The untold story of the 2011 election: Chapter 4

By Paul Wells - Saturday, May 7, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 25 Comments

Fred Chartrand/CP

Introduction: Politics turned over
How Harper got what he’s always wanted, Layton took centre stage, and Ignatieff and Duceppe were done in

Chapter 1: The first mistake
The seeds of Michael Ignatieff’s troubles were planted last fall, and by the Liberals themselves

Chapter 2: Not feeling the love
Harper was tightly controlled, Ignatieff loose and freewheeling. Layton? Just a guy most Canadians would rather have a beer with

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation
The PM had problems: the auditor general kerfuffle, Bruce Carson, the folks kicked out of rallies. The Liberals railed, but the NDP stepped up.

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat
The leaders clashed predictably in the TV debates, but the election would soon turn unexpectedly on two key speeches: one by Ignatieff, one by Duceppe

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises
Years of quiet preparation in Quebec begin paying off for the NDP—Layton’s rivals wake up to a new reality

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead
What do Harper and Layton have in common? An understanding of what works in Canadian politics in the Twitter age­—patience and determination.

To read the entire article now, pick up the latest issue of Maclean’s at your favourite newsstand.

*****

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat

The Government Congress Centre across from the Château Laurier used to be the old Ottawa train station. In the 1960s, government planners decided they had a better idea and moved the trains out to a secluded corner of southeastern Ottawa. As is often the case with government planners, this was not, in fact, a better idea. They made taking the train a pain and left one of the grandest buildings in the Parliament Hill precinct nearly derelict. Sometimes men in suits shuffle in for conferences. Once a year, reporters are locked up in the old building for a few hours with sandwiches and copies of the federal budget. And for two nights in April, Stephen Harper faced his tormentors for the nationally televised leaders’ debates.

“There was a sense coming out of the debates last time”—in 2008—“that it was a four-on-one ambush,” a Conservative strategist said later. “Harper was under attack from all sides, and our positioning in the last debates was too defensive and we didn’t look our best. We knew that we would still face that three-on-one or four-on-one dynamic this time.” In the end it was three. Green party Leader Elizabeth May wasn’t invited. “The goal was to try and recast or reframe it so that rather than looking like we were the ones under attack, there would be a pivot away from the others, into the camera, to use the opportunity to drive the ballot question with the viewers at home. Number one, don’t make a mistake. Number two, try and strategically minimize the others by making a more direct connection with the viewer at home.”

And indeed, Harper spent the debate’s first night physically pivoting away from whoever was accusing him of something and staring into the camera. Angry Harper would come out if he fought back at his opponents, so he basically didn’t engage. “That’s simply not true,” he said again and again, before telling the home audience a tale of modest, responsible government that had not very much to do with whatever the other guy had just shouted at him.

Continue…

How Justin Trudeau could have changed electoral history

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 5 Comments

Mark Blinch/Reuters; Photograph by Mitchel Raphael

Victory moustaches!

At the Toronto NDP victory celebration, which was filled with people sporting fake Jack Layton moustaches, the partiers kept the music playing over Michael Ignatieff’s concession speech as it was broadcast on giant screens. They turned the music down for all of Gilles Duceppe’s, and for half of Green Leader Elizabeth May’s. When Layton acknowledged the campaigns of the other leaders, May got the most applause. Layton was happy about the re-election of his wife, Olivia Chow. There had been a huge battle to keep her riding safe. The week before the vote, Liberals Bob Rae (who won) and Gerard Kennedy (who lost) went to Chow’s riding to support the Liberal candidate there. The NDP claimed it was an attempt to get at Layton by doing everything they could to take down his wife. Chow had her stepson, Toronto city councillor Mike Layton, helping her with door knocking, since the area he represents overlaps with hers. For his efforts, he ended up with a pile of complaints from constituents about local problems, mostly broken sidewalks and potholes.

Mulcair’s strategy

Each day during the election campaign, Thomas Mulcair would have a conference call with all the other Quebec NDP candidates. There were ridings they knew they could win, ridings in which they thought they had a chance, and ridings where the odds were against them. When candidates would report suspicious things like a large number of their signs being removed, Mulcair said that was their way of knowing the competition must be worried and they took it as a signal they should up their game in those areas.

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The real reason this election will go down in history

By the editors - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 5 Comments

Nathan Denette/CP; Photograph by Chris Bolin

When Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff triggered a federal election by bringing down Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s minority government in March, he called it “a historic day in the life of Canadian democracy.” It certainly was, though not in the way he might have hoped.

This week’s stunning election has completely rewritten Canada’s political map, and marks a milestone in the country’s history.

The biggest news is Harper’s long-sought majority government. Three consecutive victories is a substantial accomplishment in Canadian politics, and this win—the first majority for a Conservative leader in over two decades—is particularly noteworthy given the fragile beginnings of the Conservative Party of Canada in 2003. Jack Layton and the NDP have seized the title of official Opposition after running a picture-perfect campaign heavy on Layton’s personal appeal and light on traditional NDP policies. The Liberals, meanwhile, have been relegated to third-party status for the first time in history, and the Bloc Québécois, which many saw as a roadblock to coherent national politics, may now be a spent force.

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The West is in and Ontario has joined it

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 147 Comments

Photograph by Chris Bolin

Democracy, great and terrible as the sea: unknowable, implacable, irresistible, destroyer of parties, deliverer of others, humbler of leaders, elector of bricklayers and assistant pub managers. Tremble before it, and stay out of its path when it moves.

Five parties were picked up, shaken out and tossed aside by the voters in this astonishing election, but of all the many implications one is fundamental: the Conservatives are now in a position to replace the Liberals as the natural governing party in Canada, as dominant, potentially, in the 21st century as the Liberals were in the 20th. This isn’t just a victory, the first Conservative majority in a generation. It is (at least under the terms of the current electoral system) a realignment. Simply put, the West is in—and Ontario has joined it.

The temptation, looking at the wreckage of the Liberal and Bloc Québécois parties and the meteoric rise of the NDP, is to compare this election to 1993, which shattered Brian Mulroney’s old Conservative coalition into its Bloc and Reform party fragments. But it’s much more consequential than that. In retrospect, 1993 changed very little. It handed power to the Liberals, but it did nothing to alter the long-term dynamic of Canadian politics: the remorseless shrinking of the Liberal base.

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The untold story of the 2011 election: Chapter 3

By Paul Wells - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 42 Comments

Adrian Wyld/CP

Introduction: Politics turned over
How Harper got what he’s always wanted, Layton took centre stage, and Ignatieff and Duceppe were done in

Chapter 1: The first mistake
The seeds of Michael Ignatieff’s troubles were planted last fall, and by the Liberals themselves

Chapter 2: Not feeling the love
Harper was tightly controlled, Ignatieff loose and freewheeling. Layton? Just a guy most Canadians would rather have a beer with

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation
The PM had problems: the auditor general kerfuffle, Bruce Carson, the folks kicked out of rallies. The Liberals railed, but the NDP stepped up.

