MONTREAL
A month spent chatting one’s way across central Canada ultimately yields few manifestations of a populist census fixation but plenty of evidence of an increasingly vocal unease with the Conservative government in general and Prime Minister Stephen Harper in particular.
That unease seeps right into Conservative ranks, where the continued absence of justification for the summary expulsion of former minister Helena Guergis from the government caucus last spring is raising private doubts as to the Prime Minister’s bullying approach to internal party discipline.
It is a rule of thumb that critics of a government are almost always more vocal than its allies but it is still never a good sign when the words to explain the actions of their party start to fail its supporters.
The above evidence is anecdotal but it is matched by the results of this week’s CBC-EKOS poll. Since Parliament rose for the summer, Ekos has registered a precipitous decline in Conservative fortunes and the attending disappearance of an 11-point lead on the Liberals.
With support below the 30% mark, Harper can no longer assume he would be re-elected with enough seats to lead a viable government.
With the House adjourned and the opposition deprived of its daily question period soap box, support for the government normally goes up over the summer months.
On that basis, it was not so long ago that some pundits were mapping out a winning fall election scenario for the government, one based on the expected afterglow of the Queen’s visit, the dual June summits and the judicious use of a two-month window for good-news announcements.
Instead, and for the second time in less than a year, having the stage to itself is proving detrimental to the government.
Even with a public disengaged from the minutiae of the long-form debate, the fact that the Conservatives have now spent weeks taking hits from all corners of Canada’s civil society over the census issue is registering with voters.
Government strategists argue that the modalities of the next census are not important enough to most voters to cause long-term damage to the party’s election prospects. But that was also the Conservative mantra about the culture cuts in the summer of 2008.
Prior to the cuts, the Conservatives had pulled ahead of the Bloc Québécois and Quebec looked like it was about to provide Harper with a majority. By election day, the party was lucky to hang on to most of the seats it already held.
In Quebec, the perceived Conservative attack on culture touched on a larger nerve. And Harper’s wilful blindness to its existence turned what could have been a small mishap into a game-changing event.
Harper never recouped the ground he lost in Quebec in the 2008 campaign. He currently leads the least popular federal government in the province’s modern history.
The status of culture in Quebec is unique in Canada but Ontario — the post-2008 focus of Harper’s efforts for a majority — also has its distinctive icons.
As the home of the national capital and the province that has traditionally most readily identified with the country’s institutions, Ontario is, by definition, the least predisposed to buy the current Conservative census narrative on the intrusiveness of big government.
If anything, Ontarians are the ultimate insiders of the federation. Framing the census debate as an overdue battle against an establishment that they have always tended to call their own is, at best, counter-intuitive.
Since he has become Prime Minister, Stephen Harper has burned more bridges than he has built and he is in the process of destroying his last best avenue to a governing majority.