We are now at the second day of the campaign for the 41st General Election.
Conservative leader Stephen Harper is in Brampton near Toronto, where two of their top 10 targets are located. It is generally viewed that the GTA will be where the election is decided.
Liberal leader Ignatieff was in Montreal, doing photo-ops in Outremont and Papineau, and also delivered a speech in Ahuntsic. They hope to win all three and face stiff fights with the NDP and Bloc. Of note, the Liberal campaign so far involves three buses, and none of them have Ignatieff on them -- Ignatieff is not popular, people know that, some surveys have him behind "NONE" as choice for best Prime Minister. The party has very serious problems in the province, as there are reports of tensions between the Québec wing of the party and Central Office.
NDP leader Jack Layton was in Surrey with local businessmen and also gave his first press conference where he took questions, which some reporters have found odd given he is normally much more open.
In Edmonton they are running radio ad campaigns targeted at former Liberal voters in an attempt to gain one, or at most two, seats to add to the one they have.
The Bloc campaign begins in Montreal with Gilles Duceppe at Jean-Talon market and he will continue visiting here and in nearby Laval tomorrow.
The Conservatives will be pursuing the Bloc quite closely in this campaign, in order to be able to reply to attacks quite quickly, a major failing of the last campaign.
The Greens launched their campaign with a call for civility and cooperation. They are attempting to win their first seat, especially with Elizabeth May in Saanich, but the face an uphill campaign and only have a very reduced number of targets -- in reality, only 4 at most.
The campaign is starting slowly -- there are very few signs in downtown Montreal, and the few that are there are NDP ones. The riding of Outremont is already completely sign-plastered.
There's not much to report right now, so it might be a good idea to present the context of this campaign more comprehensively than I have seen it presented so far.
Elections in Canada come at semi-regular intervals for three different reasons:
- it has been 4 (formerly 5) years since the last General Election,
- the Prime Minister desires an election to improve his position or for any other reason, or
- the Government has been defeated.
It is true that there is now a fixed-date election law, but it appears not to have too much teeth. In 2008 Stephen Harper launched an election two and a half years after the 2006 one, without being defeated, and court cases against the government afterward were unsuccessful.
The first reason is obvious, but rarely occurs as the government usually goes after 4 years, the exact timing left to its discretion. Governments who ran out the clock usually do so only when they have to and are seldom successful, either provincially or federally.
The second reason is what happens most often, as in 2008, and in other elections where the government is a majority one, that is, one that cannot be defeated and is guaranteed to have its budgets and any other legislation it likes passed.
The third reason only happens where the government has less than half of the 308 seats of the House of Commons (the sad-sack Senate plays no role), in a minority government (in majorities on important matters, or confidence issues, the votes of government MPs are assured and those who break ranks kicked out immediately). This is what happened on Friday, adjourning the 40th Parliament, and led to its dissolution the day after.
One may rightly wonder whether or not this is not only a case of the third reason, but also with the motivations of the second, in that Harper sees the election as his best and possibly last chance at reaching the elusive 155+ seat count that lets him do what he wants.
There are several good reasons to suspect this is so. First the campaign's length, at 37 days, is the minimum length possible so that the election may be held as early as possible, which suggests the Conservatives are ready ; they've been in campaign mode for over a month, and few are surprised by the election call. Second, this will be the fourth federal election campaign in 82 months, and given that Harper already called the 2008 election on his own, if he did it twice in a row, anger from frequent elections would have been deflected at him. By having the opposition force the election, he can present his hard-at-work government as the victim of a coalition of "separatists and arch-centralists" who "could only agree to raise taxes", going so far as to present the election as a choice between a stable Conservative majority or a Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition.
In a nutshell, this illustrates the Conservatives' plan of attack and purported vision of how the last two years have played out. The coalition refers to the December 2008 parliamentary dispute, taxes to bedrock conservative principles, the failed Liberal carbon tax pitch under Stéphane Dion and Ignatieff's demands that pans to cut the corporate tax rate from 18 to 15 percent be cancelled.