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat
The leaders clashed predictably in the TV debates, but the election would soon turn unexpectedly on two key speeches: one by Ignatieff, one by Duceppe

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises
Years of quiet preparation in Quebec begin paying off for the NDP—Layton’s rivals wake up to a new reality

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead
What do Harper and Layton have in common? An understanding of what works in Canadian politics in the Twitter age­—patience and determination.

To read the entire article now, pick up the latest issue of Maclean’s at your favourite newsstand.

*****

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation

Later, when everything went crazy and pollsters started projecting 100 seats for the NDP, the people running the other parties’ campaigns were still mystified about how it happened. Was it the debates? That’s when the New Democrats began a long, steady climb in the polls. But debates don’t usually blow a campaign wide open, and there wasn’t much in Layton’s performance that anyone could point to as a hall-of-fame moment.

Layton’s breakthrough had its roots in events long before the debates. By the campaign’s end, voters who had never expected to abandon their old allegiances were swinging toward Layton. His performance at the debates, and in the days after, scratched a very specific itch for those voters: a growing frustration with the politics of allegation and accusation that dominated Stephen Harper’s Ottawa. That frustration had been building before the campaign even began, and the 10-day period before the debates was just more evidence that something had to change.

For the Liberals it began on a bright note, with the release in Ottawa of the party’s electoral platform. Two years earlier, Ignatieff had told a reporter that the party’s next platform “is not a Red Book.” Now here he stood, waving a red book. Reaffirming basic principles might not be such a bad thing for a party that had taken a beating. This event played to several strengths of the current Liberal team. Ignatieff spoke off the cuff, and well. The event was webcast on the Internet (the party said nearly 10,000 people watched), so it felt modern. The platform’s themes and the event’s tone were reminiscent of the discussions during Ignatieff’s April 2010 thinkers’ conference in Montreal, so the Liberals looked like an organization with an attention span and some follow-through.

Continue…

The untold story of the 2011 election: Chapter 2

By Paul Wells - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 25 Comments

Jason Ransom/PMO

Introduction: Politics turned over
How Harper got what he’s always wanted, Layton took centre stage, and Ignatieff and Duceppe were done in

Chapter 1: The first mistake
The seeds of Michael Ignatieff’s troubles were planted last fall, and by the Liberals themselves

Chapter 2: Not feeling the love
Harper was tightly controlled, Ignatieff loose and freewheeling. Layton? Just a guy most Canadians would rather have a beer with

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation
The PM had problems: the auditor general kerfuffle, Bruce Carson, the folks kicked out of rallies. The Liberals railed, but the NDP stepped up.

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat
The leaders clashed predictably in the TV debates, but the election would soon turn unexpectedly on two key speeches: one by Ignatieff, one by Duceppe

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises
Years of quiet preparation in Quebec begin paying off for the NDP—Layton’s rivals wake up to a new reality

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead
What do Harper and Layton have in common? An understanding of what works in Canadian politics in the Twitter age­—patience and determination.

To read the entire article now, pick up the latest issue of Maclean’s at your favourite newsstand.

*****

Chapter 2: Not feeling the love

If everyone involved is telling the truth about what happened on budget day, then the election happened because the Conservatives and New Democrats didn’t understand each other.

Brad Lavigne is a former chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students. Since 2009 he’s been the national director of the NDP, appointed with a mandate to make the party ready for an election at any moment. On March 23 he and Jack Layton read the budget Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was about to table. “It became obvious very quickly that the Conservatives wanted an election,” Lavigne said later.

In fact, Flaherty had told a news conference a few hours before his budget speech that he had made specific concessions to obtain NDP support. So the Conservatives thought they were being conciliatory, and the New Democrats didn’t see any sign of it. Stephen Harper’s government fell into the gap between those two viewpoints.

Continue…

The untold story of the 2011 election: Introduction and Chapter 1

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 11:59 AM - 82 Comments

Photograph by Chris Bolin

Introduction: Politics turned over
How Harper got what he’s always wanted, Layton took centre stage, and Ignatieff and Duceppe were done in

Chapter 1: The first mistake
The seeds of Michael Ignatieff’s troubles were planted last fall, and by the Liberals themselves

Chapter 2: Not feeling the love
Harper was tightly controlled, Ignatieff loose and freewheeling. Layton? Just a guy most Canadians would rather have a beer with

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation
The PM had problems: the auditor general kerfuffle, Bruce Carson, the folks kicked out of rallies. The Liberals railed, but the NDP stepped up.

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat
The leaders clashed predictably in the TV debates, but the election would soon turn unexpectedly on two key speeches: one by Ignatieff, one by Duceppe

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises
Years of quiet preparation in Quebec begin paying off for the NDP—Layton’s rivals wake up to a new reality

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead
What do Harper and Layton have in common? An understanding of what works in Canadian politics in the Twitter age­—patience and determination.

To read the entire article now, pick up the latest issue of Maclean’s at your favourite newsstand.

*****

Introduction: Politics turned over

“What a great night! Quelle belle soirée!”

By now Stephen Harper is getting used to making these speeches on the floor of the Telus Convention Centre in Calgary. This was his fourth since 2004, his third as Prime Minister-elect since 2006. Canadians have been watching this man for nearly a decade: his cadences, his body language, his preferred topics and the terms he uses to discuss them are familiar.

It’s just everything else that has changed.

“Friends, I have to say it,” the modern architect of Conservatism as a durable governing force in Canada said. “A strong, stable, national, majority Conservative government.”

It was what he had asked for, in those words, on every day of this astonishing campaign. By now it was an inside joke. But it was also a totem of victory, because for the first time Stephen Harper had won clear command of a Parliament within which no coalition could block or replace him. He is the first party leader in the history of the country to fall short of that goal three times and then succeed. By now the victims of his resilience are stacked outside like cordwood, and it may at last be getting hard for them to hang onto their easy dismissive smirks.

He thanked the voters of Calgary Southwest for returning him—and “for giving me the honour of following in the footsteps of Preston Manning,” a bit of family detail that has been true since he first represented the riding in 2002, but which he had not mentioned in front of a national audience until this night. He spoke of his love for his children, Ben and Rachel, and for his tearful wife, Laureen. He thanked the voters, who “chose hope, unity of purpose and a strong Canada.”

