Tory camp feeling the bumps on the road
Rattled by insider strife and stress of ‘long, long campaign,’ team pushes into next phase
OTTAWA— Conservative Leader Stephen Harper looked a tad weary at a brief morning campaign stop in Stittsville, Ont., outside Ottawa, before flying west later Sunday.
The marathon election campaign has just passed the halfway point but the five weeks that remain are the equivalent of another full campaign.
Right now, the attendance at Harper rallies doesn’t look like some of the bigger events put on by his rivals, such as the NDP rally in Edmonton last week that drew an estimated 1,800.
One insider said that if Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau can get 1,000 to 2,000 people to turn out night after night at this stage of the campaign and continue it up to the end, then the Conservatives have already lost the election. But he doesn’t believe that will happen.
And neither does Harper, despite his terrible sixth week on the road, sources have told the Star.
“The campaign is long, very long,” admitted Denis LeBel, Harper’s senior cabinet minister and political lieutenant in Quebec.
But he warned that the most important poll numbers come five weeks from now — in the voting stations.
Last week saw Harper’s plane and bus swing through the GTA and Niagara region, then on to Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, and to Quebec’s south shore and back to Ottawa on Friday.
In Ottawa he helped lay a wreath at Beechwood Cemetery in memory of the victims of Sept. 11. Later in the evening he staged a second “arrival” to boost his troops, many of them staffers at party headquarters, bruised by recent infighting.
The logo-wrapped campaign bus rolled into an east-end Ottawa bus maintenance depot in a flashy, triumphal entrance reminiscent of the two times he rolled into Calgary’s Telus Convention Centre on the last two election nights.
About 600 supporters and area candidates were artfully deployed among the buses to make it look as if the vast depot was packed. They put on an enthusiastic show of unity.
“Friends, Laureen and I are delighted to be back in Ottawa. Honestly, we’re delighted to be back in our own bed for a night,” Harper said. His smile was much broader and easier than it had been in days.
Four of the top campaign operatives may well have been in attendance but they were nowhere to be seen by cameras: campaign chair Guy Giorno, campaign manager Jenni Byrne, Harper’s principal secretary Ray Novak and party spokesman Kory Teneycke.
Byrne, Novak and Teneycke have been fellow foot soldiers for nearly two decades. All three travelled on a Reform campaign bus in the federal election of 1997. They were close friends and Harper’s Conservative Party family.
In fact, working on this campaign is afamily affair in more ways than one.
Byrne’s sister and a cousin, along with Teneycke’s sister-in-law, are all on staff at party headquarters for the writ period.
Giorno’s roots with Harper or his team are not as deep. The political veteran — he was chief staffer for former Ontario premier Mike Harris — did not join the political team behind Harper until later, becoming his chief of staff in 2008.
To see the Conservative political war room at war with itself last week was stunning, not just to outsiders but to demoralized insiders.
One senior strategist was blunt mid-week about the turmoil and the party’s chances: “I still think it’s winnable. I also think it’s losable.”
Sources have told the Star that the infighting and last week’s leaks that Byrne was running a sloppy, disorganized and ineffective campaign originated at the very top. Others say no, that the campaign has identified who is responsible and believes it comes from disgruntled outsiders.
Whatever the case, by Friday, Harper had quelled the internal dissension and was backing Byrne.
Whether the enthusiasm on display at week’s end was simply staged for the benefit of the cameras, it reflected what Conservative insiders, candidates and cabinet ministers have told the Star: that despite all that had happened, the week was ending way better than it had begun — with the firing of two Conservative candidates in the GTA over embarrassing behaviour on videotape and YouTube.
The Star reported last week that Harper had turned to friends “outside the bubble” of the senior staff ranks to do a reset. In fact, it appears there were two separate private gettogethers last week, including the one at which he got some frank advice on what was going wrong.
By week’s end, reports — from ministers, staffers, candidates, pollsters and volunteers in the field who are shaking out votes at the door, on the phone and through other campaign events not on the media’s radar — told Harper that Conservative support was not tanking. It had dipped to be sure but was tipping back up. And after the week that was, that was good enough for many.
“I actually can’t believe given the month we’ve had we’re within striking distance, to be honest,” said one Conservative, speaking on background.
“We’ve just been clobbered on a series of issues,” said another senior Conservative source, “but I don’t hear our candidates panicking.”
Another outlined what he saw as the party’s province-by-province path to victory, which would be boosted by a big new advertising pitch that’s to soon roll out.
By Sunday morning, though Harper appeared a little tired in Stittsville, he also sounded ready for the next stage. He did not rise to political bait and dispensed with former prime minister Jean Chrétien’s political shots on his international leadership with a patriotic flourish, citing unspecified “data” that he said shows Canada is the most admired country on the world stage. (The campaign later said it was based on the Reputation Institute’s survey published in July.) Harper may even have gotten ahead of himself, boasting that “thanks to our careful management the Canadian economy will grow for the seventh straight year in a row.”
By most indicators, if total economic output for this year shows growth, it would be growth, albeit anemic, for the sixth year in a row.