MONTREAL

In light of the enduring Conservative failure to sustain a lead in voting intentions, it is easy to forget that when Guy Giorno took over the reins of the prime minister’s office as Stephen Harper’s chief of staff in the summer of 2008, the party actually had a governing majority in sight.

It was on the basis of promising poll numbers that Harper asked the Governor-General to send Canadians to the polls two years earlier than the date set in his own fixed-election law. At the time the Conservative prospects in Quebec were particularly enticing.

Seven weeks before the actual vote, a Léger Marketing poll put the Bloc Québécois and the Conservatives neck-to-neck in voting intentions and Harper was looking at enough Quebec gains to expect a majority victory nationally. But that was before the PMO decision to hype some minor culture cuts raised predictable hackles across the province.

Since then it has become harder and harder to keep track of the self-inflicted wounds Harper and his strategists have wrought upon themselves.

There was the post-election fiscal statement that almost cost Harper his second mandate; the decision to prorogue Parliament last winter to delay the inevitable moment of reckoning on the Afghan detainee disclosure issue; the move to embrace a maternal health initiative for the Third World with little thought to the abortion angle; the summary firing of Helena Guergis from the Conservative caucus; the bizarre decision to do away with the long form of the census and, just recently, an asinine move to finance a new hockey arena for Quebec City at a time when the government is stressing the need for fiscal austerity.

When faced with the incomprehensible, political observers are often tempted to look for strategic calculations so clever that they are hard to grasp by mere mortals such as themselves.

But sometimes the only explanation for government moves that systematically fail to add up is that those who are behind them simply can’t count.

Taking on the pro-abortion rights movement over maternal health care in the Third World last winter only to then turn around and tell the anti-abortion lobby that revisiting the current Canadian regime is a non-starter made no sense from either the angle of policy or that of politics.

Uniting constituencies as vocal and diverse as church-based groups, municipal and corporate leaders and academics against the government just to tinker with a census that most Canadians were happy enough to leave alone can only be described as masochistic.

And musing about going in the business of funding new sports arenas across the country at a time when federal money for other often more essential infrastructure projects such as roads, schools or hospitals is scheduled to dry up is, to put it mildly, counterintuitive.

These days, a growing number of Canadians are reconsidering the merits of the Conservative case to do away with the gun registry; a majority want the government to hang on to the long form of the census; there is widespread hostility for the prime minister’s potentially costly flirt with the movers of an NHL franchise for Quebec City.

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Given Harper’s take-charge approach to his role, it would be simplistic to lay the accumulated missteps of the past two years and the toll they have taken on the credibility of the government at the doorstep of his departing chief of staff. But the evidence suggests that if Giorno’s successor is not up to standing up to his boss, he or she will be this prime minister’s last chief-of-staff.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

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