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Who could have predicted that the Conservatives would get themselves in trouble for dragging Terry Fox into the election campaign?

Well … anyone, really. A government that has been hounding charities for dabbling in politics got slapped for playing politics with a charity. Some may call that symmetry, or karma, but it’s also an amateur-hour error by a Conservative campaign machine that hasn’t exactly dazzled anyone with its brilliance in this election.

It’s not hard to understand why the Fox family or its charitable foundation recoiled when the Conservatives tried to elbow their way into the annual fundraising run last weekend. A chill has descended on all kinds of charities in Canada because of Canada Revenue Agency audits targeting political activities in recent years.

What’s harder to understand is how the once-fearsome Conservative campaign machine managed to make a mistake of this magnitude — dropping the prime minister’s wife, Laureen Harper, and Industry Minister James Moore into an announcement that hadn’t been vetted first with the Terry Fox people.

Who, for instance, advised Moore to tell reporters that the campaign announcement had the “enthusiastic” support of Terry Fox’s family? Nothing in the letter that Stephen Harper released (after the fact) backed up that assertion.

We seem to have come a long way since 2007, when Conservative cabinet minister John Baird invited reporters out to a huge warehouse in east-end Ottawa to show off the party’s fancy campaign war room. The cavernous facility boasted its own TV studio and desks for more than 100 volunteers. The media was being offered a peek at the facilities, Baird declared, to show the world that Conservatives were ready to fight an election at any time.

Baird is gone now. So too, apparently, is the Conservative war room’s power to intimidate rivals. As many others have observed, Harper’s team has frequently seemed ill-prepared for an election they always knew was coming on Oct. 19, and for an extra-long campaign they themselves chose. (I’m tempted to use the phrase “just not ready,” but it might be under copyright by now.)

Not only do they seem to be lacking a strategy of offence, they don’t seem to be playing defence all that well either. “Stephen Harper: He’s Not Perfect” — it doesn’t seem like something you’d plaster on a billboard to attract new supporters.

If you ask Conservatives — the thoughtful ones — why this campaign has been such a rocky experience for the party, you’ll often hear a two-word answer: Accountability Act.

The way some Conservatives tell it, the party simply isn’t attracting new talent. The people surrounding Harper are, by and large, people with nowhere else to go, doing what they’ve always done. The way some Conservatives tell it, the party simply isn’t attracting new talent. The people surrounding Harper are, by and large, people with nowhere else to go, doing what they’ve always done.

This is another example of either symmetry or karma. The very first piece of legislation passed by the Conservatives after taking power nearly a decade ago may also be the reason for their faltering fates in 2015.

The way some Conservatives tell it, the party simply isn’t attracting new talent. The people surrounding Harper are, by and large, people with nowhere else to go, doing what they’ve always done. Professionals in the private sector aren’t going to run the risk of signing up for political duty, only to face a five-year ban on dealing with the government after they leave office.

This hurdle comes on top of the stories we’re seeing every day about the dubious delights of plunging into politics with the Conservatives: the dredging-up of one’s past, the gag orders, the very real risk of ending up under a bus like countless others who landed on Harper’s bad side.

Political jobs in this government, moreover, are not proving to be good training for life in the private sector; the skills required to do politics the way Harper does it are non-transferrable. Imagine, for instance, someone leaving a Conservative minister’s office and applying for a communications job in a corporation.

Interviewer: So how are you at media relations?

Interviewee: Great! When I can’t avoid their calls altogether, I send them one-line emails after their deadlines have passed. I’m also very good at keeping them out of press conferences and events.

Interviewer: Thanks. We’ll call you if we need to antagonize the media.

For evidence of just how non-transferable Conservative communications skills really are, take a look at a recent article in the local Burnaby Now newspaper, in which a reporter is trying to find out why Conservative candidates are not showing up at events or replying to media questions. Burnaby Now ran a transcript of the question-and-answer session between the reporter and the Conservative campaign official, which, as some commenters noted, read like something out of Kafka — or an Abbott and Costello skit.

Public-relations professionals are not advised to try this at home or, worse yet, in the office.

One Conservative told me recently that winning sports teams stay on top by constantly changing their game. As soon as your rivals have figured out your strategy, you change the strategy.

Yet in this election, the Conservatives are not only playing the same political game, their entire platform rests on voters opting for “more of the same”. In an interview on CBC Radio’s The House last weekend, it was notable that Harper didn’t seem to have an answer when host Chris Hall asked what would be new or different about a re-elected Conservative government.

A couple of weeks ago, the Conservatives did a mid-campaign correction and brought in an Australian campaign guru, Lynton Crosby, to get things back on track. Crosby has been called the “Wizard of Oz” for his ability to turn around faltering campaigns.

Another wizard once told Dorothy to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. The Conservatives’ campaign, at least to now, has only summoned up the power to surprise us with flat-footed mistakes.

Susan Delacourt is one of Canada’s best-known political journalists. Over her long career she has worked at some of the top newsrooms in the country, from the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail to the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post. She is a frequent political panelist on CBC Radio and CTV. Author of four books, her latest — Shopping For Votes — was a finalist for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Canadian non-fiction in 2014. She teaches classes in journalism and political communication at Carleton University.

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