Why Canada can't have a U.S.-style election campaign

For those who have trouble discerning between Canadians and Americans, here's a difference you can't miss: how election campaigns are run.

The American campaigns ahead of party primaries to determine who will become the standard-bearer in the presidential run are like reality TV. Canadian campaigns to form Parliament are designed to be ... boring.

Both are geared to ensure known party stalwarts get out to vote. In America, that is done by whipping up a frenzy on the extreme wings (where the people who vote in large numbers reside). In Canada, the strategy is to nudge core supporters toward the polls, while making sure everyone else has fallen asleep in front of their TV screens.

For our respective nations, both strategies work.

In Canada, candidates for the highest office in the land hire (using tax dollars) highly paid staff to ensure no media gets clear access to the candidate. All policy announcements are carefully crafted into packages released as talking points for a whistle stop somewhere, with only selected questions allowed, all of which must be easily ducked and dissembled before the next whistle stop. Repeat, ad nauseum.

In the U.S., political teams plot timelines to get their boss on the air with journalists for a half hour or more of intensive one-on-one. In their game, the more time and the more valued the interviewer, the more points awarded the candidate. If the candidate ends up in a fight with a media personality, so much the better, because that's how you get the actual voting lunatic fringe behind you.

That's how you get Donald Trump. And his impersonators.

That's how you get Wisconsin governor Scott Walker — who wants to be the Republican candidate for president — to say that building a wall between Canada and the U.S. is “a legitimate issue for us to look at.” On a national network news program.

Because, you know, the fringe loonies still believe the 9/11 terrorists came in through Canada. And these are the people who will pack the floor at the various primaries, and vote. Rational people, who would be appalled that a person could say that and then actually run for president will stay far, far away.

The Canada/U.S. Wall is purely a media issue. Because American candidates actually meet the press, they will be forced to answer such stupid questions. But as we have found, the candidates — even a respected moderate like Scott Walker — will not call the question of a Wall thousands of kilometres long stupid.

That's why the question isn't actually stupid, though. The question is being asked in counterpoint to Donald Trump's assertion that he will build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and send Mexico the bill. Say it often enough, and it becomes “legitimate” in some people's minds.

The assertion is monumentally absurd, though. It is itself a counterpoint to a stated plan to deport undocumented aliens — along with their children born in the U.S., contrary to the U.S. Constitution.

Another plan — deemed “legitimate” — would task the CEO of Federal Express to design a system that will track the movement of illegal aliens like packages.

None of these things will ever happen. Or we should pray they never do.

But serious politicians planning to become president of the most powerful nation on Earth must avow things like this are “legitimate issues for us to consider.”

Why? Because they want to win the primaries. And in the Republican Party, the primaries are overpopulated by irrational zealots who would not shy away from invading Canada if they thought a teenage terrorist with a pocket full of exploding doobies might emerge from here.

Contrast that with our Canadian campaign. Top-of-mind issue? The deficit, or the surplus, whichever way you want to hire an accountant to interpret things.

Either way, all proposed budget deficits so far amount to less than a rounding error against the total budget. Less than half a per cent of total spending. Likewise, any proposed budget surplus. Rounding errors all.

So while Canadian political leaders drone on about their respective managerial prowess in getting student loan defaults down to something manageable, we get to watch American candidates contemplate a space elevator from which they can more cheaply deport illegal aliens to a colony on the moon. That is what you do with aliens, isn't it?

We get to watch Donald Trump call a supporter up from the crowd during a speech to tug on his hair, proving once and for all that he isn't wearing a wig.

Imagine Justin Trudeau or Stephen Harper doing that? Can't see it. Nice hair, though, for all of them.

Perhaps the job of a Canadian journalist is to try to keep everyone awake until election day. Since, in this election, we really have nothing else to do. After all, we can't revoke people's citizenship like they want to do Down South, or build walls to keep out terrorists and dirt-cheap labour.

Vive la différence.

