Each day, something called the "Daily Ignatieff" turns up in my Inbox. Distributed by the Conservative war room, it reminds media of past comments by Michael Ignatieff, the beleaguered star candidate in the Toronto riding of Etobicoke-Lakshore, which conflict with official Liberal policies.

It's a clever tactic. But it also reinforces the legitimacy of focusing on what candidates have said and written in the past. And that may not be something a party led by Stephen Harper wants to do.

The Liberals, as in the last campaign, desperately want Canadians to look at Harper's past statements -- about "firewalls," about Canada becoming a "second-tier socialistic country," about Atlantic Canadians being defeatists, about how we embarrassed ourselves by not sending troops to Iraq. Over the course of the campaign, Paul Martin's party will trot this out endlessly -- as much as in 2004, since it seems to be running more than a little low on ideas of its own.

For Canadians looking to make intelligent choices at the polls, it makes no more sense to base their decisions on out-of-context decade-old comments than to base them on the Liberals' baseless claims that Harper intends to shut down abortion clinics and dismantle public health care. From the time he left the Reform Party in 1997 until shortly before seeking the Canadian Alliance leadership in 2002, Harper apparently gave little thought to returning to public office. So he clearly didn't speak in the carefully parsed language of most politicians -- as evidenced by the 1997 speech to an American conservative group distributed to media this week, which was more noteworthy for its lame attempts at humour than anything telling about his ideology.

There is a difference, though, between a few ill-considered remarks and frank, wide-ranging statements of one's political philosophy. Until recently, Harper delivered many of the latter. Indeed, there is a plethora of speeches, interviews and op-eds a mere Google search away.

Among the most compelling is a June 2003 article he penned for the now defunct Report Magazine, adapted from a speech he'd delivered that April. It's a remarkably lucid piece of work -- a far more thoughtful take on the state of modern Canadian conservatism than Paul Martin could deliver on modern liberalism.

After providing historical context, Harper laid out his hope for economic and social conservatives to unite in common cause, and outlined the hurdles they face. "The real challenge is not economic, but the social agenda of the modern Left," he suggested. "Its system of moral relativism, moral neutrality and moral equivalency is beginning to dominate its intellectual debate."

Canada was now in the clutches, he went on to suggest, of something "much darker" than even moral relativism. "The Left" was leading us into "a moral nihilism -- the rejection of any tradition or convention of morality, a post-Marxism with deep resentments, even hatreds of the norms of free and democratic Western civilization."

We won't hear Harper talking about a "descent into nihilism" on the campaign trail -- not just because "nihilism" doesn't play well in sound bites, but because he's clearly recognized that the Conservative party has to position itself close to the centre. And whatever the Liberals tell us, he's not going to lead some sort of social conservative revolution if he winds up in the Prime Minister's Office.

Still, it's tough to entirely overlook the long-held views that presumably inspired him to return to politics. At some level, surely, he is still driven by them. And considering that we expect our prime minister to at least somewhat embody our collective values, that's not irrelevant.

Centrist voters who can't or won't tune out Harper's past comments find themselves with a tough decision. Is getting rid of a tired, directionless government reason enough to endorse a leader with values they'd otherwise shy away from?

Clearly, there's no easy answer. But responsible voters should at least have a look for themselves at what Harper has said, rather than entrusting the Liberals to deliver his message.