The worse the world goes, the better things go for Harper

The bright orange wave that upended the political order shows no signs of receding. In politics, a rising tide lifts only one boat, and right now it has a Dipper skipper.

There are two possible responses for those cast adrift in Thomas Mulcair’s wake: refurbish your vessel, or wait for the next powerful current. The Liberals have chosen the former, the Conservatives the latter.

With the release of this week’s environmental package, Justin Trudeau has now felled a forest’s worth of trees to fashion the policy planks that will sail him into the next election. After nearly ten years in power, Stephen Harper doesn’t have the flexibility to change his shape, and is ominously short of Cabinet-grade timber.

Fortunately for the Prime Minister, the fickle political trade winds might just have turned his way.

First, ISIL unleashed their latest tidal wave of terror.

A factory owner decapitated in France, his head spiked on a fence; dozens of defenseless European tourists mowed down on a Tunisian beach; masses of Shias felled in a Kuwaiti mosque; and hundreds of Kurdish civilians slaughtered in Syria.

If you don’t worship ISIL’s demented version of God, in their demented way, with the utmost dementedness, they want you to die a horrible death, whether that’s by lighting you on fire, dropping you off a building, drowning you in a cage, or beheading you with knives or explosives.

ISIL have made their sadistic ambition clear. Canadians deserve matching clarity from their elected representatives on a response to that threat.

Stephen Harper has cast his lot with the coalition mission to bomb ISIL and the training of Kurdish peshmerga. Should Canada be doing more? Yes. But the government’s action has the benefit of at least being something.

Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, is holding on to a whole lot of nothing. He said no to the mission, yes to jokes about “whipping out” our CF-18s, no to the mission again, and now says it is “nonsensical” to question his desire to ever wield Canada’s hard power.

And Thomas Mulcair? I think the official NDP ISIL talking point is “hey, how about them polls? First place!”

The appeal of terror as a political issue is that it makes Harper attractive to a broader segment of the voting public. And he needs their vote to stay in power; the base alone won’t cut it.

But the Conservatives can’t go overboard. They don’t need to bludgeon their opponents with ISIL propaganda ads, they just need to let the Prime Minister be the adult in the room.

This is the key to the Harper offer. Love him or hate him, people rate him as a serious man. The worse the world gets, the more serious Canada’s prime minister needs to be. That’s why the Conservative election plan won’t be about sweaters, it will be about the silver hair on Stephen Harper’s head.

The Prime Minister has the experience of guiding Canada through a global recession. He’s sat at the big boy table for all of the important summits. He’s made some tough choices to get Canada’s books back into balance. Canadians still trust him with their economy.

Which brings us to the other powerful current in global politics: the Eurozone and Greece’s slow-motion suicide.

By the time this column is published Greece will undoubtedly have zigged and zagged more than the Saturday night drunks in Corfu. But even if Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras stuffs his referendum rabbit back into his tattered hat, and the EU cobbles together a deal, chances are we’ll be right back in the Eurozone soup come the fall. It’s either tragedy now (Grexit) or farce later (another bailout).

Then again, the Canadian economy isn’t exactly a world-beater these days, having contracted for a fourth straight month in April.

In the normal run of things, this should mean an opportunity for the opposition.

Which makes Justin Trudeau’s decision this week to revive Stéphane Dion’s dead hobbyhorse — a carbon tax — even more risky. The Liberals have given the Conservatives a giant sledgehammer with which to pound Trudeau’s melon.

Who would have guessed a few months ago that Thomas Mulcair would be running Justin Trudeau’s preferred campaign as the change candidate, with Trudeau travelling the country dropping policy left, left, and centre?

The world looks like it will be a nasty place this summer.

Thomas Mulcair wants to keep surfing his wave of popularity.

Justin Trudeau has built a vessel suited for calmer waters, where the performance of the skipper is secondary to the comfort of the ride and the promised destination.

Stephen Harper’s ship might not be built for cruising, but he’s shown that it can be pretty damn effective when there’s a sea of troubles lapping at Canada’s shores.

The Conservative election plan won’t be about sweaters, it will be about the silver hair on Stephen Harper’s head.