The real odds: Tories implode, Dion next PM
The Halifax Chronicle Herald - RALPH SURETTE, Sat. Nov 10 - 4:47 AM
Now I'm not normally one of those people who counts down the days to Christmas but this year might be different.
APPEARANCES can be deceptive, especially in politics. If Stéphane Dion makes it until Christmas intact, the odds are that he’ll be our next prime minister in any election in the spring or beyond.
The opinion-making apparatus of pollsters, pundits and editorial writers has it the other way, of course: that Dion is badly wounded, taking new injuries daily from the wily Stephen Harper, and is bleeding to death.
The political opinion business, however, is notorious for its short-term thinking. Remember the impending "coronation" of Paul Martin a couple of years ago? He had, after all, hit a staggering 80 per cent in the polls. What could go wrong? Or Jean Chrétien when he became Liberal leader in the early 1990s. He couldn’t speak English, he couldn’t read the TelePrompTer, his mouth wasn’t right for TV. He was going nowhere.
The point here is not that Dion is going to catch on. Harper, after all, hadn’t caught on when he was elected. The point, rather, is that the Harper Tories, far from edging towards a majority, are themselves at increasing risk of imploding. Some sinister trends are coming home to roost.
Some are external to government. The economy is one. It has become axiomatic that good economic times no longer translate into support for the party in power. The Saskatchewan election this week proved it again. Bad economic times, however, will howl at the government’s door and by all appearances, there’s plenty of that coming any time now as currencies, stock markets, U.S. debt and other forces do a macabre dance.
Here’s a local example of the economic hazards. The Harper government got a bounce from fishermen in Western Nova Scotia with their move to end trust agreements in the fishery. Their hope is to get a few more votes and topple the narrowly elected Robert Thibault in West Nova. But the high dollar is promising a disastrous season for the lobster fishery. Add Christmas tree growers along the South Shore and maybe even the pulp plant in Liverpool, which are suddenly in trouble, and the Tories could end up losing a seat instead of gaining one.
Or the environment. The high-powered international agencies – the Paris-based International Energy Agency again this week – keep warning that things don’t add up. All it will take is for all this to crystallize in the right way, and the Harper government – which came to power less than two years ago denying climate change and has been desperately trying to stay off the subject since – could very quickly find itself in an extremely hot spot.
The real hazards, however, might be internal. The instances of high-handed, autocratic manipulations practised by the prime minister seem to be accelerating, and at the same time wearing thinner. After two years, things start to stick, and it seems to me that any of a bunch of things could suddenly blow, the way they tend to do in politics – the resurgent Mulroney affair, the sudden cuddling-up to the death penalty, and the dumping of three Tory candidates for their less-than-absolute obedience to the party line being only three current examples.
As for Dion and the opinion-makers, they thumped him again for suggesting that if elected, he might take another look at the recent one per cent GST cut by the Tories. This was declared to be bad politics – another example of Dion’s meltdown – but was admitted to be good policy, since no economist of any repute, of the left or the right, endorses cutting the GST at the expense of income taxes, infrastructure spending or a host of other things.
The problem here, then, is with the opinion makers, not with Dion: We have declared hereby that good politics and good policy cannot co-exist. Where is this taking us? Shouldn’t we be saying, "Good for Dion for frankly, if awkwardly, blurting out good policy"?
The Tories, meanwhile, picked up the story and dashed off a crude TV ad ridiculing Dion for his suggestion (he’d take away your precious one per cent GST cut), which, according to reports, they ran on American football broadcasts beamed into Canada! The implication here is that people who watch American football are stupid and that if you can manipulate enough stupid people, you can win.
Meanwhile, to round out the misunderstanding, NDP Leader Jack Layton has pronounced the Liberals’ refusal to bring down the Harper government as having the effect of a de facto Liberal-Tory coalition. But this is what the Nova Scotia NDP have been doing for years – not pulling the plug on Tory minorities – basically because the public wants the minority government kept from excess, but doesn’t want elections at every turn.
Obvious as it is here, at the national level the pollsters are baffled by this very thing. Satisfaction with the Harper government has been in the 60 per cent range, but only some 35 per cent declare their intention to vote for it. As in Nova Scotia, the public is expressing satisfaction with the minority situation, not the government itself. In the long term, this favours Dion at the federal level as it favours Darrell Dexter and the NDP in Nova Scotia.
(Source: http://thechronicleherald.ca/Opinion/977781.html rsurette@herald.ca Ralph Surette is a veteran freelance journalist living in Yarmouth County.)
