MONTREAL—With about a year to go in Stephen Harper’s third mandate, policy wins are becoming few and far between for the ruling Conservatives.

Time and time again over the past parliamentary year the government has turned what could have been policy gold into lead.

As often as not, a chronic incapacity to approach policy as more than a tool to drive a wedge in the electorate was to blame, with diminishing returns to the Conservatives.

One needs to look no further than to the government’s handling of electoral reform or its run-ins with the Supreme Court to find recent instances of self-inflicted damage.

But perhaps the most vivid illustration of the perils of a my-way-or-the-doorway policy mantra pertains to the energy agenda that has long been at the heart of the prime minister’s economic strategy.

Even for a government that has never been in the business of giving Canadians more than a glimpse into its policy thinking, the absence of a designated ministerial pitcher to talk up the decision to give the green light to the Northern Gateway pipeline Tuesday was a stunning admission of how its handling of the issue has rendered it toxic.

In the worst of the constitutional storms of the early nineties, Brian Mulroney managed to keep more bridges with non-Conservative allies open than Harper has on a project that his government has defined as strategically important for the national interest.

In the House on Wednesday the Conservatives — starting with the prime minister — retreated behind scripted lines that, when decoded, amounted to the government limply washing its hands off the Northern Gateway process.

Unless they step up to the plate and defend the merits of their policy choices, the Conservatives will have nowhere to go but down in next year’s federal election.

That starts but does not end with British Columbia where only magical thinking would allow the ruling party to believe that not engaging with the public in a serious conversation on Northern Gateway will alleviate the risks to its 21 seats.

Those risks cannot be mitigated by prospective gains in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the two provinces where the impact of the Northern Gateway decision is guaranteed to be more positive for the Conservatives.

They have little or no room to grow in either province

Then there is Ontario, whose electorate seems to be at ideological cross-purpose with the federal Conservative brain trust.

The party has yet to come up with a popular figure to fill the vacuum created by the loss of Jim Flaherty and it will nowhere more sorely miss his voice than in the late finance minister’s home province.

Based on last week’s provincial election results, Harper may have a lot of convincing to do to win back the moderate conservative Ontario voters, whose support polls show his party has lost since 2011.

More than a few of those voters were instrumental in giving premier Kathleen Wynne a majority mandate and a clear majority of those who cast a ballot in Canada’s largest province last week supported parties that, in contrast with the Harper Conservatives, see government activism as a virtue.

Should the pattern of next year’s federal vote replicate that of the June 12 election, not even a division of the progressive vote between the Liberals and the New Democrats will give Harper a win in Ontario.

Among the four major provinces, Quebec finally remains a wash for the Conservatives. With sovereignty off the agenda, the gloves of the majority of Quebec federalists who dislike Conservative policies are coming off.

The widest political consensus in Quebec these days involves a collective wish to turn the page on the Harper era. There is no guarantee that the party can even hang on to its five seats next year.

This was supposed to be the year when Harper broke through the dark clouds of a Senate scandal by moving forward shiny new policy.

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Things did not work out according to plan.

While the fallout from the scandal has been contained, the trust deficit that Harper must overcome between now and next year’s election has steadily increased.

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

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