"I have set a tone for this campaign," Stephen Harper told a Quebec audience a few minutes ago in response to the Ryan Sparrow debacle. He sure did. But that tone hasn't been set during the race itself; it was set for many months leading up to it.
Time and again, the Tories were criticized for going too far in their attacks on anyone who crossed them - from suggesting Navdeep Bains had terror links to their assaults on various public officials to the juvenile junk on their website. Time and again, they dismissed the criticism as some vast media conspiracy against them. Had they thought through it, they would've realized those media conspirators were doing them a favour.
Truth is, you can get away with a lot between elections, when most Canadians are paying fleeting attention at best. Outside of the chattering classes, the consequences of the criticism they took at various points was pretty minimal. But it was also foreshadowed what would happen when voters were paying attention, if the Tories didn't tone it down.
They may, in fact, have tried - or at least wanted - to tone it down. Maybe that was part of the plan, to go with the soft-sell TV ads. But the problem is, you can't spend a couple of years encouraging your attack dogs to lunge at every passer-by, and then expect that in the heat of an election campaign - when they're stressed out and sleep-deprived - they're suddenly going to stop frothing at the mouth.
The good news for the Tories, it what's proven to be a borderline disastrous first week, is that a lot of Canadians still aren't paying attention. Their puffin- and Sparrow-stained campaign has been thrown badly off message and set up a very unfavourable narrative, but there's still time to change it. The problem is, this goes well beyond Ryan Sparrow. It all depends whether the other attack dogs can safely be brought back in the cage.
