Platform of Rubber, Leader of Stone

Harper's party twists and turns, but his support is solid as a rock.

The National Post’s Tasha Kheiriddin tries to connect the dots between the Conservatives’ recent policy decisions, and comes up with a picture that she’s not sure is actually of a conservative party at all. On issues like blocking the Australian takeover of Potash Corp., scrapping the long-form census, defending corporate tax cuts, and attempting to fund an arena in Quebec City, the party has looked by turns libertarian, protectionist, populist and basically any other ideology you can name besides islamofascist revivalist. This has gotten Kheiriddin down. “Perhaps this is a depressingly natural state of affairs,” she writes. “After being out of power for 13 years, which they largely spent redefining themselves, Canadian Conservatives are now so enamoured of being in power that they no longer care what they are: They just want to stay there.”

Parts of this column by the Toronto Star’s James Travers read as if he wrote them huddled in fear under his kitchen table. He throws around words like “chaos” and “downright frightening” to describe the Conservatives mixed bag of policy decisions, and correctly identifies Industry Minister Tony Clement as the man throwing all the switches willy-nilly. Less conservative than Kheriddin, Travers isn’t so much concerned that the Tories have abandoned right-wing principles as they have facts altogether, noting that Clement’s vow to reverse the CRTC’s ruling on usage-based billing came after the agency studied the issue exhaustively and reached an evidence-based conclusion. “From potash to Internet billing and beyond,” writes Travers, “Conservatives are setting the country’s policy course by their own political stars.”

But as the Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin points out, none of this inconsistency seems to have any effect on the polls. “The consistency of Mr. Harper’s support is extraordinary,” says Martin. “The Harper base cannot be dinted. It’s more than Teflon. He is the granite man.” Martin speculates that the Liberals are about to smash headlong into that stone façade, because two-and-a-half years into the Conservative minority government and after making so much bluster about bringing down the government, the Grits can’t avoid triggering an election for much longer.