Hang on. Unity of purpose? Six voters in 10 did not vote for his party. Those who voted against him were so desperate for an alternative that more than a million of them abandoned once-sturdy vessels, the Bloc Québécois and the Liberal Party of Canada, in favour of a bicyclists’ party led by a former city councillor with a bum hip.

Jack Layton is the evening’s second great story, in some ways fresher: a career politician with a Ph.D. whose opponents, and some of his allies, wrote him off for years as a naïf or a citified bumpkin. Harper himself would say in private that he had urged Layton to take a chance from time to time, but then the Conservative leader would always shrug: “You can’t teach an elephant to dance.” That’s okay. Elephants don’t have to dance. They just walk right over things.

Every election comes down to a choice between “change” and “more of the same.” But in a parliamentary system we get to have both. Harper set the terms for this election two years ago. His agenda was never secret. He would propose stability and warn against risk. He knew the choice would split the electorate, and hoped only for the larger part.

In the end, those Canadians who wanted stability have it. Only seven incumbent Conservatives were defeated on Monday night, compared to 82 incumbents from other parties. The Conservative vote keeps growing, but most of the voters who supported one of Harper’s candidates were doing so for the fourth time. As they head back to the drawing board, Harper’s opponents should start by admitting to themselves the extraordinary buyer satisfaction Harper provides his supporters. He is becoming what he has hoped Conservatism could become in this country: a familiar habit.

But even the voters who rejected Harper’s stability proved him right by preferring risk—and taking a big one. A vote for the Bloc Québécois has, for 20 years, been a respectable way to wave the home flag and choose, in other important ways, not to play with others. A vote for the Bloc combined pride and safety, and why would anyone ever give up a blanket like that? Unless they started hoping for more. Quebecers did. Monday’s awesome swing in that province is many things, but among them it is an expression of hope. So Jack Layton became the first anglophone leader of a national party to win in Quebec when a francophone was on offer. Half of his caucus will now come from Quebec, so he will need to put more French into his speeches than he did in accepting the people’s verdict on election night. He’ll adjust.

Sixty-four per cent of the NDP vote on Monday came from outside Quebec. Layton has MPs from eight provinces. In Saskatchewan, where a trick of the electoral system locked him out, his party won nearly a third of the vote. He is a truly national Opposition leader, facing a truly national Prime Minister, and that alone is good for the country. So it was not mawkish but accurate of the Prime Minister to say Canadians “chose hope” on Monday, even if they chose such starkly different kinds of hope. Even if the results throw some into despair. But we’ll get to the Liberals in a minute.

“Because Canadians chose hope, we can now begin to come together again,” Harper said. “For our part, we are intensely aware that we are, and we must be, the government of all Canadians, including those who did not vote for us.”

This will be the test of the next three or four years in this country. Will Canadians judge that Harper has listened to them? Will he take his majority mandate, as his opponents always warned he would, and take such radical action that Canadians feel betrayed? Or do his opponents now have something worse to fear: the possibility that more Harper will mean more support for Harper, as has been the case now for four elections in a row?

The Prime Minister offered a few hints. “Friends, hear me on this. All those lessons of the past few years—holding to our principles, but also of listening, of caring, of adapting—those lessons that have come with a minority government, we must continue to practise as a majority government.”

So he plans, or says he plans, to stay the course. “Our first job will be to implement what we set out in our budget.” The budget the other parties, including Layton’s, said they would oppose, a budget they cannot now block. The months ahead will show both the extent and the limits of Layton’s new clout.

So the Harpers move back to 24 Sussex, but little of what lies ahead is familiar. The story of how we got here is one of the most amazing stories in the annals of Canadian politics. Once again, Maclean’s has deployed all the resources at our disposal to tell that story. A team of Maclean’s reporters, led by myself, John Geddes and Aaron Wherry, travelled the country to cover the 2011 campaign. We interviewed key members of every leader’s campaign staff, often on the understanding that nothing we were told would be revealed until after Canadians had voted.

Here is that story. In part it is the tale of an election strategy decided by Harper himself in the days after the 2008 coalition crisis nearly took his job away. He announced his plan as soon as he concocted it—a clear choice between a majority and a reincarnated coalition—in the first week of 2009, in an interview with the publisher of this magazine. Michael Ignatieff had two years to prepare but he never found a persuasive answer.

This is also the story of a party, the NDP, that has courted French-speaking voters in Quebec for literally half a century, through good days and bad, and of a leader who has been written off as an also-ran for every one of the four elections in which he improved his party’s standing.

But the story has to begin with Michael Ignatieff. To understand anything else in this election, we have to understand how he became the leader of a once-great party, and how Stephen Harper took him apart, piece by piece.

Chapter 1: The first mistake

Photograph by Christopher Pike

Michael Ignatieff’s gaze drifted upward, past the ceiling of the foyer of the House of Commons and, as it seemed, toward heaven.

It was Friday, March 25. The House of Commons had just voted, by 165 votes to 145, in support of this Liberal motion: “That the House agrees with the finding of the standing committee on procedure and House affairs that the government is in contempt of Parliament, which is unprecedented in Canadian parliamentary history, and consequently, the House has lost confidence in the government.” Tomorrow, an election campaign would begin. Now, the Liberal leader had come out of the Commons chamber into the grandly decorated foyer, backed by a handful of his most telegenic MPs and faced by a pack of reporters and cameras.

The press wanted to know whether he would conspire with the other opposition parties to take power from Stephen Harper after an election, just as Stéphane Dion had tried to do in 2008. Ignatieff was trying to explain that if he had his wish, there wouldn’t even be any other opposition parties. He just wanted a fair fight between his Liberals and Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. His attempts to make this argument were not going well.

“Let me make it more clear: if you vote for the NDP, if you vote for the Greens, if you vote for the Bloc, you’ll get more of this,” he said, tilting his head back toward the Commons chamber, where the Harper government had so vexed him for two years now. “And Canadians are saying, ‘Enough.’ I can’t be clearer than that.”

Tonda MacCharles, who writes for the Toronto Star and does not like vague answers, cut in. “No, you’re not clear at all. You’re not clear at all, sir, actually. Do you believe that a coalition is a legitimate parliamentary option that you will pursue?”

Ignatieff smiled wanly. Go talk to the Governor General if you want to debate “abstract constitutional principles,” he said. His formidable eyebrows arched up, then pressed downward and together, like twin dolphins at yoga class. He rambled on a bit more.

There is a 2004 novel by the Toronto journalist and author Patricia Pearson called Playing House. Its main character runs into the dashing Harvard academic and essayist Michael Ignatieff at an Italian restaurant in New York City. She’s briefly smitten. “He was, I mused, everything that I’d ever dreamed suitable,” Pearson’s narrator says. “Accomplished, bold, socially gracious, a touch mischievous, emotionally pent-up in a wonderfully provocative way. One could sense real excitement within that crumpet. I was half in love with him by the time he’d analyzed the Middle East and the tartufo had arrived.”

