At some point this must have become clear to Ignatieff. Perhaps he would have been better not to turn his short tenure as Liberal leader into a succession of ultimatums, but having delivered them he finally had to live up to them. His Sudbury speech amounted to the first draft of the Liberals’ campaign manifesto and, for the first time, a hint of a coherent rationale for replacing Harper as prime minister.
“We can choose a small Canada—a diminished, mean, and petty country,” Ignatieff said. “A Canada that lets down its citizens at home and fails them abroad. A Canada that’s absent on the world stage. That’s Stephen Harper’s Canada.
“Or we can choose a big Canada. A Canada that is generous and open. A Canada that inspires. That leads the world by example. That makes us all proud. 2017 will be our 150th birthday. We can be the smartest, healthiest, greenest, most open-minded country there is—but only if we choose to be.”
Of course, a late-breaking fit of backbone and a few lines of rhetoric won’t guarantee a Liberal triumph whenever the election does come. They will need a complete strategy and a fair bit of luck. Up to now Ignatieff’s advisers have preferred to view Harper’s election in 2006 as a fluke, and his re-election in 2008 as a bit of bad luck helped along by Stéphane Dion’s carbon-tax proposal and his inability to communicate well. When Canadians come to their senses, the thinking goes, they will come back to the Liberals. “I believe the overwhelming number of Canadians don’t like Mr. Harper,” Ian Davey, the Liberal leader’s new chief of staff, told the Toronto Star. This is certainly true of the overwhelming number of Canadians who hang out with Ian Davey, and demonstrably not true of the overwhelming number of Canadians in general.
In public opinion polls, Harper routinely does better than Ignatieff and the NDP’s Jack Layton when respondents are asked who would make the best PM. The government routinely does well when respondents are asked whether it is on the right track or the wrong track. Party preference polls bounced around a bit this summer, but basically the Liberals and Conservatives are tied. That’s between elections. Historically, going back almost half a century, the Conservatives underperform in polls between elections and then deliver a bit of a surprise at the ballot box. Which helps explain why Chrétien in 1997 and Paul Martin in 2004 were surprised to see their opponents take a serious bite out of their hide, and why the Harper Conservatives and the Dion Liberals were tied in August before Harper opened an 11-point gap on election day last year.
The election campaign will surely bring its share of unforeseeable surprises and, one suspects, an important change in strategy on Harper’s part. He has always depended on a divided opposition for victory, which after all is what Jean Chrétien needed, in mirror image, to rack up his three majorities. The NDP has done a little better at every election since Layton became the party’s leader in 2003, rising from 15 to 37 seats. This has been excellent news for Harper, and in the heady days after the 2006 election it was possible to find both New Democrats and Conservatives who talked about eliminating the Liberals in a new, polarized national politics. But Layton’s best performance, combined with the Dion-led Liberals’ all-time historic worst, wasn’t enough to give Harper a majority. And then the NDP and the Liberals combined to try to form a government weeks after last year’s election. To Harper, the NDP is not good enough at its best and dangerous at its worst. He has spent the year treating Layton with barely veiled contempt, rarely answering the NDP leader’s questions in the House and offering Layton no concessions during their private meeting late last month.
Instead Harper has sought to polarize the coming confrontation, portraying it repeatedly as a fight between his Conservatives and “the Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition.” Never mind that Ignatieff has shown no interest in forming such a coalition; for Harper it will exist from the day those three parties bring his government down, and he will brandish its spectre every day on the campaign trail.
It’s a high-stakes gamble. After all, the only way Harper can be sure of averting an opposition coalition is to win a majority of seats. He may feel he has little to lose. First because a third straight minority would endanger his continued leadership of his party. Also because a Liberal-NDP coalition, if those parties have the numbers to form one, really would be a strong possibility after an election, whatever those parties’ leaders say before.
So Harper seems to be calculating that he has to double down. He will seek a polarized vote in which the choice is Conservative or Not-Conservative. His appointment of Gary Doer, the country’s most popular NDP premier, as Harper’s ambassador to Washington can be seen in this light, as an attempt to appeal to NDP voters. If NDP support collapses he needs more of that party’s support to come his way than it has so far.
There is no way to guess in detail how an election campaign will unfold, so soon after last year’s coalition crisis. It was a system shock that profoundly divided the country in ways that are not obvious from Toronto. All that’s clear is that Harper has taken the effects of that shock into account to the best of his abilities. Whether Ignatieff has done the same is one of many question marks over Ignatieff, the only national party leader who has never led his party into an election before.
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