Harper losing control.

Now I don't mean in his patented angry white guy way during question period. I mean that he seems to be losing not only his grip on his ministers and party, but the message the media is sending about him and his party as well. Harper has spent much of his time in power controlling his ministers, caucus and party with an iron fist and pretty much trying the same thing with the media.

Now it seems that his government is leaking like a sieve, and not the planned leaks designed to either float ideas or make the government look good, but the damaging at the polls kind with his ministers flying off at the mouth of late. Both Baird and Raitt saying, shall we say, things in a non-ministerial way and the media lapping it up. Baird has since apologized, unusual for a Tory, and Raitt seems to be still lurching from scandal to scandal. It seems that in the media at least, all this has likely totally wiped out any benefit the Tories were hoping for in their Ignatieff attack ads. Even Raitt in her taped conversation mentioned Tory backbenchers off pushing their own agendas in private members bills against the wishes of the PMO.

In short, Harper has lost control of the message and to some extent his party. This is not good given that the only message that Harper and Co. have really been using is the “Vote for us, we're not the Liberals” followed with a sliming of the current Liberal leader. They tried again with Ignatieff, but the ads seem to have backfired, having cost the Tories somewhere between 3 and 5 million dollars for little if any gain in the polls. This inability to take control of the message in this instance is quite telling. It shows that the MSM is finally not being the passive lap dogs that Harper and Co. have been counting on.

If Harper can't get the message back and soon, there is a real danger that the Liberals will be able to snatch up that message and run with it. Given how low the Tories have driven politics, that won't be good for them as there are plenty of skeletons in the Tory closet, and that's just looking at their performance as government. If Ignatieff and the Grits start to push home the Tory lack of record, not to mention the antics of Tory ministers, there can be nothing good in that for Harper. Perhaps if Harper released the tapes he has of Ignatieff...

Harper really needs to stop the bleed. Everything his government has done in the past couple of months has only managed to drive the Tories down in the polls in the two provinces that matter the most, Ontario and Quebec, which isn't the road to another minority government, let alone a majority. Further it would appear that the Federal Tories have managed to annoy the Alberta Tories (a feat in itself) which doesn't bode well for them either. That's not to say Albertans won't go to the polls in droves to vote Conservative next election, but it may make voters in parts of the country where people realize that you can indeed vote for other parities have second thoughts about them, not to mention making the summer BBQ circuit here in Cowtown quite interesting this summer.

So what can the Tories do to get the message back? They can start by dragging themselves up from the petty politics that they have been engaged in since they came to power. By shining a light on their accomplishments, they may have a chance. The problem is of course the small number of accomplishments to shine a light on. If there had been more Tory accomplishments, they wouldn't have had to stoop to negative politics while in power. More negative ads are just going to be ignored, especially in the light of what the Tory ministry is saying in their off the cuff remarks. Actually governing would help too.