Governments have life spans. I have stated this before is this space. What it means is after a time people just get sick of seeing the same faces and hearing the same voices from the people running the country. It is inevitable and nothing can change that.
In Canada the typical life span for a government, both federal and provincial, is about eight years. That does not mean that at the eight year mark a government will lose an election but it does mean that at about eight years a government is operating on borrowed time. Alberta is a the exception, having lived under Conservative governments for most of the last 50+ years. A whole whack of PHD candidates in Political Science could write dissertations to explain why Alberta voters seem to be political masochists.
Scandals do not change this timeline. The Harper government had a scandal once every 18 months during their time in power but they still won three elections, losing after being in power nine years. The Chretien/Martin Liberals had their share of scandals but they lasted 11 years before losing. The McGuinty/Wynne government in Ontario also had their share of scandals but they lasted 15 years, although it should have been eleven but the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario pulled a Hudak in 2013 and allowed the Ontario Liberals to grab one more majority government term.
I am certain that there are a large number of political observers in this country who have noticed this phenomena. However, they could also be fooled by the fact that the last two changes of government have taken place during or immediately after scandals. The Martin Liberals lost after the revelations of the Gomery Inquiry into the Sponsorship Scandal and the Harper Conservatives lost after the revelations of Senator Duffy's trial for taking bribes. I believe that this might have fooled more than a few political commentators into focusing on the scandals instead of taking a look at the whole picture.
Canadians have proven over and over again that they do not get too worked up about scandals by their governments. They just don't. As long as they believe the government is generally competent in doing its job they can be very forgiving. As well, I believe the COVID crisis has changed politics in this country. Suddenly, the little things no longer seem to be registering with Canadians because they are too focused on the COVID virus and its impacts.
It is interesting that the SNC Lavalin controversy caused polls to move more than the WE controversy. SNC was about the ins and outs of the legal independence of the Attorney General while WE was about money. Most Canadians do not understand the intricacies of legal independence but all Canadians probably understand money. So why did SNC move the polling dial but WE did not? Simple answer is COVID of course. That is not just the elephant in the room that is a whole herd of them and they are not happy. So Canadians are rightly focused on it.
That has not stopped the Conservatives, the NDP and the media from focusing on a perceived scandal. What they are trying to do is shorten the life span of the government. Past history has demonstrated that they would probably not succeed in normal times and chances of success in the current abnormal times is probably even less.
However, even if they had a chance of success they are going to have to find something more than SNC and WE. First, because two controversies are not enough to cause Canadians to turn on their government. The Harper government had gone through at least five of them before the 2011 election and they won that election handily. Second, the scandals have to be more compelling than the two that they have been pursuing. Both SNC and WE did not have the kind of oomph that would move the needle among the 10 to 12 percent of non-aligned voters in Canada, the very voters that decide elections. The Sponsorship Scandal certainly did because it was truly a scandal. Maybe the Senate Expense Scandal had an impact but I believe that was less about the details of the scandal itself and more about the fact the Duffy trial dominated the first three weeks of the 2015 election campaign and reminded those non-aligned Canadians of just why they had grown tired of the Harper government after nine years.
So the resurrection of WE will probably not have the impact the Conservatives, the NDP and the media would like it to have. They have gone past flogging a dead horse to flogging its dried out old bones and Canadians have much more pressing issues to worry about. They really need to find new material but it does not seem to be available and even if it was available it probably would not matter. As in the past they are just going to have to wait for Canadians to organically grow tired of the Trudeau government, which we should see the first signs of in about three years.
Then again if they really want to focus on WE instead of trying to find another scandal to focus on or actually decide to become an effective opposition to the government and they want to do this during a global pandemic I would encourage them to do so. The more they waste time on trivialities the better it is for the government.
No comments:
Post a Comment