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One gets recorded on camera peeing in someone’s coffee cup. Another jumps out of the bushes in camo to tackle a woman caught vandalizing his campaign signs in the dead of night. And now, a board member of a Conservative riding association has been dismissed for race-baiting posts on her Facebook account.

No wonder Jenni Byrne is folding like a $3 dollar suitcase. Reform-style loons have broken out of their shallow graves and are once more shambling across the landscape.

And how did Stephen “He’s Not Perfect” Harper react? By insisting the Conservative Party of Canada runs only the best candidates. Given the exploits of Jerry “The Urinator” Bance, Ryan “The Enforcer” Leef and “Sgt.” Sue MacDonell, it was an odd thing for him to say.

Stephen Harper’s decade of getting Canadians to believe in absurdities — like the 2006 pledge of transparent and accountable government — is over. As the sign on the septic tank truck says, “This vehicle is full of political promises.”

With the loonie approaching northern peso territory, a world refugee crisis threatening to overwhelm Europe and Islamic State still posing almost no domestic threat to Canadians, Steve is sticking with the economy and national security as his ballot questions. He might as well have picked Egyptian architecture and macramé.

Now you know why Harper and the Cons are in third place, the advantages of incumbency and a bulging war chest notwithstanding. After a decade of life in the bubble of power, Harper is like a man who has broken free of the surly bonds of reality. No mention of the environment, no mention of $36 billion cut from medicare over the next ten years, no mention of abandoning veterans, not a word about the creeping police state threatened in new laws like C-51 — and, of course, something worse than silence on the unfolding human catastrophe in the Middle East. It is a tsunami of denial.

And for those still paying attention, Harper’s idea that the best way to help Syrian refugees is to bomb ISIS … well, that’s Dick Cheney talking out of Harper’s mouth. What isn’t Steve telling you? That this refugee crisis is being driven by the civil war in Syria and the monstrous abuses of the Assad regime, which the West has ignored for years.

Do something about the war, and you might just relieve some of the human misery in that bedevilled country. Tilting at the ISIS windmill by flying just over two per cent of the coalitions bombing missions is the purest politics — an attempt to put the security agenda front and centre in the campaign. In Harperland, foreign policy is just long-distance domestic politics.

Thankfully, it’s all coming to an end now — the phoney wars, the dictatorial fiats, the whole public relations nightmare Harper has made of Canadian public life on behalf of the corporate elite. The epitaph for Harper’s reign of mendacity, fearmongering and distortion was self-written — as it usually is by overreaching tyrants — when he recently declared that Canada’s hadn’t just toppled back into recession.

Really? Statistics Canada took a reality-based position — that two consecutive quarters of negative growth equals “recession”. Like the Flat-Earther he is, Harper declared that he didn’t believe in Statistics Canada.

It’s all wearing so thin now. The Con campaign machine, lubricated and hyped by the dutiful blatherings of mainstream media, is wheezing like a calliope on its way to the junkyard. Even Ms. Byrne, the Queen of Mean, is getting blowback from all those Tories sick of feeling her heel on their backsides. It’s all wearing so thin now. The Con campaign machine, lubricated and hyped by the dutiful blatherings of mainstream media, is wheezing like a calliope on its way to the junkyard. Even Ms. Byrne, the Queen of Mean, is getting blowback from all those Tories sick of feeling her heel on their backsides.

It’s sort of like arguing with the boiling point of water, or the date of the next full moon: it’s the God-complex writ in bright pink neon. Before this mind-numbing confirmation of the depth of Harper’s delusional narcissism, there were already plenty of signs that the Top Con had been guzzling his own bathwater.

Confabulation has always been Harper’s reflex response whenever he doesn’t like what the facts have on offer. And so — with the economy in recession, unemployment on the rise, the oil patch in a shambles and the dollar at 75 cents — Harper says the economic news is good … that it proves his plan is working. Still, Steve insists he balanced the budget this time. Fiddling with the math and balancing the budget are not the same things, but it hardly matters. The man isn’t listening.

Steve also didn’t believe in the long form census. To him, facts are just another form of opposition. He didn’t believe at first that there was a recession in 2008. He didn’t think it mattered that he was found in contempt of Parliament. (It mattered. The man who found him in contempt, former speaker Peter Milliken, thinks he still is in contempt.) Steve didn’t think there was anything wrong with making an unconstitutional appointment to the Supreme Court of Canada. Put a girl in ermine and she gets uppity — it was all Beverley McLachlin’s fault, we were told.

It’s all wearing so thin now. The latest lie? That Canada takes in more refugees per capita than any country in the world. The truth: we’re sixth — and the PM knows it.

Now the Con campaign machine, lubricated and hyped by the dutiful blathering of mainstream media, is wheezing like a calliope on its way to the junkyard. Even Ms. Byrne, the Queen of Mean, is getting blowback from all those Tories sick of feeling her heel on their backsides. The workhorses are beginning to kick the stall walls as Jenni is shoved aside. Steve, they now say as they struggle to hit reset on a moribund campaign, really isn’t perfect after all.

There is a reason the smarter members of the Con herd — Peter MacKay, James Moore and John Baird — bolted from the barn before the flames reached the roof. They could smell smoke, even if the boss couldn’t.

And so, Harper now finds himself all alone with the bootlicking brigade — which is a very dangerous place to be in a losing campaign. Even Laureen Harper — the Conservatives ‘secret weapon’ — placed her dainty foot in her mouth on the campaign trail when she claimed that “you don’t put people in jail” for marijuana use. Her husband passed a law to hand out mandatory six month minimum sentences for growing six pot plants pot back in 2012. Do these two even talk to each other?

Some of the better evidence that Harper is about to go the way of Jim Prentice was presented during his interview with the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge. Despite national coverage of detailed facts to the contrary, Harper continued to insist that only Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy bear the blame for Duffygate.

That whopper took care of his last shred of credibility. Everyone watching that bizarre exchange knew that Harper was carrying on with the coverup, denying the hard facts. Lots of other people were involved, including Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton, Senator Irving Gerstein, former party president Dan Hilton and, from the documented evidence, even Ray Novak. Apparently they all knew about the deal, the dirt and the money. The corruption was on display for all to see at the Duffy trial. All Harper has done since is defend the indefensible.

From where I sit, what he says hardly matters any longer. Liars — like Brian Mulroney in the twilight of his political career — should be ignored, because listening to liars is a waste of time. And take it with a very big grain of salt when you hear pundits say there’s still plenty of time for Harper to turn it around — that every campaign stumbles, that he just needs some time alone to come up with a plan, or something.

The wave of change that is sweeping the Canadian electorate has been building over a decade of fraudulent communications, political corruption and misguided national leadership — and a decade of obedient journalists pandering to a PM who has deconstructed Canadian democracy. So when John Ivison of the National Post argues that all Harper needs is a little time to think, you know that even the media isn’t up to speed on what is really happening out there on the campaign trail. This is about Harper’s record catching up with him. He can’t avoid himself.

The Conservative Party of Canada is learning about the downside of answered prayers. Election 2015 is turning into what they once thought they wanted it to be — a referendum on Stephen Harper.

No wonder Doug Ford is already applying for the job.

Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His nine books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. His new book on the Harper majority government, Party of One, is a number one best-seller.

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