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If Stephen Harper were an NHL coach he’d analyze the stats, pore over game video and come up with a style of play calculated to win more than it loses, based on the percentages. It’d be cautious hockey, likely – no Gretzky flourishes or Lemieux elegance, more dump-and-fetch, punctuated by consistent forechecking and flurries of intense aggression. Minimizing opportunities for mistakes would be a big part of the package. A Harper team would put a premium on having some big, mean enforcers who can skate and score now and then, as well as fight.

None of which explains how this very approach, which welded together a new political party and won Harper a decade at the top of a G7 government, isn’t clicking so well any more.

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With less than a full week to go until voting day, Harper is well back of where he needs to be to win a minority, let alone the majority he must have to continue in office and retire, say in 2017, on his own terms. It could all change, of course; the polls could be wrong. But as things stand today, Oct. 19 could be Harper’s Waterloo. Why, is the interesting question.