Unlike the last time Canadians went to the polls, Stephen Harper is regularly acknowledging to them that he wants a majority government. But he’s unwilling to make an impassioned case for why he wants it, or what he would do with it. Rather than try to capture Canadians’ hearts, the Conservative Leader has spent the past five weeks aiming to keep things uneventful at the national level while his party ekes out victories in enough battleground ridings to put it over the top.
The danger of running not to lose, though, is that someone running to win can step in and capture the electorate’s imagination. Now, Jack Layton has done just that. And so Mr. Harper is left clinging to a strategy that made sense at the start of this election campaign, but looks much more dubious today.
The Liberal Party of Canada, long the bane of the Conservatives’ existence, is in something approaching a death spiral. The Bloc Québécois is suddenly in free fall. But it’s Mr. Layton’s New Democrats who are reaping all the benefits, soaring to a stunning 30 per cent in the polls. Meanwhile, Mr. Harper’s Conservatives are struggling to crack 40 per cent – usually, though not always, a benchmark for winning majorities.
If Mr. Harper can’t get his party to that level of support now, he probably never will. And the odd part is, he’s not even really trying to get there.
On the contrary, he has been convinced – through the bitter experiences of Canada’s right-of-centre parties over the past two decades – that Conservatives must make do with a low ceiling of support. And so he has become a leader unwilling to make a broad appeal to the electorate.
Mr. Harper was convinced as far back as his Reform Party days that it was folly to seek a big swath of voters. Preston Manning wanted to make a populist pitch that would appeal to Canadians, regardless of their political ideology. Mr. Harper always wanted an incremental approach.
Even Mr. Harper, though, took a while to arrive at his current campaign’s level of bloodlessness.
In his earlier days as leader, when a majority government appeared within reach, he would make a relatively impassioned late-campaign pitch for what he would do with it. But that prompted a backlash among voters, causing the Conservatives to fall short.
By 2008, he had stopped talking about a majority at all. But he nevertheless tried to win one by making a mass appeal to Quebec, which had many seats up for grabs. Instead the attempt foundered as the Bloc Québécois capitalized on the Conservatives’ arts-funding cuts, which the nationalist party cast as an attack on Quebec identity.
Following that last disappointment, Mr. Harper started aiming primarily for what pollster Nik Nanos refers to as a “smash and grab” majority.
Rather than trying to usher in a blue wave, even in a key province or two, the Conservatives began trying to cobble together a voting coalition that would give them just enough votes in just enough ridings.
That meant, for instance, targeting certain ethnic minorities that could help them win in the suburbs. It meant solidifying support within the Jewish community, to help win a few urban seats. It meant trying to ensure strong voter turnout among their support base, largely through their law-and-order agenda. And it meant furiously ramping up their ground organization in ridings where they had fallen just short previously.
By the time this campaign started, Mr. Harper’s job was largely to stay out of trouble. Rather than inspiring anyone, his boldest aim was to help play the three main opposition parties off against each other, fostering the vote-splitting that would help put the Conservatives over the top.
