“The problem is we left too many of those folks at home in the last election. So that’s who our vote is. We’re already doing fine with certain segments. Not enough. We’re doing fine with youngish voters, but there are issues there with turnout. We’re doing fine with university-educated voters, but again, there’s not enough of this to go around.”
Photograph by Christopher Pike
What the Liberals really must avoid, this person said, is a fragmented vote. “In an election that’s going to be heavily polarized—that we’re going to work like mad to polarize—[the NDP] get squeezed big time. And we need to squeeze them big time because we can’t afford an NDP at 18 per cent and a Bloc at 10 per cent. Can’t afford that.
“Frankly we also can’t afford a Bloc at the level they’re at. You’re going to see a very different treatment of the Bloc than it has been in the past. It’s going to be less, ‘You’re bastards who want to destroy the country.’ It’s going to be, ‘Actually, you Quebecers haven’t got a thing in common with Harper. You abhor him more than any other Canadians do. And if you really want to get rid of him, don’t vote Bloc. Because voting for the Bloc is what keeps him in office.’ ”
That’s the rhetoric. What are they going to put in their platform? What’s there to vote for, besides a clever parsing of Conservative shortcomings?
In the sunroom at Stornoway, Ignatieff gave a pretty detailed answer to that question. The Liberals have been refining their platform for more than a year. “There are two fundamental issues for the country,” Ignatieff said. “One is, ‘Does this Prime Minister respect the democratic restrictions placed on the authority of a prime minister? Yes or no?’
“Issue number two is, ‘Can this Prime Minister be trusted, as we move forward, with the key sources of economic success?’ Which are: a health care system you can count on; a pension system you can count on; child care when you need it to get into the job market.”
On the first issue, the Liberals do not believe the nation is with them in believing Harper is a threat to democracy. The constant drip-drip of embarrassing stories has ignited no national outrage. Bev Oda altered a memo from her department to make support for a project look like opposition. A fundraising letter went out from Jason Kenney’s office on ministerial letterhead, not Conservative party stationery.
“It’s not the burning issue in the mind of the average voter,” a Liberal who has worked on the platform said. “But it’s significant because it’s significant. This is a government and a Prime Minister that have demonstrated again and again and again and again that they think the rules don’t apply to them. Sometimes they think the laws don’t apply to them. There really is a real issue about our democracy being eroded. It’s quite real.”
There are, in fact, some in the Liberal caucus who think the only way to spark a public debate about such relatively arcane issues is to put them at the centre of an election campaign. Which is why some MPs quietly support provoking an election before the March 22 budget, if it can be done.
As for the economic stuff, it gives the Liberals a shot—a long shot, to be sure—at displacing the Conservatives as a party that working-class Canadians feel is on their side.
“I actually think that the reason our country has been economically successful since the Second World War—in Liberal governments, in Conservative governments, in and out—has been that we’ve cared about equality of opportunity,” Ignatieff said.
Equality of opportunity will be a running theme of the Liberal campaign, then. It is a darned sight less flashy than Dion’s plan to shift billions of dollars from income taxes to carbon taxes, but it may sound less like it was delivered to the electorate by space aliens.
The Liberals will target rising university tuition. How? “Watch this space,” Ignatieff said. “We’ve got a very specific, costed, serious investment to make in removing barriers to access in post-secondary education. I’m thinking particularly of those Canadian families whose moms and dads didn’t get a chance at a university or college education and they want their kids to go. And we’re going to do something additional for Aboriginal Canadians.”
They’ve already announced a compassionate-leave plan to allow Canadians to take time off work, paid out of the Employment Insurance fund, to care for elderly relatives in declining health. They’ll also work to supplement the Canada Pension Plan through voluntary supplementary payments into the public pension system. They will, having twice lost the debate to the Conservatives about public child care versus direct cash payments to parents, try again with a more modest daycare project.
“One Canadian child in five under the age of five has access to a certified child care space. That’s not good enough,” Ignatieff said. “Nobody’s going to ram child care down families’ throats if they don’t want it. That stuff about ‘choice’ “—the preferred Conservative mantra for their per-child cheques—”is nonsense. You don’t have a choice if you don’t have child care spaces. And we haven’t built enough child care spaces in Canada.”
“There’s a universe of contrast opportunity on this ground,” said the Liberal who has been working on the party’s platform, “if we can actually get heard.”
This is the gamble the Liberals are rallying around, with varying degrees of enthusiasm: that they will be heard if they can start a real fight. Party pollster Michael Marzolini tells them approval for Ignatieff is higher among the narrow slice of the electorate that pays attention to politics between elections. Very well then: widen the slice. Don’t fear the electorate. Run toward it, arms waving.
“When the lights go on in an election, Canadians will have an alternative,” Ignatieff said. “That’s my job. My job is to give them an alternative. And then they’re the boss. They’ll decide what they’re going to do.”
