The three federal byelections last week shifted the political landscape in favour of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives to an extent few observers and voters are aware and, because of a strategic Conservative decision on candidate selection for the Winnipeg North contest, gave the Liberals the sense and image of showing well while actually playing into Conservative hands.

A top Tory from Winnipeg told The Hill Times that had the Conservatives mounted the same candidate who ran in Winnipeg North in the 2008 election, Ray Larkin, whose daughter Marni Larkin is a senior director and organizer for the federal Conservatives in Manitoba, NDP candidate Kevin Chief would likely have won.

Instead, late last summer, after Mr. Lamoureux defeated a prominent member of the large Filipino community in the riding for the byelection nomination, the Conservatives dropped Mr. Larkin and selected a little-known member of the Filipino expatriate population, Julie Javier, who barely ran a campaign, avoided candidate debates and media interviews, featured a mobile poster mounted atop an automobile that sporadically appeared in the riding, and drew criticism from even Conservative party members for her lacklustre effort.

The end result gave Ms. Javier a paltry 1,647 votes, which NDP MP Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre, Man.) says came largely from a diehard knot of Filipino Conservative supporters who supported the tough-on-crime agenda Prime Minister Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) drew attention to on his only low-profile visit to the riding. Had Mr. Larkin been the Conservative candidate, after having won 5,033 votes and 22 per cent of the vote in the 2008 election, Liberal candidate Kevin Lamoureux, who resigned his provincial legislative assembly seat to contest the byelection, would have lost, the senior Conservative said.

It appears that despite allegations the Conservatives put up Ms. Javier to draw votes from the Liberals, the opposite was the case—Prime Minister Harper and the Conservatives wanted Mr. Lamoureux to win.

Party insiders say there is one main reason: They want Mr. Ignatieff to be leading the Liberal Party into the next general election. Mr. Ignatieff has the lowest personal voter support ratings on the federal scene, perhaps since Brian Mulroney, although not for the same reasons, and he has been unable to bring the party's support above the 30-per-cent threshold in public opinion polls.

Critics say he has no political instincts and makes mistakes. For example, last week he got the Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette riding wrong when he was addressing his caucus.

"If they lost all three, the knives would have been out," the Conservative said. Another told The Hill Times in an earlier interview after the byelections: "We're happy Iggy is staying."

It was the second time Mr. Lamoureux, a veteran of the Manitoba assembly, had resigned his provincial seat to run federally. The first time, in 2000, he lost a bid to defeat Mr. Martin in Winnipeg Centre. Mr. Martin predicts Mr. Lamoureux will give no boost to Liberal chances in Manitoba in the next federal vote, calling him a "dilettante" in the provincial political scene.

Mr. Martin and the senior Conservative agreed Mr. Lamoureux's victory will not threaten Conservative incumbents in Winnipeg going into the next federal election. "Rob Bruinooge [Winnipeg South, Man.]and Shelly Glover [Saint Boniface, Man.] are doing a good job, they're solid," the Conservative said.

Not wanting to be identified, he noted, as well that the Conservative candidate placement also meant Mr. Lamoureux was running against members of two minorities—the Filipino community and a member of the large aboriginal community that the riding is also home to.

Mr. Martin speculated that the credentials and history of the star NDP candidate, Kevin Chief, a gifted and accomplished leader at the University of Winnipeg who grew up in a poor district in Winnipeg North and obtained a degree at the university through basketball scholarships, would have given the NDP a boost nationally had he won a seat in the Commons. It might have been at the expense of certain Conservative ridings as well as Liberal-held territory.

A second Conservative from Winnipeg also told The Hill Times the Conservatives wanted Mr. Lamoureux to win, although he later retracted the comment.

In the meantime, organizers with each of the parties told The Hill Times the Conservatives threw everything they had into the Vaughan, Ont., byelection to get former Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Julian Fantino into Parliament. Mr. Fantino's victory, as close as it was with his margin of only 964 votes against Liberal Tony Genco, represents a potential leap ahead for the Conservatives in neighbouring Metro Toronto ridings.

One veteran Liberal told The Hill Times even though Liberal MPs played up the fact Mr. Fantino won with such a narrow margin, the fact that the Vaughan Italian-Canadian community swung heavily toward Mr. Fantino is another signal new and old immigrant communities in the City of Toronto proper are ready to change their voting patterns. The Liberal noted even the large Polish community is shifting toward Mr. Harper, in part out of discontent with past Liberal measures such as the legalization of same-sex marriage, and in part because of the Conservative focus on crime. The Liberal said Mr. Harper and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney (Calgary Southeast, Alta.,) have been working visible minority and immigrant communities more intensively than most people know. Mr. Harper recently attended a locally high-profile wedding in one of the neighbourhoods in Toronto, impressing local citizens, but did not publicize the appearance through the national news media.

"Vaughan showed us that no seats are safe," the Liberal said.

At the same time, say New Democrat organizers, the NDP nearly ignored Vaughan, focusing on Winnipeg North instead with its federal as well as local organizational support. Mr. Chief's campaign manager, Patrick Costigan, is a staffer at the party's Ottawa head office, and Brad Lavigne, the party's national director, told The Hill Times there was no point in wasting valuable resources in Vaughan, where 26-year-old NDP candidate Kevin Bordian garnered only 661 votes, 1.7 per cent of the byelection ballots, compared to 5,442 votes, 9.6 per cent, the party's candidate won in Vaughan in the 2008 general election.

In the third byelection, in Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette in Manitoba, the Liberal Party barely put up a fight, New Democrats and local Conservatives say. There, a district in which two Cabinet ministers from the Manitoba NDP government reside, and helped out in the bylections, the NDP increased its vote share to 26.5 per cent from 16 per cent in the 2008 election and its candidate, Denise Harder, placed a healthy second to Conservative Robert Sopuck.

Pollster Frank Graves said he found it "incredible" that the Conservatives would construct such an election scenario, with the ulterior aim of helping the candidate representing their chief opponent in the riding. But he acknowledged the Conservative motive of doing everything it can—without suffering self-inflicted damage as in this case—to keep Mr. Ignatieff afloat.

"That's even bigger than just two byelections," said Mr. Graves. "It's unprecedented."

The NDP strategy in Vaughan and the Liberal approach to Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette raised suggestions that, while the Conservatives may have controlled the outcome of the byelections, the Liberals and NDP may be in a better position in the next general election, when they can pick and choose the districts in which they want to pour resources.

Liberal MP Judy Sgro (York West, Ont.) said she heard hints of that message from voters when she knocked on doors supporting Mr. Genco in Vaughan.

"People are getting fed up, they want to start seeing us, I think, get together and start eliminating the minority situation, they're clearly tired of that, I heard that," Ms. Sgro told The Hill Times.

tnaumetz@hilltimes.com

The Hill Times