In the tightest three-way election race in Canadian history, you might expect to see the Conservatives making efforts to shore up the base, stoke the fires of ideological commitment, remind the true believers of who loves them best — or at least adopt a policy of live-and-let-live.

Not Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. Leave it to the ‘tough guys’ of Canadian politics to pick fights in all the wrong places and remind the little people of who’s really calling the shots. A former party flag-waver has learned that bitter lesson — which is why Sheldon Clare, president of the National Firearms Association, is now running as an independent against the Conservative incumbent in Cariboo-Prince George, B.C.

Clare heads an organization that wields only a fraction of the power enjoyed by its carnivorous cousin in the U.S., the National Rifle Association, the bête noire of liberals everywhere. The NRA routinely tilts the table in Senate and House races south of the border, while Clare’s group can’t really be called a power-broker.

That said, its membership is composed of solid Conservative party supporters who patiently waited through the Reform/Canadian Alliance Opposition era and those Tory minority years for Harper to repeal the long gun registry. When the Harper government’s anti-terrorist bill, C-51, came up earlier this year, Clare became alarmed by some of the firearms restrictions in the legislation and offered to join left-leaning critics of the bill at parliamentary committee hearings.

According to Clare, Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney’s staffers got into the act.

Clare says he was told not to “be used by the NDP as a stick to beat up the CPC” and to refrain from criticizing Bill C-51 in the interests of political solidarity. In return, the NFA says it got a guarantee that Bill C-42, which addresses firearms licensing, would be amended.

Harper doesn’t merely take his core supporters for granted — he seems to relish every opportunity he gets to rub their noses in the mud for being naïve enough to believe a political promise. Harper doesn’t merely take his core supporters for granted — he seems to relish every opportunity he gets to rub their noses in the mud for being naïve enough to believe a political promise.

Mutual backscratching — a time-honoured political tradition. Turns out the joke was on the NFA, though. Once the government got its way with C-51, it also steamed ahead on C-42 — minus the amendments sought by the NFA.

Clare was outraged over the whole affair and went public, claiming that Teneycke just shrugged and said the group had been “played.” Maybe you think that kind of “play” is just good clean fun, or bad politics, or just politics as usual. At any rate, it’s politics as usual for these Conservatives. Harper doesn’t merely take his core supporters for granted — he seems to relish every opportunity he gets to rub their noses in the mud for being naïve enough to believe a political promise.

After Harper became leader of the Canadian Alliance, he actively courted social conservatives, most of whom distrusted him and had remained faithful to Stockwell Day. He learned the language of evangelical Christians, using the key words that hinted that he was one of them.

He never had any intention of pursuing their objectives, of course. He made that clear in 2012, when MPs were debating Conservative backbencher Stephen Woodworth’s motion to examine whether a child is considered human at conception or birth. Harper gave his House Whip, Gordon O’Connor, a barn-burner of a speech to read, belittling the motion and proclaiming that “abortion cannot be eliminated. It is part of the human condition.” Debate’s over, social conservatives. Back to your kennel.

The military, a Conservative bastion since the Pierre Trudeau years, has quietly endured Harper’s contemptuous neglect as well. Harper loves a good blood-and-thunder speech, of course, and probably achieves his greatest level of believability when addressing a military audience. But that hasn’t stopped him from carving his balanced budget out of the backs of the Canadian Forces, where he continues to play a ridiculous shell game of moving money from one pile to another.

Somehow the DND funding chart keeps showing the arrow pointing upwards — but the obsolete equipment isn’t getting replaced. And those who leave the military — particular those who leave with lingering trauma and missing limbs — soon find out that all those kind words about service to country and a nation’s eternal gratitude don’t add up to a real veteran’s pension any longer. As with gun owners and social conservatives, the message is the same: Take what we’re offering, shut up and get back in line. Oh, and remember to vote Conservative.

Farmers also keep getting the deaf ear from the government they helped to elect. Disappearing agriculture programs and vanishing farm subsidies have also allowed the Conservatives to nickel-and-dime their way to a zero deficit. Harper has so completely gutted the foreign worker program — to convince people that only skilled workers need apply at the border — that farmers now cannot find enough unskilled people to perform the mundane but essential menial tasks involved in running a farm.

Harper really couldn’t care less. The ag vote is pretty solid. Could be worse under the NDP, right? And so farmers — just like every other core party supporter — are expected to keep their mouths shut and learn to live with it.

David Krayden was raised on Vancouver Island and has written extensively on Western political issues over the years. He was a columnist for the Calgary Herald and host of Calgary’s Liberty Today radio program; more recently he worked as an editor for Sun News. Krayden was a public affairs officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force and spent almost a decade on Parliament Hill as a communications staffer. @DavidKrayden

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