T here is a crazy, quiet air of desperation around Stephen Harper. On the surface, the Prime Minister is – as always – the personification of iron self-discipline. On television, he speaks in measured tones, his sentences deliberately interspersed with tight little smiles to suggest friendliness.

But the increasingly bizarre actions of his government suggest that this is a façade. In his first term, Harper managed to walk the fine line between pleasing the general public and placating his much more conservative base. Now, with that base uneasy about his interventionist approach to the economy, he flounders.

Almost every week, the government comes up with something new to divert red-meat conservatives away from Ottawa's ballooning deficit.

The most recent was the government's abrupt, and almost certainly unconstitutional decision to prevent Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik from returning home to Canada.

Abdelrazik's story is Kafka-esque. Returning to Sudan in 2003 to visit his mother, the Montrealer was jailed by local authorities as a suspected terrorist.The Sudanese released him after 11 months, declaring that he was innocent. The RCMP say they have nothing against him. Still, he couldn't get on a plane to come home because the U.S. had, by this time, placed him on an international no-fly list (albeit one that does not bar the repatriation of citizens stranded abroad).

Meanwhile, Ottawa said it would issue him temporary travel documents (his passport expired while he was being tortured) if he could arrange a flight. Last week, aided by luminaries such as former UN ambassador Stephen Lewis, Abdelrazik did so. But just as he was due to board his flight home, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon announced that no travel papers would be issued, calling Abdelrazik a security risk.

That's not the first time that Harper's government has played the national security card. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney turned Canada into an international joke last month when he declared British MP George Galloway a security risk and barred him from the country.

Like the Abdelrazik decision, that made sense only as a blatantly political move designed to show Harper's core supporters that, in spite of his new economic heresies, the Prime Minister remains an unrepentant hardliner.

So, too, Defence Minister Peter MacKay's otherwise inexplicable public attack on Russia earlier this year for daring to fly a military plane in international air space near Canada.

Even U.S. military officials found MacKay's tirade unwarranted.

Some have suggested that MacKay did this as part of his failed bid to become NATO secretary-general. If so, it was a doomed gesture.

The more logical explanation is that MacKay, like Cannon and Kenney, was acting under orders to appease the Conservative base and allow control-conscious Harper to reassert his grip.

Because that grip is starting to slip. Some on the right of his party were ready to dump Harper when he almost lost government last fall. His conversion to Keynesian stimulus economics alarmed still more, as has his reversal of fortunes in Quebec and his clumsy feud with former prime minister Brian Mulroney.

Events are starting to spin out of control. Another politician might go with the flow. Stephen Harper's instinct is to hunker down and rebuild the dikes.





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Thomas Walkom's usual column appears Wednesday and Saturday.

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