On choosing one's demise

Kenneth Kidd apparently thinks highly of the Cons' ability to manage the next Parliament so as to win a majority in the next election. But is the confidence in Harper all that well-deserved?

To get Conservative legislation through the House of Commons, Harper knows he'll need to play a kind of Parliamentary Twister — touching the different NDP, Bloc Québécois and Liberal spots for support at various times. And, like the parlour game, this one will end when such contortions prove elusive.

But here's the thing about the parliamentary version: It will undoubtedly be Harper himself who manufactures a Conservative defeat in the House of Commons, the one that heralds the next federal election.

"Harper will introduce something that will sound popular but will go against the principles of all the other parties," says Nelson Wiseman, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. "He will engineer his own defeat."

The parallel: 1972 to 1974, when Pierre Trudeau (with just two seats more than the Progressive Conservatives) led a precarious minority government with the support of a strong NDP contingent. The question facing Trudeau was how and when to pull the plug.

The article nicely covers Harper's ideal scenario as to how the Cons could manage the next Parliament. But unlike Kidd, I'm far from sure that Harper will get to choose positive terms for his party as the start of the next election.

Granted, there's likely going to be some sort of grace period, particularly as the Libs try to get their house back in order - and there'll be some opportunity for the Cons to build a record in government while that's going on. But particularly if an election is going to be a year-plus down the road, it's hard to see how Harper can win a majority by precipitating an election.

After all, given the range of ideology within the opposition parties, virtually any genuinely popular policy would find at least some support in one of the other parties. Which means that if the Cons are going to engineer their own defeat, it'll be based on either a wrong calculation as to what issues really are popular, or at best based on an issue where Harper's being on the wrong side is counterbalanced by a likely split in the opposition vote. And neither of those sounds like a recipe to add to the Cons' current support.

Indeed, Harper's best chance may be instead to make the minority last as long as he can. That way, Canadians may get accustomed to the idea of Harper being able to build consensus, and figure that a Con majority would operate on the same terms. But picking a divisive issue to force a campaign can only highlight some differences that Harper needs to try to suppress in order to succeed.

Mind you, there is an even worse-case scenario for the Cons than reminding Canadians of the divisions between themselves and the rest of the parties. Contrary to Kidd's view that the Cons will get to engineer their own defeat, it's not hard to envisage a situation where a moment of Con mismanagement could make all three other parties see an opportunity to improve their electoral lot. And that's not the kind of the momentum that a government wants to face going into an election: see Martin, PMP.

There's some opportunity for a Trudeau-type leap next time out. But that'll have to be based on the other parties failing utterly in a campaign, not based on Harper choosing to go to the polls based on an issue where Canadians back his party. And the more Harper appears to be calculating the next election rather than running the country in the meantime, the easier it'll be for the other parties to make sure that majority never materializes.