She shut down Parliament for him, saving him from getting ousted in the Commons.

An opportunity for Harper time to finish off Stéphane Dion.

Actually, Dion would do it to himself.

His reply to Harper’s Speech to the Nation Wednesday night was a horror show.

Dion was supposed to tape his speech ahead of time and deliver it to the Radio-Canada broadcasting Centre in Ottawa for distribution to five major television networks.

But instead of hiring a professional firm to tape the speech, Dion turned a friend, Mick Gzowski son of the iconic Peter Gzowski, who happened to have a digital camera.

Hey, why hire an expensive professional when you’ve got a friend who can do it on the cheap with his own camera?

Trouble was the automatic-focus on the camera was broken and because Dion had taken all day to write his speech, it was too late to get another camera. So the whole speech was shot out of focus.

They were supposed to get the recordings in English and French to Radio Canada at 6:20 p.m. so they could be shown right after Harper finished his speech at 7:10p.m.

The tape arrived downtown at 7:15 p.m. but the Liberals thought the Parliamentary Press Gallery was the same thing as Radio-Canada. Wrong place. Nice try boys. Another 10 minutes lost.

At the CBC, they discovered the French and English versions were on the same tape. Ooops! So they had to recopy. Plus make copies for other networks. Producers were pulling out their hair and cursing Dion’s Liberals.

Another problem. No High-Definition version, throwing off framing on HD channels. Dion’s chin kept appearing and disappearing off the bottom of the screen. Remember the old Cinemascope movies on television?

The CBC’s Peter Mansbridge remarked: “This must have been shot with a cell phone camera.”

CTV news chief Lloyd Robertson said the Liberals couldn’t even get respect a deadline.

One old backroom politician remarked: “If they can’t make a video, how do they expect to run a country.”

Over at Conservative Party Headquarters they were splitting their sides laughing.

The editing was a disaster as well. The speech had gone over 10 minutes, so they had lopped off the start, the part where there should have been a salutary greeting and a preamble. Dion just went straight into his speech.

The color was a horror. Dion’s face was somewhere between orange and red. CBC technicians took pity and tried to fix it but had only limited success.

On-air show hosts on various networks were so ashamed, they kept repeating to viewers that the tape was the work of the Liberals, not their studio technicians.

Liberal backroom strategist Warren Kinsella called the whole thing “pathetic.”

The NPD were furious. They had allowed Dion to speak on their behalf.

The background was a disaster, Instead a neutral, sophisticated scene like the one behind Harper, Dion was behind a desk in somebody’s office, seated in a high-backed chair almost the same color as his jacket which made his shoulders seem part of the chair.

There was bookcase full of eye-catching stuff, a piece of driftwood, a family photo, a souvenir porcelaine plate, and other collectibles, and some books, some of them fallen over – everything to take the viewers’ attention off Dion.

One of the books, in plain view, was entitled HOTAIR. It happens to be a serious work by author Jeffrey Simpson, but for viewers who didn’t know, it might have been a comment on Dion’s speech.

Dion looked more like a university professor tucked into a cubby-hole office than a politician seeking to be the leader of a G-8 country.

Afterwards, Dion delivered the best line of the evening: “Actually, I wasn’t so bad on radio.”

He was watched and judged by millions. It was his big moment to fight back. He blew it badly.

Politicians like to talk about “turning points.” That was one.

A day later Dion called for a full investigation – by then, it was a bit late.

Only one thing remained for him to do -- hand in his resignation, and the sooner the better.