MONTREAL—Stephen Harper’s Conservatives went into the last parliamentary stretch of their majority mandate last January with a breeze in their backs in public opinion and amidst long-awaited signs that Justin Trudeau’s honeymoon with voters was finally at an end.

With a budget replete with tax cuts and a popular piece of anti-terrorism legislation in the making, all seemed to be in place for a timely pre-election realignment of the stars in their favor.

Six months later, the budget has fallen flat. Support for the government’s anti-terrorism legislation has steadily declined. Some of the more able members of the caucus have bowed out — including, as of Friday, Industry Minister James Moore. And while the Liberals have consistently bled support over the first half of the year, their decline has not benefited the Conservatives.

An uptick in party fortunes in Quebec early in the year is increasingly looking like a mirage.

In Ontario and British Columbia, the NDP has been on the move in the polls while Conservative support has stalled or declined. Ditto in Atlantic Canada.

The NDP and the Liberals have long been communicating vessels for opposition votes but there is more than the usual opposition arithmetic at play behind the deficit in support of the Conservatives.

By all indications, a sizeable proportion of the 2011 supporters that they expected to come home as disenchantment with the Liberals set in are keeping their options open and/or are checking out the New Democrats.

That Harper will be campaigning next fall in an environment more hostile than four years ago has always been a given.

Like his predecessors, the Conservative leader has become a more polarizing figure with each passing mandate. Having covered Ontario at the tail end of Pierre Trudeau’s reign in the mid-80s I saw first-hand how rampant fatigue with his ruling party had become by the time he retired.

Now as then, regime change has become an overriding incentive for a record number of voters.

Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe has been getting a taste of that since his return to the fore. Some otherwise sovereigntist-friendly voters have been questioning the wisdom of potentially facilitating Harper’s re-election by further dividing the opposition vote.

With the NDP on the rise nationally, back-to-back visits to Atlantic Canada, Alberta and southeastern Ontario over the past month have confirmed that Quebec is no longer an isolated pocket of anti-Conservative opposition.

Those visits elicited a lot of more Harper-phobia than Mulcair-mania.

But perhaps what struck me most was how few people were willing to speak up in defence of the government. As opposition to Harper has become more vocal, support for his re-election has become more discreet.

That stands in stark contrast with the immediate lead-up to the last campaign when even non-Conservative voters would often readily concede that they felt Harper had managed the global economic crisis with competence. That sentiment was omnipresent in Ontario — where he subsequently won his majority.

Four years later, many die-hard Conservatives privately admit that they expected more from their party’s first majority government in almost two decades. They are underwhelmed by the sum of Harper’s third mandate.

More than a few of them find it hard to take pride in a team that has chosen to dumb itself down by making ultra-partisan MPs such as Pierre Poilièvre and Paul Calandra its poster boys in the House of Commons.

Over the past few months Canadians have been more likely to catch a glimpse of some of the more solid members of Harper’s caucus as they take their leave from politics than in action in the House of Commons. Moore’s decision to follow John Baird, Peter MacKay, Christian Paradis and James Rajotte out the door only adds an extra touch to the end-of-reign climate that has attended the last week of the parliamentary sitting.

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And then there is the Senate mess and the unwillingness of the prime minister to make it his job to address it.

On that score, the silence of so many otherwise committed Conservatives is eerily reminiscent of the embarrassment that drove many federal Liberals in Quebec to stay home or jump ship to another federalist party in the wake of the sponsorship scandal.

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

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