If a win is the only ideal, a loss is assured

Data-driven policy can take a party only so far

If Stephen Harper were an NHL coach he’d analyze the stats, pore over game video and come up with a style of play calculated to win more than it loses, based on the percentages. It’d be cautious hockey, likely — no Gretzky flourishes or Lemieux elegance, more dump-and-fetch, punctuated by consistent forechecking and flurries of intense aggression. Minimizing opportunities for mistakes would be a big part of the package. A Harper team would put a premium on having some big, mean enforcers who can skate and score now and then, as well as fight.

None of which explains how this very approach, which welded together a new political party and won Harper a decade at the top of a G7 government, isn’t clicking so well anymore.

With less than a full week to go until voting day, Harper is well back of where he needs to be to win a minority, let alone the majority he must have to continue in office and retire, say in 2017, on his own terms. It could all change, of course; the polls could be wrong. But as things stand today, Oct. 19 could be Harper’s Waterloo. Why, is the interesting question.

As of Tuesday, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals stood at 35.1 per cent in the aggregate as measured by poll tracker Eric Grenier at ThreeHundredeight.com, compared with 31 per cent for the Tories and 23.3 per cent for Tom Mulcair’s New Democrats.

But the Liberals have been trending higher for more than a week, and hold a near 10-point lead in Ontario. In Quebec, where Mulcair was the overwhelming favourite 10 weeks ago, the Liberals and NDP are battling it out at 28 per cent and 29.1 per cent, respectively (with Tories well back at 19.3 per cent, and the Bloc at 20.2); whereas in B.C., the third key battleground population-wise, Liberals now narrowly lead at 31 per cent, compared with 28.7 per cent for the Blue Team and 28 per cent for the NDP.

If an election were held today, Grenier projects, Trudeau would take 136 seats, Harper 118, Mulcair 80.

Before we get to why Harper isn’t winning — today, we stress again — it’s worth exploring why he’s still in contention.

Many “small-c” conservatives, as the National Post’s Matt Gurney pointed out Tuesday, believe Harper has never been conservative enough, whereas centrists and leftists, judging from the way he’s often characterized by opposition trolls on social media, consider this prime minister to be an arch-fiend who, left to continue in office, would bleach all the colours from the rainbow and transform Canada into a gulag. How, given the animus he inspires, can Harper even have a hope?

The answer is that this Conservative party is different from every Canadian political party that has come before it.

I have mentioned Susan Delacourt’s 2013 book, Shopping For Votes, before, but it bears repeating; Delacourt’s conclusion, that the Conservatives’ growing vote share after 2004 was built on data mining, with policies and messaging designed via scientific marketing, goes a long way toward explaining this campaign across the board.

Academic work on this subject by Jennifer Lees-Marshment, Thierry Giasson and Alex Marland makes it even more clear that the Tories began winning only after they tailored their offerings to the needs and wants of swing voters.

The Harper decade, and every policy plank that has emerged from it, was not designed principally around conservative ideology, but rather winnability. This explains why it hasn’t been particularly conservative, and indeed has often felt like Jean Chretien Liberalism with a coat of blue paint over the red.

But if that’s true, then why isn’t Harper ahead in the polls?

Perhaps because there’s a fundamental weakness in pure, data-driven policy and politics, which emerges over time. Maybe it can only take a party so far, after which the electorate begins to crave something more — perhaps as simple as a different set of faces on the evening news, or some reason, bigger than putting the puck in the net, for an incumbent party’s wanting to keep power.

The mantra that Canadians only ever vote their economic self-interest, rewarding the party that cuts their taxes and offers benefits and spurning any idea that sounds like an appeal to the greater good, has been bequeathed to us by marketing, reinforced by the Conservatives’ repeat successes, and adopted in one form or another by all three major Canadian parties.

Its great failing is that it is lacklustre in character and holds all the excitement of a pail of water gathering moss.

“We will keep out of your way and take no bold steps, ever” seemed a refreshing, calming change when Chretien came along in 1993, after a decade of Brian Mulroney’s polarizing ambition. Twenty-two years on, maybe, it lacks the necessary zing.

THE HARPER DECADE ... WAS NOT DESIGNED

PRINCIPALLY AROUND CONSERVATIVE

IDEOLOGY, BUT RATHER WINNABILITY.

— COLUMNIST MICHAEL DEN TANDT