Article content continued

It was Wynne’s willingness to offer these voters a measure of relief, a program that trumpeted government activism as opposed to individual sufferance that catapulted her back to power at Queen’s Park.

Confronted with this same set of economic circumstances, Tim Hudak replied with a perplexing promise to fire 100,000 teachers, firemen and people who deliver our public services. He sought to motivate his Conservative base — something he was led to believe would grant him victory —with tough talk of sacrifice for everyone except large corporations who would be granted an additional $3.4 billion in tax cuts. In an effort to listen for the heartbeat of Ontario, he proved to be staggeringly tone deaf. As a result, Hudak himself is now barely employed — turned away by voters one week and by his remaining caucus members the next.

Team Hudak thought they were taking a page from the prime minister’s playbook — but they misread the material. For all his instinctive inflexibility, Harper has proven himself able to gauge the mood of voters with greater care than his Ontario cousins. Unlike Hudak, his cuts have not been boldly shouted at citizens. They have come quietly: with infrastructure funds that never actually flowed, defence dollars that were returned slyly to the government treasury and public servants who were let go in the dark of night, not during sunlit news conferences.

Harper’s approach has proven fiscally effective as the budget deficit has been whittled down to where a surplus is now plainly in sight — setting the stage for an election budget that he needs badly to help resuscitate Conservative chances at re-election. It is the prospect of this growing surplus that guarantees the federal election of 2015 will not be a repeat of the Ontario campaign of 2014.