ST-EUSTACHE, Que. - On a day when Stephen Harper strolled peacefully through a vineyard, the earth around him was being scorched again.
The Conservative leader's photo-op in an idyllic field offered a fitting snapshot of his day -- and of his campaign so far.
Harper has delivered a message of calm, competent, even cheerful leadership. But that message has been squashed by moments of intemperance, ineptitude or downright nastiness within his ranks.
While he strolled through that vineyard with a candidate he hopes will be his first-ever elected in the Montreal area, one of his aides was ordering the RCMP to handle his public relations.
"I want that camera out of there," Harper spokeswoman Carolyn Stewart Olsen told a Mountie after spotting CTV reporter Robert Fife and a network television crew.
That camera was rolling.
The agent tentatively raised his hand and quietly, almost apologetically asked the news crew to move away.
He might not have been a public-relations professional, but the plainclothes officer appeared to recognize a bad PR decision when he saw it.
It's been such a week for the Conservatives that asking a man carrying a gun to keep the news media at bay was not their worst communications move of the day.
Things looked so promising on Thursday morning. With his war room's puffin-pooping gaffe far behind him, Harper entered Quebec. He hopes the province will deliver a dozen Tory seats and serve as the building blocks of a Conservative majority government.
Early headlines from a morning speech carried his suggestion that the Liberal carbon-tax plan would be bad for national unity.
But the father of a soldier killed in Afghanistan was upset by the announcement of Canada's pullout in 2011. He took his anger at the Conservatives public.
The Tories responded to this brush fire as they often have: They whacked it with a sledgehammer.
They did to the mourning father -- Jim Davis -- what they have habitually done to those who criticize the government. They've done it to political opponents across the floor, to NGOs, and to celebrity spokespeople including Al Gore, Bono and Sarah Polley.
They attacked. They impugned Davis's motives. They called him a Liberal. In politics they call it "pushback" -- and nobody pushes back more aggressively than the Conservatives.
It was the default position for much of their time in government to any difficult question they faced on the floor of the House of Commons. The prime minister has employed that modus operandi since taking office.
The opposition asks about prisoner abuses in Afghanistan? They're supporting terrorists.
Liberals ask about the environment, the economy, climate change, or foreign policy? Well, Liberals did nothing for 13 years in government, goes the stock reply.
Sticky questions about Canada's policy on the detention of Afghan prisoners of war? They didn't shy away from blaming their generals.
Harper's singing a different, more open, more positive tune in this campaign.
"I want to make it very clear that I have set a tone and an expectation as leader for this campaign," Harper said.
Someone did not get the memo.
The same campaign war room that produced a graphic of a bird defecating on the Liberal leader produced more unwanted attention Thursday.
When a reporter asked the prime minister about Davis's remarks, he replied that losing a child was obviously a horrific ordeal but maintained he was doing the right thing.
His war room, in the meantime, was firing off an e-mail aimed at discrediting a grieving father.
The Conservatives' communications director, Ryan Sparrow, sent a CTV producer an e-mail suggesting Davis was a Liberal.
Within minutes, Sparrow was suspended. The prime minister's communications director, Kory Teneycke, was trying to limit the damage.
He described the remarks as unacceptable and said Sparrow would be disciplined for the duration of the campaign. A few television crews were hoping to get the prime minister to say the same thing on-camera. So they tried asking him during the scheduled photo op at a vineyard during his next campaign stop.
That's when the RCMP was called in.
Teneycke -- who was recently hired onto Harper's staff in the hope of improving its communications -- was not around during the testy exchange. But he quickly sought out the media and apologized.
That made for three apologies from Conservatives in three days.
