This is the way Alberta rightist Ted Byfield described the main challenge he and his fellow oil-patch neoconservatives were facing two years ago in their grand plans to rally Canadians around Stephen Harper's hopes for regime change in Canada: "How do we fool the world into thinking we're moving left when we're not?"

It's turning out to be pretty easy, after all.

It's amazing what you can get away with when you're starting with friends like the CanWest Global media empire (which includes the National Post, the Vancouver Sun, the Province, and the Victoria Times-Colonist), CTV news, and the Globe and Mail. But still, you've got to make it easy for them.

So here's what you do.

Give Harper a good makeover, a new suit, a proper haircut, and smiling lessons. Hire spin artists with a sufficiently cunning aptitude for branding, stage management, and message-packaging.

Do that, and all Harper has to do is show up.

Make sure he doesn't repeat that thing he said about how he doesn't care if Canada disintegrates into "two national governments or several national governments". If somebody asks whether or not he still thinks that "totalitarianism" is the proper term to describe the work of human-rights commissions, insist it was just a tongue-in-cheek thing.

If somebody brings up that time Harper said Canada should be constitutionally restructured along the lines of the American congressional system, or that time he got up in front of a conference of American right-wingers and called Canada a "second-tier socialistic country", here's what you do. Have him say something like, "I think over the course of a decade, people's views evolve somewhat and situations change."

It will work. Crazy, I know. But trust me.

If anybody starts asking about the plans to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol, or to reverse Canada's decision on the U.S. continental missile-defence shield, or to tear up that historic accord the Liberals struck with Canada's aboriginal peoples in Kelowna just a few weeks back, don't worry. Just start making fun of that 30-second Liberal election advertisement that didn't even run. It's called "changing the subject".

If people notice that a Conservative win would mean oil wells up and down the B.C. coast, just throw around some gobbledygook words like precautionary and mitigate and scientific. If anyone gets so cheeky as to ask for an explanation, the punditti will browbeat them for engaging in "fear and smear" tactics and bringing up "ancient history" and carrying on with leftish "hidden agenda" nonsense. That'll shut everybody up.

The preceding is a bit of a cartoon, of course.

But here we are, in the final days of an election that the vast majority of Canadians didn't even want, and we're poised to elect as prime minister a guy the Washington Times calls "the most pro-American leader in the Western world", a free-marketer who is "pro-Iraq war, anti-Kyoto, and socially conservative”¦Mr. Bush's new best friend internationally and the poster boy for his ideal foreign leader". Plus, the election was triggered by no less than Jack Layton, the most effective left-wing leader in a generation, all because of his own hubris, which toppled the most progressive Parliament since the days of Lester Pearson in the early 1960s.

Sorry, but life is imitating a cartoon right now.

The Conservatives have got Darrel Reid running in Richmond and Cindy Silver in North Vancouver, both former paid staff with the Canadian branch of the American Christian right Focus on the Family conglomerate. Then there's Phil Eidsvik out in Newton and John Cummins in Delta, both of whom have counselled and engaged in acts of mass illegal-fishing protests in their fury over aboriginal rights. And who is one of the most seasoned and senior of these B.C. politicians? Stockwell Day, a hard-right Bible fetishist who says gay people should be "cured" and that humans once coexisted with plesiosaurs.

You don't have to scour their high-school yearbooks for weirdness. You don't have to go back any further than, say, January 9 of this year for this, straight from Stephen Harper himself: "I think there should be property-rights protection in our Charter."

The Liberal party was roundly mocked for saying property-rights entrenchment could mean the scuttling of laws that protect workers, unions, children, and the environment. But what would happen to zoning laws aimed at urban sprawl, exactly? What, then, about the Agricultural Land Reserve? Aboriginal treaty settlements? Or environmental rules that might diminish the profits of forest companies?

Saskatchewan Conservative Garry Breitkreuz says property rights need to be entrenched in the Charter of Rights to protect Canadians from the Species at Risk Act, the cruelty-to-animals provisions in the Criminal Code, the Canada Wheat Board, and the Firearms Act. Ontario Conservative Garth Turner says property-rights entrenchment would have caused B.C.'s Islands Trust to lose at the Supreme Court of Canada in 1996, when the public right to regulate land use was challenged by landowners who'd acquired MacMillan Bloedel's lands on Galiano Island.

But Breitkreuz said those things back in 1998, and Turner's comments go all the way back to last April, long before the election was called. Ancient history, I guess. So forget about those things.

In fact, suspend disbelief entirely. It's all just a cartoon.

And that's what you'd have to believe to be fooled into thinking that Harper and his oil-patch neoconservatives are just like the rest of us, when they're not.

The Chronicles Web log can be found at transmontanus.blogspot.com/.