On Friday, Aug. 29, as the Conservatives were putting the finishing touches on election planning, the S&P/TSX composite index closed at 13,771 — down from its record earlier in the summer, but still at historically high levels, and rising. A week later, just before the election call, it was down 955 points. Four days later, another 670.

Still, for all the turmoil on the markets, the gathering crisis in global finance remained for many Canadians a distant thunder — troubling, but not yet occasion for a cold-sweat panic. For all the stock market's gyrations over the first weeks of the campaign, the trend was unclear, and Conservative support held relatively firm. Through the end of the campaign's third week, the Tories maintained a healthy 10-point lead over the second-place Liberals.

And then everything went to hell.

The economy was not just the most important issue of this election. It was the only issue. It wasn't even an issue, as such: nobody really had much to offer in the way of significant policy differences. It was more like a natural disaster. It was like holding an election in the middle of a hurricane. Nobody much wants to know what your policy is on force nine gales. They just want to know how well you'll stand up in it. They just want to know if you can get them in to port.

All elections are about leadership, to a greater or lesser extent. This one became, as few elections are, a test of leadership under fire, played out in real time. Surprisingly, that did not automatically redound to Stephen Harper's benefit.

In the early part of the campaign, the Conservatives had some reason to hope that a diffuse unease over the economy would work to their advantage: that steady-as-she-goes would be an appealing message, that Harper's image as a "strong leader" would attract undecided voters to his side. But when the storm clouds turned into a deluge, it became clear that the "strong leader" image was built on sand. Harper had had great sport beating up on Stéphane Dion, he'd shown a tactical mastery of the House of Commons, he'd bullied and bruised virtually anyone he'd come into contact with. Politics engages the primitive part of our brain, and Harper's appeal was that of the lead wolf, "red in tooth and claw." But what did it amount to in the end? All those broken promises, all those abandoned convictions, all those jaw-dropping about-faces — they'd won him the element of tactical surprise over his opponents, but at the cost of any relationship of trust with the broader public.

It turns out that matters. Way back at the start of the campaign, it was commonly framed as a contest between strength (Harper's preferred "ballot question") and trust (Dion's presumed comparative advantage). Apparently strength depends on trust. When the crisis broke, Harper was at first unable to call upon those reservoirs of trust a leader needs if he is to, well, lead. A leader whose appeal was based on always being in control was peculiarly vulnerable when it became clear he wasn't in control — not of the markets, not of the televised debates, timed with cruel precision for the very week of maximum turmoil, where a blinking Harper was subjected to a non-stop, four-party barrage of abuse: you don't care (not true), you're not aware (surely not), you have no platform (you got that right).

It must have been bewildering to Harper. In policy terms, he was absolutely right: the Canadian economy was hardly in as bad repair as the American, nor were the sorts of remedies being contemplated there in order here. We were bound to be affected by the crisis in American finance and there were sure to be hard times ahead, but in the short term there was little that any Canadian government could do about it, and even less that any party leader was actually proposing. Yet for a week or 10 days after the markets collapsed, no one was listening. Or not enough people were listening. Or not the right people: the undecided, the swing voters, the voters in parts of the country Harper needed to reach if he was to achieve the majority he sought.

What happened, in that first flush of public panic, was that everybody returned to their corners. Polling data from Harris/Decima tells the story. Of those who said the economy was the issue that would decide their vote — and there were many more of those midway through the campaign than at the start — a disproportionate share broke Tory, from Manitoba west, while from Ontario east, they tended disproportionately to vote Liberal. The regional and partisan split correlated closely with people's views of the nature of the threat to the economy. Those who saw the threat in more general terms were inclined to look for a steady hand at the tiller, Harper-style — and more of them were to be found in the prosperous West. Those who saw a threat in more personal terms — my job, my future — looked for someone who cared about them. And so was born the brief Dion boomlet, in those parts of the country where people are more inclined to see the government as their protector. He may have been slow to recognize how completely the economy had come to dominate public concerns — at the expense, say, of climate change — but he was quicker than the others.