The harder you work to control, the less control you have

In an election, you can understand why candidates want control over what gets discussed and how campaigns are run. But maintaining this kind of control too tightly is like squeezing a handful of mud — the tighter you squeeze, the more mud oozes out between your fingers.

Over the weekend, this adage was proven for both the Liberal and Conservative party leaders.

On Saturday, a Postmedia article correctly pointed out that Liberal leader Justin Trudeau had declared he wanted purely local nomination races for the right to run as Liberal candidates, in all ridings. But in reality, the opinion piece claims Trudeau and his advisors have intervened in a record number of nomination contests, in an attempt to ensure favoured candidates win the nominations.

The article — by a columnist well-known for his strong support of the Tories — claims that nomination dates were changed in some ridings to give advantage to selected candidates. It also says that in other ridings, potential candidates were disqualified from running, presumably against the will of voters in local riding associations.

That central offices of national parties interfere with local campaigns is nothing new. If I wanted to run as a Liberal here, for instance, the party — not any group that I could gather to take over a nomination meeting — would need to make sure I really was, in fact, a Liberal.

If I turned out not to be a true blue (or make that red) Liberal, I should not expect to be allowed to run under the Liberal banner. Or the banner of any party whose leader and platform I could not be proven to support.

That's our system, no matter what Trudeau might have claimed regarding non-interference in local nomination races. Whatever such declarations, all parties will interfere with nomination races in selected ridings.

Does that make Trudeau less trustworthy than the other leaders? Depends on how you spin it. In this election, it's safe to suspect that there quite a few control freaks working in the central offices of all the political parties.

But the more you attempt to control things (especially things like information flow) the more things seem to leak out.

Over the weekend, CBC reported that a federal wildlife officer, Tony Turner, was put on leave (with pay) pending an investigation into whether he as a civil servant crossed an ethical line by writing and performing a protest song about prime minister Stephen Harper.

He and his church music group posted on Youtube a five-minute old-style folk song called Harperman. I found it amusing, but then, I would.

The song actually won a songwriting contest, and will be performed in a national sing-along on Sept. 17 (with or without Turner being present).

The question raised is about the expectation of civil servants to be non-partisan, especially considering the atmosphere of suspicion the Harper team has created in its relationship with the civil service.

The courts have already ruled that taking a job as a wildlife officer does not cancel that part of Canadian citizenship which allows one to participate in democracy. Civil servants are allowed to run for office (by taking a leave), or to door-knock, put up signs and all the rest for someone else, during a campaign. Just don't use taxpayers money or resources to do it. That right is reserved for the parties themselves under the new laws governing federal elections.

Just the same, civil servants must do their work in a non-partisan manner. All totally reasonable.

But writing a protest song about a control-freak prime minister? Does that really cross a line? If so, who gets to draw the line?

Here's a point that was raised in discussion around this issue. The Prime Minister's Office staff is highly paid — by tax dollars. Employed by and beholden to taxpayers, yet they are the most hyper-partisan group in the nation.

It's a perfect given that we expect the PMO to lie, prevaricate, manipulate, misdirect and spin wildly on the party leader's behalf, and not on ours. Right now, former and current PMO staff are involved in a case of direct bribery of a certain senator.

But a guy who researches the flight routes of migratory birds can't sing: “Harperman, it's time for you to go”?

Business as usual — and a perfect example of why so many voters have simply given up on voting. Free speech denied to one means it will exist for none. Is this right not worth defending? 

To me, it merely shows that the more pressure you put on highly educated and dedicated people, telling them that you can't speak, can't act, can't do what you think is right, the more these things are going to happen.

The more you try to put a chill on things, the more likely it becomes that someone will eventually light a fire. And the more credibility that will be given to people when they do it.

It's a good outcome when party leaders discover they can't control everything. It makes them more likely to seek consensus, rather than dictating everything.

We all know that leaders need to be in control, or they have no authority. I prefer that authority should flow more from the power of consensus, than the force of office.