But that was seven years ago, in the pages of a novel. This was right now under TV lights. The leader of the oldest political party in Canada looked as though he might turn to salt.

Finally, Terry Milewski from the CBC put Ignatieff out of his misery and into some deeper misery. “Surely this coalition monkey is going to stay on your back every day of the campaign,” the veteran broadcaster scolded him. “Because people will assume that if you don’t rule it out, that’s because you’ve got something to hide.”

Ignatieff’s forehead was shiny as he started to perspire. “You’re buying the Conservative line here. There’s nothing to hide. I am saying as clearly as I can to the Canadian people, looking them straight in the eye”—here he focused his gaze into the TV camera directly in front of him, so it would seem to a television viewer that Ignatieff really was looking him in the eye—“if you want to replace the Harper government, you’ve got to vote Liberal. It can’t be clearer than that.”

With that, Ignatieff wheeled 90 degrees and fled to the safety of a nearby corridor, his telegenic MPs marching briskly in his wake. The beginning of the election was still a day away. The Liberal leader was already fighting ghosts. He couldn’t get a clear shot at Harper because he had to wrestle with something he might someday do, or not do, depending. It was like struggling in molasses.

A week later, with the campaign under way, a senior Liberal campaign strategist sat in a leather chair in a Toronto office tower and looked back on that scrum as the first sign of trouble in the Liberal campaign. “I thought it was a terrible day,” the strategist said.

“I thought he didn’t answer the question right on the coalition thing—a total Ottawa issue which I hadn’t heard a single person outside of Ottawa talk about. But anyway, I understand why it is what it is.

“But I thought he looked bad; he looked evasive answering the question. He was sweaty. I don’t think he was dressed properly. Other than that, I thought it was a terrific day.” The strategist paused to consider whether he had laid on the sarcasm so thickly that his meaning might be obscured. He decided clarity would be best: “I thought it was just a shitty day.”

Oh, well. The campaign hadn’t even started yet. Five weeks of rallies and speeches lay ahead. Ignatieff had trained for this for a year. No opposition party leader could choose, alone, the moment a campaign began. But right now, hard on the heels of a deeply unimpressive Conservative budget, was the moment the Liberals had used for months as the basis of their election planning. Ignatieff had the best staff, the best equipment, the most up-to-date software, the most motivated troops any Liberal leader had brought to a fight in at least a decade.

But there was something big he did not know, or maybe he knew it in his heart but still hoped it wasn’t true. The something big was this: this campaign had started long ago. Its central target was Ignatieff himself. He and his party had already taken hits so severe that he could not now recover.

Not a politician

Most stories about Michael Ignatieff’s return to Canada after many years abroad begin with three Liberal activists—Ian Davey, Alf Apps and Dan Brock—visiting him at Harvard University in early 2005. But the story really begins a little earlier, in December 2004, when Ignatieff was in Toronto to deliver a dinner lecture. Apps invited him to the boardroom at his law firm, Fasken Martineau, with Brock, another Fasken lawyer, and a few other Liberals. Ignatieff showed up with his wife, Zsuzsanna Zsohar. Ignatieff said he felt his roots were with the Liberals. His hosts said the party, after only a year of Paul Martin, needed fresh leadership. The meeting ended with Ignatieff saying he was flattered and he had been thinking about Canadian politics for years—especially since the close call of the 1995 referendum.

What was the selling proposition for a guy like this? “Not a politician,” Brock said this spring. “Not part of the internal struggles in the party in the previous decade. In a curious way, a liability of being away, we thought, could be converted to a positive: somebody coming in with a different perspective. Fluently bilingual. Notwithstanding having been away, had a good understanding of the country. And was a risk-taker. Bold and provocative.”

His admirers wrangled an invitation for Ignatieff to deliver a keynote speech at the national Liberal convention in early 2005. Peter C. Newman, the patriarch of Canadian political journalism, wrote a week earlier in the National Post to explain what it all meant. Here was a leader born and bred, Newman wrote, for a party that has often preferred to “pluck from obscurity an untried but inspiring outsider.” King! Pearson! Trudeau! All had come from outside to shake up the party. And now this crumpet. “Even those untutored Liberal apparatchiks who think charisma is a brand of French perfume will recognize his magnetism,” Newman wrote.

At the convention, Ignatieff fumbled for a bit on the podium after realizing he had lost a page of his prepared text, then delivered a very loose-fitting vision of Liberalism built on national unity, Canadian sovereignty and social justice. Less than a year later, he was a candidate for the party’s leadership after Paul Martin managed to lose to Stephen Harper. The timing wasn’t ideal. “None of us thought it was a good idea for him to be in the leadership race after his first election,” Brock told Maclean’s.

But you play the hand you’re dealt. Ignatieff’s CV made him the 2006 leadership campaign’s front-runner. His fondness for freewheeling conversation made him an easy target. He said he wasn’t losing sleep over the war that erupted that summer between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, then overcompensated by calling the Israeli bombing of Qana “a war crime.” “In the high relief of media reporting and then the dynamic of a leadership race, it was incendiary,” Brock said. “So did it need fixing? Listen, you can’t succeed in politics if you have a propensity to light yourself on fire.”

Ignatieff set about learning how to douse flames, and then to avoid igniting them. After he lost the December 2006 leadership vote to Stéphane Dion, he worked methodically on rehabilitating his image. He wrote a long article for the New York Times Magazine recanting his support for the Iraq war. He visited Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto to try to correct the impression he was anti-Israel. He muzzled his earlier support for constitutional reform as a remedy to Quebec nationalism.

His admirers worried he might become too bland. “So many people in the party said, after the first leadership race, ‘He needs to become a better politician. He needs to be better at politics,’ ” Brock said. “And our sense was, that’s a mistake. The moment he becomes a good politician, he loses the sense of being kind of over politics.”

Late in 2008, Dion lost the next federal election badly. Ignatieff announced again for the Liberal leadership. But then, weeks after the election, the Harper government delivered a fall economic update that threatened to end public funding for political parties; the great coalition crisis of 2008 was on. Dion and Jack Layton organized an alternative government with Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe’s support. Ignatieff was a reluctant conscript—the last to sign the letter to the governor general that every opposition MP signed, as if his place on the document made any difference.

The coalition effort collapsed. Dion resigned. Ignatieff’s opponents in the leadership race threw in the towel. The dejected Liberals handed him the leadership months before any formal mechanism could ratify the coronation. Still a rookie in federal politics, Ignatieff had become the third Liberal leader, after Bill Graham and Dion, in three years.

