OTTAWA

Canadians are now living through the fifth year of a phenomenon. Flipping political history and conventional wisdom upside down, a federal party has taken and is holding power by leading the country where it doesn’t want to go.

More than a result of new electoral math, Conservative success is a product of seeing the political universe through a different prism. Love or loathe him, Stephen Harper has achieved with shrewd calculation and superior organization what most here in the national capital believed was impossible.

Even if the ultimate objective of complete control remains elusive, the Prime Minister and his ruling party have marched a long way since defeating Paul Martin in the winter 2006 campaign. Helped enormously by the Liberal Big Red Machine’s loss of traction, Harper and his coalition of Progressive Conservatives and Reformers are firmly established as the prevailing federal force.

Quite simply, Harper’s Conservatives are better than their rivals at every aspect of a blood sport increasingly played beyond the painted boundaries of traditional rules. A party that was little more than a late 80s gleam in Preston Manning’s eye is now the gold standard in raising money, mobilizing its core constituency and capturing ridings rivals once considered safe.

Progress that remarkable rarely has a simple or singular explanation. The Conservative evolution is no exception. Harper’s federal party learned much of what it needed to know from the Ontario Mike Harris Common Sense Revolution and continues to benefit from both a fissured opposition and an apathetic electorate. But the critical factor, the catalyst for Harper’s transition from chattering class laughingstock to the presumptive favorite to win a third consecutive mandate, was Conservative willingness to confront and then embrace a hard truth.

Tom Flanagan, once the Prime Minister’s mentor and now something of a nemesis, best deconstructs that challenge in his fine, must-read 2007 book, Harper’s Team. In it the University of Calgary political scientist concedes that Canada isn’t naturally the conservative country his party wants it to be. Shifting the country on its political axis, Flanagan says, is slow work best done in almost imperceptible increments.

No other Conservative has been this candid about the ruling party’s tactics and strategy. “Small conservative reforms are less likely to scare voters than grand conservative schemes, particularly in a country like Canada, where conservatism is not the dominant public philosophy”.

Flanagan’s prophetic analysis is now an unfolding reality. This country today is not the country Conservatives inherited. For better or worse—and certainly to the qualified satisfaction of voters who share Harper’s brooding hostility to the Canada of Pierre Trudeau, Tommy Douglas and Joe Clark—this is becoming a different, sometimes difficult to recognize, place.

Flanagan’s prescience is not limited to the serial baby steps leading us from centre left to somewhere way off to the right. This Prime Minister’s pin-step progress only halts when the increments cross the threshold from imperceptible to unsettling.

Examples abound of Harper tripping himself and Conservatives by too obviously moving too far or fast. Musings about closet Liberals in high Ottawa places sucked the momentum out of the party’s 2006 surge. In 2008, a wholly unnecessary tilt at arts funding, coupled with bizarre advice to invest in a tumbling stock market, cost Harper a more decisive victory at the expense of the most vulnerable Liberal leader in decades, Stéphane Dion. Now Conservatives are doing it again by following a winter when Parliament was suspended a second time with a spring abortion controversy and a summer census conflict.

Those examples have a common denominator. Each forced voters to take a closer look at the Prime Minister and his party. When that happens, Harper bumps up against the low ceiling of support for a party that even after more than four years in power can only count on about one in three voters.

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If public acceptance is the medium, then the message is unusually clear. A Prime Minister who has already beaten the odds in winning and maintaining power presses his luck when the ultimate Conservative purpose becomes too obvious for Canadians to stomach.

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

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