Not-so-plausible deniability for clients at Ashley Madison

In our house, we have two computers. My wife has the laptop, and I prefer the one you can't lug around. We share an an email address, which is used as our online identity for I don't know how many site logins connected to a large number of largely forgotten passwords.

I also have my own private email address not connected to the laptop, so my wife need not be annoyed by my political junk, while browsing her stuff.

So, I wonder: since my email is listed on my blog sent to (I assume) billions of people around the world, has anyone used it to set up an account on the adultery web site Ashely Madison?

If so, the site's founder and CEO Noel Biderman says I have plausible deniability. If my email is discovered among the 30-odd million addresses — made public by a hacker group that revealed Ashley Madison's client list — I can claim I've been hacked.

Wasn't me! Someone absconded my email for hookup opportunities! In 30-odd million cases!

In my case, I trust my wife would believe me. I am terrible at keeping secrets and there's no way I could hide or plausibly explain away an adulterous affair to someone as insightful as my wife. Not that I've ever thought about that. Really.

But 30-odd million people thought they could get away with it. And now their email identities are public.

A whole lot of them work for government agencies, and used their government emails to sign up as a person seeking to cheat on their spouse, looking for someone who is also seeking to cheat on their spouse. And paying for the hookup service with a credit card. Setting themselves up for some pretty serious blackmail.

Ray Boisvert, a former assistant director of Canadian Security Intelligence Service asked the question that immediately pops up. Why on earth would you use your username, client ID from your credentials at work to log in and create an account on an adultery web site like Ashely Madison?

Well, obviously, so the spouse wouldn't find out. Better your boss at the school board, the attorney general's office, the RCMP or the other guys in the executive suite. Better any of them than your spouse.

One of the exposed emails belongs to the executive director of the Louisiana Republican Party, John Doré. He claims he signed on for research purposes.

Those of us with memories of the former Alberta government know how that goes.

But until Thursday at least, Noel Biderman was claiming Ashely Madison did not verify the emails of their clients for exactly this reason: someone could be falsely using your email account to look for hookups. He suggested out-of-date emails that no one uses anymore can be “harvested” by hackers and sold to people for this purpose.

No one can prove it's you out there cheating on your marriage, right? So you're OK. Thirty million-odd times.

Josh Duggar is a guy I never heard of before. He's a star (or used to be) of a reality TV show on the TLC network 19 Kids and Counting, about him and his devout fundamentalist Christian family.

Now we know he molested girls as a teenager, likes porn — and was a client for Ashley Madison. Another day, another tearful confession.

One wonders about the tearful confessions now being heard in the Pentagon, FBI, U.S. Homeland Security, Treasury, Justice, Department of State, to name a few Obama administration offices where service emails were used to compromise horny staff with sensitive portfolios.

Is everyone on the set of Homeland these days?

Duggar is reported to have paid just under a thousand dollars over the last three years for services rendered by Ashely Madison. Multiply that by 30 million and you can see how the site's owners want to sell an IPO, valuing the business at $1 billion.

Ashely Madison owns little more than a database and some rather vulnerable disks to store it on.

The hacker group says Ashley Madison's business plan is stupid, their entire client base is stupid and the whole $1 billion “thing” should be shut down.

Biderman believes he can plausibly deny this.

Ashley Madison is Toronto-based. There is a Canadian class action lawsuit filed against them seeking $760 million for the losses suffered by their sex-seeking clients who were outed by the hacker group's data leak. Who would be stupid enough to sign up for that?

The site has a button to click where you can pay them to delete and erase your client identity. The hacker group says that's impossible, and you would be stupid to use it.

Biderman and millions of others may be in deep denial these days. But plausible? Not so much.

Josh Duggar said two honest things when he came public: one is to admit that he is a hypocrite — which in his circles is a pretty serious thing. The other is to say you can choose your actions, but you can't choose the consequences.

Telling the truth about oilsands and climate change: good luck with that

"A lot of the oilsands oil may have to stay in the ground if we're going to meet our climate change targets."

