Harper Manages To Fumble Two Pressing Issues

Time frays the edges of all governments; first they lose their focus, then their communications mojo. But what's happening here has more twisted roots with deeper implications. A ruling party with minority attitudes and contrarian objectives is now struggling to explain itself to the majority. Its determination to restore past military glories and manage rather than fix the environment puts it at odds with Canadians more inclined to peacemaking than combat and who believe protecting the planet is this generation's great project. Conservatives aren't entirely off base. Like Liberals before them, they recognize that Canada's capacity to exert influence abroad is weak and that getting serious about meeting Kyoto targets would cost votes. Those are shared political realities; they are not the specific Conservative problem. What's keeping this government in the spotlight and wrecking its carefully constructed reputation for competence is the assumption that enough of the people can be fooled enough of the time. The raw math of a four-party Parliament supports the equation. But it's challenged by another hypothesis, the one that holds that within the madding crowd lurks a mysterious collective ability to reach a consensus that's surprisingly wise. Conservatives are counting too much on one and too steeply discounting the other. They relied on support-the-troops jingoism to distract attention from the mission and from a fundamental change in military purpose. And they let the party's base skew the government's political judgment until expecting consumers to be environmentally responsible seemed too much to ask. http://www.thestar.com/opinion/article/208967 [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on May 2, 2007]

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