will stick with Harper.
On the other side of the coin, the Conservatives have long been on the wrong side of the Afghanistan issue in Quebec and urban Ontario. Voters there are much more skeptical of the long-term benefits of soliders dying in Kandahar, and today's position change reduces some of the resistance to Harper in these areas.
These are the tipping point seats Harper needs to get from a minority to a majority, and you will continue to see the Conservatives modify or reverse some positions in an effort to reach out to these voters.
