The Harper rally in London, Ont. Monday night drew the biggest crowd yet for the Conservatives during this still-young campaign. By my count -- and I do actually count -- there were about 800 people in a downtown conference centre to hear Harper give what has become a pretty standard stump speech.

Still, even with 800 people present, the hall wasn't full and the event didn't have much energy. That's not Harper's fault necessarily. Barack Obama, he is not. But his stump speech is always competently delivered and his speeches are generally well crafted. What Harper needs from rally supporters his energy and tonight, in London, despite the crowd it wasn't there.

Now that, by itself, is not a big deal.

But it was a rally in the very same hall in early January of 2006 that first got the national press corps travelling with Harper beginning to sense that a change was about to happen.

In the last general election, the Conservatives had ran a disciplined campaign before Christmas, full of policy announcements, including the GST cut. But according to the polls, Harper's campaign wasn't winning much support and the Liberals, at Christmas, were still ahead.

Then, over Christmas, the income trust investigation broke and Harper returned to the road in the new year with new wind in his sails.

And so, on a Friday night in the first week of January, 2006, we ended up were we were tonight. The weather was much worse then. Dark, cold, windy winter weather then; a warm, pleasant summer evening tonight.

In 2006, about 1,200 supporters crammed into the very same hall that just 800 were in tonight. (And, again, I was there in '06 and I counted them then.)

Until that point, the biggest crowd we'd seen for a Harper rally was about 500 people.

But that night in London in 2006, it was the first hint to those of us watching the campaign that perhaps Harper did indeed have what it takes to topple Paul Martin. Shortly after that, we were starting to see huge crowds at Harper rallies, including 1,000-plus turnouts in downtown Montreal during the last week of the campaign.

But tonight, it wasn't the challenger that everyone had come to see. It was the prime minister. And perhaps there isn't the same urgency or desperation among Conservatives that there was in 2006. This time, Harper came to London well ahead in national polls; in 2006, he was behind.

Still, there is a new poll out today from Nanos Research that shows Conservative support ticked down slightly. And tonight we saw some evidence, in a sense, that Harper and the Conservatives still haven't ignited the kind of passionate political love that can propel a party to a majority victory.