Harper also insists that there was nothing in the budget worth voting down. Beyond the corporate tax cut, there are a few questionable cuts to certain federal departments, such as Fisheries and Oceans and ACOA (Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, a regional development agency), and the budgeting for prison expansion is disputed. Meanwhile, the Bloc Québecois demanded the inclusion of a 2.2 billion $ agreement with the Québec government over sales tax harmonization, similar to agreements with Ontario and B.C. The NDP wanted a number of measures dealing in particular with pensions and energy costs. The budget did meet some of these demands, but the NDP deemed them insufficient. So the stage was set for the inevitable election.
The budget does contain a sprinkling of targeted incentives and tax credits, and was more or less tailor-made for an election platform. This is in contrast to the last time a federal budget was defeated, in 1979 ; then, as the Liberals had no leader, an austerity was defeated, and then Joe Clark two months later in Trudeau's comeback majority. It is the cornerstone of the Conservatives' re-election platform ; Finance minister Jim Flaherty was quoted as saying that after a successful election, the same budget would be reintroduced, with only updated economic data. A defeat on the budget would have helped the Conservatives play up their position on the economy file, where they are by far the most trusted, all the while rallying their base on the coalition file, which scores them points due to the indirect participation of the Bloc Québecois. The more the issues of the "needless election", of the economy, and of the coalition are discussed, the more the Conservatives benefit.
Also, Ignatieff is seen as an exceptionally weak leader who is out of place, out of touch, slightly creepy, unable to connect with the electorate, more likely to have a hidden agenda than Harper (!), or who simply wants to waltz in to Canada from Harvard and run the place, perhaps returning if unsuccessful... Furthermore, so many elections may depress turnout, increasing the weight of the Conservatives' base, and that in the fall many provincial elections must take place (at LEAST Ontario and Saskatchewan), making a federal election impossible, and this election would have to be held at the latest next October anyway. Put together, it all suggests Harper was aching for this election.
However, the opposition parties present this election in a different light, as necessary due to a government in contempt and out of control. The motion that led to the government's defeat was not on the budget, but on ethics, despite Conservative legislative maneuvering. It pointed out that for the first time in the history of any Commonwealth government (including such countries as Zimbabwe!) the government has been found in contempt of Parliament, which is a criminal offence in Canada. In particular, it referred to the refusal to supply certain information to Parliament, regarding the actual costs of prison expansion and of the purchase of 65 fighter jets, which has ballooned from an already high figure of 16 billion $ to 35 (!) billion $, as well as a recent and steady stream of ethical lapses and scandals, the most serious one so far involving International Development minister Bev Oda and the forgery of documents related to the defunding of Christian aid organization Kairos, due to the latter's failure to adhere to the Conservatives' über-pro-Israel stance (the word 'not' was scribbled after she signed off on a document authorizing the funding, by a staffer most likely in the PMO.)
Although the opposition parties have used ethics as their springboard to the election, the issue is nowhere as central to the campaign as the economy issue, both for the electorate and for all the parties. It isn't all that clear that it should've been, either -- Adscam still scars the Liberals for many people, they have a fresh scandal involving one of their former senators, and the Conservatives have worked very hard to own any issues relating to 'accountability' (which I suspect is a right-wing code word.)
As far as this poster is concerned, now that the pre-campaign and election-triggering dancing has ended, the real campaign can't come soon enough -- unpredictable and lasting seemingly an eternity, such that by election day all this will be forgotten. Or so one hopes...
NOTE TO FELLOW KOSSACKS
I know that some of the language may sound odd, so to help out Americans, and others who are joining us, learn about Canadian political life, I will produce a short glossary of political and other terms used. And no doubt I will also show, over the next few weeks, many different aspects of Canadian political culture and history, which have defined the political landscape, and no doubt, have already heavily defined this one.