TORONTO — On his final campaign flight from Abbotsford, B.C. to Calgary, Stephen Harper sat with his closest friends and began putting together the plan for his exit from the Conservative Party leadership.
That plan will unfold this morning, as Conservative politicians and the party's rank-and-file look to a future leadership race — only the merged party's second — putting the pieces in place to move forward and rebuild from a devastating election loss.
Harper was calm about the defeat that laid before him, according to sources who spoke to The Canadian Press over the past 24 hours. He sat alternately with longtime aide Ray Novak, and party president John Walsh on the plane.
There are two main things that will happen right away — Harper will resign as leader, but stay on as an MP. The party's much smaller caucus will vote for an interim leader. Former cabinet minister Diane Finley's name is an early name being floated.
Then, the party's national council will appoint a "leadership election organizing committee," which will set the ground rules for the impending contest.
All these things will send the party into a period of upheaval — this was the party Harper built, filling positions with loyalists over the years to such an extent that there was barely a murmur of discontent in 12 years.
At the same time as the leadership race is set in motion, the activists are in the process of sorting through the embers of the campaign, analysing what went wrong and who is to blame.
The party's executive director, Dustin van Vugt, is in charge of a process to review the campaign.
A senior party source said the party will be in debt after this election is through, something the members aren't used to.
As far back as Thursday, campaign manager Jenni Byrne was packing up her office in the Ottawa party war room. In a sign of how tense things have become inside Harper's circle, Byrne was not in Calgary on election night, and is out of a job this morning.
During the campaign, sources say longstanding friction between Bryne and campaign director Guy Giorno just became worse, and the two strong personalities clashed on elements of the campaign. One insider said Byrne refused to hand over a list of candidate contact details to Giorno in the final days.
Eventually, their hostility spilled over into bad blood between Byrne and Novak, who is the person Harper trusts the most.
"There's a tremendous amount of antipathy towards her on the part of the leader," said one source.
"You don't run a campaign by surrounding yourself by sycophants, interns and family members," grumbled another.
But there are different ideas of why the campaign did not succeed. Some point to failings in the nuts and bolts organization of the campaign, while others believe the problems centred around the leader himself and his choice of message — factors no local candidate could control.
A source close to the war room said the party's focus groups and voter research had told them that the die was cast before the campaign began. Conservative voters "were sick of the PM and had a hard time voting for him."
"The feeling from Jenni as the campaign manager is that this was lost from the get go," said the source, who asked to remain anonymous.
"They underestimated people's feelings about the PM, that there was a stronger desire for change than they realized."
Dan Miles, a senior aide to outgoing finance minister Joe Oliver, said it was clear in the riding that voters were looking for change. Oliver lost his Eglinton-Lawrence riding in a near Liberal sweep of the Greater Toronto Area.
"The only negative I really ever heard was that they liked Joe, but they had a problem with the leader," said Miles.
"That was the only consistent thing I ever heard."
Meanwhile, the leader's message on the economy wasn't resonating as well as they suspected. The Liberals ate into some of that territory with voters who liked the promise of infrastructure spending. Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau performed better than expected during the debates.
The niqab issue raised by Harper dealt a blow to NDP Leader Tom Mulcair in Quebec, but it also seemed to wound the New Democrats elsewhere.
"That policy and so many others resonated positive with some voters, and negatively with others," said Oliver.
"I think that, and maybe some other policies, were responsible for the collapse of the NDP, which had a very significant impact on the national results."
Calgary Conservative MP Jason Kenney, widely believed to be a serious leadership contender, alluded to problems with the party message. Trudeau had focused on optimism, while Harper issued dire warnings of bleak economic times and terrorist threats.
"We need a conservatism that is sunnier and more optimistic than what we have sometimes conveyed," Kenney said.
"We have to take collective responsibility for that."
On the other side, there are those who believe the party's losses can be attributed to poor preparation.