— Linda McQuaig, NDP candidate for Toronto Centre

Well, wasn't that a blast for the federal election campaign: an NDP candidate from Central Canada in effect suggesting Alberta perhaps should not be developing its “dirty oil.”

It didn't take long for the bad stuff to hit the national fan, and it didn't take long for NDP leader Thomas Mulcair to clarify that the party was all for energy development, as long as it is done in an environmentally responsible way. So therefor both statements can be true at the same time.

Shortly after McQuaig's comments to the CBC, the Ontario Energy Board ruminated that TransCanada Corp.'s proposed Energy East pipeline to carry that dirty oil to a refinery in New Brunswick contained more risk than reward. Needless to say, New Brunswick premier Brian Gallant was not happy with that.

More recently, Alberta's environment and parks minister Shannon Phillips appointed a five-member panel to write a climate change action plan for the province.

Anyone can offer opinions online to the panel and one-day public sessions in Edmonton and Calgary are being arranged, with a deadline of early November for the plan's presentation. Good luck with that. Seriously.

Meanwhile, consumers are expected to believe that a 50 per cent shutdown of one single refinery in Indiana is responsible for gasoline prices rising by 15 cents a litre overnight — at a time when crude prices are at near-historical lows.

Hanging over all of that — and tying it all together — is McQuaig's truthful comment that Canada will never come near meeting a signed declaration committing us to a 70 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Not without leaving a lot of that 168 billion barrels of oilsands crude forever in the ground.

Canada produces about 726 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent a year. That's about two per cent of the global total. Canada's greenhouse gas emission target in our latest agreement is just under 220 MT per year.

China produces nearly a quarter of the current global total. The U.S. produces 18 per cent. If cutting greenhouse gas production by 70 per cent will save the planet, that's where the big cuts will have to come.

Good luck with that, too. I do mean that.

Let's look at what the experts have told us in the period of time between what McQuaig said, and what our environment minister said.

If we are to cut about more than 500 MT of C02 equivalent off our annual carbon footprint in 35 years, where would the cuts be achieved?

Federal government reports say transportation — cars, trucks, motorcycles, rail and domestic air travel accounts for about 98 MT of C02 per year. That's the largest category of production.

The entire oil and gas industry — minus the oilsands — accounts for only 19 MT. The oilsands, at current production accounts for 62 MT.

Add that up: it's 179 MT. So, if we outlawed all internal combustion engines and all air travel, and shut down the entire oil, gas and oilsands industry over the next 35 years, Canada would miss its sworn goal by 312 MT per year.

Under those conditions, I don't think many Canadians would still be around in 2050 to celebrate the achievement.

And that draconian effort would affect only 1.4 per cent of today's global emissions. Good luck to the rest of the world matching our reduction.

In other words, averting climate change in today's economy is not only more difficult than we imagine; it is more difficult than we can imagine.

So what does this have to do with the sudden spike in the price of gas, and Alberta's announced climate change action plan? Considering the task before us, the cynical mind wants to know.

One of the questions that have been put to Alberta's climate panel is how to put a price on carbon. If Alberta puts a carbon tax on gasoline, for instance, what's the most our government could add to the pump price without really putting a serious crimp on things?

Well, the gasoline industry just put an overnight 15 cents-a-litre bite on the gap between what was currently being charged and the theoretical max. You want a carbon tax on gas? Well, tack it on top of $1.20 a litre, and blame it on a partial refinery shutdown in Somewhere, Indiana.

I can't shake the feeling that we're being played here. Consumers do have a real appetite for reducing carbon pollution — except in vehicle fuel consumption, which is the biggest single source of carbon pollution. We also have a big resistance to personal sacrifice, when it comes to our lifestyle.

A secret planning document for the federal government, uncovered by the CBC, suggests up to 89 MT of CO2 can be saved in efficiencies in electricity production. Read: close all coal-fired power plants.

Now why would the feds even consider shutting down existing power plants over 35 years hoping to save 89 MT of greenhouse gas, while expanding oilsands production (already producing 62 MT) by approving bitumen pipelines to anywhere?

