Just a few weeks ago, Niall Ferguson, the Harvard economist-historian, showed up at a packed room at the Chateau Laurier and scared the hell out of the local chattering classes.

Although federal Conservatives were conspicuously absent, just about everybody else in Ottawa worth knowing was there: the dour Scot’s gloomy forecast for Canada and the world dominated conversation in the capital’s bars, restaurants and salons for several days afterward.

Given the impact that Ferguson’s gloom and doom forecast had on official Ottawa, Stephen Harper’s recent “the-glass-is-half-full” schtick is all the more bizarre.

Before we go further, a couple of things should be noted.

In any recession, a whole crop of professional cassandras get busy writing books and making speeches on the impending economic Armageddon that is nigh. Ferguson, whose latest book, The Ascent of Money, is doing very nicely thank you, is certainly one of those.

Ottawa is a highly educated city in which very few people actually produce goods or services that are of practical value. It is a city that lives off the avails of the rest of the country’s economic activity.

So the prospect that those avails won’t be so availing in the coming months must truly be terrifying for many of those holding cushy jobs in national associations, think tanks, research institutes and other groups that live off the public process.

That this class of people and the current government have never known what to make of each other probably makes things all the scarier.

In his Ottawa lecture, Ferguson predicted “blood” in the streets as a result of world economic disorder (a prediction a wee bit over the top, don’t you think Mr. Ferguson?). But he did have a couple of things to say that should be resonating with Canadians.

Although the American economy has been run in recent years about as well as Iceland’s, the U.S. retains safe haven status for the world’s economic activity. This is why the U.S. dollar, for the most part, has retained strength over the Canadian currency. Ferguson sees a danger that America’s trading partners, such as Canada, will get hurt more than the country that caused this mess in the first place. After all, who said recessions are fair?

Regardless of what they might say about each other, the U.S. and China are virtually functioning as a joint economy, or “Chimerica,” as Ferguson calls it. The U.S. is dependent on dollars from China to service its debt and the Chinese have too much socked into the U.S. economy to walk away now. So the U.S. will be preoccupied with appeasing its new economic partner far more than it will with its current largest trading partner, Canada.

Regardless of whether Ferguson is right, there is a strong likelihood the world will come out of this recession with a very different economic landscape. What contingency planning is Canada doing for that change?

Perhaps a more pertinent question would be: what was Harper thinking in mid-March when he said Canada would be out of recession soon? Since last fall, Harper has gone from dismissive about the economy and gloomy at budget time, to seeming to be more interested in photo ops. Finally, there’s the most recent, “Don’t worry, be happy” mode.

It was only a matter of time before someone prominent in Ottawa would call Harper on his reading of the economy. That person turned out to be the former governor of the Bank of Canada, David Dodge. Dodge basically said that Harper’s optimism was nuts.

In another era, such intervention would bring a minority government down. But since all of Ottawa is looking to the Obama administration to lead us out of recession, the impact of Dodge’s intervention can be discounted.

However, the comments will eat away at this government’s reputation as economic managers, just as the sponsorship scandal slowly eroded the Liberals’ reputation for ethics over four years.

So far, Harper’s reaction has been predictable. He called Dodge’s comments partisan, the same term he uses for any comments with which he doesn’t agree.

With the Liberals now inching ahead in the polls, especially in Ontario and Quebec, Harper should start thinking beyond optics and tactics unless he wants to be remembered as the R.B. Bennett of the 21st Century. IE