A good many long-time Conservative voters find themselves in a quandary in this election: How can they support the policies of the Conservative government without endorsing the continued rule of Stephen Harper?

Many of these Tories are older and comfortable financially. They were reinvigorated in 2006 when their party ended the 13-year regime of the Liberal party. They approved of the general approach promised by the new administration: smaller government, lower taxes, incentives to business to stimulate growth, an emphasis on law enforcement and national defence — and now income-splitting, which offers disproportionate financial benefits to taxpayers in higher brackets.

A reader in Kitchener (who asked that his name not be published) told me that he and his wife — he’s retired, she’s still working — have been able to build a very nice nest egg thanks to pension income-splitting and the increase (from $5,500 to $10,000) in the annual contribution limit for tax-free savings accounts (a “windfall,” the reader calls it). “The Conservatives know that financially comfortable, articulate and well-informed seniors are both aware and appreciative of this benefit, and that this voter base will reward them with their loyalty at the polls,” he said.

Even so, this voter is torn. He calls it a conundrum. He doesn’t like Harper and his style of politics. He worries about ethical issues: the way the Conservatives have abused election spending rules; the deliberate misleading of voters in the robocall scandal of the 2011 election; the ramming through of Bill C-51, the anti-terrorism legislation; the efforts by the Prime Minister’s Office to cover up the Senate expense scandal in the Mike Duffy affair; and the cynical way the Conservatives tried to buy votes by issuing fat retroactive child-care cheques on the eve of the election call.

The failure of the Harper government to keep its implied promise of a steady hand on the nation’s economic tiller will probably hurt the Conservatives more with the party faithful than any other issue. The failure of the Harper government to keep its implied promise of a steady hand on the nation’s economic tiller will probably hurt the Conservatives more with the party faithful than any other issue.

Another Conservative reader in Guelph, who is a devoted admirer of the late John Diefenbaker, has similar concerns. “Stephen Harper is a nasty man,” he says.

Yet both of them will, I suspect, stick with the Conservatives on Oct. 19. “Critics would call me selfish — and that would be true!” said the Kitchener reader. “Perhaps even shallow, and maybe that’s true, but there is a strong temptation to be ‘all right, Jack!’ I remember the dubious moniker of ‘greed is good’ from a late 1980’s movie.” (He was referring to the 1987 film Wall Street, directed by Oliver Stone.)

These readers reflect a softening of the edges of the Conservative base — a softening that has contributed to the Tories being eight to 10 points below their support level in the 2011 election. Firming up the base is clearly job one for the PM, and Harper did a decent job on that front in the first election debate, staged by Maclean’s magazine last week.

(A digression: I thought it was an excellent debate, infinitely superior to the Republican circus — I think of it as ‘Donald Trump and the 16 Stooges’ — that aired the same night on American television. All four Canadian leaders performed well, in my view — including Harper, who had to fend off three attackers. His only problem came when he tried to deny, then had to admit — more or less — that Canada is experiencing its second recession on his watch.)

The failure, or inability, of the Harper government to keep its implied promise of a steady hand on the nation’s economic tiller will probably hurt the Conservatives more with the party faithful than any other issue (including whatever comes of former Harper chief of staff Nigel Wright’s testimony at the Duffy trial this week). Those soft Conservatives who feel alienated from Harper will not be reassured by repeated banal assurances that Canada is out-performing other G-7 nations.

The reader in Kitchener is looking for a way of his “moral conundrum.”

“I think I will need to revise my charitable donations upward, as I may hold my nose when I vote in October,” he told me.

I suppose that’s one way out of the Tory quandary.

Geoffrey Stevens is an author and the former managing editor of the Globe and Mail. He teaches political science at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph. [email protected]

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