Don't blame Linda McQuaig for telling the truth.

In a fentanyl crisis, harm reduction needs to become an election issue

There's no such thing as a “normal” day in Vancouver's drug scene, but last Sunday must have broken all records for abnormality. In that one day, there were 16 potentially lethal overdoses — at least those which made it into the official record. In one hour alone, there were six.

The drug involved? It was a pink concoction of heroin, mixed with fentanyl.

Fentanyl is deadly — it's a painkiller hundreds of times more powerful than heroin and 80 times more powerful than Oxycontin, which is sold on the streets in fake form as green pills that contain fentanyl.

You can buy them in Red Deer, if you know the right (wrong) people. And we know that at least six people in Red Deer have been killed by fentanyl — or their drug dealer, depending on how you look at things.

The line between getting high on fentanyl and being dead on fentanyl is extremely narrow. But it is cheap for drug cartels to buy in bulk overseas, easy to mix with other substances, and to press into pills and distribute.

An overdose is easy to spot, and easy to treat, if someone calls for help in time. A drug called Naloxone, sold as Narcan, can be injected and within minutes it binds to the gateway cells in the brain than take in opiates, blocking opiates from having any effect.

In the case of a fentanyl overdose, blocking the effect means the drug user continues to breathe, and continues to have a heartbeat. Pretty simple.

The federal government continues to oppose at every opportunity community efforts to reduce the harm of drug addiction and to save the lives of people who have overdosed. Right up to the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously that Vancouver's safe injection program, Insite, must be afforded exemption from drug enforcement laws in order to operate.

As a result, although people do overdose on their illegal drugs at Insite, thus far, none of them has died from it. Which is a pretty amazing accomplishment.

Canada, it seems, is one of the top countries in the world for opiate abuse. And with the arrival of fentanyl in bulk on our shores over the past couple of years, B.C. has experienced overdose deaths at a rate of about two deaths every three days. In Alberta, the overdose rate in 2014 was reported at roughly one every three days.

An overdose from fentanyl is easily treated with Narcan at a harm reduction site.

Many would think these deaths are among street-level addicts. As if that makes it easy for us to look the other way. The experts who follow this are quick to point out that this is not the real picture.

Regular middle class teens, well rounded kids with a great future, go to a party and are given a green pill they believe is Oxycontin. Jack Bodie, 17, died from that mistake.

Amelia and Hardy Leighton, caring parents of a two-year-old, thought they'd inhale a recreational drug one evening. Not a good couple activity; it was fentanyl, and they died.

Some 11,600 tabs of fentanyl were reported seized in a police raid in Calgary earlier this year. You can safely bet a portion of them were bound for sale in Red Deer. Forty tabs were seized in Lacombe not too long ago. Each one could be a potential death.

The staff at Insite in Vancouver describe it this way. Fentanyl is bought as a bulk powder by drug gangs, and mixed down with other stuff in a bathtub and the appropriate green or red dye is added. It is then pressed into pills and sold.

Each pill is like a chocolate chip cookie. Some cookies have lots of chocolate (fentanyl) chips in them, some have just a few. Pick the wrong cookie and you die.

Jennifer Vanderschaege, executive director of the AIDS network in Red Deer said in an interview earlier this year that a big barrier to people reporting a friend's overdose is fear of exposure, and fear of legal reprisal. This is highly illegal activity we're talking about here, after all.

She'd like to see a law in the books like a Good Samaritan law, where people could call authorities and save a friend's life without having to fear exposure or reprisal.

Adrienne Smith of Pivot Legal Services in Vancouver would like to see the complete repeal of Bill C-2, the federal Respect for Communities Act.

The Supreme Court unanimously decided that Insite saves lives and should therefore get its legal exemption to operate.

The feds came out with Bill C-2 and said: “Sure, we'll give you your exemption, but you have to reapply for it every year, and every year anyone in the community and in law enforcement can come out and speak against it during a rigorous review process.”

