On Tuesday, April 12, the evening of the English-language leaders’ debate, a couple of NDP strategists were so jazzed they could barely contain themselves. But they couldn’t say a word.

Instead, campaign director Brad Lavigne and Karl Bélanger, Jack Layton’s senior press secretary, stayed silent in what was comically called the NDP “spin room” — an old storage closet in Ottawa’s Government Conference Centre, draped for privacy and containing a single screen TV with a direct feed to the debate onstage.

They could be overheard by their nearby counterparts in the other parties and so had to be satisfied with significant looks and nods. As campaign director Lavigne recalls: “At that moment we knew our guy had just scored a home run.”

The home run was what political junkies call the “pivot.” You get lobbed the big question and you pull off a pivot, smashing it right back in your opponent’s face and taking the game. Or you flop around like a dead fish.

“Why do you have the worst attendance record in the House of Commons?” Layton challenged Michael Ignatieff, adding the Liberal leader missed 70 per cent of the votes. Layton threw in that Canadians who don’t show up for work don’t expect to get promoted.

Oddly, Ignatieff was smiling as he launched into his answer. He began talking about his “respect for the institution of Parliament” before his voice rose to angry indignation: “So don’t give me lessons on respect for democracy.”

Veteran Toronto MP Jim Karygiannis groaned along with Liberals across the country. Apparently, Ignatieff didn’t understand the pivot. Karygiannis (Scarborough-Agincourt), who easily spends more time in his riding than in Parliament, was practically screaming answers at the TV screen: “Look, you’re a professional pol, Jack. You stay in Ottawa. I’m out working hard and talking to real Canadians, listening to them and working with them. That’s ... what I’m doing.”

Extensive Star interviews with campaign insiders and politicians show a large slice of the loss must be attributed to the arrogance of the Liberal leader. In the end, a central Conservative criticism against Ignatieff — that he was arrogant — turned out to be true. It wasn’t the demeanour of a man deliberately trying to be haughty. Rather, as a Liberal communications expert noted: “Any political party is like a Masonic Lodge. You’ve got to know the secret handshake — and he didn’t know what he didn’t know.”

Layton’s pivot in the debate was a turning point in the federal campaign. It took about a week to gain traction. But by April 19, Liberal pollster Michael Marzolini privately read his numbers and was horrified to see that the NDP had overtaken the Liberal Party of Canada.

The Star has learned that the bulk of debate preparation was done before the election writ was even dropped, going back as far as 2009; that the key question on attendance was not seriously addressed during debate preparation; and that Marzolini twice requested Ignatieff rehearsal tapes be sent to his focus groups, but they were not available.

Some Liberals told the Star Ignatieff felt he didn’t need to rehearse.

Once begun, the party’s plunge continued. By April 21, a CROP poll in Quebec for La Presse reported the NDP had surged ahead of the Bloc Québécois — a historic finding — and by the next week, the last of the campaign, all national polls had weighed in with the same stunning finding: the NDP was in second place behind the Conservatives. The Grits were hurtling to the catastrophe of election night, in which they dropped 43 seats to a 34-seat rump, while Layton, with 102 seats, was suddenly destined to be Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. The Conservative, meanwhile, motored on to a 167-riding majority.

The debate fallout shattered a prominent myth of this campaign: that Ignatieff was a dead man walking when the writ was dropped, and that the constant barrage of Conservative attack ads (“He didn’t come back for you”) did him in. “This hatchet job is complete,” a defeated Ignatieff said.

Insiders now cite other issues. They complain of a pre-election leader’s refusal to listen to the input of MPs who weren’t favourites. Ignatieff ignored advice passed up the chain-of-command from pollster Marzolini to stay on message. Instead of sticking with the Liberal platform of the “family pack” of social issues, Ignatieff ad-libbed. Snapped a disgusted Liberal: “He thought he was Phil Donahue.”

On election night, Ignatieff inexplicably went on television before even knowing he’d lost his own riding and talked as if he had options other than resignation.

Marzolini believes it didn’t have to be a disaster. It had been a good launch, and his daily polling showed upward trending with nice surges of three or four points. Media reports were upbeat, the campaign team was buoyed, then, blam! Where were you, Mr. Ignatieff?

Still, a problem already existed. “I had a concern we were off-message and I brought it to the attention of the campaign,” said Marzolini in an interview. “What may have worked at the rallies just didn’t register with the general public ... We didn’t need (the Ignatieff tour) to talk about Stephen Harper; we needed the national campaign to talk about Michael Ignatieff.”

It was more than arrogance, says Jason Kenney, the immigration minister who pounded the pavement for years and deserves a lion’s share of credit for big Conservative gains in the GTA.

“I don’t want to sound unkind, but frankly it was laziness,” Kenney told the Star. “There were 32 Liberal MPs from the GTA, and of the hundreds of ethnocultural events I attended in the past five years going from Scarborough to Mississauga, typically there were no Liberals there ... They treated the ethnic communities like passive vote banks owed to them through the supposed myth of Pierre Trudeau. They mailed it in.”

Kenney represents another myth of this campaign: that the Conservatives lost faith in the last week and were convinced they couldn’t get enough seats in Ontario to help form a majority.

Hokum, says Kenney.

“I was always very confident we were going to see a significant breakthrough in the GTA. I felt it on the ground. In the first week I was campaigning in Eglinton-Lawrence (lost by Joe Volpe) in 80 per cent Liberal territory and people were complaining about the arrogance of the Liberal party.”

