On detachment

It shouldn't come as much surprise that the Cons have spent the last month and a half trying to manufacture new conflict rather than taking "yes, yes, a thousand times yes" for an answer from Michael Ignatieff. But Chris Selley highlights the absurdity of that strategy now extending to the very budget which the Libs helped to pass in addition to other peripheral areas:

(Harper) can’t abandon the gratuitous partisan attacks, Chantal Hébert explains in the Toronto Star, because it’s all part of an election-ready “narrative” the Tories are constructing—namely, that the Liberals have been “sabotaging his efforts” to fix the economy at every turn. But is it a narrative? First Hébert says Harper’s “laying the groundwork” for the campaign; then she argues he “blew a gasket” twice in Question Period last week. This sounds less strategic than reckless and haphazard, which would be nicely in keeping with the last election “narrative” Harper gave us. Either way, it hurts our brains even to contemplate the prospect of painting an intransigent face on the Liberal party after it simply rolled over on the budget and asked to have its tummy rubbed.

In fairness, of course, anybody familiar with the Cons' track record can hardly expect them to limit their political messages to the realm of the plausible. But it's worth noting that the effort to create an image of Lib intransigence may be as counterintuitive strategically as it is counter to reality.

Since Ignatieff chose to keep them in office, the Cons' best hope to avoid political fallout from their recession had seemingly been to portray any stimulus package as a purely bipartisan effort. While Harper would surely take at least some blame as the face of the government in power, an effort to portrary the Libs as marching in lockstep at every turn would dilute Ignatieff's ability to capitalize on the (virtually inevitable) failure of the Cons' stimulus package.

That explains in large part why the Libs have been trying to disengage from talk of bipartisanship in the meantime. But one would expect the Cons to seek to respond by putting forward a countermessage inviting the Libs to work together in relatively soft terms which would be tough for Ignatieff to refuse.

Instead, Harper's decision to claim the stimulus solely for his party and pick new fights with the Libs would seem to signal one of two possible outcomes. On the one hand, it wouldn't be at all surprising if Harper expects an election in the very near future (i.e. before the results of the stimulus package can actually be assessed) and thinks he can fool enough Canadians into seeing him as wanting to respond to the crisis in contrast to his opponents.

Or it's instead possible that Harper is once again calculating that he's best off focusing his efforts on making the Libs' leadership look weak - even if this time that comes at the cost of taking sole ownership of a recession. And that means forcing more confrontations by any means necessary, while using the government's bully pulpit to present himself as the face of economic recovery (or any other top-of-mind issue) in order to scare Ignatieff into submission.

Either way, the obvious inference is that Harper's focus is anywhere but the actual economic concerns of Canadians - which should be fairly obvious from Harper's own words yesterday. But when the Libs still haven't given any indication that they're willing to make Harper pay the price for his consistently flawed government, it remains to be seen whether he'll face his comeuppance anytime soon.