Here’s a tip. If you’re running a hard-right government with a tyrannical sense of mission, don’t pass a law mandating US-style fixed-date elections. For you are Father Time’s plaything. It will bat you like a cat toy.

The Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, passed just such a law and so was forced to call an autumn election. And on Tuesday, Canada entered a recession, the only G7 nation to do so.

Harper had placed his tender hopes in the rough hands of the planet-poisoning Alberta tar sands. Oil prices collapsed. Canada’s economy is now based on cheap oil and job fear. The two main opposition parties are pumped, and it’s voting time!

Canadians will go to the polls on 19 October, many feeling worse off than they have in years. “The government has been in austerity mode since 2011,” economist Jim Stanford told the CBC, Canada’s national news network, which has been decimated by the Conservative government. “They’ve pulled back C$15bn [£7.4bn] of programme spending, eliminated tens of thousands of jobs in the broader public sector and helped create an environment where bad news in one sector, oil, could actually push the whole economy into the negative.”

Here’s another tip for Harper. Don’t pass a law mandating a balanced budget, as Harper’s Conservatives did this summer in another serious case of bad timing.

For all the neoliberal economics he has promoted, Harper doesn’t balance his budgets. Harper ran seven consecutive budget deficits while claiming to despise such things, and then his own law turned around to bite him. Thomas Mulcair of the leftist New Democratic party (NDP) declared he’d balance the budget. And then Liberal leader Justin Trudeau stepped in, saying with his air of quiet confidence that if elected, he’d run a deficit. Austerity was too damaging right now, he said. The Liberals instantly became Canada’s operating left wing.

Harper has always been at odds with Trudeau. He dislikes the young man, whose attractive hair and warm manner are frequently contrasted with Harper’s helmet-like mane and weird frigidity. Yes, hair is a campaign issue. An almost stationary man, Harper reacted by pinching his thumb and index finger together to mock Trudeau’s “tiny” deficit. And, of course, it looked as though he were describing his personal arrangements, or something worse. People stared at that photo.

For all the neoliberal economics he has promoted, Harper doesn’t balance his budgets

One last tip for our prime minister. In a country that, like Britain, prefers its election campaigns brisk, don’t copy the Americans twice over and drag the thing out. But Harper has. The campaign will last 11 long weeks, giving voters a chance to see just how strange Harper is. A controlling man, who dislikes being physically approached, Harper won’t meet just any voter. Anyone who wishes to attend a campaign rally must sign up, provide ID, be vetted and searched, and sign a gag order – though the last was subsequently dropped. Reporters are searched by the RCMP, Canada’s federal police force, sniffed by guard dogs, and allowed a total of five questions, which are generally dismissed by Harper while the audience boos.

At one rally, two female reporters were abused later by members of the audience. “You’re a lying piece of shit,” said one man, a propos of nothing, who became known as #AngryCon. Compared to the invariably courteous Trudeau, relaxed in the presence of other humans, and Mulcair, who happily holds public rallies of the NDP faithful and unfaithful, Harper sticks with his base: older, white, male, rural.

That base doesn’t photograph well. Canada is a genuinely multicultural nation. It’s almost as if Harper wants to win, but only with the votes of people he can stand. However, even those people worry about soaring house prices, lousy interest rates on savings, traffic jams from neglected infrastructure and unemployed children. Canadians are sick of this feeling of rot, this economic precariousness.

Summer polls are reliably unreliable, but Harper has walked into an electoral trap of his own making.