MONTREAL—The first stop of the extended 2015 campaign on Sunday night found Stephen Harper speaking at one of the most low-key election launches ever held in a major Canadian city by an incumbent prime minister.

Billed as the opening Quebec rally of the campaign, Harper’s appearance in the Montreal riding of Mount Royal spoke more loudly to the peculiar circumstances of his hasty election call and his limited prospects in Quebec than to a governing party hitting the ground running.

To put the attendance in perspective, on a Friday night last May, at a time when the campaign was months away, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair spoke to 1,500 Montreal supporters in one of the larger halls of the city’s convention centre.

About 300 people attended Harper’s opening show, including 40 or so candidates from across the province. They packed the kind of community centre room that Preston Manning and Stockwell Day used to book when the Reform/Alliance flew well below the Quebec radar.

Still, in the circumstances it would have been hard to find an audience more receptive to Harper’s national message than this particular one.

The Conservative economic case was to be the backbone of Harper’s campaign narrative. But then some major pieces failed to fall in place. The Trans-Pacific Partnership he was going to use to illustrate his successes on the trade front has yet to materialize. Canada’s economic indicators are not what the government expected at the time of its delayed spring budget in late April. Prospects for short-term improvements are slim.

That leaves the national security card: the other priority Harper listed when he called the election.

In Mount Royal — a riding that is home to the second-largest Jewish population in Canada — Harper’s staunch pro-Israel stance and his combative approach to the war against Islamic State resonate more loudly than anywhere else in most of Canada.

Mount Royal is anything but a bellwether riding. But it is also more than just a rare Montreal seat where the demographics could give a Conservative underdog a bit of an edge. Bragging rights are at stake, for Pierre Trudeau — the father of Harper’s nemesis — represented the riding in Parliament for all his time in politics.

Not that the Trudeau name ever crossed his lips on Sunday. In fact, the latest twist in the Conservative approach to the Liberal leader seems to involve banning his last name from its campaign material. It was absent from the speaking notes Harper and his Quebec lieutenant Denis Lebel used at the rally. In their mouths he was just Justin. (And no, before you ask, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair was not just Tom.)

As one Conservative insider put it, calling the Liberal leader by his first name alone has the double merit of belittling Trudeau while not reminding voters of a last name that echoes too positively with many voters for Harper’s comfort.

It is a small and ultimately petty gesture.

But the notion that the three-mandate prime minister of a G7 country would sit with his brain trust to come up with the idea of demeaning a rival by denying him the courtesy of using his last name is revealing of the mindset of this Conservative campaign and of the man who leads it.

Regardless of how one feels about their skills or their policies, the candidates running in this election — from Harper on down — are all engaged in public service, at cost to their private lives and their family time.

The Conservatives rightly take issue with the visceral hatred Harper elicits in some quarters. But when it comes to respect for those who engage in public service, a prime minister is expected to lead by example, and not to debase the political conversation.

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The 2015 campaign is young. But based on the tone of its first hours, it might not take long for a Conservative leader whose economic case is less persuasive than he would have liked and whose cabinet lineup has lost a lot of shine to morph into little more than a walking and talking attack ad.

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

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