The party had never known such frequent turnover at the top. Pierre Trudeau led it right through the ’70s, Jean Chrétien for all of the ’90s. You used to be able to build your life and career around that party. Now the whole organization was buffeted and exhausted by wave after wave of defeat and failed renewal. A few hawks around Ignatieff, including Ian Davey, wanted to provoke an election immediately and take the idea for a coalition into an election in early 2009. It would split the country, but Ignatieff and Layton might take the upper hand. Party veterans, including the aging Sen. David Smith, told Ignatieff the party was in no shape for such a fight.

Ignatieff, unready for the top job and unsure of himself, decided he needed a pause. He extricated himself from the coalition with Layton by supporting Harper’s January 2009 budget. But he tried to look tough by demanding updates every four months on the budget’s progress. “We’re putting Stephen Harper on probation,” he told the cameras. What he had done was give Harper an excuse to spend millions bragging that he was spending billions.

“You make a deal that says every three months they’re going to issue a report on how they’re doing on the recovery plan,” Brock said. “And every three months they do a major media show to talk about all the great things they’re doing. So I don’t know where that idea came from, but it was a colossally stupid one. We had let the PM off the hook.”

Stephen Harper on the rebound was a dangerous character. On May 13, 2009, the Conservatives launched a multi-million-dollar ad campaign against the new Liberal leader. The long-time expat bon vivant was “just visiting,” the ads warned. “He didn’t come back for you.”

The architect of the campaign was Patrick Muttart, a soft-spoken political consultant whose fastidious market research and flair for communication made much of the difference between Harper’s 2004 defeat and his 2006 victory. Muttart had the party register a website in Montenegro so its URL could be www.ignatieff.me, reinforcing the notion that the Liberal was “just in it for me.” They stuffed it full of embarrassing old quotes. Ads ran for weeks on television and radio.

“I don’t think we really understood how effective it would be if done over a sustained period of time between writ periods,” Brock said. “We thought, ‘Canadians are going to reject this, because this is just over the top. Canadians are going to say, “You shouldn’t be doing this.” ’ And that’s exactly wrong. Canadians aren’t going to say that. They’re too busy living their lives. They pay a little bit of attention to [politics], and if that little bit of attention is dominated by a particular message, effectively delivered and repeated over and over again, it’s going to sink in. And it did.”

The ad barrage must have felt like a carpet bombing, but in many ways it was more like a surgical strike. Halfway through the 2011 campaign, a Conservative war room operative sat down in an Ottawa pub to discuss the party’s entire strategy against Ignatieff.

“They say that we try to portray Ignatieff in our ads and so on as a weak and flailing professor,” the war room staffer said. “No, that’s how we portrayed Dion. Dion was weak, you know, Dion was ‘not a leader.’ We’ve never said Michael Ignatieff isn’t a leader. We’ve never called him weak. And we’ve never called him a flip-flopper. Even when he changes his mind, we don’t say he’s a flip-flopper. Michael Ignatieff, in our narrative, is a political opportunist who is calculating, who will do and say anything to get elected.

“He’s a schemer. When he says one thing and then he changes his mind the next week, it’s not because he’s indecisive and a flip-flopper. It’s because he’s an opportunist who will say different things to different people. I don’t think we’ve even used the phrase, even internally, ‘He’s a malicious human being.’ But that’s kind of the sentiment we’re getting at. With Dion, we were trying to portray him as weak. You can’t trust him to lead us out of the economic recovery because he’s a weak man. With Ignatieff, it’s ‘He’s a bad man,’ right? He’s someone you don’t want your daughter to marry, right?”

The Conservative staffer’s laudable effort to specify the precise nature of this sustained assault on the character of a national party leader brought to mind a passage from former British prime minister Tony Blair’s 2010 memoir, A Journey. Blair explains how he did away with a succession of Tory opponents.

“So I defined [John] Major as weak; [William] Hague as better at jokes than judgment; [Michael] Howard as an opportunist; [David] Cameron as a flip-flop, not knowing where he wanted to go,” Blair writes.

“Expressed like that, these attacks seem flat, rather mundane almost, and not exactly inspiring—but that’s their appeal. Any one of those charges, if it comes to be believed, is actually fatal. Yes, it’s not like calling your opponent a liar, or a fraud, or a villain, or a hypocrite, but the middle-ground-floating voter kind of shrugs their shoulders at those claims. They don’t chime. They’re too over the top, too heavy, and they represent an insult, not an argument. Whereas the lesser charge, because it’s more accurate and precisely because it’s more low-key, can stick. And if it does, that’s that. Because in each case, it means they’re not a good leader. So game over.”

‘It was Bob Rae’s idea’

In September 2009, Ignatieff arrived in Sudbury for the annual Liberal end-of-summer caucus retreat. He was in a fix. He had spent the spring demanding changes to Employment Insurance to make it easier for jobless victims of the recession to get benefits. This was worth fighting an election over, he said. Harper sent emissaries to discuss the notion, but negotiations had come to nothing, and now Ignatieff had to decide what to do about it.

At this sort of event, the leader always gives an opening speech to his assembled MPs and senators. “In June, we set out four tests for Stephen Harper,” Ignatieff said. “Mr. Harper, you’ve failed all four. After four years of drift, four years of denial, four years of division, four years of discord”—here he stared right into the camera facing him—“Mr. Harper, your time is up.” The caucus applauded. “Give ’im the boot!” a voice from the crowd said. Ignatieff did a nervous little fist-pump thing to demonstrate a simulacrum of enthusiasm.

Ignatieff’s staff was quietly appalled. “None of us thought that was a good idea. We didn’t have the tools to bring the government down on our own,” Brock said. Then whose idea was this? “Bob Rae’s.”

A couple of days before the speech, Ignatieff convened senior members of caucus to discuss the meeting. “Bob’s exact line was, ‘You can’t be half-pregnant. Either we’re taking these guys on or we’re not. And if we’re taking them on, say so.’ Seems sensible, except it completely ruins your room to manoeuvre.”

As a reward for acting bold, Ignatieff failed to defeat Harper in the Commons. Jack Layton and the NDP supported the Conservatives. For trying to force an election, the Liberals sank in the polls while the Conservatives soared. “People were getting disheartened. The poll numbers were discouraging,” Brock said. “And Ignatieff personally just completely lost his confidence. Completely lost his confidence.”

Four days before Halloween 2009, minutes before 5 p.m., rumours started flying around Ottawa that Ignatieff had fired his chief of staff, Ian Davey, his communications director, Jill Fairbrother, and Brock, his principal secretary. Peter Donolo, who had served as Jean Chrétien’s spokesman through most of the 1990s, was the new chief of staff. It was a desperation move. According to one rumour, the party of Chrétien and Trudeau had sunk to 18 per cent in internal overnight polls.