He got the same reaction everywhere across the GTA. “It was phenomenally positive.”

In the end, the Conservatives went from 14 seats to 31 in the GTA, while Liberals plunged from 32 to 7. In the 416 area code, the Conservatives picked up 8 seats and the Liberals lost 14.

Throughout, the Conservatives were running a stealth campaign in plain sight.

Harper’s treatment of the media made headlines — particularly the five-question limit. Meanwhile, on April 24, Easter Sunday and the Sikh holiday of Khalsa, the PM was at the Coptic Centre in Mississauga announcing a new international centre for religious freedom.

In the front row, Kenney was beaming because he knew the new centre would be a big vote getter. He knew insider national polls were showing, for example, a 70 per cent support rate nationally among the ethnic Chinese population.

At the Coptic Centre that Sunday, Kenney had his “rainbow coalition” of multicultural Canadians. These were natural Conservatives, he said, and “their vote for you has that potential of being a long-term realignment.”

Of Harper’s announcement, Kenney said: “You are speaking to their values ... I’ll be honest with you about the extent to which the mentality of today’s Liberal party is characterized by the kind of flippant secularism of the Annex.”

“If you go inside most places of worship around the GTA today,” Kenney said, “the large majority are new Canadians who have a higher degree of appreciation of religious freedom than your average university professor at the University of Toronto.”

The NDP also chafes over what they see as a campaign myth: that Layton was lucky and an election-day winner because of vote splits. Layton’s chief of staff, Anne McGrath, argues the party had worked hard through the three previous elections, since Layton became leader in 2003. “It wasn’t luck. We were trying to grow. We did our research ... We were ready to catch the wave when it came.”

Still, Marzolini was gobsmacked. “I’ve never seen in 580 election campaigns anybody as popular as Jack Layton ... Basically, he was on a par with Don Cherry in the eyes of Canadians. He was right up there with David Suzuki and Canadians think Suzuki walks on water.”

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On March 16, they sent it to a focus group in Toronto and “it was a hit,” said Lavigne. They decided to proceed and the ads were produced in the next few days.

Still, even Lavigne was “surprised at how ill-prepared he was for that line of attack.” It had been in the media over the previous year, he said. “You have to inoculate yourself against those kinds of questions.”

Inoculations come in debate prep. That’s a sore point for some Grits.

Both Kenney and Lavigne talk about the hard work their leaders did preparing for the debates.

But a disgruntled Liberal veteran said of Ignatieff: “He didn’t want to do the debate prep. He said he’d been a championship debater at university and had spent his life as a TV journalist.”

A senior adviser to Ignatieff, tasked with dealing with Star questions, confirmed rehearsal tapes were made but couldn’t say who had access.

When told some Liberals claimed there had been little debate prep, the adviser said: “I don’t think that’s entirely accurate.”

Instead, according to this insider, “the bulk of it occurred prior to the campaign,” a situation that was attributed to the “go-go-go” nature of a cross-country campaign.

Asked about the attendance question, the adviser said; “It was asked in scrums” by reporters. Part of debate prep? No comment.

The issue scored hugely for New Democrats at the door. The party targeted low-vote-turnout Liberal MPs Gerard Kennedy in Parkdale-High Park and Mario Silva in Davenport. NDP candidates Peggy Nash and Andrew Cash trounced both Liberals respectively.

Karygiannis — a scrappy opponent on the ground — has never been an Ignatieff favourite. He says his efforts to work hard among ethnic voters in other ridings were rebuffed. “What am I, chopped liver?” he asked. “(Ignatieff) didn’t utilize all his players,” he said. “We’ve got a whole team and we didn’t take on the Jason Kenney effect. I tried to help but I got sidelined. Anybody who objected to anything the leader said got sidelined.

Marzolini’s point — which he had hammered in caucus — was that only if voters clearly understood that Ignatieff had a plan would he have the credibility to attack Harper. He never got that credibility.

Of course, Ignatieff certainly can’t be expected to shoulder the blame alone. There were other factors, including a general sinking of morale after the debates.

Liberal consultant Jamie Carroll, the party’s former national director, said he thought Ignatieff “ran as good a campaign as possible and better than the last election (under Stéphane Dion).”

Ignatieff also made it clear to reporters he intended to continue to work hard as leader, no matter the results. By the last weekend, panicky Liberals were apparently telephoning campaign director Peter Donolo to say the leader had to go.

And on election night, addressing the Sheraton Centre crowd before the vote, Ignatieff promised: “I will play whatever part that the party wishes me to play as we go forward to rebuild, to renew, to reform.”

The senior adviser says Ignatieff meant he would stay. That coincides with scuttlebutt among Liberals that Ignatieff was still reasonably upbeat because he’d been told they’d win 65 seats and still believed a minority Conservative government and a coalition with the NDP were possible when he hit the stage on election night.

“I don’t know why they told him that,” said a source. “Probably to keep up his spirits. They tried to gild the lily, put lipstick on the pig, polish the turd.”

The adviser said Ignatieff’s decision to resign the morning after the election was a joint one made with senior staff in Ignatieff’s room at Toronto’s Sheraton Centre. With results clearer, they realized “there was a necessity to step aside.”

That’s not how a Liberal detractor put it. In the hyperbole of dark humour in the savage game of politics, he characterized Ignatieff’s idea he could choose his future with the party this way: “That’s nice but it’s not going to happen ... They left the revolver, closed the door and left him to make the decision.”