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Who are the threatening forces Harper called on Canada to resist at the Conservative convention?

It would be wonderful to know exactly what Stephen Harper meant when he warned 2,300 Conservative Party members that forces are rising in the world "that Canada must resist" and that in facing these undefined monsters "strength is not an option, it is a necessity."

"Moral ambiguity, moral equivalence are not options, they are dangerous illusions," he told his party in the otherwise celebratory convention this weekend.

But there was no clue in his speech about what it is that threatens Canada, other than the forces that were unleashed on Sept. 11, 2001, which Canadians, at a cost of billions of dollars over the past 10 years, have already consented to oppose.

No hint either in the party's constitutional and policy resolutions the delegates rushed through on Saturday. The only resolution that had no trace of moral equivalence was overwhelmingly rejected — a proposal for high treason charges and loss of citizenship for any Canadian who would "take up arms" against the soldiers of Canada or its allies.

Harper's dire warning, however, showed again that now that he has defeated the mighty Liberals, and the Bloc Quebecois is vanquished thanks to the NDP, he he has to find other ways to keep a crucial element of his conservative movement, the oft-cited "base", looking over their shoulders, ready to pitch in and donate a few hundred dollars every year to keep the Conservative machine battle ready.

The small band of protesters who harassed the convention street side on Friday evening may have even played into Harper's hand, plastering as they did light standards and signs with a new version of Brigette Depape's small red stop sign, this time with a small black palm of a hand printed on them, and the words "Beat Back The Tory Attack" instead of "Stop Harper." The posters likely confirmed to Conservative convention delegates, before they streamed back to their homes across the country on Sunday, that they were indeed still engaged in a life and death struggle with a ragtag mob of political opponents.

By no small coincidence, the Conservatives also timed the start of the convention with another warning. Its purpose was explained though, openly contained in a donation appeal to party members, seeking yet more money following the undoubted deluge before and during the election. It called for help defending against another new threat — the dark forces of unamed news media and left-wing opinion makers who are already raining a hailstorm of attacks against Harper's "democratically elected government."

It is true, elements of the 60 per cent of voters who chose other parties on May 2 have already challenged the Conservatives, but over many of the same policies and legislative plans they had opposed before the election.

Every federal political party is aware how, over the past five years, the introduction of Conservative crime bills, the quarterly denunciations of the federal gun registry, even the attack against the innocent and unsuspecting long-form census last year, were all accompanied by a barrage of direct mail and call-centre telephone appeals for more cash.

And, as Senator Irving Gerstein, the party's chief fundraiser in charge of the Conservative Party Canada fund, implied, it has all been enormously successful. Gerstein told a primed up convention audience the fund raised a record $7 million in the first quarter of 2011, suggesting it will harvest at least $28 million in donations over the year, four times more than the Liberals did in all of 2010.

And, getting back to Harper's speeches and who the target of his message is, the Conservative contributions averaged $120 a year.

That is a large base, a broad one, and a significant component is the swath of supporters who once pulled similar amounts out of their modest bank accounts and bedroom drawers for the Reform Party and the Canadian Alliance. When Harper led the Canadian Alliance into its merger with the Progressive Conservative party in 2003, the Alliance had 145,000 members and the PCs had 40,000. One can only imagine the scale of support for the new Conservative party at the moment.

And, despite indications there are still divisions between those two factions, surfacing among other things in the fight over whether all of the 308 Conservative riding associations should have equal clout in a leadership vote, there is no more bloodshed on Conservative convention floors.

The friction on the weekend was smoothed over in no small part thanks to a convention machine that is as well-oiled and controlled as the Conservative election machine. In the policy votes on Saturday debate was limited to two or three intervenors for every resolution, 30 seconds each, and when there was a difference of opinion over whether a debate should be held at all, there was a vote on the question, and the majority ruled. Many resolutions were not debated at all.

All the more reason Harper's party is not about to fall apart. The reins are held tightly.

"I see us as one party and we have very strong democratic views and that's what makes us so special because everybody is allowed to voice their opinion, but it is a united, strong, single party," Shelley Glover, Conservative Member of Parliament for Saint Boniface, Man., told Yahoo! News.

As things stand right now, this party will only grow stronger, building its swollen treasury even further. Coming out of the 2011 convention, the Conservatives are the strongest they have ever been, and four years remain until the next election.

A few hundred protesters outside party meetings or even on Parliament Hill won't do much to change that.

(Photo credit: Fred Chartrand/CP)