It's all about Harper

When Canadians awake next Wednesday they will likely find they have willed a Harper majority or minority. Even a Liberal minority or a coalition of the unwilling is not out of the question.

The NDP will have done well, though Layton's "running for the top job" made him seem not particularly well anchored in reality and may have cost him votes, notwithstanding the considerable achievements of provincial New Democrat governments in recent years serving as an example of what they could do if elected.

In closely contested ridings some New Democrats will have found themselves voting Liberal to stop Harper, just as will have some Greens, albeit the latter more comfortably. New Democrats will have crossed their fingers in the hope that Liberals will have turned to the NDP in ridings where that was the best way of stopping their common nemesis. Greens will be assessing how much good they have done the planet this time by their efforts on the Canadian political stage.

How much vote parking was at work in the outcome will have been revealed early election night by outcomes in a number of Nova Scotia ridings. Here, where what matters is how the vote configures riding by riding, we will again lead the country.

Among the disquieted

As to the prospects of a Harper victory, I continue to count myself among the disquieted. Despite following the campaign closely, I remain unsure of what to expect from a Harper majority, or even from a significant increase in the number of seats on his side of the House. Last time Harper's trick was to outline a very narrow platform (compared at least to what many believe he really wishes to achieve), this as a way of calming fears about his earlier convictions as a Reformer.

This time, as I write, he has yet to release his platform, suggesting instead that the issue for this election is trust, that he will continue as he has. Harper's practice, in the last few months, has been to target particular groups of Canadians and offer them and their issues very modest amounts of money. This piecemeal, reactive approach to government may well be how he continues to govern if re-elected.

But his unwillingness to offer a clear platform reinforces concern that he is tired with this approach and, if re-elected, will claim a mandate to accomplish much more of a neo-conservative shift in the country than we might reasonably expect.

Harper's reliance upon the now deposed thinking of the Australian Prime Minister, his implicit commitment to American Republican values and indeed his rush to the polls, when he was so opposed to such use of Prime Ministerial power, works against trust. The fact he has apparently not been good at hiring reliable, moderate staff and that he has a Cabinet that must rank among the country's worst suggests he doesn't have a lot of talent on which to draw to make the more moderate decisions the majority of Canadians would wish from him.

Harper could, of course, provide a specific, more limited platform in the dying days of the campaign. But this will likely be insufficient to assuage the concern of many. His flip-flop on the democracy of a fixed four-year term has made such a platform of promises considerably less convincing than it was the last time.

Debate performances

As I write, the election outcome is far from settled. In the French debates, M. Dion breathed new life into Liberal prospects in Montreal while Gilles Duceppe cashed in years of hard work on behalf of Les Quebecois. The fact that Dion did well may effectively have displaced the dollars that Harper's crew have spent to destroy his image. And the fact that he stuck to his environmental commitments may have helped deliver some of the vote he will need to remain competitive elsewhere. Elizabeth May, with great political instincts, knew she was speaking not in or to the French in Canada, but to the rest of Canada, and used her time with effect.

Harper needed to show Quebecers an image of himself they might come to like, but he seems to have failed in this effort, even if some of the Quebec press surprisingly remain his best friends in the province.

I will leave assessment of the English language debate to those many Canadians who enjoyed it. But this election remains about whether in our best, considered, judgment we believe Steve Harper will do what most needs to be done at this time in our history, for the future of our nation.

And it is about how we decide to register our judgment on this question.