Harper Has His First Challenge In A While: Day 2

Gilles Duceppe can be forgiven for being a little sore today. After doing what few have done, put Stephen Harper on the defensive during a campaign, as he skillfully did yesterday by reintroducing the 2004 letter signed by Harper, Duceppe and NDP leader Jack Layton and in 2008 with the cultural funding, he would only go on to see the Liberals reap the harvest of his work.

Such was the case today when the media was quick to react and shifted the coalition question from Michael Ignatieff to the Prime Minister. Harper was somewhat buffered by Jack Layton's response later in the day which indicated that no talk of a formal coalition happened seven years ago, but the damage has been done -- tomorrow's headlines will be about Harper's hypocrisy instead of Ignatieff's hidden agenda. At this stage in the campaign, it's not likely to be a major factor but it does throw the Conservatives off their game since they've been quite clear that their intentions for the last two years were to make this campaign a referendum on a Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition; now that the spotlight has shifted, they will either have to reframe their message to focus more on the alleged secrecy of the idea rather than the idea of a coalition itself.

If there is a silver line that the governing party can turn to tonight, it's that the longer the coalition issue is in the news, the more Canadians will focus on a topic of their choosing and not that of Mr. Ignatieff's. What is more beneficial to the Liberals at this point than the topic itself is the fact the Tories have done very little to control the message this weekend; the Liberals and NDP are frequently getting their responses into election articles while the Conservatives are only getting news on their activities so far. It's almost as if the Tory war room is asleep at the campaign bus wheel, allowing the Liberals to cruise through a good-news day and take the win by default today.

Day 2 Winner: The Liberals