The Harper Campaign Follies Just Keep on Rolling

So a leaked draft of an Auditor General report suggests that the Harper Tories mislead parliament (yet again) on the expenditure of $50 million of taxpayer dollars in pork barrel spending in Tony Clement's riding during the G8 Summit. Now it's not the final report, that won't be seen until parliament reconvenes after the election and no doubt the Harper government threatened Sheila Fraser with a reduction of the AG's budget (or her job) so that the final report is properly "sanitized" to show King Harper in the proper light. That being said it's not good news for Harper and the Conservative campaign.

Now from the onset, this election has been Harper's to lose. To that end Harper has been doing an excellent job in losing an election as the wheels of his campaign began to fall off week one. If things continue as they are going, Harper will be lucky to still be living in 24 Sussex on May 3, let alone have a majority. From restricting the media to a handful of hand picked questions, to keeping the ideologically impure out of campaign rallies (and using the RCMP as Harper's own personal Stasi to do it) Harper has had problems taking control of the message during this campaign. Now not going into how this is likely to affect a control freak like Harper personally, it's not good when the opposition is getting all the good press and you can't even get your campaign platform out without some Tory misdeed stealing the thunder. Add to this Harper's bizarre insistence to campaign against a coalition government that doesn't exist while all the time the polls showing that the Canadian voter is more comfortable with such a coalition than with a Harper majority government and you have a leader and a party spinning its wheels in a campaign.

Now the war room Con-bots (TM Pat. Pend) have been putting out the narrative about "..but the Liberals" when it comes to the scandals that are coming out about Harper and the Conservatives in a vain attempt to change the channel. It's not really working, but they get payed to do that so their spam is spread far and wide on the internet. I'm sure some of them will point out that Harper is still leading in the polls. I also note that they fail to note that Harper has at best been stalled in the polls since the writ dropped and that the Liberals have been drifting up in popularity. Many a PM who was ahead in the polls when the writ dropped ended up in Stornoway the day after the election. Further the polls give the preference of decided voters and from what I've seen, most of the polls have the undecided vote in the mid 20% range, generally not good for a sitting government.

Finally, the complete lack of any vision in the Conservative platform. The only real tax breaks for middle and low income are definite possibilities of a firm maybe, possibly sometime in the future while the wealthy get tax breaks now. Harper has promised to cut $11 billion from the federal budget, but not from where and is steadfastly refusing to tell anyone about that, allowing the opposition to attack him on that by setting up health care as where Harper is going to cut. This could be a death blow for Harper as most Canadians are not looking at reducing our system of socialized medicine, heck not even the Wild Rose Alliance is that stupid as to openly suggest that massive cuts is what healthcare needs. This creates a further opening for attack which I'm sure the opposition will take, especially during the leader debates over the next two night.

So given the colossal blunder that the Harper campaign has been so far, the best that the brain trust in the Harper war room can come up with is vote for Harper because we are safe in his hands. These hand have created the largest deficit in history which would have been much less if misguided and unwarranted tax cuts hadn't be put through early in Harper's tenure as prime minister. Further, planning on spending upwards of $9 billion on new prisons and untold billions on new fighters ($25 billion and the price tag keeps climbing) while axing $11 billion, likely from programs such as healthcare and education show that the country would be hard pressed to find hands that are worse than Harpers to be in.

Now this being said, Harper could still surprise and start listening to advisors and turn his campaign around. It would take some bludgeoning on the part of the advisors to get the advice into Harper's thick skull but it's not impossible. I think this is unlikely though and at this point the best Harper can hope for is to maintain his seat count. If that's all he is able to do it remains interesting to see how much longer he can keep his coalition of hard right and more centrist conservatives together, but that's a discussion for another time.