Insite still operates precariously under Bill C-2, but the review process bar is so high, it's highly unlikely any other city could get a life-saving site like Insite. This, during a poisonous fentanyl crisis that kills people across the country every day.

Even in the unlikely event the Conservatives are defeated in this next election, a new federal health minister cannot issue another licence for a safe injection site, until Bill C-2 is repealed. The legal process just prohibits doing that.

Probably, some time or other in this long election campaign, someone will bring this to greater public attention. Saving lives should matter, during an election.

The internet is today's ultimate predator

Walter Palmer, the Minneapolis dentist who shot an iconic lion named Cecil just outside the safety of Hwange National Park in Zimbawe, says he regrets his actions.

Oh my yes, he most probably does. If you can find him, you could confirm that for yourself.

After a photo of him, smiling triumphantly (over Cecil's corpse) shot online round the world, his dental practice has been shuttered, with a giant poster saying Rot In Hell taped to the door.

It took but a day for 141,000 people to petition the White House to extradite Palmer back to Zimbawe to face charges of poaching. (The lion — a local favourite of the photo-safari tourist trade, and well-conditioned to be close to humans — was allegedly lured outside of park boundaries by use of a dead animal pulled buy a vehicle, with the surrounding area marked with attractive scent.) As of Thursday, White House staff are saying they are considering doing just that.

Walter Palmer has since gone to ground and he has become prey for stalkers that only the internet — today's ultimate predator — can create.

Well, that's $50,000 for a hunt well-spent, isn't it?

By now the whole world knows that Walter Palmer is a passionate hunter of endangered species. He has the money and resources to vet that passion, and until now wasn't that concerned who knew about it.

He hunts with a bow, which he holds to be a more honourable way to kill endangered species. Cecil was shot with a bow — up close enough and with a professional rifleman at Palmer's back — but was only wounded. The alpha lion was killed 40 hours later with a rifle shot.

Speaking of being alpha, Palmer claims he has bagged every animal but one on the Pope & Young scorecard of 34 North American big-game animals. Pope & Young is the bow-hunter's subset of the Boone & Crockett scoring system.

He's killed a jaguar, a bison and much more — even a rhinoceros. He's got a houseful of exotic pelts and regally-mounted heads with glass eyes.

And he's become another object lesson for people who do disagreeable things to practice their disagreeable acts in greater secrecy. If that's even possible anymore.

Rot In Hell has no wrath like that of a mob of online shamers.

We used to think that the rise of online communication would provide fertile ground for non-mainstream thoughts to flourish.

That may be true for some (the flourishing of porn and gambling, for instance), but more commonly now, common outrage drives the agenda of ideas.

You cross certain lines at your peril, because peril now lurks behind every online troll's vicious comments. Who knows what actions can follow the hateful comments that get posted online?

Even those who not cross lines lines of social acceptability can suffer. Consider the teens hounded into suicide by social media gangsters.

Walter Palmer is only the latest poster boy of online hatred, desperately trying to erase his online presence, because there's now a digital target upon him.

You may think he deserves public scorn. I certainly do.

But what has exploded around this wealthy dentist and his predilections for killing things is not exactly what our freedom to communicate has promised.

Perhaps this was to be expected. Really, there are people out there who could well use a change in perspective. Public scorn or shaming is a pretty effective tool to do that.

Palmer shows little mercy for his prey, as much as he has claimed kinship in nature with them, and claims that killing great beasts with razor-sharp arrows is a form of honour. So he should expect little mercy from people who honour his victims by voicing their outrage when they are killed.

But if we decry his lack of mercy, we should show some ourselves.

Lets not allow the internet to be judge and jury here.

I'm suggesting this guy is in a very scary place right now, and he does not deserve to be there. At some point, it should become safe for him to come out and show the world that he's learned something.

You don't kill things just because you can. It's a morality thing. We kill for food, we kill for shelter and clothing. We even kill because we have appropriated the habitat for our own use.

But these days, killing exotic animals — for pleasure, for thrills, or for bragging rights — crosses a line.