That would include the training of local volunteers, the recruitment of candidates, convincing incumbents to run again, and vetting candidates. The conclusion is that the party didn't take enough advantage of natural advantages of being in power, of having a huge warchest and its wealth of experience from previous campaigns.
"In this case I fear that, like all parties in power, we got fat and happy," said Chad Rogers, a party loyalist who volunteered during the 2006 campaign, then run by the late Doug Finley.
"This campaign was not as lean, as focused or as aggressive as the ones that preceded it. A lot of candidate and campaign managers that I've been talking to informally were very surprised that things we were good at, just weren't done this time."
Rogers said there would be questions asked about how money was spent, especially the abandoning of a new, multi-million voter identification system two years ago.
Other Conservatives said the party hasn't kept up with the times on the latest research methods and technology.
The source close to the war room said that it will be unfair to lay the blame all on Byrne, who also led the successful 2011 campaign.
"She's a lightning rod, partly because of her personality, but also because she's a woman," said the source. "She's going to bear the brunt of a lot of knifing because she's a woman at the top of the food chain."
CHAREST, KENNEY, FORD: NAMES FLY AS CONSERVATIVES PLAN LEADERSHIP RACE
TORONTO — The Conservative Party is only in the very earliest stage of launching a leadership race, but the names of contenders are already flying.
First out of the gate was an unofficial group promoting former Toronto city councillor Doug Ford as a leadership candidate.
Ford delivered a 10-minute speech at a rally with outgoing leader Stephen Harper in Toronto on the weekend.
But the most repeated name in Conservative circles is former cabinet minister Jason Kenney, who is by far the most organized of any potential contender.
Other names that are circulating include MPs Kellie Leitch, Tony Clement and Lisa Raitt, B.C Premier Christy Clark and Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall.
But the fact that the Liberals won such a decisive majority might dissuade some from considering a run, since the next Conservative leader would be in opposition for an indefinite amount of time.
HARPER'S LEGACY: SMALLER GOVERNMENT, UNIFIED PARTY, TARGETED BENEFITS
On election night 2006, Stephen Harper walked out in front of a room full of supporters and smiled at the country that had just voted for change.
The incoming prime minister told the crowd that the party would clean up Ottawa with the Accountability Act. They would cut the GST to five per cent. And the Conservatives would scrap the Liberal child care program and give money directly to parents.
He spoke of the big picture, saying the Canadian identity was not forged by government policy, nor did it flow from any one party or leader.
"The result tonight signals a change of government, not a change of country," Harper said in his victory speech.
Yet after nine years in office, much has changed.
The federal government, in particular, has shrunk.
Taxes, such as the GST, have gone down and the tax code is sprinkled with tax credits.
The federal government has become less active in the daily lives of Canadians, with direct benefits replacing big government programs, for instance.
On the benefit front, the Conservative approach has become convention. Today's Liberals promised a new child benefit of their own to replace the existing universal program. And the other parties have started to understand how to target pocketbook issues during elections that Harper used so effectively — and that voters are now acutely aware of.
"You can take it as a recognition of clarity of leadership and purpose when the other parties call for similar policies or small incremental change," said Tim Hudak, the former leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives.
There is also one clear change that Harper has left on the political map:a unified Conservative party with a track record that spans a decade.
Observers say his efforts have inched federal politics to the right — although not as radically as some think, said Richard Nimijean, who teaches Canadian studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. Harper, he said, continued a path of slashing federal spending and tax cuts that started in the 1990s under the Liberal government of Jean Chretien.
The provinces have become bigger spenders, with provinces like Ontario still running deficits as the tax burden has shifted.
Moving the federal government back into a more activist role won't be easy because the money to pay for new programs has to come from somewhere, said David McGrane, an associate professor of political studies at the University of Saskatchewan.
Cutting the GST by two points eliminated about $14 billion in annual government revenues. No government will want to increase the GST to pad the bottom line, McGrane said.
