Inkless Wells

Inkless Wells

Inkless Wells

Paul Wells on all the latest out of Ottawa—along with the occasional post about jazz. Follow Paul on Twitter: @InklessPW

Categories: Capital Read, Inkless Wells

UPDATED: Conservative ads succeed in moving the numbers!

by Paul Wells on Monday, May 25, 2009 12:39am - 122 Comments

harper-queNew large-sample Quebec poll, taken during the first four days of the Conservatives’ new ad campaign, shows the Conservative party has fallen to fourth in Quebec, behind the NDP. Stephen Harper’s party is now polling about as well as the sum of the performance of Stockwell Day’s Canadian Alliance and Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservatives in 2000. So it’s going pretty well, really.

UPDATE: The new ads are working with unprecedented speed. Why, it took only days for the Conservatives to drive their numbers down to the same 15% level the Liberals were at in Quebec a year ago, after months of anti-Dion ads. And that’s what Harper wanted to do, right? Drive his party support down to Dion-like levels in Quebec, right? Yes? No?

UP-IS-THE-NEW-DOWNDATE, Monday morning: Still, it’s important to keep hope alive. That’s why (both of these links are to Le Devoir articles in Conservative Party-approved Quebec-French) Chantal Hébert explains the Conservatives have hitched their wagons irrevocably to the Action Démocratique in Quebec. Super Mario’s old party “may be a shadow of what it once was,” Chantal writes, “it’s still in better shape than the federal Conservative party.” And how’s that working out? The rest of today’s poll shows the ADQ at 8%.

So cheer up, Conservatives. The boss has a master plan to cut your party’s remaining Quebec support in half! I hear Dimitri and Leo are working on it full time.

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  • Bruce

    Again we see one of these polls, big deal. These same polling companies were predicting that former PM Paul Martin would win the largest majority in Canadian history and they had also predicted that Stephane Dion would at the very least win a minority government. Didn’t exactly turn out that way did it?

    You know what dogs do to poles?

    There is only one poll that counts and that is on election day.

    • Paul Wells

      Insightful.

    • dan in van

      Aww, spoken like a true Harper ‘I-believe-in-the-power-of-negativity’ fan club member. Yes, there’s only one poll that picks our parliament. Right now, Bruce, your team has stopped peeing on it and they aer now peeing on themselves.

    • Will

      That’s not true. Large sample polling is usually right (give or take a few percentage points). The important thing to remember is that this is a snapshot of the past few days. The trend indicates that it doesn’t look good for Harper and that’s why he’s been fighting for his political life lately. If there’s no election in the immediate future, this poll means nothing anyway.

    • Ian

      Just like the polls in December (during what Kady calls “The Madness”) didn’t mean anything either? Because I recall a lot of people like you pointing to those as proof that Canadians were rejecting the Socialist-Separatist coup…

      • Jean Proulx

        Ha, I noticed this too. Polls are worth taking seriously, until they tell us something we don’t want to hear.

  • Rob

    Paul Wells, is that Martin Van Buren on your avatar?

    • Paul Wells

      It could almost be, couldn’t it? But it’s George Brown, appropriately enough on this day.

      • John W

        If you dared have an American on your avatar, you couldn’t write for Maclean’s ever again.

  • David

    Let’s face it, the current and temporary occupant of the PMO is just not a ‘people person’ – in fact, I’d go so far to say that he’s much more comfortable in a room by himself surrounded by all of his cherished photos of himself. Canadians are shaking off the doom and gloom this little twerp dragged into our lives a few years back when he was toadying up to the Cheney/Bush administration and now we’re ready to lighten up and feel Canadian again. It’s back to the broom closet for little Steve – he’s had his kick at the Canuck.

    • Orson Bean

      I agree. Everyone must now assimilate into the Liberal Party collective. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.

  • chrispogi90

    no more discussion that the peoples are now dying lolz

  • Stephen

    The ads were different in quebec, different in content but not approach. Harper has a foundation of support in ROC, negative ads work there because the choice in people’s mind is different than the choice in Quebec.

    At one point he was in the choice set but is out now. Just like dumont was, and no longer is. But quebec being Quebec you can always come back. Charest is a good example, as was Bourassa. But it starts with Quebecers deciding you arent such a bad person after all….I dont know enough about what quality formed the foundation in either of those two cases….and native sons are different than outsiders.

    I don’t know if Negative ads, as an approach, works for Cons in Quebec. They need to get themselves back into the chocie set before they can get any effect of knocking others down.

    Ontario is completely different story, where I woudl expect to see the approach work, and BC is third narrative where the con enemy is more the NDP…but dumping on Ignatieff helps prevent vote splitting.

    Paul, who was the architect of the 2006 Quebec breakout? Are they still around?

  • Sea Otter

    Has enough time now passed that Maxime Bernier can re-enter cabinet? It strikes me that the Conservatives need a strong, articulate voice full time in the province, a voice that none of current Quebec caucus can provide. Bernier was well on his way to becoming that voice until his a) misguided shuffling out of Industry, and b) that other little incident. That’s old news now, so perhaps the Prime Minister can put him back in cabinet, a la Charest after his brief timeout in 1990. Judging by the current numbers, it can’t possibly hurt, and it may well help.

    • keith c

      this would probably be imminent.. but chantal hebert reminds me that the RCMP investigation on l’affaire couillard is still active, so that has to complicate things. you’d have to assume that ends first. Interesting, as wells pointed out earlier, that Mad Max started his bilingual video blog 2 weeks ago, staking out a a more libertarian message than the party has.

      • Sea Otter

        Good for him. Bernier is definitely a strong libertarian on fiscal issues, and is no doubt appalled at the tax and spend, interventionalist mood that has taken hold in government. (It is simultaneously sad and amusing to see governments embracing deficits and heavy government economic intervention like it is something new and different that has never been tried before.) Max is a guy who could give Quebeckers the fiscal facts of life and not be dismissed as just some stuffy Anglo.

        As for the RCMP investigation, do they ever formally close those things? They seem to be loathe to ever publicly declare that a given investigation is closed. After all this time, it is hard to imagine what they could be investigating, and what they could find on the Couillard affair that hasn’t already been reported on publicly.

  • keith c

    random / irreverent thought.. what do we make of the two most important backroom quebec tories / adq linked guys being greek? has that ethnic community gone particularly libertarian / away from the libs in the last decade?

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