Harper suddenly looks like a guy who is betting too heavily on weak cards, sticking with a bluff out of pride. Stephen Maher,

With little room to grow his support, leaving the field to rivals poses a risk

If you want to make money playing poker, you have to read your opponents without letting them read you.

Stephen Harper sure is hard to read, but in the game of highstakes poker over the election debates, he seems to have misread the other players.

On Thursday, representatives of the New Democrats, Liberals, Greens and the Bloc Quebecois agreed to do one English and one French debate to be broadcast by CTV, CBC, Global and Radio Canada, which would reach mil- lions of Canadian TVs.

The Conservatives say they’re too busy with other debates. So far, they have agreed to debates put together by TVA, Maclean’s magazine, the Globe and Mail and the Munk Debates.

The problem for the Tories is that the big broadcasters control TV bandwidth, and they are refusing to cede control to the other media organizations.

When U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron stayed away from a similar debate recently, the British consortium went ahead without him. That didn’t help Labour Leader Ed Miliband, because he got beat up by the leaders of smaller parties.

The dynamic would be different here because many voters would like to have a different prime minister, but they disagree on whether it should be Thomas Mulcair or Justin Trudeau.

If the two of them square off (with Elizabeth May) in the only English debate to be broadcast on millions of TV screens, the non-Tory voters might settle on one of them. If that happens, Harper would find it hard to keep his job.

The numbers do not look good anyway. Friday’s Ekos poll for iPolitics shows the Tories in a three-way tie with the NDP and the Liberals.

Worse still for Harper, he has little room to grow. About 40 per cent of both Liberal and NDP supporters identify the other party as their second choice but only 13 per cent of Liberal and eight per cent of NDP supporters would consider voting Conservative. And 58 per cent of Canadians would not consider voting Conservative under any circumstances.

“If our numbers are correct, the Conservatives are in deep trouble,” said pollster Frank Graves. “They’ve got very little room for growth, and they’re 12 points back … from where they were election night.”

A security crisis might move that number, but the “balanced” budget, anti-terror talk and tax cuts haven’t done the trick.

A big chunk of voters — Graves calls them “promiscuous progressives” — want to see the back of Harper. If the biggest debate of the campaign takes place without him, and these voters settle on one of the other guys as the preferred alternative, that guy would win.

In Quebec Friday, Harper raised the stakes, telling reporters firmly that he’s not doing the consortium debate. He suddenly looks like a guy who is betting too heavily on weak cards, sticking with a bluff out of pride.

It’s possible that he knows something we don’t, and Mulcair will back out if Harper’s not in.

The Liberals think the Conservatives and the NDP are co-operating behind the scenes in the debate negotiations, continuing a long-running tactical arrangement that allows the left-wingers and right-wingers to squeeze the Liberals from both sides.

The NDP and Tories think the Liberals are in league with the Greens, pushing to have May in the debates, which helps squeeze the NDP from the left.

By snubbing the consortium that usually organizes these things, Harper has shaken things up, creating more opportunities for debate, which is good, but he’s also turned a quasi-bureaucratic process into a wild game of nolimit poker.

Nobody trusts anybody. Nothing is locked down. Everybody is worried about getting blindsided. It would be much better to establish an organization of elders to supervise the arrangements.

Elections Canada’s advisory board — featuring Ian Binnie, Lise Bissonnette, Sheila Fraser, Preston Manning, Bob Rae, Roy Romanow and Hugh Segal — should be asked to take it over in future years so we can avoid this foolish game-playing.