Debris
This election clarified certain things. The Liberal Party is not a national party: it is the Toronto Party.
Smilin’ Jack still can’t quite close the deal (I really thought he would do better.)
Except in BC, Green voters lie to pollsters.
Harper owns the West and a lot of rural and exurban Ontario.
It is not smart to piss off Quebec artists.
Danny “Double Dipper” Williams is scary.
Polls are accurate within their confidence intervals but elections are won and lost within the error bars.
No one liked the Green Shift.
People rarely vote strategically.
People like to think of the Toronto Party as a sort of guard poodle. Harper knows that with the right threat or the right snack the guard poodle will roll on its back. And each time it does it will look sillier.
The Toronto Party can’t afford another day with M. Dion as leader and it can’t afford a leadership convention. The happy term “hooped” springs to mind.
The CPC is going to be under more pressure from its own activists than from the Toronto Party or the NDP.
Giles Duceppe is a a very smart guy who will have to travel across Quebec thanking artists. He will not have to travel to the Toronto Party enclave on L’île de Montréal.
For the NDP to win the Toronto Party must die. For the CPC to win, the Toronto Party must die. For the Bloc to achieve its goals for Quebec, the Toronto Party must die.
Thus all three parties will likely seek to arrange the accession of either a) Bob Rae, b) Iggy, c) Justin to the leadership. Anyone of them is perfectly capable of being the last Leader of the Toronto Party.
October 15th, 2008 at 3:30 am
Justin Trudeau! Hah
Trying to start a dynasty, that one.
October 15th, 2008 at 3:43 am
Hi Jay
I live in Toronto (Davenport) and I think you have us (them) pegged exactly right.I had to email my conservative candidate 4 times just to get a lawn sign. Im not sure she even tried to beat “The Toronto Party”. People here just spout toronto star and cbc propaganda without even thinking.
October 15th, 2008 at 4:02 am
You have to thank Maggie Attwood for her contribution to Harpers fortunes, she was a great help in here in inimitable fashion;)
October 15th, 2008 at 4:33 am
It is not smart to piss off Quebec artists.
You are swallowing the media spin – the artists’ hissy fit had no more effect in Quebec than it did elsewhere. The conservative support in Quebec was very soft at the beginning of the campaign and it went back to the Bloc for a variety of reasons. Second thoughts about a majority government, an oddly passive debate performance, the financial turmoil, nothing really compelling in the platform, etc.
The artists issue is the one the media wish caused the problem, but it wasn’t.
October 15th, 2008 at 7:38 am
The outcome proved two things to me;
A) Rural/heartland/small town Canada rejects Urban-centric crusade politics and left wing economics. There is a true metropolitan-heartland schism in Canadian cultural fabric (It’s not east-west or French-English)
B) We clearly see there are now 2 politically myopic regions of the country that think a contrary protest vote can extort more from Ottawa than having a seat in the caucus or cabinet.
October 15th, 2008 at 9:10 am
As you pointed out, the idea that Rae would win any more Ontario seats is a non-starter. Both the NDP and the Tories would love to see him in the leader’s chair. As Layton said during the debate (to Dion): “he’s yours now”.
As for Iggy: he is as incomprehensible in English as Dion is. He did look good last night when he was asked, constantly, about leadership. He has no poker face at all. His eyes said “Yesssss”, even as his mouth said “I support our leader, and our leader is Stephane Dion”.
Or maybe his eyes were saying “What happen?”, hard to tell.
Interesting: the Liberals got about 70% of the # of votes the Tories got, and the NDP got about 70% of what the Liberals got. I doubt it means anything, but it does show that math is fun sometimes…
October 15th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
I’d be a little careful about planning a funeral for the Libs too fast. It was a good night, but the culture stumble in Quebec should serve as a warning that there are still lots of pitfalls out there and potentials for sudden reverses. Harper has proven that the Cons are not just a prairie duststorm the others can divert to dissipate over Hudson’s Bay if they blow hard enough, but then neither have they proven yet to be an unstoppable wave that will wash the Liberal Party into the Atlantic. The Libs started their decline when they openly decided they could ignore the West and the Cons could suffer from the same hubris.
The Cons have built a national consensus on fiscal restraint, limited government, foreign policy, resource and spending devolution, crime, etc. . These are huge, as we will learn fast if anyone else gets in. But there are still lots of symbolic/social/constitutional matters that could open fissures pretty quickly. There are always two separate political dynamics going on in this country, one dealing with ideological imperatives and the other with reconciling conflicting regional, cultural and linguistic divisions. It’’s a big, wonderful, fractious country, but just because you transcend it’s parochialisms doesn’t mean you have shrunk it.
