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There is a possibility that Stephen Harper could still be our prime minister this time next year — maybe until 2019, or beyond.

But it’s still more likely that he will be gone by 2016, left only to haunt our dreams. It’s just the way of his going that has yet to be determined.

Here are some of the scenarios:

He resigns

I think this is less and less likely. Still possible, though.

Some pundits have rightly pointed to the fact that Harper recently dumped Julian Fantino from Veterans Affairs, which looks very much like taking out the garbage before an election run. And he has moved one of his most trusted advisors, Jenni Byrne, out of his office and back over to Conservative HQ to run the campaign.

The Conservatives have edged up in the polls in the last six months and the Liberals have slumped ever so slightly. It’s actually a little unclear whether the recent spate of terrorism headlines is helping Harper’s numbers, but it hasn’t hurt. The lower price of oil damages the economy in the Conservative heartland but probably helps in battleground Ontario.

And the Conservatives have a lot more money to spend between now and the official start of the election campaign than any of the opposition parties.

Still, anything less than a majority victory would be a decisive defeat for Harper (see below) and would see his career come to a sticky end rather than, say, finishing with the “triumph” of a balanced budget.

To be sure, it would be discourteous to his party for Harper to walk away just months from an election. But chivalry towards his subalterns has never been his most striking characteristic.

Brian Mulroney waited until February to announce he was going before a required fall election — and he was at 21 per cent in the polls at the time. Harper would leave a successor a more respectable standing than that.

He loses

This is an easy one. If the Liberals under Justin Trudeau or (less likely) the NDP under Tom Mulcair win the most seats in the next election — even if they don’t win a majority — Harper is likely gone.

Could he hang around in the hopes of a Pierre Trudeau-like resurrection, thus courting a Diefenbaker-like self-destruction? I suppose so.

It’s much more likely that he would step down on election night, then go away and make money somewhere.

He holds a minority

Harper’s Conservatives have seldom been anywhere near majority territory in the polls in nearly two years. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen — it just means it’s less likely.

I think Stephen Harper is probably gone as prime minister within a year — even with a divided opposition. His only real chance to stay in power is an outright majority, which is a long shot.

A much more plausible scenario is that Harper’s party gets the most seats but faces a larger combined opposition of Liberals and New Democrats.

Of course, Harper faced the same situation following both the 2006 and 2008 elections and survived. In 2008, he even stared down an attempt to form a Liberal-NDP coalition under Stéphane Dion.

But the circumstances would be very different this time. In 2006, Paul Martin quickly resigned as party leader, accepting the result of the election as a repudiation of the Liberals by the public. Some people urged him to fight on, to perhaps even refuse to hand over the keys to 24 Sussex. He wisely refrained. The Liberals had lost.

You could have interpreted the election results in 2008 in many ways — but not as an endorsement of Dion, who had run a woeful campaign. By the time the opportunity for a coalition with the NDP arose, the Liberals were already in the process of unceremoniously dumping Dion as their leader. The public was unimpressed and the coalition bid failed.

This time it would be different. Trudeau and Mulcair will both campaign claiming to be the one true Harper-slayer. Indeed, the campaign between them for this crown promises to be fierce.

Campaign rivalries might make it difficult for the Liberals and NDP to work together to oust Harper after the election. But those same dynamics would make it impossible for them to explain to their supporters why they’d prop him up. They’d be under pressure to find a way, soon after Parliament meets, to dump the Harper Conservatives. And they would.

Strategy and tactics

Some people have argued that Stephen Harper has created a “dictatorship” through his party’s electoral corruption (the robocalls scandal), his manipulation of rules on party funding and the Elections Act, and his emasculation of rival institutions — including his own caucus.

The opposition parties could easily test this proposition by running a single candidate in each riding, thus removing Harper’s biggest electoral advantage: a split opposition.

They won’t do that, for two reasons. First of all, they don’t really believe it is a dictatorship. Each party thinks it can come to power under the existing rules.

Second, the rivalry between the Liberals and NDP is so fierce that they might prefer to see Harper win another majority than see the other emerge as the clear “progressive” champion.

That’s not how their supporters see it, of course. Ordinary Liberals tend to rank the NDP as their second choice and New Democrats pick the Liberal party second. They’d rather see the two parties work together than allow another Harper government. Pity them.

In last year’s Ontario election, some elements of the union movement had enough clout to drive strategic voting by supporting Liberals in certain regions and NDP candidates in others. But provincial law allows the unions to advertise in a way the federal law does not.

Other groups, such as Leadnow, will encourage voters to vote tactically in the coming federal election. But they tried this in 2011 without discernible success.

Summing all the scenarios, I think Stephen Harper is probably gone as prime minister within a year — even with a divided opposition. His only real chance to stay in power is an outright majority, which is a long shot.

But if he is with us for another term as prime minister, it won’t be because we are living in a dictatorship. It will be because his opponents failed to get their act together.

Paul Adams is associate professor of journalism at Carleton and has taught political science at the University of Manitoba. He is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail and EKOS Research. His book Power Trap explores the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties.

Follow Paul Adams on Twitter @padams29

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