A friend with agricultural connections started a senior position with a national political party on Feb. 1.
Our exchange of e-mails went something like this:
“Interesting time for such a career move. There will be an election.”
“Don’t I know. Since getting here, I’ve been up to my neck in election planning.”
Yes, after more than two years of the current minority Parliament and in the week that prime minister Stephen Harper passed Lester Pearson’s record of time in office, the election train has left the station.
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It is not too late to call it back, of course, but the odds don’t seem good.
The federal parties have drawn too many lines in the sand.
The Conservatives, while proclaiming their disinterest in a vote, privately are itching to go to the people. They think they can win.
The Liberals say they don’t want an election but cannot vote for the spring budget unless the Conservatives cancel planned corporate tax cuts already approved by Parliament with Liberal support. They won’t.
The NDP has little to gain from an election and face a probable loss of seats but its leaders are in such a lather over Harper’s plans to negotiate a “perimeter security” deal with the United States that any move to keep the Conservatives in power by supporting the budget would be fraught with political peril and the odour of fear.
The Bloc Québecois has issued a non-negotiable demand for $5 billion for Quebec in the budget and won’t get it. The BQ doesn’t care since their seat total in the 50 range seems secure.
So one of the parties will have to undertake an amazing face-losing climb down to avoid defeat of the government.
But then come the election naysayers who read the public opinion polls and confidently predict an election would produce almost the same minority fractured Parliament that now sits. Why bother?
Maybe, but don’t count on it.
It is true that on a national basis, the numbers don’t look promising. The Conservatives can’t get much beyond the mid-thirties percent, the Liberals have been mired in the high twenties and the NDP in the mid-teens.
By traditional standards, this would return a Conservative minority.
But the national numbers do not tell the local and demographic story.
The Conservatives need to pick up 15 seats or so (assuming they hold what they have) to reach a majority.
Within those national and provincial numbers, there are a number of targeted Liberal and NDP seats the Conservatives think they can win without a change in overall numbers. An improved outreach to the immigrant vote, holding their traditional conservative base and targeting some rural Liberal and New Democrats over their long gun registry votes all are part of the strategy.
Besides, even in the national numbers, Conservatives score well with voters over 35 and very strongly with seniors while the Liberals lead among younger voters.
The problem for the Liberals is that younger voters are the least likely to vote. The older the voter, the more likely they will the trek to the polling station. It’s far from in the bag but the Conservatives think they can smell a majority even with current polling numbers.
Who do you suppose wants an election the most?
