Losing ground: Can Harper turn it around?
MONTREAL— As the extra-long 2015 campaign finally passes the halfway point, the top-of-mind issue facing Conservative strategists is not whether it is doable to get Stephen Harper’s message back on track but whether there is a winning track to fall back on.
Harper has so far lost more campaign days to unforeseen events than is good for an incumbent. He has not had a good week since he called the election last month.
The refugee issue alone had the Conservatives off message for seven days. Harper could have put the matter to rest early on if he had initially said — as he belatedly did on Thursday — that his government would go back to the drawing board to find ways to resettle more Syrian refugees.
Still, with more than a month to go before the vote, the one luxury the Conservatives have is time, and a day after Harper shifted his emphasis to a more humanitarian refugee approach, the journalists who cover his tour did move on to other issues.
That was the easy part, for the Conservative campaign has fundamental problems that predate the refugee debate. For a while, the latter obscured a so far ineffective stay-the-course message.
In the big picture, figuring out whether the Conservatives are in first, second or third place in a tight race is a secondary consideration.
At or about 30 per cent in voting intentions, they are not where they need to be and nowhere near having found an effective antidote to the itch for change that has taken hold of an overwhelming majority of the electorate.
Take Quebec, where the end of the sixth week found Harper on Friday. Only a few months ago he had big hopes for the province. His strategists believed the party had a shot at doubling or tripling its seat count, raising it to 15 from five.
That may not sound like a lot but the Conservatives maxed out their vote outside Quebec four years ago and the province is the only region in the country that offers them ground for potential gains. That last sentence should probably be in the past tense.
Since the election call, the Conservatives have been far behind and dropping in voting intentions. The last string of polls placed the party at 13 per cent. If the vote had been held this week Harper would have come out of Quebec with fewer seats than the measly five he had going in.
And yet this is a province where the Mike Duffy trial and the Senate spending scandal did not resonate in the way that they did in the rest of the country.
Moreover, in contrast with Ontario, whose Liberal government fully backs Justin Trudeau in the election, Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard is not campaigning against the Conservatives.
The Parti Québécois is the only Quebec party in the federal fray. So far, its active support of the Bloc Québécois has failed to give Gilles Duceppe a lift. He is fighting Harper for fourth place in the Quebec polls.
Of even greater concern to Harper is the steady rise in Liberal support in Ontario.
There, too, the refugee issue has probably only made an already mediocre situation a bit worse.
Trudeau’s Ontario fortunes have taken a turn for the better since he promised that balancing the federal budget would come second to reinvesting in the country’s social and physical infrastructures for a Liberal government. And he is winning back votes that helped Harper win the last election.
This is not the opposition votesplitting that the Conservatives had hoped for when they planned their re-election campaign.
In Quebec, Harper counted on the Bloc to sap enough NDP support to keep his own seats safe and, in the best-case scenario, to make gains at Thomas Mulcair’s expense. But so far the Bloc is a no-show.
In Ontario, the Conservative leader expected to benefit from a mutually destructive close combat between the Liberals and the NDP.
That’s happening in some areas — notably in Toronto’s downtown core — but those local battles are not necessarily representative of the larger election war.
In the big picture at mid-campaign, Harper is looking at seat losses to his main rivals in both Central Canada provinces next month. Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.