IT WAS meant as a joke but there was an underlying logic to the punch line.
Instead of waging national election campaigns at a cost of $250 million, said the political sage, why not just have elections in the 100 or so ridings that are up for grabs in this election?
After all, most of Alberta and Saskatchewan are unlikely to waiver from their bedrock conservatism. Lethbridge, Alta. Conservative MP Rick Casson has joked that he can draw 65 percent of the vote if he campaigns hard and 75 percent if he isn’t visible.
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Large swaths of the Maritimes have voted little but Liberal for a generation. Downtown Toronto and ethnic Montreal have been Liberal since before Christ was old enough to vote.
Of course, more than 50 Quebec seats are destined for the Bloc Québécois, maybe 60.
So why bother making believe this is an election campaign with 308 seats up for grabs when the real volatility, the places where the election will be won or lost, concentrates on one-third of the seats that are susceptible to change?
It is a good, logical question that is based on the false premise that politics is predictable.
Tell that to generations of Alberta dynasties that seemed invincible but were swept away – Liberals in 1921, United Farmers of Alberta in 1935, Social Credit in 1971, Conservatives in ….
Or tell that to the Quebec federal Liberals who won by 30,000 votes in 1980 and lost by 20,000 votes in 1984 when Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives swept the province for the first time since Sir John A. Macdonald in 1886.
In the Gatineau Valley of west Quebec, north of Ottawa, the last Conservative to represent the area was Alonso Wright, son of the founder of a local city who represented the area until 1891 and has a bridge named after him.
In 1984, a little known former Liberal named Barry Moore became the first Conservative MP in a century.
Or tell that to the Conservative candidates in Ontario in 1993 who ran in ridings that had been Tory since the 1930s, ridings like Parry Sound- Muskoka that boasted a 25-year Tory veteran, Stan Darling, who was retiring. Suddenly, a local bank manager called Andy Mitchell was the Liberal MP as the Liberals swept the province.
The point is that for all the complacency that some voters and some politicians develop, democracy can be a volatile and unforgiving system that slaps complacency on the side of the head sometimes.
And these days, with new election financing laws, there is no such thing as a ‘wasted’ vote. Each vote brings the chosen party some public finances.
But the great incentive to vote is that you never know the outcome, no matter what the assumptions.
In 2004, rural Ontario Liberal MP Paul Bonwick boasted in the local media that incumbency and the riding realignment gave him an “unassailable advantage.”
On election night in Simcoe-Grey north of Toronto, he lost a safe Liberal seat to neophyte Conservative Helena Guergis, a rape crisis centre manager.
Unassailable turned out to be completely assailable.
It is a good reason, even in seemingly hopeless ridings, to vote.
Democracy, as Pierre Trudeau once said, has a way of surprising us.
