Dan Hannan has noticed! Dan has written a great piece on First Post about Canada's Stephen Harper - a hugely under-discussed conservative leader:
"At a time when virtually every incumbent government is suffering from the recession, his Tories might increase their numbers. Not bad when you remember that, in 1993, Canada's Conservatives were left with just two MPs. So how did Harper do it? Well, he stopped fretting about the handful of Liberal-Tory floating voters, and went after the 40 per cent of Canadians who had stopped voting altogether. He shed his party's Establishment image, and embraced an anti-politician, decentralist, tax-cutting agenda. His party duly lost support in the posher parts of Toronto, but more than made it up in suburban and rural Canada - including Quebec. ("There are guys out there who listen to French talk radio and French country music", Harper's chief strategist told me). The result? Canada is becoming less like Scandinavia, more like the rest of the Anglosphere..."
ConservativeInternational.com is also reporting regularly on the General Election in Canada. Click here. I'm hoping to fly out to Ottawa next Tuesday for a week or so. More soon.