In the 10 months the conservatives have been in office, they’ve managed to offend a wide variety of interest groups. Yet they don’t seem to care, even as the Liberals catch up to them in the polls. It’s as if they were a majority government — and an entrenched one at that.

This is because the Harper government is practising something new to Canadian politics — political narrowcasting. It works like this: instead of gravitating toward the political centre to win the votes of the moderate majority, narrowcasting is a direct appeal to a party’s hard core, to the exclusion of everyone else.

Narrowcasting was developed and perfected by the U.S. Republicans and its aim is to mobilize a solid and dedicated core that will influence undecided friends and neighbours who fall into the swing-voter category.

This is why the government has followed up pledges to the law and order crowd with seven reforms in justice statutes, including measures jurists and editorialists might find odious, such as reverse onus in the three-strikes bill or making the results of a roadside breathalyzer test absolutely uncontestable in court over witness testimony, while reneging on a promise not to tax income trusts.

It also explains why the Harper government continued to be anti-gun control in the aftermath of the Dawson College shootings and highly militaristic despite widespread public opposition to Canadian troops in Afghanistan; or why this government will have little to do with things that resonate with urban voters, such as daycare, women’s rights and justice for the marginalized through the elimination of the Court Challenges program and cuts to programs for Aboriginals and the illiterate.

Making exclusive love to the core vote means risking the wrath of environmentalists around the world by abandoning the Kyoto protocol and the entire global warming issue in favour of a copy of the 1970 U.S. Clean Air Act that concentrates on smog.

This year, the finance minister’s annual economic statement to the House of Commons finance committee was a scant 45 minutes that was heavy with election-style promises of guaranteed tax cuts of every kind, debt reduction, but light on detail on how this all would be accomplished.

It matters little to this government that economists and other experts will question how all these promises will be delivered or that some infidels will point out that the federal debt won’t change that much despite the Tories’ best intellectual gymnastics. After all, there is a more than even chance the 2007 budget won’t become law because Parliament will be dissolved for an election this spring.

But narrowcasting doesn’t appear to be working for the Conservatives yet. After great success in the first three months of its mandate, the Harper government has not only stalled in the polls but may be receding from where it was on election day last January.

Still, it is too early to count narrowcasting out. It could very well work yet. The polls resemble the trendless state of the first six weeks of the last election campaign, when news of an RCMP investigation put the Conservatives into an accelerating lead.

In addition, a recent poll suggests 30% of Canadians still associate the Liberals with corruption. And the media have been concentrating on the Harper government’s weaknesses rather than deep structural problems of the Liberal party.

If narrowcasting works this time, it will likely change Canadian politics forever. IE