If the Conservatives win this election, it will be because Stephen Harper was a better Paul Martin than Paul Martin was at playing Jean Chretien.

Mr. Harper has taken dead aim at the centre-right voters, notably in Ontario, whom Mr. Martin successfully wooed in elections past. At times, he explicitly invokes the “old Paul Martin,” suggesting he would act as Mr. Martin did in the past, whereas Mr. Martin has lately moved off that centre ground.

Mr. Martin, for his part, seems intent on confirming that thesis. On issue after issue—Kyoto, gay marriage, tax cuts, the list goes on—the Liberal leader has charted a course well to the left of, well, of Paul Martin. Indeed, having won the leadership on the strength of his differences with Mr. Chretien, Mr. Martin has come more and more to resemble him, not only in policy terms but, increasingly, in tone. Some while back I commented that the essential difference between Mr. Chretien and Mr. Martin was that the latter was not entirely without shame. That can no longer be said.

For as the internal contradictions of the Liberal campaign have deepened, they have also spread, the leader jumping from issue to issue in search of an opening against his opponent, yet finding his palpable insincerity undercuts his ability to exploit each in its turn. The result is a campaign of more or less total incoherence—and utter shamelessness.

So, for example, the man who made the Liberals’ most hawkish MP, David Pratt, his Defence Minister, now poses as a peacenik, notably with regard to Iraq. Mr. Chretien himself never had any principled objection to participating in the war, only finally deciding against it after having offered the Americans 800 ground troops—and even then leaving a small contingent of Canadian personnel in the field. But Mr. Martin and his advisers leaned much more strongly in favour of joining, and it is a fair bet would have done so had they been in power.

So, too, the man who spoke of delaying ratification of the Kyoto accord, or even of of reneging on it afterwards, whose platform barely acknowledges it exists, now runs attack ads warning that Mr. Harper would scrap the accord (which at least has the virtue of being true, unlike most of the rest of the ad). Again, Mr. Chretien could have gone either way on Kyoto, and in the end, as with Iraq, did both, signing on to a version of the treaty unknown to the rest of the world. But Mr. Martin was clearly to the skeptical side of Mr. Chretien—at least, while he was still trying to win seats in the West.

Mr. Martin, the fiscal conservative, now warns that Conservative fiscal policy cannot possibly work. You cannot cut taxes and still balance the budet, he advises, citing the baleful example of Mike Harris. But Mr. Harris did balance the budget, in part because revenues, far from declining, grew at a rapid pace—in fact, as my colleague William Watson has pointed out, rather more rapidly than did federal revenues under Mr. Martin. Of course, in fairness, Mr. Martin had also cut taxes. But apparently the tax cuts that were necessary and beneficial then are now ruinous and impractical, in light of Conservative plans to increase spending by 3% per year—the same rate to which Mr. Martin pledged to hold spending in 2000, the year he launched his tax cuts.

(Even wilder is the Liberal ad invoking Brian Mulroney’s example, in which it is claimed that he ran large deficits by attempting to raise spending and cut taxes at the same time. Brian “slash and burn” Mulroney? Brian “GST” Mulroney? As revisionist history goes, this is breathtaking—leave aside the fiscal mess that Mr. Mulroney inherited from the Trudeau Liberals, which was why he spent the whole of his time in office raising taxes and cutting spending.)

On it goes. The Liberal leader who came to office promising a more “sophisticated” relationship with the United States now demonizes the United States as a country that does not look after its people. The leadership candidate who preferred civil unions to gay marriage, the Prime Minister who “punted” (his adviser’s words) the Supreme Court reference until after the election, now slams his opponent for taking precisely the same position. The finance minister who sharply cut subsidies to business (read the background material to the 1995 budget for a primer on why they’re a bad idea) now praises them as the finest form of government intervention.

And the visionary who wanted to raise the tone of Canadian politics, who promised a less confrontational relationship with the premiers, who dreamed of a Liberal breakthrough in the West, who spoke of the need for radical reforms to the health care system, now stakes his campaign on a crude attack on the premier of Alberta for daring to propose just that: an exact replay of the Liberals’ 2000 campaign strategy.

As I say, it’s all very reminiscent of Mr. Chretien—minus the Clarity Act.