A lifetime ago, that is last week, Stephen Harper believed the world was his oyster. He thought nothing of trying to cut off the oxygen principally to the Bloc who, because of Mr. Harper’s own campaign gaffe related to the Arts, stripped the Conservatives of majority to which they were otherwise clearly on route.

‘I’ll fix that,’ was clearly his thinking.

The sign of a good strategist isn’t one that never makes mistakes, but rather one who makes few but recovers well.

A week ago Mr. Harper had the country up-in-arms and the opposition parties arm-in-arm. Today, according to polls, support for the Conservatives is up six points to near 45% and nearly 70% support ending a hockey game two minutes into the first period simply because the home team was down three nothing. No, Mr. Burke, you can’t.

The last sentence of my Nov 29th post read as “If Mr. Harper goes back to not blinking so much, you’ll know the opposition parties didn’t pull their goalie soon enough.”  Click the image above and observe Mr. Harper talking to reporters immediately following his meeting with Michaëlle Jean. This is a more confident and far more relaxed Stephen Harper than his appearance on November 29.

In short, the think time Mr. Harper exactly one week ago orchestrated to have work in his favour accomplished just that, a most favourable outcome for Mr. Harper. Parliament is prorogued, Conservative support levels albeit unstable have skyrocketed, the Dion coalition is dead, and take a minute to scan the news items of the past 24 hours and try and find any recent mention of the initial and offending incident.

In a matter of one week, Mr. Harper has gone from being visibly shaken to the one visibly shaking-up others. How did this happen, you may ask?

True, overconfident cockiness led Mr. Harper into making the tactical mistake that put him into a position where opposition parties could theoretically and tactically claim and respond with a loss of confidence in the government within the house. But it was hypocritical for the coalition to argue Mr. Harper had lost the confidence of the house when it, the coalition, didn’t have confidence in its would-be leader, Mr. Dion, however temporary his term might have been. By association, most Canadians in turn lacked the same confidence.

If nothing else, the past week has confirmed the not-so-old adage that “a week is a lifetime in politics.” On that score the Liberal Party can’t afford to wait 20 lifetimes before choosing its new leader.

Mr. Dion could, tonight, benefit from a solitary walk in the snow.