The Slippery Slope

Now that the Liberals have lost a vote in the House of Commons calling on them to resign, we appear to be on a slippery slope sliding into an election. And it is possible the government is not completely unhappy at the prospect.

There have been three polls in the last week by Pollara, SES and Ipsos-Reid. The first of these would produce a weak Conservative minority government. The latter two both would produce Liberal minorities. In the case of SES we would see a stronger Liberal minority than 2004. In the SES poll and the Ipsos-Reid poll, the Liberals had leads of 44-31 and 44-33 respectively in Ontario very close to the 2004 results in the province. The Ontario numbers could making Mr. Martin’s election planners bullish.

However, because of the B.C. election there is a possibility that the spillover is artificially boosting federal Liberal support, and the underlying trend is much less favourable to the Liberals than appears to be the case.

B.C. Election – A Week to Go

News reports from the west coast indicate that Gordon Campbell has gone on the attack against the NDP, even invoking the name of the much despised Glen Clark. Earlier in the week a quickie Ipsos-Reid poll and media commentary generally gave the edge in the TV debate to Carole James. This strongly suggests a tightening race. In fact a new poll from Robbins SCE Research both reports James as the debate winner by a decisive margin, and actually places the NDP ahead of the Liberals 40-39. Two earlier polls by this firm reported higher levels of support for the NDP than those taken by their competitors.

Although Robbins reports that just one third of respondents watched the debate, commentary on their web site explains Carole James’ debate win as follows:

Insight- Pundits and talk show hosts were so busy ‘spinning’ for Gordon Campbell that they failed to see the ‘knock-out’ punch in the Great election debate. It came about when Carole James asked Premier Campbell to explain his actions and promises (which he will keep and which he won’t) to the television viewers. This revealed Ms. James ‘charisma’ and populist connection with people and exposed Gordon Campbell’s lack of ‘political humanity’. Mr. Campbell’s shortcoming has always been his inability to connect with the average voter and Ms. James exploited this very well knocking the Premier ‘out cold on his feet’.

The University of British Columbia’s election stock market, which I think should be interpreted as simply reflecting the expectations of its 82 market participants, has reacted since the debate by showing a tightening race. By the way I don’t accept the claims that the operators of these markets make that they are better at anticipating elections than the polls. For one thing it is quite clear that polls fundamentally affect the outcomes that one sees in these markets. But the measured expectations of a group of observers with a stake in the outcome are worthy of our attention in following these events.

The Liberals should not have been in any danger of losing this election but one of the uncertainties I noted at the outset was that for many voters Carole James was a blank slate. It looks like she has made a relatively dull and uneventful election campaign much more interesting and the outcome less clear.

Nomination Blog

There is a great new blog for all us junkies on the impending 2005 election. It is called Nomination Watch. It is just what it says: the blog tracks all the local nominations of the various parties in the run up to this year's election.

The power of changing the subject

The past week has seen the political impact of changing the subject. The media and public focus on Martin’s speech to the nation, and the subsequent Liberal/NDP deal on the budget have reversed the Liberals’ decline in the polls.

I posted on April 19 on my forecast election outcome based on the early April polls released in the wake of the Jean Brault testimony at the Gomery inquiry. Based on the polls of this past week an updated forecast still finds the Conservatives in front, but the Liberals have gained significantly. In terms of seat totals, the Liberal gains have been largely at the expense of the NDP. The ideological proximity of the two parties, so manifest in the budget deal, means that Liberal strength translates, relatively speaking, into NDP weakness and vice versa. Here are the totals for the most recent week’s poll numbers:

Conservatives – 117
Liberals – 97
NDP – 28
BQ – 65
Other – 1

The Liberals are clearly still weak enough to justify the Conservatives’ declared determination to bring the government down. Whether it will happen is going to remain in doubt until the last vote is counted on the floor of the House of Commons, apparently some time in the third week of May.

Who would have thought...

