A few days ago I wrote a series of posts on Facebook to provide some context around the announced $343 billion deficit from the economic update. I did that because that number is an eye opener. I do not fall for all of the doom and gloom hype surrounding the deficit and debt but even I was rather wide eyed when I saw that number. That number had collective Canadian sticker shock written all over it.
I believed at the time that the Conservatives and the media would jump all over that deficit and the shock it might have caused and keep on jumping all over it for days on end. Instead it only lasted a single news cycle and then quietly went away.
I know why. The Conservatives and the media could not resist a perceived scandal and they have such a low opinion of Canadians that they believe that we cannot pay attention to more than one thing at a time. So, they had to make a choice.
They made the wrong one.
Regardless of what the Conservatives and the media think, scandals, real or otherwise, do not have the staying power that they seem to believe they do. Unless a scandal takes place during or immediately prior to an election they usually do not have a real impact on where voters place their X on the ballot paper. No election will be held for at least another year. The COVID virus will prevent one from happening until it is behind us, with January being the best case scenario for that to happen. As well, none of the Opposition parties are inclined to trigger an election, for a whole host of reasons and the Liberals appear to be focused on governing instead of playing political games.
So, if the Conservatives really want to challenge the Liberals in a year or so they should be laying the groundwork right now and the announced deficit was a big issue in which to start doing that. Most Canadians have been well conditioned by the chattering classes to be wary of deficits and debt, even if that conditioning is predicated on advancing a false narrative about them. Although the current situation would have been used to justify the current deficit, a relentless campaign against it, over the next year, would probably have paid dividends for the Conservatives.
Preston Manning proved that. When he took over as the leader of the Official Opposition in 1993, leading the Reform Party, he launched a relentless campaign against the deficit. He was so single-minded about it that many commentators began to ridicule him about it but it worked. His campaign against the deficit forced the Chretien Liberals to address it. Mr. Manning's plan was pretty simple. Force the government to deal with the deficit, which would have forced them to make some very hard choices around taxes and spending cuts to get it done and hope that the choices they made would make the Liberals so unpopular that Canadians would give the Reform Party a shot. Unfortunately for Mr. Manning his timing sucked and he launched his campaign at the beginning of what would be a 15 year period of very healthy economic growth. The result was employment increased, with the increase in government revenue and the decrease in government expenditures, allowing the government to bring the deficit under control without the tough decisions Mr. Manning was hoping they would have to make. It was a contributing factor to the Liberals' victories in 1997 and 2000.
Give Mr. Manning his due. He was the leader of the last Official Opposition that effectively opposed the government. No Official Opposition party, of any political stripe, has been nearly as effective as the Reform Party was between 1993 and 1997.
Really effective opposition parties play the long game. They take one or two substantive issues where they believe the government will be vulnerable for the foreseeable future and they relentlessly push the government on them. It is a little risky because if they choose the wrong issues they hamstring themselves but it has proven to be the best way to steadily wear down a government. Instead, the current Opposition parties are just pursuing non-issues and personally attacking the PM. Although that might play well to the base and it might bump up the fund raising it is not conducive to long-term success.
Maybe when the Conservatives choose a new leader they will change tack and actually come up with a coherent line of Opposition but considering the candidates for that position I would not count on it. If they do not then the Liberals are the prohibitive favourite to win the next election.
2 comments:
I know you tend to ignore polls (and I agree they're not predictive), but I thought it was interesting that even two Conservative pollsters said just today that in the long run this may come out in the wash as a temporary impact, and COVID/the economy will be more important and overshadow this by the time the next election rolls around.
It could very well be that the Liberals found the perfect sweet spot timing-wise to air their "dirty laundry". If the Bloc (who is cynically abusing this story to detract from Blanchet's arguably worse allegations) and the shambolic Cons were somehow to persuade gullible Singh to bring down the government, they'd get punished for forcing an election in the middle of a pandemic. As well, an election next fall or even in the spring of 2022 gives the Liberals some time to put this nonsense in the rear view mirror.
What is certain is that they have no policies to speak of, so they resort to this scandal-mongering, while the media craves their horse race narrative and drama as a last-ditch effort to salvage their abysmal ratings and subscriber numbers. What both the opposition and the media have in common in their mutually parasitic relationship is an unquenchable desire for attention. The Liberals meanwhile, keep to their duties -- they made several funding announcements this past week --- and don't allow themselves to be distracted by noise.
I thought it was interesting too that a Star article reported Trudeau doesn't even read the papers or watch TV news. Per usual it became a talking point to portray him as ignorant or out of touch. But he knows it's all sensationalist crap and they have nothing good to say about this government anyway, so why should he let it throw him off his game?
Angus Reid, as Conservative a pollster as you will ever find, published a poll the other day where 16% or respondents named ethics as the most important issue, while 40% named the pandemic as the most important issue. After a month of the "We Scandal" being in the news that is a ridiculously small number of people who find ethics to be the most pressing issue.
This is before people really begin focusing on sending their kids back to school in a few weeks, during a pandemic.
The Liberals will not call an election in the Fall. So the only way that we have an election is a non-confidence vote. That will happen if the Opposition Parties advance a non-confidence motion, which would probably not be well received during a pandemic and a possible spike in cases in school children. Or, the government will propose a bill to extend CERB or some other economic support program and the Opposition will vote against it, triggering an election. That would also be a great way for the Opposition Parties to go into an election, voting against economic help for Canadians during a pandemic, while Canadians are also dealing with a possible spike in cases in school children.
That leaves sometime 2021. By then a vaccine could be developed and the government has been doing a great deal of work behind the scenes to be prepared for that. It is in the interests of the Provincial governments that the roll out of the vaccine goes smoothly so they will be working closely with the Feds to make that happen. If we can get the pandemic under control then the Federal government can turn to programs to boost the economy. Again, the Opposition triggering an election during either of these times would probably not endear them to a large chunk of the electorate.
Probably the next time the Opposition can trigger an election is Fall of 2021. By then the WE issue will be well behind us. Which is not to say the Opposition and the media will not find some other bullshit issue to call a "scandal" before that but like this one if it butts up against the general competence of the government in getting the vaccine to Canadians and restarting the economy post-pandemic it should not have much of an impact if an election is triggered.
Then again, the Liberals may engineer an election soon after a vaccine is distributed and they have submitted a plan to Canadians to rebuild the economy post-pandemic. The only alternative Canadians would consider would be anything the Conservatives produce and we all know they would focus their efforts on business and trickle down economics. An election where Canadians are asked to choose between two very different alternatives is not what the Conservatives are looking for.
All of this will be moot however if the pandemic is still raging in 2021. It is highly unlikely that any party has the stomach to trigger an election during a global pandemic.
The Liberals are laser focused on governing and they have been since 2015. I have yet to see them alter their approach, which is a far cry from how Stephen Harper operated.
Justin Trudeau does not have time to watch TV and read newspapers. Even during normal times there are not enough hours in the day for him to get his work done and these are not normal times. There would be even less if he had to read or watch the news. He gets the news but he gets it by means of a daily briefing. Part of that briefing would have included some news about the WE issue, over the last few weeks. However, those briefings would have stuck to facts and all of the spin and hyperbole that we see in our media would have been removed.
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