With a federal election coming up later this year, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s campaign strategy of using wedge issues to separate his principal opponent from Canadian voters while strengthening his bond with conservatives is coming into focus.

Regarding the former, he’s championed the construction of the Victims of Communism memorial in Ottawa, which has elicited shrieks of outrage from the Ottawa intelligentsia (as well as specious excuses from the Liberals). Again, the politics here are designed to separate voters of Polish, Ukrainian, and other Eastern European extraction — and, for that matter, non-European refugees of communism, such as the Cambodians — from the Liberal Party. In the latter mode, he’s commented on Bill C-42 – designed to deregulate gun ownership, as well as rural citizens’ need for guns to defend themselves.

As I have said a number of times before (here and here), another excellent wedge issue Harper might exploit is the Keystone XL pipeline, whose Congressional approval President Obama has recently vetoed. Traditionally, Harper’s Conservative Party has been seen in Canada as the pro-American party due to the Conservative’s natural ideological sympathy with the American system of government. The Liberals have used this to insinuate Conservative disloyalty to Canada. With Keystone XL, however, the roles are reversed: Harper can play the anti-American card against the Liberals, who are forced by their ties to environmentalism, to oppose a project that is indisputably good for the Canadian economy. So far, so good.