Patricia Sorbara, a long-time Ontario Liberal organizer, was reading about Donolo’s appointment online when her phone rang. It was Donolo. “Are you calling to talk about how crazy you are?” she asked him.

“No,” Donolo said, “to talk about how crazy you’d be to come with me.” The two had dinner at Terroni, an Italian restaurant in downtown Toronto. Neither knew Ignatieff well. Neither had worked hard for the national party for more than a decade. But lifelong partisans hear calls of duty where others might hear only cries of despair. Donolo would be the ideas man. Sorbara would bring discipline and order. Most of the bright young staffers Davey had hired would stay.

The party they were going to help Ignatieff run was in lousy shape. It needed fresh policy and a campaign-ready leader, but most of all it needed an organization on the ground. Donolo and Sorbara visited meetings of the party’s provincial wings, where they spotted riding presidents who’d held the same jobs 30 years earlier. They’d stepped back into their old roles because there was nobody else around to do them. It was hardly a sign of strength.

A thinkers’ conference in Montreal helped refresh the party’s storehouse of ideas. A summer-long bus tour by Ignatieff was obviously designed to get him used to the rigours of campaigning. The tour’s less obvious purpose was to give Liberals on the ground a reason to pick up their game. “So where we had a candidate, for example, in London West, we would call the candidate and call that person’s team and say: ‘Okay, you’ve got to build us a 400-person summer event,’” a senior Liberal organizer said. “And if they could do it, you could get a sense that they were ready.”

For every stop on Ignatieff’s bus tour, teams of local Liberals had to have a venue and a crowd waiting. They were practising for a campaign, along with Ignatieff. The goal: “Get the leader ready, but at the same time get the ground realizing that we’re in a fight,” the organizer said. At one stop on the endless and encouraging Ignatieff bus tour, Sorbara turned to Donolo and said, “The Liberal party is not dead. The Liberal party was just having a little nap, and we’ve managed to wake it up.”

When Ignatieff hired them, Donolo and Sorbara had asked for a year to get ready for the next election. By the fall of 2010, the year was up. Liberals started to tell one another it would soon be time for an election, and then, being Liberals, they began to tell reporters. Late last fall, La Presse ran a column by Vincent Marissal in which he quoted senior Liberals who said they didn’t intend to let the next Harper budget pass a confidence vote if they could help it.

The Conservatives took Marissal’s column as gospel, and pounced. “If the Conservative party wins again, I think the single biggest strategic mistake the Liberal party made was telegraphing their intentions to bring down the government in the fall of 2010,” a senior Harper strategist said. “This basically gave the Conservative party and the operatives and the people who control the money licence to do two things: one, delay the budget as long as possible; and two, start an attack-ad campaign as early as possible and run it as long as possible.”

Jim Flaherty had delivered the 2009 budget on Jan. 27, a not unusual time. This year he waited and waited before finally admitting he would deliver one on March 23. The Conservatives filled the space with by far the longest and heaviest anti-Ignatieff advertising barrage they had ever run. Earlier campaigns had run a few weeks. “This one went on for part of January, all of February and almost all of March,” the Harper strategist said. “And the Grits actually did that to themselves.”

Of course, whenever the Conservatives started a new ad barrage, the Liberals debated about how to respond. Bob Richardson, a Toronto lobbyist who would be in charge of campaign advertising, figured the campaign was on as soon as the Conservatives fired a shot, and was eager to fight back. Donolo had the same instinct.

Gordon Ashworth was Ignatieff’s campaign manager, a role he had played every time Jean Chrétien ran for prime minister. He was more worried than his younger colleagues about the cost of an ad war before an election. Down in the polls and saddled with a leader still learning the craft, the Liberals were not an effective fundraising organization. Ashworth also insisted the Conservative ads wouldn’t do lasting damage, although that attitude may have been influenced by the cost of a real fight back, even if Ashworth had wanted one. “It was a fight that we simply could not win,” a participant in those debates said, “because [the Conservatives] had more resources than we did.”

In the end, the Liberals and NDP finally produced some ads to counter the Conservative barrage. But only the Conservatives had the resources, thanks to effective fundraising, to fund more than a token display. In the weeks before the budget, a Liberal strategist said, the Conservatives bought airtime to run 1,600 ads. “We had 131, and the NDP had, like, 25 or something,” the Liberal said. “It was a massacre.”

Duceppe hands Layton the reins to Quebec

By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, May 3, 2011 at 1:18 AM - 31 Comments

Gilles Duceppe took all of five minutes to run through the history and victories of the party he led has led for 11 years before announcing he was stepping down as leader of the Bloc Québécois. “I respect the choice and I assume the responsibility in the name of the Bloc Québécois,” Duceppe said serenely. “As a result, I’m quitting my functions. In the next few days, the party’s leadership will figure out what happens next.”

It will be a rough hangover for Bloc supporters tomorrow morning. Having lost official party status, the Bloc is now in for a reckoning—official “long walk in the snow” territory, to borrow a line from the Bloc’s First Nemesis, Pierre Trudeau. Continue…

The Bloc's reckoning

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, May 2, 2011 at 9:48 PM - 8 Comments

I’ve remained resolutely bearish on the NDP’s prospects during this campaign. I wasn’t hatin’, I swear. I think Jack Layton has done an incredible job of filling the vacuum left by Gilles Duceppe’s phone-it-in, entirely middling campaign; I think by using his aw-shucks, joual-inflected French, he did a marvelous job of appealing to those whose vote for the Bloc have become similarly phoned-in over the last two years for more than two decades. And I’m thrilled to bits at the possibility of having a genuine right and left in this country without the latter inevitably coloured by the debate over Quebec separation.

It’s just that there was a hell of a headwind. First: no real ground game to speak of off the island of Montreal; candidates who were, let’s face it, considered fencepost furniture no more than two weeks ago; and this stream of wildly optimistic seat projections, each more crazy than the last. Optimistic winds of change that blow right to the ballot box? Or opportunistic piling on that starts and ends with the call from the pollster? The cynic inevitably believes the latter.

Then, there’s the history: given its support amongst off-island francophones, the Bloc has always had less of a problem with ‘junk vote’ that helps with vote percentage numbers but not in actual seats. (The Bloc tends to win its seats with less of a majority than, say, the Liberals.) It’s why Jean Charest won the popular vote in 1998, but lost the election to Lucien Bouchard.

But here’s the thing: that support has hardened in Montreal and spread significantly off-island, making Jack all the more bulletproof as a result. The sudden switch to the NDP more or less shows how the Bloc no longer has the monopoly on virtue it has enjoyed for over 20 decades. And whether or not the party suffers an out-and-out drubbing tonight, and I still have my doubts despite the buckets of orange paint threatening to spill all over the place, the Bloc is in for a long-overdue reckoning hinted at midway through the campaign.

