Just another word or two, if you can stand it, on our big subject before we drop it for a peaceful and non-political summer. I just want to say something I was too polite to say during the election campaign — you know how Maritimers are. But the dirty little secret is that our old friend Stephen Harper has been, all along, cultivating a culture of defeat within the inevitably humbled neo-Conservative party.

I wouldn’t say it even now if it wasn’t that I was scouring Alberta newspapers on the Internet looking for the meaning of Western alienation the day after the election, and was rather astonished at what I found from many commentators.

After running through the statements of Premier Ralph Klein on medicare, of former Reform/Alliance/Conservative party justice critic Randy White (“the heck with the courts, eh?”), and the rocket scientists at party headquarters who accused Paul Martin of favouring child porn, all of which helped sink the Conservatives, here’s what columnist Rick Bell had to say in the Calgary Sun:

“I’m tired of shaking my head at these rubes and their death wish . . . It was an election for the Tories to win. And they didn’t. In fact, they blew it . . . Tories out here will loudly lament the loss. Tories out here are good at that . . . When in doubt, you always have alienation . . . There will be questions, plenty of questions at the coffee shop, but sadly none facing the mirror . . .

“Those Liberals (they’ll say). Those lousy Liberals. They run attack ads, they smear, they simplify, they’ll do anything and say anything to stay in power.

“Cry me a river. Losers, weepers.”

And another columnist, Lisa Corbella: “The election should have been about three things — corruption, corruption, and corruption. Alas, moronic Conservatives! . . . and that particularly includes Alberta Premier Ralph Klein.”

And another: “Ralph has hardly done anything right since he got off the bottle.”

Speaking of Western alienation, which, like other alienations, pops up when in doubt, what about that peculiar Maritime twist? The Globe and Mail, on the front page the day after the election (“Western voices rise in anger”), made the point with as authentic a Canadian as you can find: a “grandmotherly, soft-spoken, kindly” lady, originally from a small village in Nova Scotia, with ancestry back to 1745 (suspiciously, even before the founding of Halifax — but let that pass) who’s so disgusted that she’s “ready to give up,” and gravely declared that “there is no Canada” and “it’s time for us (the West) to form our own country.”

Then there were those letters to Nova Scotia’s The Chronicle Herald, one from an Edmontonian “ashamed to admit I am originally from the Maritimes” because “you fools would vote for anyone who gave you 50 bucks to increase your welfare status!”

Cry me a river.

The problem wasn’t just Ralph Klein, Randy White, campaign clumsiness, general foot-in-mouth and slick Liberal opportunism. The new Conservatives, with embarrassed old Conservatives tagging along, were going door-to-door peddling rotten fish at the very time that the Liberals were past their best-before date.

To put all that in big words, doggedly sticking to a fiscal policy based on reckless tax cuts that lead directly to higher deficits and that makes even real conservatives’ blood curdle, a willingness to play fast and loose with the Charter of Rights, a virtually colonial foreign policy vis-à-vis the United States, and a tendency to loosen the ties that bind the nation, including medicare, amounts to insisting on perpetual defeat as a way of life. Without a moderate conservative party somewhere around the centre, the Grits can probably bung up indefinitely and, with permanently panicked soft-NDPers in tow, keep dodging the bullet forever.

And so, along with the mainly Liberal drama of minority government, when the story heats up again we’ll find the issue of the Conservative party unresolved. Instead of Paul Martin walking the plank for overdoing the hubris, it will be Stephen Harper contemplating the abyss. He’s already hinted at leaving. Peter MacKay says no, don’t go. But Peter doesn’t mean it.