Hands up all those who thought they would live to see the day that an ex-President of the National Citizens' Coalition would lecture Mike Harris and Preston Manning on the merits of Canadian medicare, in a speech at the Fraser Institute, while denouncing the pair's health care privatization proposals as 'naive and misguided'.

Says something about the continuing support by the Canadian public for our health care system.

Lack of Perspective

One the things that has bothered me about media coverage of the sponsorship scandal has been the lack of perspective. For example, Globe columnist John Ibbitson called it as bad as Watergate (subscription required). To take just one tiny example from that notorious scandal, the plumbers unit set up by the White House broke into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, to find information that would be used to discredit him in the administration's ongoing efforts to undermine the antiwar movement. The break-in at the Watergate itself was an effort by the White House to spy illegally on their political opponents. Um, comparing a patronage/tollgating scandal to a series of abuses of power? You see the problem.

However, the main point being missed is that the amount of money involved was actually quite small. Today's column in the Globe and Mail by Jim Stanford (subscription required) provides a needed corrective. He calculates that the scandal has cost him personally the equivalent of a coffee at Tim Horton's (and a donut every second year). Here are the key quotes:

Okay, enough already with the huffing and the puffing, people. Enough with the televised speeches. Most of all, enough with the pompous moral outrage. You're all overacting. So $100-million was paid to ad agencies between 1997 and 2003, some portion of which is unaccounted for. Some portion of that was stolen. And some portion of that, it seems, ended up in Liberal coffers.

These grants consumed less than 0.01 per cent of federal revenues during those six years. I paid a grand total of $107,000 in income tax to Ottawa over the same period. Therefore, the sponsorship program wasted $10.70 of my money over six years. That's $1.78 per year -- enough for a double-double at Tim's, and a doughnut every second year....

Is the sponsorship issue the most scandalous thing in Canada right now? Not even close. Why don't we get banner headlines about the unsolved murders of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Canadian prostitutes? Why don't we bring down the government over Canadian complicity in the torture of Maher Arar? Why don't we have televised hearings on the thousands of Canadians who die prematurely because of smog?

Has the sponsorship scandal destroyed Canada's reputation, demolished the "moral authority" of government? Get real.

Does it even hold a candle to the self-dealing, tax-evasion, insider-trading and tax-deductible partying that occurs in Canada's private sector every business day of the year? Hardly.

Most damning of all, does the sponsorship scandal remotely affect my life, or those of 99.9 per cent of my fellow Canadians? Uh-uh.

BC Election

The campaign is underway. The first poll - by Strategic Counsel for the Globe and Mail - echoed a number of earlier surveys in giving the Liberals a 46-38 lead over the NDP with the Greens at 13%. The seat estimate this produces is 52 Liberals and 27 NDP with nothing for the Greens. The only prospect for a Green seat appears to be leader Adriane Carr’s Powell River-Sunshine Coast constituency.

With a prosperous economy and a balanced budget one might think the contest will be an uninteresting march to the result just cited.

However, the poll has some numbers that do suggest some uncertainty. Most important are Premier Campbell’s negatives – with 42% rating his performance poor or very poor, compared to just 25% calling it excellent to good. In addition 64% thought strongly or somewhat that Mr. Campbell did not understand the concerns of ordinary British Columbians. Anyone with that baggage is vulnerable to the appropriate constellation of personalities, issues and events.

This brings us to the second great unknown that emerges from this poll: NDP Leader Carole James. She is not well known, with just 52% able to identify her. How the public reacts as they get to know her from media coverage of the campaign cannot be known in advance. If it is highly favourable, it could matter given that Campbell is less than beloved.

My intuition continues to be that the BC Liberals will win with the NDP staging a major recovery. The strong performance of the Greens in the last election in 2001 was aided by voters fleeing a discredited NDP. In that sense this election is a critical test for the Greens, one they appear likely to fail. Their support is spread to thinly to win any seats in our first-past-the-post system. Their efforts are likely to be futile at least this time out.