Superimpose a 2011 federal election map over that of Metro Toronto and what you get is a picture of how the so-called Ford Nation brought a sizeable section of Canada’s metropolis into Harperland.

As seen from the distance of the Conservative Parliament Hill backrooms, Ford’s upset mayoral victory in 2010 was a beacon shining brightly in the night of Stephen Harper’s second minority mandate.

Here was tangible evidence that deep in a media capital that Harper saw as the stronghold of the liberal forces aligned against his party, there were the elements of a winning Conservative electoral coalition.

As a bonus Ford had pulled those elements together just in time for Harper’s third and possibly last bid for a majority.

The prime minister embraced the new mayor in a way that he has yet to embrace any past or present premier. More than just an inspiration for the federal Conservatives as they campaigned for re-election in 2011, Ford became a mascot.

After the votes were counted there were large patches of Conservative blue in sections of the Metro map where only red had been seen for almost two decades and a Harper majority was headed for Parliament.

One of those patches spread out from the mayor’s heartland of Etobicoke. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff’s Etobicoke-Lakeshore riding was among those painted blue.

This week, it is the symbiosis between Ford’s base and Harper’s coalition that has the federal Conservatives tiptoeing across the ethical minefield upon which the crack-smoking admission of the mayor has landed them.

A party that has never been known to err on the side of mercy suddenly seems to be tapping into an inexhaustible supply of compassion for Ford’s predicament.

Some of that compassion is heartfelt as in the case of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, a personal friend of the Ford family, who is visibly touched by the human drama that has been unfolding at Toronto City Hall.

But much of it stems from the strategic calculation that past and present Ford supporters are as central to Harper’s next majority bid as they were to the last and that the populist glue that held them together back then has all but evaporated.

There is a jarring disconnect between the Conservatives’ punitive judicial agenda, their much proclaimed law-and-order principles and their efforts to look away from the public transgressions of the man who runs Canada’s biggest city and the disruptions to Toronto’s municipal life that result from them.

If Ford had been a Harper minister, the keys to his limousine would have been taken away this week along almost certainly with his place on the Conservative bench. His dismissal from the government caucus would have been non-negotiable.

Harper has just moved heaven and earth to have his majority in the Senate remove three of his past appointees over a matter of expense accounts. For all their faults, senators Mike Duffy, Patrick Brazeau and Pamela Wallin did not threaten the orderly governance of the country. The same cannot be said of Ford and Toronto.

But Ford’s downfall also plays to the emerging central theme of Harper’s own pre-electoral discourse.

In a keynote address to his party convention last weekend the prime minister set out to regroup his troops around the notion that he is an underdog fighting the good fight on behalf of the average Canadian.

In the us-versus-them populist narrative that Harper is seeking to shore up as he casts himself as the anti-elite champion, there is no place for a Conservative hand in Ford’s descent into political hell.

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He may be beyond the help of his friends on Parliament Hill and at the end of his mayoral rope as at least some of his loyalists shed stubbornly-held illusions about his character.

But the strong sense of many Ford fans that their mayor — for all his failings — is ultimately being hounded out of office by an unforgiving coalition of establishment forces remains. The Conservatives are banking on that sense to keep Ford voters in Harperland in 2015.

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

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