AYLMER, QUEBEC | It took two days for the Canadian election campaign to turn, take on water, roll over, and sink to the bottom. The refusal of two party "leaders" to allow the Green Party to participate in the televised debate deserves to be called anti-democratic. And how about petulant, arrogant, unfair, and stupid? They all work.

Harper's is easiest to understand. How could he welcome Elizabeth May to anything, given what she represents for his base constituency, the oil industry.

She put it well: Harper, she said, has shown himself not to be a strong leader but to be a strong-arm leader.

What about Jack Layton? Who expected a social democrat to slam the door on the environmentalist, the only female leader, and on a party which stands for a few new ideas?

This election is Layton's great opportunity, as he sees it. With the Liberals in disarray, saddled with a leader who cannot galvanize the nation, the NDP finally has a chance to displace the Liberals. Since the neo-Cons pushed the benign, traditionalist Tories out of the right side of the political spectrum, Layton sees the NDP pushing the complacent Liberals off the left side.

But if Harper is the keen strategist so many journalists insist he is, this would be a terrific chance to deliver a decisive boot to Layton and the NDP. Harper should welcome May to the debate, to the whole campaign, because May and the Greens will only take votes away from the NDP (maybe from Liberals). Will Conservatives like what they see in May and switch their allegiance? A switch by Harper would put Layton on the defensive so that he would follow suit, looking like a follower not a leader, or he would insist she still be excluded, and find himself over-ridden and ignored.

Except why would Harper bother?

This suits a callous man. And it is more to Conservative benefit that the enemy be divided as much as possible. If he weakened the NDP, that leaves a traditional two-party race with the Liberals. And here Canadians usually opt for the 'small-l' liberal side. No, better a buoyant NDP to draw off support from Liberals, unimpressed with Dion. Divide and conquer, is the idea.

Which makes Layton's long-term thinking look lame. Shouldn't he be consolidating his allies, countering Harper's divide-and-conquer tactic? Layton does have charisma, but he would add leadership to that quality if he could build a coalition of progressive people, starting with the Greens.

There is open talk within Canada's progressive community of the need to rebuild the progressive alternative to the American neo-Con tide. These people want a new party, one built of NDP, Green, and all other progressive-minded people. They want this new movement to be something more than an old fashioned politics-only machine.

Instead, Layton is basking in the polls and Big Media coverage, thinking these two forces will help avoid what has killed his party every time in the past: reliance on fickle, easily-influenced polls and on a corporate media which will bury the NDP when push comes to shove.

Bob Rae quit the NDP because, in his words, they don't want to win. By saying no to Elizabeth May, Jack Layton has done this much: he's proven Rae wrong.

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Copyright © 2008 Fred Ryan/Log Cabin Chronicles/09.08