On May 12, Harper's Defense Minister Gordon O'Connor announced they would allow the House of Commons, the main chamber of the Canadian Parliament, to hold a free vote on whether Canada should participate in a new NATO ballistic missile defense program.

"If we reached the stage where it appeared that we were willing to enter into an agreement on ballistic missile defence, we would bring it before Parliament for a vote," O'Connor said.

The NATO missile defense feasibility study was approved last week at alliance headquarters in Brussels; it was launched at the 2002 NATO summit in Prague.

The free vote decision was simultaneously tactically shrewd and aggressively controversial: two qualities that are already becoming Harper's political trademark. He ended more than a decade and a half of Liberal Party domination of Canadian politics with his victory in the general election earlier this year, but he squeaked home with only a plurality and no overall majority in the Canadian House of Commons.

However, at the very time that U.S. President George W. Bush's popularity is plummeting at home, Harper, who greatly admires Bush's style and policies, is deliberately emulating the political strategy that Bush successfully applied after he won the November 2000 U.S. presidential election with half a million votes less than Democratic candidate Al Gore. He is presenting himself to the Canadian public as a dynamic and confident leader who is already acting as if he won a landslide mandate from them.

Harper is seeking to set himself apart from all the other four major Canadian parties as aggressively as he can and pushing partnership with the United States in ballistic missile defense is one of his favorite wedge issues.

By scheduling a free vote on the issue in the Canadian parliament, Harper locked onto a win-win strategy. His chances of victory, while ridiculed by most centrist or left-leaning Canadian political pundits, do exist. The New Democratic Party and the Bloc Quebecois are both fiercely opposed to partnership with the United States in BMD. But the Liberal Party, whose leader Paul Martin rejected Bush's offer of partnership in February 2005 when he was still prime minister, is divided on the issue.

Harper won big by getting a far more overwhelming parliamentary vote of endorsement for NORAD renewal than anyone had expected. If he can scrape home a parliamentary victory on the BMD issue, he will cement his reputation as a can-do, decisive and dynamic national leader. And he can push ahead with a program he is convinced is essential for his country's national security.

But by making the vote a free one, Harper has also escaped the trap that if he is defeated by a coalition of the other major parties -- as still appears most likely -- he will be forced to resign and call early general elections at a time not of his choosing.

And even a defeat on this issue carries potential political benefits for Harper. He is convinced that his strong stand on BMD helped bring him victory in the general election, ending a Liberal run of three general election victories in a row under former Prime Minister Jean Chretien.

Also, Harper wants to force the Liberals and the NDP to ally on major issues and key votes with the Bloc Quebecois as much as possible so that he can reposition the Conservatives back to their old position under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in the 1980s as the party that defends the far larger population of English-speaking Canada from policies imposed on them by French-speaking Quebec. Therefore, even a parliamentary defeat on the issue could supply him with valuable political ammunition to fire at the Liberals and tar them as puppets of the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois in the next elections that he is expected to call within a year or two.

Harper is also convinced that major technological and testing progress by the U.S. Missile Defense Agency and its prime contractors on BMD programs over the past two years have made BMD more attractive and credible than ever to the voting populations of other major Western democracies.

It is certainly the case that over the past five years Prime Minister John Howard in Australia and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in Japan have enjoyed unprecedented electoral success and political power even while they boldly pushed ahead with BMD programs and close cooperation with the United States far beyond anything their predecessors had ever contemplated. The governments of India, Israel, Britain and Poland have also shown themselves eager to play ball with Bush on BMD.

Harper is convinced the time is ripe for a similar move in Canada. Given the success of his hard-charging ways so far, it might not be advisable to bet against him.

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