If the internet can be any good here, it can be to stop the practice of trophy hunting, without harm to its (hopefully former) practitioners.

Harper's “Prentice moments” were no mistake

At this early point in this long election campaign, I expect people will have turned their attention to the first leaders debate.

That's understandable, but let's not allow a couple of opening shots by the prime minister to be swept away by the flow of events before voters have a good chance to consider them.

There's a second new tactic on display in Stephen Harper's election arsenal. The first was to call the election early, creating the longest campaign in Canadian history. Pundits are welcome to go back and forth over that, to find out if the decision was actually useful.

I'm interested in the second tactic: Harper's over-the-top attacks on “the enemy.”

Not once, but twice so far in this campaign, Harper has gone out of his way to belittle the premiers of provinces whose support he will desperately need if he is to win another mandate. By way of what can only be construed as slurs against Ontario's Kathleen Wynne's government and that of Alberta's Rachel Notley, he also directly insulted the voters who elected them.

This was not just divisive, it was deliberate, and planned.

Ordinarily, actively alienating a sitting premier is not a good tactic in a federal election campaign. Recall back to 2008, when Newfoundland premier Danny Williams became incensed after he felt Harper had lied to him during a dispute over federal-provincial equalization.

Williams pulled the Canadian flag down off provincial buildings and endorsed an “Anything But Conservative” campaign in the following election. The result? Zero Conservative seats in Newfoundland and Labrador.

So what's his strategy with this open hostility to Kathleen Wynne and Rachel Notley? Is a similar shot at B.C.'s Christie Clark also in the works?

Ontario and Ottawa are at odds over infrastructure funding and a proposed provincial pension plan. Wynne complains that Harper simply won't return her calls and — as a Liberal leader herself — endorsed the federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau in the election.

Harper's response was simple arrogance. He said he recalled some early advice he received, that as prime minister he'd have best relations with premiers “who are doing a good job.”

In Harper's eyes “doing a good job” equals “being a Conservative.”

Economically, the federal government is not out-performing Ontario to any great degree. In fact, if there's any uptick in Canada's economic stats, it's due to manufacturing and exports numbers from Ontario. If Wynne's government has been in deficit budget positions, well, look at the numbers on Harper's record.

It just seems counter-intuitive to go out of your way to slag your partners in Confederation at a time when you are looking for support.

But Harper doubled down when he outright accused Rachel Notley's NDP government of incompetence.

Speaking in French for a small audience in Laval Quebec, Harper called the Alberta government a disaster. Twice. He said they were “incapable” of producing a budget. He said the government of Alberta is a “failed experiment.”

What's with that?

Harper himself was “incapable” of producing a budget earlier this year, on the deadline required. The downturn in federal revenue from natural resources (read: Alberta oilsands) needed more study, he said.

Harper's close friend and former cabinet colleague Jim Prentice was likewise unable to produce a budget on time, during his very brief tenure as premier — and in provincial politics.

In fact, it took mere minutes for commenters to call Harper's attack on the just-elected Alberta government a “full Prentice” moment.

Budget math must be hard, right?

Why would a political schemer like Stephen Harper think that insulting Alberta voters — who had just turfed a worn-out Tory dynasty — would be a good idea?

I believe Harper isn't looking for the votes of people who wanted a change in Alberta. He's not out to change minds or persuade anybody. Rather, he's out to galvanize his core, to rally them in what he see is an “us-against-them” war.

For some reason, in Harper's eyes, we're not all Canadians anymore. We're either Conservatives or something else. Harper doesn't want to unite Canadians behind a vision for us all, he just wants another mandate from his traditional core. And he wants to make sure that core all comes out to vote against change.

Remember how Harper once bragged that Canadian values are Conservative values. That was at a time when he had just won a majority government — with a minority of total votes. If you weren't with him, you just weren't worth counting.

That's not a strategy for building a national consensus. But the people who plot Harper's strategy must believe it's a way to stay in power. Otherwise, Harper wouldn't have said the things he's said.

What does that tell you about the qualities of a leader?