Tory campaign thrown off script once again,

In the face of a glaring humanitarian crisis, it is usually easy to transform a campaigning incumbent into a unifying figure.

All it takes is a Maple Leaf flag, a microphone and a prime ministerial willingness to head straight for the high road.

Little of the latter was in evidence on Thursday as Conservative Leader Stephen Harper dealt with the latest event to throw his campaign off script.

The Middle East refugee crisis is a humanitarian drama of such magnitude that any governing party with moderately decent antennas would have managed to get ahead of the issue.

Immigration Minister Chris Alexander, who was scheduled to appear on the CBC just hours after the heartbreaking picture of the drowned body of three-year old Alan Kurdi came to light on Wednesday afternoon, had such an opportunity.

Instead he set out to turn a discussion of his government’s contribution to the resettlement of refugees from Syria into an unfounded attack on the media and ended up treating viewers to a ministerial meltdown.

To Alexander’s defence, he was hardly the only Conservative higher-up to be blind to the impact of what was to most of those who saw it an eye-opening picture.

Until a Canadian connection to the drowned boy surfaced, it was business as usual on Harper’s tour. Defence Minister Jason Kenney was even scheduled to hold a news conference to talk about increasing the “integrity” of Canada’s immigration system.

Once the Conservatives’ survival instinct kicked in, the latter was cancelled and the campaign went in crisis-management mode.

Canada’s current government leader is notoriously averse to facing the media music at the best of times.

If the chore cannot be avoided, as in the case of an election campaign, Harper prefers to deal with questions to the sound of a partisan chorus. And so he chose a campaign venue where a full retinue of supporters was on hand to cheer him on to address Canada’s response to the festering refugee crisis.

In Harper’s place, another prime minister might have announced that he would call in the organizations that toil on the front line of the refugee issue and have them talk him through the hurdles they have been facing. If a Syrian family such as the Kurdis — with relatives in Canada and the help of a local MP — could not find its way out of the federal bureaucratic maze, how many migrants will?

Harper might have sought his rivals’ support for expediting the safe arrival of more refugees and, in the process, removed the issue from the electoral arena. NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair had opened the door to a non-partisan approach to the crisis.

Instead, Harper used his intervention to push in a wedge between his party and its rivals.

He argues the refugee issue validates his decision to engage Canada in the international air war against Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria.

But the line between one and the other is not as straight as the Conservative leader makes it out to be.

Whatever the merits or non-merits of conducting airstrikes on ISIS, the fact is that it is the multi-year Syrian civil war and not Islamic extremists that is driving most of the fleeing civilians out of the region. The Conservatives had already lost two campaign weeks to potentially corrosive testimony at the Mike Duffy trial. For lack of an alternative, they mostly dealt with that problem by stonewalling daily.

Then the party was hit by economic news sufficiently divorced from the recent optimistic pronouncements of Finance Minister Joe Oliver that he was absent from the Conservative campaign when Statistics Canada declared a recession on Monday.

Now, an irreparable family tragedy has brought to light discrepancies between the Conservatives’ glowing rhetoric on Canada’s role in solving a global humanitarian crisis and the reality of its contribution.

There is a saying in theatre parlance that a bad dress rehearsal foretells a good opening show. Harper’s Conservatives can only hope that it holds true next month.

Over the past five weeks, the damage wreaked on the Conservative campaign by events beyond its control has so often been compounded by an unwillingness to move past talking points that it begs the question whether this cast is still up to the job it is re-auditioning for. Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.