October 15th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Anyone thought of this, though:
The Tories can either move left, right, or try to be the political middle-ground.
If they move right, they risk the gains they made in Ontario. Maybe. It would certainly make Quebec harder to gain. The Maritimes and NL? They’ll vote for whoever is giving them the most money (sorry, but somebody has to say it).
And why move rightward when you already have the west?
So, they try to move left a bit, solidify Ontario, woo Quebec and the East.
Can anyone say “Reform II”....
October 15th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Wise words Peter.
The CPC does need to perform a balancing act along the line which you suggest. But all the while it needs to be undermining Toronto Party support in the enclaves. I leave it to people with more time than I have to pick off the individual seats; however, I note in BC that the CPC picked up Richmond which was previously a strong Liberal seat. And they came very close in Vancouver South.
Steady work in the ethnic communities can pay off. In particular, the hammer lock the Toronto Party had on Chinese and South Asian voters can be broken as Richmond demonstrates.
Isolating the Toronto Party as an essentially elitist, Annex driven, spent force will resonate with the non-Torontonians as well as people who do not self identify with the sort of elitism which the Toronto Party has come to embody.
The big wedge will be driven in when the CPC begins to point out to the currently “Liberal” ethnic voters how very little the Toronto Party has in common with their own hopes and aspirations. That will take time but can and will work.
Meanwhile, it would be in the CPC’s interests to work with the NDP against the common foe of the Toronto Party. Where possible, the CPC should be seen as working with the NDP on shared concerns and to the exclusion of the TP.
October 15th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Agreed about the immigrant vote, Jay, and I also hope Harper finds one or two big names to keep building in Quebec.
James, I know what you are saying, but it seems to me ideological divisions aren’t the danger, it’s more the symbolic and constitutional stuff cons, particularly in the West, have been steaming about for a few decades. All I am saying is that if we are going to address these, I hope it won’t be done in high-profile, in-your-face, all-or-nothing ways. If you recall, the most maddening thing about Quebec for decades was how they both ran the whole show andmanaged to portray themselves as oppressed victims who would pull the plug if they didn’t get what they wanted. This wasn’t because of greed or Canada-hatred, it was the product of years of being marginalized—the victim syndrome doesn’t disappear overnight just because of one election. We’re going to have to learn to check those impulses to see Canada as a botched portrait we’ve been invited to re-paint from scratch.
Take the CBC as just one example. I can see lots of ways the Cons could shrink it, supervise it, make it more accountable, re-direct it, yada, yada, but a charge from the backbenches to wipe it out would just be a gift to the Lib remnant, at least for now.
October 15th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Peter, almost everything which is wrong with the CBC could be solved by moving CBC HQ to Moosejaw.
October 15th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
LOL. Count me in, and Radio-Canada can move to Beauce.
October 15th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
You bet…And the fun part is that the sale of the TO HQ would finance the move and the construction of a real state of the art facility right there in Moose Jaw with money left over. Lots of money left over.
It would, however, cause a minor real estate depression in the Annex and Cabbagetown.
October 15th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Not only that, Jay, I’m sitting here just loving the thought of what a Moose-Jaw produced episode of Little Mosque on the Prairie might look like.
October 15th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
You mean with real yokels – the ones with the chemical engineering degrees…the mind boggles.
October 15th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
LOL, you guys are great.
October 15th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Move CBC to Moose Jaw? Now there’s an idea whose time has come.
October 16th, 2008 at 6:54 am
Love the CBC to Moose Jaw idea, but why do people always pick on Moose Jaw – it is a lovely little city and deserves much better than the elites at CBC. However, what I really wanted to say is that the CPC do seem to learn from their mistakes, however they are up against a huge media that blows anything that they do out of proportion – the arts cuts is an example – the cuts were minor and targeted to specific programs that had little merit. If these had been cuts made by the Liberals, the MSM would have hailed them as an example of how the Liberals respond to the needs of Canadians and are good fiscal managers (yawn). I was caught in the slashing that happened during the 1990’s, which was wholesale cuts regardless of performance of the programs. But the Liberals used that as a vault into the myth of their fiscal skills. But Canadians have absolutely no sense of history beyond last weeks TV shows. Few remember that Chreiten sent Canadians to the polls how many unncessary times when he had solid majorities? And one time was just to catch the newly formed Alliance off guard, but almost all of the comments in the G & M are about how useless this election was and how Harper is somehow evil because of it cost a lot of money. I really have lost a lot of faith in Canadians.