Former NDP war room guy Robin Sears, with whom I share camera time on Power & Politics, had an interesting point the other day: In 1988, when Ed Broadbent seemed to be coasting into official opposition thanks to a now-familiar wave of goodwill in Quebec, Jacques Parizeau et al. came out en masse against him. Result: the PQ “machine gunned the NDP support,” as Sears put it. They lost something like two-thirds their vote in a matter of weeks. Poof.

Thing is, when the Bloc tried the same thing a few weeks ago—trot out Parizeau for a barn stormer—it utterly fizzled. “He looked like a bitter old man,” Sears said.

Which brings me to the Bloc’s curious mid-campaign switcheroo. Right around the time of the NDP’s bolt in the polls, the Bloc began this back-to-the-roots, proto-sovereignist tack that, on the outset, reeked of desperation—and it may well have been, since the party was basically telling the entire province that they could no longer take the hardcore sovereignist vote for granted.

But I think it might be something other than straight up fear. It hints at what’s to come for the Bloc. Having already lost that monopoly on virtue during the campaign, and with a possible drubbing coming in a matter of hours, the Bloc will retreat and renew. It will turf the mushy and disingenuous mantle of “defending Quebec’s interests” and return to its roots of promoting Quebec sovereignty in Ottawa.

The party that started as a coalition between Progressive Conservatives peeved at the failure of Meech Lake, Liberals peeved at Jean Chrétien and sovereignists peeved at everything will flush the vestiges of the former two from its ranks and its thinking and represent the enduring hardliners in the province. In short, it will become the party it should have always been.

On the campaign trail with the Bloc

By Mitchel Raphael - Sunday, May 1, 2011 at 9:54 PM - 1 Comment

The Bloc Québécois rallied in Montreal last week hoping to thwart the “Orange Crush.”

Continue…

Madame Paille goes for the Bloc

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, May 1, 2011 at 2:53 PM - 15 Comments

The briefly famous everyday Canadian casts her vote for the BQ.

“We are united, we are proud to be Quebeckers, we are proud of our language, and we can trust them to defend all of that in our name,” Ms. Paillé said in a speech at a campaign rally. “On May 2, please don’t vote for the NDP flavour of the day,” she said. “Don’t vote according to the polls, which can be used to say anything. Vote according to your basic common sense, for Quebec, and that is the Bloc Québécois.”

There's room for everyone on the NDP bandwagon

By Philippe Gohier - Friday, April 29, 2011 at 7:31 AM - 25 Comments

Holy cow, Gilles Duceppe’s gonna be in a foul mood when he sees this: in an open letter sent to La Presse, two former Bloc Québécois operatives are calling on their fellow sovereigntists to vote NDP on Monday. Maxime Bellerose, a former riding association president, and Benoît Demuy, who worked as a staffer in former Bloc MP Réal Ménard’s office, write Quebecers would be foolish to not hop on the social democratic bandwagon Jack Layton hopes to lead all the way to Ottawa.

“For the first time in our political lives, social democracy is knocking on Parliament’s door! It would be a shame if Quebecers did not take advantage of this opportunity to send to Ottawa MPs who loudly and proudly share Quebec’s values of justice and cooperation,” argues the pair, who say they’re both still members of the Bloc Québécois.

“We are still and will remain profoundly convinced that sovereignty is the best way for Quebec and its people to continue its development,” they add. “But as is widely said, the sovereignty of Quebec will be achieved in Quebec and not in Ottawa. Until then, our fellow citizens must live under the Canadian federal regime, whether they like it or not… In the absence of a referendum victory, voting NDP is now the way to end the cycle of Conservative minority governments.”

A country gets its back up

By Paul Wells - Thursday, April 28, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 95 Comments

Andrew Vaughan/CP

Maybe now we can stop telling ourselves Canadian elections are predictable.

It is fashionable in Ottawa circles before every election campaign to draw oneself back from the lunch table, let one’s gaze wander toward the ceiling, and announce to the room, “I don’t know why we’re even bothering to have an election, anyway. It’s not like it’ll change anything.” More often than not these weary predictions are wildly wrong.

The 2000 election killed the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and—because Jean Chrétien was able to win a plurality in Quebec less than a year after he passed the Clarity Act—the political career of Lucien Bouchard. In 2004, Paul Martin came within an ace of losing power to an upstart Calgarian whom Liberals had viewed with contempt. In 2006, Stephen Harper took Martin down. In 2008, Harper confirmed his hold on the seats he’d won and drove Stéphane Dion’s Liberals to their lowest share of the popular vote since Confederation.

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Will Jack Layton usurp Michael Ignatieff?

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 12:48 PM - 17 Comments

Thanks to a late-campaign surge, the NDP has a real shot at replacing the Liberals as the main alternative to Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. Jack Layton’s party is arguably closer to forming a government than it’s ever been. But that doesn’t mean the party is actually contending for power. There are clear limits emerging to just how far the party’s sudden popularity might take it.

According to an Innovative Research poll conducted for Maclean’s and L’actualité between April 21 and April 25, the New Democrats are now very close to leapfrogging the Liberals for second place among decided voters. The NDP’s popularity sits at 23.9 per cent, just a point behind the Liberals’ 24.9 per cent. Despite their stagnating fortunes, the Conservatives remain in the driver’s seat going into the final week of campaigning with 38.4 per cent of the vote. Support for the Bloc, meanwhile, has dipped to 6.4 per cent nationally and 27.7 per cent in Quebec, while the Greens sit at 5.3 per cent.

Indeed, the NDP’s rush toward the spotlight from its usual place at the margins of Canadian politics has been the story of the campaign so far. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Quebec, where the party has supplanted the Bloc Québécois as the first choice among province’s prickly voters. The NDP now has 36 per cent support in Quebec, nearly nine points more than the Bloc. Perhaps most significantly, Layton’s party is far ahead of its federalist opponents in the province, with nearly double the support of the Conservatives (18.3 per cent) and an even heftier lead over the Liberals, who are now solidly fourth in voter intentions with a paltry 13.6 per cent support.

“It looks like Layton has created a ‘third option’ in Quebec,” says pollster Greg Lyle, the managing director of Innovative Research. “While hard federalists and especially hard sovereigntists have resisted his appeal, soft federalists and sovereigntists have really gravitated to the NDP.” Among those who describe themselves as “somewhat favourable” to Quebec’s independence, the NDP was the first choice of 53 per cent. Meanwhile, 49 per cent of those who say they’re “somewhat opposed” to Quebec sovereignty say they too will cast their lot with Layton. That push toward the mushy middle of the constitutional divide has left the Conservatives (39.8 per cent) and the Liberals (19.5 per cent) fighting over the hard federalist vote, while the Bloc Québécois takes home the overwhelming majority of (77.1 per cent) of militant sovereigntist votes.