"That's the largest thing that Stephen Harper has changed in Canada: just shrinking the size of government and doing so by reducing the tax base," McGrane said.
(The Liberals instead have vowed to run deficits and raise taxes on the wealthiest Canadians; they still plan to lower taxes on small businesses as the Conservatives planned, and cut employment insurance rates, but not as much as Harper proposed.)
His crime agenda, embedded in legislation, won't be easily undone, even as the courts acted as a check on government power. Calls for Senate reform, which Harper once championed, grew louder as the upper chamber was engulfed in a spending scandal sparked by Harper appointees.
He recognized Quebec as a distinct society —looking to eliminate separatist sentiment in the province — and apologized to the survivors of residential schools, even though his government's relationship with First Nations was problematic.
The residential school apology and the Truth and Reconciliation commission, combined with general prudence on spending and heavily investing to stabilize the economy during the recession six years ago will "all stand the recollection of this government well," said Hugh Segal, a former Conservative senator.
There were also mistakes during Harper's time in office, Segal said, pointing to anti-labour legislation and the cancellation of the long-form census.
"But governing for 10 years is a rare privilege, and Conservatives have no reason to be bitter," Segal said. "Conservatives need to be thankful, respectful of the voters' choice and reflect on how to regain the broad moderate centre clearly deserted in this campaign."
CLOSE RESULTS IN DOZENS OF RIDINGS MARK STRATEGIC VOTING, TORY MISCUES: OBSERVERS
OTTAWA — The 184-seat majority the Liberals won Monday could have been even greater, save for dozens of close races that could have seen Justin Trudeau rival Brian Mulroney for the largest majority in Canadian history.
In all, there were 128 seats where the margin of victory was less than 10 per cent between the winner and the runner-up, with the Liberals coming in second in 57 of those ridings, based on a Canadian Press analysis of Elections Canada voting data.
Enough votes one way or another and the Liberals could have picked up those seats, amassing a majority of 241 seats. Mulroney's Progressive Conservative victory of 211 seats in 1984 remains Canada's biggest electoral landslide.
The tightest races in the country most often saw the Liberals and Conservatives going toe-to-toe. The Conservatives eked out victories over the Liberals in 31 of the closest races in the country, while the Liberals barely won 33 ridings over the Conservatives.
Claude Denis, a professor of political studies at the University of Ottawa, said the numbers may hint at strategic voting in a number of ridings that either made the race closer than it might have been, or pushed the Liberals out in front.
Anti-Conservative voters backed the Liberals, eliminating vote-splitting and sending Grits to Parliament instead of New Democrats and even some Conservatives, Denis said.
Kathy Brock, a political studies professor from Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., said the numbers suggest the Conservatives lost the election, even more so than the Liberals won it.
The Tories, she said, put too many eggs in one basket — namely trying to paint Trudeau as "just not ready" and counting on him to slip up and prove them true. There wasn't a plan B when that didn't happen, Brock said.
"The Conservatives were on the verge of doing much better," she said. "This could have been an election that flipped, as is often the case."
Of those ridings where the margin of victory was less than 10 per cent, the Liberals won 53 of them, leaving the Conservatives narrowly missing 33 seats and the NDP an extra 16 ridings.
The NDP saw their 59 seats in Quebec cut to 16 — as a share of the seats available, the NDP went from holding 79 per cent of the seats down to 21 per cent. Likewise in Ontario, the Tories saw their hard-earned gains from 2011 slashed: After winning 73 seats in Ontario (about 69 per cent of the seats available) four years ago, Canada's most populous province delivered the Conservatives 33 seats, or about 27 per cent of the seats available.
The majority of people occupying the 338 seats in the House of Commons will be rookies. The House will welcome 197 first-time MPs, 57 of them women.
Women will make up 26 per cent, or 88 seats in Parliament — up one percentage point from the last Parliament, according to Equal Voice, an organization that advocates for greater female involvement in politics.
