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Stephen Harper may be the biggest loser if Ontario Liberals form minority or majority

Minority Liberal government or majority, the biggest loser in the Ontario election, aside from Tim Hudak, could be Stephen Harper.

Who would have guessed, after Rob Ford's right-wing sweep of Toronto only a year ago and Harper's sweep of Toronto last May, that by this time, this year, GTA voters were set to scratch their heads, look around and ask, huh?

Certainly the possibility was not on Harper's mind when he joined federal finance minister Jim Flaherty, Ford and a field full of vintage common-sense Tories at a good-old-boys BBQ in Ford's expansive backyard this summer and declared it was time for a "hat trick."

Fast forward.

Ekos pollster Frank Graves had Hudak's PCs way behind Dalton McGuinty and his governing Liberals as the election edged closer this week, while two different pollsters for the Toronto Star showed a statistical dead heat.

Earlier, columnists used up reams of newsprint analyzing how much Andrea Horwath could squeeze out of McGuinty in return for propping up a minority government.

Graves' show of courage has to be appreciated, considering he spent the summer analyzing, apologizing and writing epics about the polling errors that led him to miss even the margin of error in his last-minute predictions for the May 2 federal election.

But as of Wednesday, he was dead certain about his provincial call, and he says Harper's hat-trick wish on Ford's lawn was one of the biggest forces behind Hudak's misfortunes.

"A clear driver in the election was that Ontarians, and Torontonians in particular, were clearly not enamoured with the prospect of another Conservative government, a third, in Ottawa," Graves told Yahoo! Canada News.

"It wasn't a plus, it was a clear minus."

Graves quickly added it's not that GTA voters wanted to get rid of Harper. He says Harper and the federal Tories retain the support they garnered in May, taking almost all of the GTA federal ridings, which have the same boundaries as the provincial electoral districts, and leaving only a handful, less than a handful, for the federal Liberals and NDP.

"This is not a question of Torontonians or Ontarians saying 'oh, I'm sorry I voted for Stephen Harper. "This is just evidence of the prudence of voters."

As McGuinty asked voters every day: What stripe of government would you want negotiating a new medicare accord with the federal Conservatives?

Those last comments from Graves suggest Harper might not be one of the losers after the Ontario dust settles.

But even one of his MPs, chatting casually in a cafeteria lineup in the Centre Block this week, was worried.

"It means the Liberal party is back," he said, having in mind the federal Liberal party, crushed so decisively in Ontario in the May election.

The Conservative was aware, in hindsight, that grassroots organizers with the provincial wing of the Liberal party, the Liberal Party of Canada Ontario, stayed away in droves in May.

Rumours are they did not particularly want to help Michael Ignatieff, a feeling apparently shared by a couple of million voters across the country.

If that's the case, and the federal party chooses wisely when it selects a new leader in two years, help from Ontario Liberals, reinvigorated and reunited after the provincial election, could spell bad news for Harper in the next federal election in 2015.

There's another front, an unusual one.

In this Ontario election, there is little doubt organized labour, particularly in the form of financial donations, came out where it counted, but for the Liberals, not the NDP.

McGuinty and his party had financial support from Catholic and public teacher unions, and substantial contributions as well from construction and carpenter unions and other unions during and before the campaign.

Locals with the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America contributed more than $90,000 to the Liberals during the campaign. Canadian Auto Workers union boss Ken Lewensa campaigned with McGuinty.

And what was Harper doing at the same time?

Well, he and his party and his MPs were ganging up on the newly elected NDP Official Opposition in Ottawa over . . . its ties to trade unions.

The immediate assault centred on thousands of dollars several large unions, including the United Steelworkers and the Public Service Alliance of Canada, paid the NDP to put up sponsorship signs at the party's 50th convention last June in Vancouver.

Unions and businesses are prohibited under the Canada Elections Act from donating financially to federal political parties, and the Conservatives argue the payments were in effect donations.

But they made it clear, through other criticism of NDP relations with organized labour, that they want to tarnish the party with the old Union Boss brush.

Whatever the eventual legal outcome from a complaint the Tories filed with Elections Canada over the convention, members of trade unions, teacher associations, hospital workers, hundreds of thousands of voters, particularly in Ontario, will remember the Conservative attack.

And that will be a 2015 election grudge that was not even on the horizon last May.

(Reuters Photo)