Canada's election campaign knocked askew by crisis

Not long after Canada's five-week election campaign began last month, a reporter asked Prime Minister Stephen Harper what kind of vegetable he would be if he had to be a vegetable.

It was one of the last light-hearted moments on what quickly turned into an extraordinary campaign dominated by a single topic: the global economic crisis.

Harper is the first leader of a Group of Seven nation to fight an election since panic struck global stock markets, and his counterparts are sure to be watching closely.

They will note how the crisis demolished previous certainties. Two weeks ago, the ruling Conservatives were set to win next Tuesday's election with ease and quite possibly turn their parliamentary minority into a majority.

Now they will do well to keep their minority. Although Harper still leads, the fight has been much tougher than he can have imagined when he triggered the election in September.

At the time, Harper said Parliament had become dysfunctional and he needed a mandate to steer the country through a slowdown in the United States - Canada's biggest trading partner.

That approach "was basically rooted in the premise there were no really troubled times ahead," said Allan Tupper, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia.

This turned out to be a miscalculation. When pressed early on about the increasing signs of woe in the United States, Harper said there was unlikely to be any kind of market crash.

Even when stock markets began to plunge, he stuck to his guns and told Canadians not to panic and to look to the longer term. This was the point when he started to lose his previously healthy poll lead.

"If you keep repeating something that people have stopped believing, then you're going to be in trouble," said Pierre Martin, a political scientist at the University of Montreal.

Harper is painfully reserved and sometimes has trouble connecting with people, coming across as cold and aloof. His woes were ironically compounded by Conservative efforts to make him seem warmer.

As the campaign started, the Conservatives ran television ads showing a relaxed prime minister decked out in a casual sweater, talking about his family and showing how he was closer to the average Canadian than people might imagine.

This branding exercise jarred with the reality of a distant prime minister telling people they should not panic.

"This contradicted the image of the man in the sweater talking about his family," Tupper told Reuters. "The response showed the prime minister was out of touch... and unable to relate to Canadians as the message said he could."

In hindsight, Harper may have stuck too long to his initial plan, which had been to make one low-key announcement a day and let the media focus on the opposition Liberals, who want to bring in a carbon tax that the prime minister says would be a disaster.

"They didn't seem to have a clear vision of how to approach the situation," Martin told Reuters.

After the global financial crisis erupted, Harper stressed that the carbon tax would make things even worse.

Yet he seemed not to see that the focus was on him and his reaction to collapsing share prices, with reporters asking time and time again why average people didn't seem to think he understood their fears.

His opponents relentlessly accused him of being out of touch, a tactic which put him on the defensive. Speaking to a rally in Victoria, British Columbia, last Wednesday, Harper let slip his frustration.

"We're getting this criticism that somehow I don't understand the stock market, or I don't understand what people are feeling," he complained. "I'm criticised because I will stand back but surely to God, people want a prime minister who will stand back from panic in the market and make good decisions," he said.

Few reporters wanted to know about his announcements, not even those on usually high-profile topics such as health care. Under increasing pressure, his team began to make moves that opposition parties and commentators branded as errors.

After one deep plunge on the Toronto Stock Exchange, Harper was pilloried for suggesting it might be a good time to buy shares.

His comments about future government moves on the crisis were followed quickly by a Bank of Canada interest rate cut, prompting critics to accuse him of telegraphing the move.