An escalating war of words between an Ontario premier and a prime minister campaigning for re-election on the scale of the public feud involving Kathleen Wynne and Stephen Harper is unprecedented.

The two of them have traded shots through the media for the better part of the first campaign week, with Wynne calling on Ontarians to defeat Harper and the latter saying her Liberal government is doing a bad job.

This is a frontal collision that the Conservative leader could have postponed until after the campaign or avoided altogether. Instead he pushed hard on the accelerator, all but ensuring that it would happen.

Harper baited Wynne onto the federal battlefield by serving her government written notice last month that it would get no federal help in setting up the proposed Ontario pension plan.

The Conservatives make no secret of the fact that they are out to sabotage the project.

Setting up a provincial pension plan without federal co-operation would be fraught with bureaucratic difficulties and doable only at an even greater cost to the public purse.

Provinces such as Quebec and Saskatchewan that have introduced provincial variations of the Canada Pension Plan did so with full federal co-operation.

In Wynne’s place, any premier would likely have taken the bait.

The pension plan was part of the platform she was re-elected on a year ago. The Ontario Tories campaigned against it and finished with only 31 per cent of the vote on election night. That is less than the level of Ontario support Harper will need in October if he is to emerge with another majority government.

So why are his Conservatives picking a fight that their Ontario cousins lost decisively not all that long ago?

Some Conservative strategists are convinced the issue failed to get a full airing during the Ontario campaign. They believe Tim Hudak’s Tories provided a diversion by painting a target on their backs with a promise to cut 100,000 public service jobs.

Ontario voters have had a pattern of putting their eggs into different federal and provincial baskets for decades. By purporting to protect their pocketbooks from a new pension contribution — which he misleadingly presents as a tax hike — Harper is looking to give them a reason to stick with that pattern.

This is not a risk-free exercise for either protagonist.

The Conservative leader may be underestimating the size of the audience for an improved public pension system. As an alternative, Harper has recently been floating the notion of voluntary additional contributions to the CPP. That’s an option his previous finance minister, the late Jim Flaherty, had rejected as unworkable.

The Conservative decision to revisit it could play to the perception that Harper is mostly out to help more affluent Canadians help themselves.

The assumption that any post-provincial-election ill will toward Wynne will drive votes to Harper in October could be flawed. The Conservatives are not the only alternative to the Liberals on the ballot.

Wynne is campaigning for Justin Trudeau’s Liberals but in her heart of hearts she would probably be happy enough to have Harper lose to the NDP.

She is not the first premier to take on Harper in a federal election but she is playing for higher stakes with a potentially weaker hand.

In 2008, Danny Williams, then premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, turned a feud over the equalization formula into an anything-but-the-Conservatives campaign that saw Harper shut out of the province.

In that same election, Quebec premier Jean Charest gave more momentum to a Quebec backlash against the Conservatives over a round of culture cuts by suggesting that Ottawa hand the province exclusive responsibility for cultural policy.

Williams and Charest were championing issues that enjoy an iconic status in their respective provinces.

It remains to seen whether the provincial pension plan or the notion — as promoted by Wynne — that Ontario is not getting a fair shake from Harper will have as much resonance.

In the end, Charest and Williams landed on the winning side of the argument against Harper in their respective provinces but the Conservatives still won the federal election.

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There is no such save-face middle ground in the case of the Harper-Wynne feud.

If Harper is re-elected with a majority government in October, it will be because he has also won a plurality of Ontario votes and, from his perspective, a mandate to put spokes in more Ontario Liberal wheels than just Wynne’s pension plan.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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