Right Wing Nut House

If timing is everything in politics, somebody should give Canadian Tory Leader Stephen Harper a stopwatch.

Five weeks ago, the Tories were riding high as revelation after revelation from the Gomery inquiry into the Liberal Party’s electoral slush fund drove the approval numbers of Prime Minister Paul Martin’s ruling party lower than the attendance figures at an old Montreal Expos game. At that point, Harper was in the catbird seat as far as calling for a no-confidence vote in Martin’s increasingly shaky government.

But then Mr. Harper gambled. He decided to wait a while to see if even more damaging revelations would come out of the Gomery hearings. His theory was sound. Wait for the momentum caused by the ugly political scandal to build up to the point that the conservatives, who needed plenty of help in order to bring down the government, could rely on other minority parties to vote their way in any no confidence vote.

The gamble failed:

After his defeat on a vote designed to force a spring election, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper finds himself today with a chunk of his political capital spent, a temperamental image with the Canadian public, and some members of his party sniping at him for what they believe was the frittering away of the massive advantage given to him by the sponsorship scandal.

“He lost sight of the big picture,” one senior Tory said.

“You get so consumed by what’s going on in Parliament, sometimes you forget what it looks like from the outside.”

Harper didn’t help his cause when he got a sudden and severe case of foot in mouth disease:

The first questions about the Harper strategy began to surface after Prime Minister Paul Martin pledged in a speech to the nation to hold an election within 30 days of the report of Mr. Justice John Gomery. In his televised response, Mr. Harper kicked off what was to become a pattern of personal irritation, calling the Prime Minister a sad spectacle.

Later, he told the Commons that Mr. Martin’s career was going down the toilet, and, in perhaps the most controversial remark of all, accused the Prime Minister of waiting for two cancer-stricken MPs to get sicker so they could not make the budget vote.

MMMM…Harper is a conservative but he’d fit in right smartly with our Democratic party, I think.

So while Harper and the conservatives were skewering the liberals in Parliament and the media, the canny Martin was doing a little gambling himself - and with much better results. First, he locked up the New Democrats (NDP) with, what I would call (but Canadian readers have told me otherwise) a shameless budget bribe to increase spending by $9 billion.

Then, he took advantage of a political faux pas by Harper:

Then, in an effort to demonstrate that the Liberals had lost the moral authority to govern, Mr. Harper and his colleagues shut down the House of Commons, a move that one consultant said actually took the heat off the Liberals, who were being battered daily by testimony at the Gomery inquiry.

“Rule one in politics is that when your opponent is in the process of destroying himself, you don’t get in the way,” said Rick Anderson, who was an adviser to Preston Manning, former leader of the Reform Party. The rushed attempt to force an election interrupted what was a growing consensus that the Liberals needed to go.

This is the kind of advice our Republican Senate leaders should listen to. Instead, the Republicans are playing the Democrats game and what’s worse, on their playing field.

Finally, Harper experienced the biggest shocker of all; a high profile MP Belinda Stronach defected to the Liberal Party - in return for a Cabinet post:

Tories and other observers call the loss of former leadership foe Belinda Stronach to the Liberals the ultimate mistake. But Mr. Harper was also blamed for taking the heat off the Liberals by bringing controversy on himself.

Game, set, match, Martin.

The vote was close; 152 to 152, the tie being broken in favor of Martin by the Speaker. But a miss is as good as a mile. And Martin, who has promised elections next fall following the report by Judge Gomery on the scandal, has plenty of time to repair the party’s battered image.

Here’s the Captain on Harper’s future as leader of the conservatives:

Harper made some odd decisions in this fight, and all played against him. Telling people that this vote was an all-or-nothing one-shot deal was his biggest mistake. In light of the corruption already exposed in Ottawa, Harper should have instead made clear that he will not stop until the Liberals were kicked out. He made the decision to drop his challenge to the earlier motions which should have qualified as no-confidence votes for no return whatsoever, a decision which legitimized yesterday’s vote. Harper also failed to come to terms with Canadian ambivalence about his own political image; since he was in effect running for PM, he needed to make his case more publicly for that position. A slew of polls resulted in some contradictory numbers but showed a trend swinging back to the Liberals, driven mostly by a distrust of his leadership, and that needed immediate addressing.

Lastly, though, Harper may have been undone by his own basic honesty. During this entire episode, Harper made clear what he wanted to do and was aboveboard in his efforts to topple the Liberals. Harper clearly underestimated Martin and overestimated the man’s ethics. Harper appeared unprepared for the garage sale that Martin kicked off, buying the NDP with a budget package and Stronach with a second-tier ministerial position. Anyone who paid attention to the Gomery Inquiry should have known better, but even I was pretty amazed at how baldly Martin and his cohorts sold out Canada just to squeeze past the no-confidence vote.

Harper seems like a decent sort. Not flamboyant but certainly earnest and hardworking. As the Captain pointed out, he didn’t try to arrive at the no confidence vote using subterfuge or misdirection. He was straight and upfront about it.

Whether those are the qualities the Tory party wants in a leader as they go into elections this fall remains to be seen.