As the crow flies, the byelection battleground of Whitby-Oshawa and the GTA venue Prime Minister Stephen Harper picked on Thursday to pre-emptively divvy up the spoils of a still-hypothetical federal surplus sit less than 50 kilometres apart.

The riding’s voters go to the polls to fill Jim Flaherty’s vacant seat on November 17. The late finance minister had a good sense of humour. He would not have missed the irony of having the government’s income-splitting scheme thrown into the mix of the campaign for his succession.

His parting shot as finance minister blew a hole in the rationale of the 2011 Conservative promise to allow couples with children under 18 to transfer up to $50,000 dollars of income to the spouse with the lower income for tax purposes. Flaherty had serious enough doubts as to the fairness of the policy to voice his reservations publicly.

Whether he would have found solace in the fact that the original Conservative commitment has been significantly scaled down is another matter.

Middle- and upper-income families that opt to have a parent stay home will still be among the top beneficiaries of the Conservative income splitting policy. But the decision to cap its tax benefits to $2,000 — a maximum of $38 a week per family — has significantly reduced its social engineering potential.

The social conservatives who were hoping for a solid nod in the direction of stay-at-home mothers have, for now, to make do with a wink. For most Canadian families, a tax break that modest will not be an incentive to make do without a second income. But in the wake of those measures, they will scramble no less to find affordable quality daycare.

In most of Canada, the sum total of the tax breaks the Conservatives will be delivering to parents, including the enhanced family allowances that kick in next summer — just a few months before the scheduled general election — will not cover more than a few days of child care a month.

Meanwhile, every dollar spent on individual tax relief of the sort announced on Thursday is one less dollar available to governments to fund a more affordable, more comprehensive child care system.

Inside this thin social policy shell, what Harper delivered on Thursday is essentially a massive pre-election spending program designed to both woo voters and undercut the opposition promises of more social spending.

Flaherty’s riding of Whitby-Oshawa is poised to be a test ground for the Conservative approach and the ruling party is leaving nothing to chance.

Thursday’s visit to the GTA was Harper’s second spending stop in the area in the space of a few weeks.

Just prior to calling the byelection, the prime minister was in Whitby to announce Conservative plans to double the children’s fitness tax credit.

It is hard to overstate Harper’s need for a strong win in Flaherty’s former riding.

The Conservatives have been scrambling to counter Justin Trudeau’s momentum for more than a year.

That momentum is nowhere more a threat to their re-election next year than in suburban Ontario and the GTA.

Whitby-Oshawa does not have a consistent Conservative history. The New Democrats and Liberals have both represented the area in the past.

But Flaherty won the riding with almost 60 per cent of the vote in 2011.

The NDP’s loss of Olivia Chow’s former riding of Trinity-Spadina last summer has shown that affection for a departed MP does not always translate into voter loyalty to his or her party.

Still the Conservatives can hope that Flaherty’s name or at least his legacy of an expected return to federal budget surpluses will work some magic on his constituents

Conservative strategists expect at least a temporary bump in support in the wake of last week’s attack on Parliament Hill and of the generally positive reviews that Harper earned on that occasion.

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They have just put forward the centrepiece of the party’s 2015 election platform.

Against what can only be described as an optimal backdrop for a decisive victory, anything short of that would take a toll on party morale and a Conservative defeat would be an upset of a high enough magnitude on the political Richter scale to impact on Harper’s leadership.

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

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