Unfit for office

Today was a particularly ugly day for Con personal attacks: in addition to Harper's much-discussed Bush impression, Maurice Vellacott reminded everybody why he's normally muzzled by launching a slander that Lorne Calvert was able to dismantle in a matter of seconds.

But as poorly as those incidents reflect on the Cons' fitness to hold office (or indeed productive employment), the even bigger problem remains that of policy. And one of the worst of the Cons' plans managed to go virtually unnoticed even as the Cons brought it up again to try to influence the results of Quebec's election:

The Conservative government is promising to take historic steps to limit federal spending power - but only if federalists win next week's Quebec election.

Lost in all the budget headlines this week was a little-noticed promise to negotiate with the provinces about how to formally prevent Ottawa from spending money in provincial jurisdictions. Prime Minister Stephen Harper repeated the promise in the House of Commons on Wednesday and said he wants to hold those discussions with a federalist government in Quebec.

Tory Quebec lieutenant Lawrence Cannon was asked whether that means the entire initiative hinges on the defeat of the separatist Parti Quebecois in Monday's election.

"That's what I understood," Cannon said of the prime minister's remarks.

"We'll see what happens on election night. But it takes federalists to reform federalism."

Now, I've blogged before about how damaging it would be if the Cons are successful in tying their own hands as well as those of the provinces. And that part isn't particularly new - although it too is one of the most under-reported stories of the Cons' stay in power so far. But it's a new development for the Cons to have explicitly tied their promise to the outcome of the Quebec election.

Mind you, given the rightful cynicism of Quebec voters when it came to the federal budget, it's entirely possible that the Cons will only manage to hurt the cause of Quebec's federalist parties by tying what's supposed to be a carrot to their willingness to vote in the right party. But whatever the effect, the fact that the Cons are both fixated on bad policy and attempting to use it to dictate election results in Canada's provinces should serve as a far more profound indictment of their competence than their taking a few steps further into the personal-destruction morass.