Every once in a while a public policy is shaped here by something other than the rough hands of partisan politics. Leaving Canadian troops in harm’s way is not one of them.
By again extending Canada’s commitment to Afghanistan, Stephen Harper is altering the federal landscape. From the Remembrance Day timing of the prime minister’s confirmation of that decision to its safely-delayed repercussions, the abrupt change of course reeks of election positioning.
Only one among the many nebulous foreign and domestic pressures affecting the Conservative flip-flop is potentially measurable. Should the future unfold in the ruling party’s favour, the NDP will get a useful boost from public anger at the broken promise to bring home all but a handful of soldiers next summer.
Confusing as it sounds and counterintuitive as it seems, that political dynamic turns on a simple pivot. A competitive NDP is essential to Conservative prospects of retaining and strengthening their grip on power in the coming campaign.
Nik Nanos, the respected Ottawa pollster and analyst, explains how that works. “When you are in a minority situation where it’s difficult to win a majority on your own, then the next best thing is to reconfigure the opposition to your advantage.”
Like Liberals before them, Conservatives owe much of their success to vote splits among rivals to the left of the ruling party. The ruling party’s problem — the one the prime minister apparently moved to fix this week — is that those splits lose critical effectiveness as Liberals edge up opinion polls and the NDP slides down.
Not much threatens Conservatives more than essentially one-on-one battles with Liberals in the Ontario political heartland. No solution is more immediately appealing than giving the NDP a timely boost.
Fortunately for Harper, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff made that easy earlier this summer. By endorsing an Afghanistan transition from combat to training, Ignatieff handed Harper the opportunity he seized this week. Along with aligning Conservatives with Liberals on the contentious issue, the prime minister effectively anointed NDP Leader Jack Layton as the lone national champion for complete withdrawal of an exhausted expeditionary force.
Layton expects the popularity of that cause to help an NDP now down a couple of opinion poll points from its support at the end of the last election. Layton says Canadians who had already concluded that Canada has done its fair share in Afghanistan are now angry at the often callous treatment of wounded veterans.
Only an election will determine if that angst will change how ballots are cast. Much more certain is that the prime minister has found protective cover for a risky Afghanistan reversal.
While no strategy ever fully survives contact with the enemy — the Bloc will use the extended mission to its advantage in war-weary Quebec and a stronger NDP could hurt Conservatives in battleground B.C. — Harper has scored two tactical victories. He neutralized any Liberal advantage in outflanking Conservatives on a post-combat Afghanistan policy and then widened the all-important fissure to his party’s ideological left.
Best of all for Harper, the consequences of Canada’s hastily recalibrated Afghanistan position won’t be known until after the next federal election. Fears that the new role being promoted as behind-the-wire safe will ultimately prove deadly won’t be calmed or confirmed until after a campaign widely anticipated for spring.
War is often said to be diplomacy by other means. In this capital, it’s also politics by other means.
James Travers is a syndicated Toronto Star columnist.