How much credibility does Harper have left?

We started out with Stephen Harper having loads of credibility with the Canadian voter. Harper and Canada's "New" Government (TM. - Pat. Pend) took office with promises of being different, more open and accountable than the previous Liberal administration. What a difference a year has made. There have been so many different government positions on the treatment of prisoners handed to Afghan authorities by the CF, you need a score card to keep it all straight. The Harper government didn't know about it, then reports show up that they did. The government claims that there is no torture, then admits there is. There is is an agreement on prisoner inspections and there's no agreement. The merry-go-round just keeps going around and around. It's beginning to become clear why Stephen Harper needs to micromanage everything since it would appear that his ministers are incompetent based on the widely conflicting stories out of the mouths of cabinet this past couple of weeks.

Back at the beginning of their term, when the Tories could stay on their rather narrow message, they had a lot of credibility, and it was growing. Then the wheels started to fall off. Slowly at first, with the mishandling of the environment file and then the misleading statements and outright lies in parliament. Now with the complete bungling of the Afghanistan file the credibility of the Harper government must surely be sinking with the voter. The micro-managerial style of Harper is starting to come back to haunt him, since he's been the "face" of the government for nearly the whole term, all the bad stuff starts to bounce onto him as well as his ministers. Unless the Tories can weather this storm quickly, they're in for a world of hurt at the polls.

Now one has to wonder why all of a sudden the Tory machine that ran with Harper's single minded purpose and voice can no longer even get it's fact straight. After all, in the past the Conservative government would just push through, insulting all detractors with a unified message. This time we got the insults, but the message was far from unified. This isn't to say members of the government weren't trying. I was listening to a discussion on CBC1's The House on Saturday morning between MP's of the Conservatives, Liberals and NDP. The Tory stuck to his talking points like they were glue, and even wrapped himself in the flag a few times saying basically any attack on him and his government was an attack on the soldiers in the field. Unfortunately for him though, events and information had rushed past his talking points and he was sliced and diced (verbally) by the two opposition MP's as well as the CBC reporter.

So where did things go wrong? Well in the case of the Afghanistan file the Tories were simply caught with their pants down and were, for whatever reason, unable to keep their mouths shut until they came up with a communication strategy. It would have been simple enough to say that the government is looking into it, stall for a couple of weeks, get the facts, then present a unified plan to the country and push through. That didn't happen though. It's as if the Harper government has run out of ideas and is now just lurching from one crisis to another. The whole Afghan file is a case in point, with policy seemingly made up on the fly with no real thought or direction to it.

Which would make it seem that the Harper government has run out of ideas overall. Cerberus has opined that it's all because the Tories have run out of script. I would tend to agree with him. From what I have seen, the Tory plan was to work on its so-called "five priorities" which would win over the electorate. This would be followed by a feel good budget which would be defeated and in the ensuing election, a Tory majority would result. The problem with this plan is that the opposition didn't play along. They passed the budget. Which left a Conservative party busily ramping up for an election high and dry. The only thing left on their agenda was some non-action on the environment which needed to be hastily changed lest the opposition get any traction on the issue. Of course, since there was no actual plan for the environment, what they came up with was basically a smaller version of the previous Liberal plan with a few extra window dressings.

Now that the "Green Plan" has been put forward and found to be lacking, the Harper Conservatives have nothing else in their bag to put forward. At least nothing else that won't hurt their chances at a majority. This puts Harper in a terrible spot. To keep his credibility intact he needs to look like the decisive leader he was at the beginning, pushing government in a particular direction. To remain looking like a moderate, he can't really push forward a more radical neo-conservative agenda which leaves trying to maintain the status quo. Maintaining the status quo is a problem though, it makes you look like you have no plan and with what's been coming out of Ottawa these past few weeks it's beginning to look more and more like the Tories don't have one. Their plan ended at the last budget. They anticipated having an election and a majority at this point in time so that they could do what they want without any resistance from the opposition. It didn't happen and now the Harper Tories are foundering.

Given that time is not Stephen Harper's friend, he needs to act quickly. He needs to reassert his control on his ministers (who'd of thought that would be a good thing) and he needs to come up with a vision of where he's going. He needs to present that vision in the next month or so. Failure to do that will cause an even nastier downturn in the polls and a possible trip to Stornoway next election.