Like him or loathe him, Stephen Harper at least used to know how to run a campaign. He was polished, that was one of his main strengths as a politician, whatever he did was calculated and played to his strengths, that’s how he managed to become Prime Minister in the first place. All of this is in past tense, because on this campaign Harper seems to have lost a lot of that polish.
The moves have been strange since the start, with the campaign itself being twice as long as usual. Whatever advantages it brings from a campaign finance perspective, it’s still starting your run off with an unpopular decision, and many voters are not particularly fond of having either a lengthened election or a more expensive one. It’s not as though the campaign had not started anyway, but the increased use of taxpayer dollars to fund a lengthened campaign is something which is going to be unpopular, and that’s how we started the election season.
Creating a problem that doesn’t exist, and then solving that problem through doing nothing, that has been a weird tactic that the Conservative party has adopted recently. That’s how you get the invented tax on streaming video, or Netflix tax as Harper called it, which would be an incredibly unpopular move if anyone attempted to pursue it. Which is why nobody has, it’s a tax invented by Harper before he promised he wouldn’t implement it, leaving people more confused about what he’s trying to pull than anything else. In other places such a tax does exist, Chicago specifically due to a tax on entertainment in general, but it had not entered the discussion in Canada until that video, which just forced people to confirm they had no intention of doing something they didn’t even consider in the first place. Other Conservative MPs also supported the non-move, including Canada’s most prominent yes-man Joe Oliver, as though it would become a smart play if they believed hard enough.
That’s weird, but it’s not outright hostile, which has been the case in Harper’s inexplicable attacks on Rachel Notley, Premier of Alberta, and Kathleen Wynne, Premier of Ontario. Both Premiers are from opposing parties, sure, and Wynne has been aggressively anti-Harper and is campaigning for Trudeau – though Notley has largely been trying to get Alberta’s house in order and has said she won’t be active in the campaign as a result. But to attack the provinces is a bizarre move, these are women that the eventually winner of the election will have to work with, in the case of Notley she was just elected and her mandate will be concurrent with that of the winner of this election. Making an enemy of two provinces, both of which are economic drivers in the country, seems like a bad move both for a campaign and for doing the job. Yet, Harper is trying to do just that, much to the bafflement of observers.
Harper knows how to win an election, he has done it several times. Maybe I am wrong and these bizarre tactics will lead to success, that we will not know until October. But as the campaign begins, only one of the candidates has me scratching my head, wondering what on earth he’s doing, and what he’s trying to accomplish. He seems to be in a different world, and his campaign moves are just strange as a result.
