OTTAWA—Two years ago this coming week federal Conservatives came within a few percentage points of winning the unfettered power Stephen Harper so desperately wants. Now, with another campaign not far off, Conservatives are lower in opinion polls and the Prime Minister’s majority is mathematically farther out of reach.

How the ruling party and its leader got from there to here — and what comes next — is the story of Canada’s new politics. Once a rough sport played by known rules, the game has changed so much it’s hardly recognizable to many on the field, let alone the shrinking crowd in the bleachers.

Nothing measures that change quite as accurately as Conservative behaviour since Canadians last voted. Since Oct 14, 2008, Harper has turned conventional strategy upside down. Instead of widening the Conservative base to attract the roughly 40 per cent of voters needed for a majority, he is drilling deeper into the party’s core constituency, throwing off, among others, women and highly educated Canadians.

Driving them away has been more easily achieved than clearly understood. By twice padlocking Parliament, by dividing the country over the long-gun registry and then the long-form census, Conservatives hardened their image along with the resolve of supporters who wouldn’t think of voting any other way.

One result will worry the two out of three Canadians who don’t support Conservatives. As a seasoned Liberal strategist puts it; “Harper is closer to a majority today than Michael Ignatieff is to forming a government.”

His observation is accurate, if, on closer scrutiny, self-evident. Even so, the underlying analysis demands deconstruction.

Nik Nanos, one of the few pollsters who believe a Conservative majority is still possible, argues that Harper holds advantages beyond the comforting certainty that supporters will herd to polling stations. Conservatives, he says, are both efficient in converting votes into seats and unusually skilled at “repelling people from voting for others.”

A fusion of current realities work in Harper’s favour. A deeply polarized electorate, the absence of a clear alternative and the low voter turnouts that flow from rampant disillusionment with the political process all contribute to ruling party prospects that are considerably more promising than they appear at casual glance.

Two lessons this Prime Minister learned from former prime minister Jean Chrétien are never take your foot off an opponent’s throat and never miss an opportunity to win an election. Both are relevant now.

Harper is confident campaign rigors will expose Ignatieff’s weaknesses, fissuring the vote and discouraging Canadians from coalescing around the Liberal option. He also knows the economy is shaky and that hard times ahead make an election more attractive sooner than later.

Conventional national capital wisdom — seeded by whispering Conservatives — is that a government that consistently warns against an early election will have to wait until late winter to be defeated over its next budget. Still, Harper could advance the timetable by including legislation in this fall’s fiscal update that opposition parties couldn’t swallow.

Conservative critics warn that Harper’s divide-to-rule tactics take reckless chances. They say the Prime Minister’s relentless pursuit of near absolute, between-elections power risks fragmenting Canada into deep but small pockets of Conservative loyalists.

That may be so. But what’s more certain as well as more immediately pressing is that Harper is the master manipulator of the new politics he largely invented.

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In less than five years this Prime Minister has reduced once dominant Liberals to a rump and is closer than it appears to the majority he covets.

James Travers' column appears Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

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