Will all that Conservative pork help in Quebec?

Well you've got to hand it to Harper and Mr. Flaherty. Their plan to target voters in suburban and exurban areas in the hopes of making significant headway in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal may well pan out. This budget, like everything Harper does, is done with a view to realizing his goal of a majority government and making the Conservative party the natural governing choice for years to come.

The question is will all of that pork really help in Quebec? As Chantal Hebert has said many times, winning Quebec is no guarantee of winning Canada, but it's just about impossible to win Canada without Quebec. Harper (and Mr. Dion as well) may be well served in reading Ms. Hebert's new book "French Kiss". In a chapter entitled "The End of Pork", Ms. Hebert recounts the chronology of patronage in Quebec by governments from Trudeau to Mulroney and Chretien. She attributes the Liberals loss to the Block in the 1990 by-election of Laurier -- Sainte-Marie, to the "misguided notion that Quebecers would put proximity to the honeypot of the federal government above their strongly held views on a defining issue such as their political with the rest of Canada".

And she later points out that like "their counterparts in Mississauga and Calgary, urban Quebecers are impervious to the politics of pork. Their ballot-box issues, especially at the federal level, are more likely to have to do with macropolicies such as taxes, child care, clean air and urban transport." If she's right then maybe Harper has miscalculated and Mr. Dion, who has been much more focused on policy and vision, may yet win the day.