What Now Mr. Harper?

You blew it!!

You managed to alienate Canadians enough that the best performance by Canadian athletes in the Olympics, on Canadian soil, did not cause you to even enjoy a temporary bounce in your polling numbers.

The result was a Throne Speech that was forgotten 5 minutes after the GG finished reading it and a budget, whose most positive review was it is bland, innocuous and inoffensive.

You are in a political pickle. Budgets are really the only tool you can use to pick up more support from voters and the one you just produced will be a complete failure in achieving that. You see, restraint is not cool. It does not gain votes. You need to provide something to grab the attention of voters and there is nothing in the budget to do that. Certainly there is the attack on the public service that all Conservative governments do when their fiscal incompetence forces them to deal with deficits that they create. Unfortunately, that kind of thing only appeals to your base it does not cause others outside of it to support the Conservatives. Indeed, I would argue that you will lose more votes than you will gain. The decisions in this budget are going to negatively effect over 150 thousand people in the National Capital Region and Eastern Ontario directly and indirectly effect 100s of thousands more. That is more than 25 seats that you just put in play without any counteracting benefit elsewhere.

Now the one thing that might have stuck out from that past few days, the national anthem proposal, is being withdrawn after just three days, probably because your internal polling demonstrated that Canadians recognized it for the deeply cynical move that it was and they rejected it in droves.

This was the last week where you had the opportunity to drive the agenda for the next few months. Instead, now it will be the Opposition as they hound you some more on issues that caused you to prorogue Parliament in the first place. It is ironic that you took this action to escape those issues only to be faced with them again just 10 weeks later but from a political position much weaker than it was before Christmas. A position you find yourself in because of your own actions and decisions.

I am not certain how you are going to escape this one. The once compliant media is becoming more critical and the Opposition seems content to let you twist in the wind for a few more months waiting for the negative reactions of Canadians to your government over the last few weeks to be cemented in their consciousness.

I am certain you have some things up your sleeve but will any of them be any different than we have seen from your crew before? Can you be truly innovative in your approach?

I guess we will see but if not then I suspect we are beginnning the death watch for your government and your term as the leader of the government of this great country.