9.9.2015 eerickson

Dress rehearsal’s over, cue the election lights

If this past month was merely the dress rehearsal, then Conservatives can breathe a sigh of relief.

They can get back on track as the curtain comes up and the lights come on for the real deal in election 2015.

But if we are wrong, and Canadians have indeed been engaged for the first five weeks of an 11-week campaign, paying more attention than we give them credit for, then Stephen Harper has hurt himself with his strategy of adding an extra 40 official days to this exercise.

The Conservative campaign has been daily proof that the best planning, strategizing and plotting can be blown up in your hands by what one-time British prime minister Harold Macmillan described as his biggest fear: “Events, dear boy, events.”

On the economy, ethics and international crises, the winds of reality have buffeted a meticulously choreographed campaign.

An incumbent who wants to set the agenda has spent too much time reacting.

Surely, the strategy must have been to try to take some of the sting out of Nigel Wright’s testimony at the Mike Duffy trial by having Harper out campaigning and diffusing courtroom testimony with policy promises on the trail.

Instead, new revelations from the trial meant it dominated the early part of the campaign and Harper had to endure a litany of questions which merely fed skepticism about his potential role in a coverup.

At worst, it cost him soft Conservative support, those who broke his way in 2011 but will not go that route this year. At best, from a Conservative point of view, it knocked him off-message for more than a week.

Then the man so eager to campaign on the economy found himself on the hustings the day Statistics Canada confirmed we have been in a recession.

A few days later, the unemployment rate rose, throwing into question Harper’s jobs policy.

PHOTO bridesmaid dresses cheap

Lastly, in the dress rehearsal month, came the galvanizing photo of little Alan Kurdi dead on a Turkish beach and suddenly Harper’s three-pronged anti-terror policy was under intense scrutiny on the humanitarian and refugee front, while his insistence that Canada’s role in an anti-Islamic State bombing mission was equally important seemed discordant with the country’s mood.

He is wilfully ignoring the reality that the refugee crisis is much more a product of the Syrian civil war than the atrocities of the Islamic State.

That’s where we’ve been. It’s far more important to try to divine where we might be going.

Harper is a superior campaigner and a man who cannot be knocked off-message. If he has been fortunate enough — and shrewd enough when he could see something coming — to have put most of this bad news behind him in the phoney war part of the campaign, he will right himself in the last six weeks and can never be written off.

He will gamble that the Wright testimony fades as the vote approaches — and fervently hope Pamela Wallin is not criminally charged in the midst of the campaign.

He has ample reason to expect the economic numbers will improve and he will have something positive to sell between now and Oct. 19.

As he showed when he cancelled a previously scheduled transit announcement in Surrey, B.C., Harper can show some emotion and limit the political damage when he is forced to by the unexpected, such as a potential tipping point on Syrian refugees.

He may have to pivot on this issue again because it is not easily tucked away by the tried-and-true partisan attacks on his opponents

Yet — and this is strictly anecdotal — past Conservative voters I have spoken to during this campaign are remarkably unenthusiastic, and in some cases, fatalistic, about their support this time around.

Finally, it was written in this space earlier this summer that if NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau remain deadlocked in support by Labour Day, that stasis will only benefit a Conservative leader looking covetously at vote-splitting as a route to victory.

That still holds true.

But there is also a sense this NDP-Liberal deadlock is a result of voters biding their time until they decide collectively who is best positioned to replace a tired Harper government.

That will not last. One of these three parties will break out before we cast our votes in six weeks and right now the least likely party to break out has to be Harper’s Conservatives.

That will become increasingly certain if, again, those damned events get in the way. And the thing about the worst of those events is, you can’t see them coming.