Though less dramatic than in Quebec, the NDP’s popularity in B.C. has seen a similar upward swing. At 29.4 per cent support, the NDP still trails the Conservatives (41.7 per cent) by a significant margin, but it may have seized enough ground to disrupt the Conservatives’ designs on a handful of ridings out west. “The Conservatives may end up breaking even, depending on how hard the NDP surge goes,” Lyle says. “But that’s a big difference—from between four and six pickups to zero. You’ve gone from half the gains you needed for a majority to none. If this is going to be a game of inches on election night—which it might be—then this surge cost them a lot of inches.”

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s in his home province of Ontario that Layton’s popularity has been most stubbornly stagnant. At 17 per cent, his party trails far behind both the Liberals (36.1 per cent) and the Conservatives (41.4 per cent). Their breakthroughs elsewhere simply haven’t carried over into the one province anointed the key battleground at the start of this election, a situation Lyle attributes partly to a wariness among centre-left voters outside Quebec that voting NDP might clear the path for a Harper majority. “English Canadians are a lot more likely to say this election is a two horse race than Quebecers,” Lyle says. “This may be the reason behind the NDP failure to break through in Ontario.”

Regardless, though Layton’s popularity may end up hitting a wall in Canada’s most populous province come election night, he’ll have at least succeeded in positioning himself at the centre of a post-election coalition scenario—a role even the Conservatives had never imagined could be filled by anyone but Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. That scenario, says Lyle, is now dependent on Layton’s success at wooing those Quebecers who for years have cast their lot with the Bloc Québécois, but are now legitimately intrigued by the NDP. “How far can Layton take this? He could say to Quebecers, ‘Look we may not be able to get into government in one shot, but you can make us number two and set the stage for a progressive coalition that will end the Conservative government’,” Lyle says. “There’s real excitement in Quebec at the idea of a Jack Layton-led minority.”

The online survey was conducted among current members of INNOVATIVE’s Canada 20/20 panel from April 21st to April 25th, 2011. The Canada 20/20 Panel is recruited from a wide variety of sources to be representative of the known distribution of Canadians by age, gender, region and language. The weighted total sample included 1543 responses eligible for inclusion in our analysis including 363 in Quebec. An unweighted probability sample of 1543 would have an estimated margin of error of ±2.49 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Are young voters behind the NDP surge in Quebec?

By Josh Dehaas - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 3:01 PM - 6 Comments

The NDP is surging in Quebec and many point to the party’s popularity among young voters as the reason why. Jack Layton’s progressive message, the logic goes, makes him stand out as a legitimate alternative to Gilles Duceppe among left-leaning voters.

But here’s a problem with that storyline: data from the Historica-Dominion Institute’s poll of young voters suggests there isn’t an NDP surge among Quebec youth at all. Its 2011 Inter-generational Study shows young Quebecers are no more likely to vote NDP now than they were in 2008. Back then, the party captured a mere 12 per cent of the vote in Quebec.

The Historica-Dominion survey gathered the opinions of 831 youth aged 18 to 24, including 189 from Quebec. The NDP was the most popular party among young voters in Quebec, capturing 27 per cent support, while the Liberals got 23 per cent, the Bloc Québécois got 21 per cent, and the Conservatives came last with 8 per cent.  (For more results from the study, including a look at which issues matter to young voters, read the next issue of Maclean’s.) Those figures are virtually unchanged from the Institute’s 2008 Youth Election Study, which found 27 per cent of young Quebecers leaning toward the NDP, another 27 per cent supporting the Bloc, 20 per cent behind the Liberals, and 7 per cent leaning Tory.

The youth numbers also mirror last week’s EKOS and CROP polls, give or take a few points. “That seems to indicate the rest of the population is catching up to the youth in considering the NDP rather than a youth surge,” says Allison Harell, a political scientist at the University of Quebec at Montreal. That may be good news for Jack Layton. If his support is more broadly distributed across age groups, she adds, it may translate into more votes on election day. Historically, only about a third of Canadian youth end up voting, compared to nearly two-thirds of the electorate overall.

The big question is whether the current NDP supporters—young or not—will change their minds before election day. Houda Souissi, a 21-year-old labour law student at the University of Montreal has already switched back to Duceppe after a brief dalliance with Layton. After scrutinizing the NDP record, she worries an NDP government could take away provincial powers. She’s also turned-off by Layton’s stance on the long gun registry. Most importantly, she’s wary of inexperienced MPs. “I don’t want to say they’re nobodies,” she says. “But outside of Outremont, we don’t really know who the NDP candidates are.”

Souissi’s worries may be moot come May 3. If the NDP’s surge in the polls translates into actual votes, the party’s Quebec candidates could be well on their way to becoming decidedly mainstream among voters of all ages.

Carrément, une première (presque)

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 5:26 PM - 18 Comments

Fun fact: If the NDP take a plurality of the vote in Quebec this election, as some recent polls indicate they would, Jack Layton would be, with one, somewhat arguable exception*, the first non-francophone party leader to defeat a francophone leader in any federal election in the province’s history.

Up until Sir Wilfrid Laurier, all federal elections were contests between anglophone leaders. Though Sir John A. Macdonald defeated Laurier in 1891, the Liberals took Quebec, beginning the party’s near-century long domination of federal politics in the province. Laurier held Quebec, narrowly, in his 1911 loss to Sir Robert Borden, and by a resounding 3-1 margin in the conscription election of 1917.

Francophones Louis St Laurent and Pierre Trudeau also held the province, effortlessly, though their anglophone successors were not so lucky. John Diefenbaker’s sweep of the province in 1958 was at the expense of Lester Pearson, while Brian Mulroney’s 1984 victory was over John Turner (besides, Mulroney was the more francophone of the two).

Jean Chretien failed to carry the province in 1993, 1997, and 2000 (though he did win the popular vote in 2000), but lost to francophones, first Lucien Bouchard and then Gilles Duceppe — who went on to win in 2004, 2006, and 2008.

Of course, in one way Layton’s victory, if it came, would confirm the rule: though less francophone than Duceppe, he is easily the most francophone of the four national party leaders, and the only one born in Quebec.

*The exception: The Ralliement Créditiste, under leader Réal Caouette, in 1965, took only 9 seats, to 56 for Lester Pearson’s Liberals. The Créditistes were born of the breakup of the Social Credit party two years earlier. They contested one more election before rejoining Social Credit in 1971, with Caouette as national leader.

Tory base rallying around Harper: poll

By Charlie Gillis - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 6:24 PM - 49 Comments

You don’t need a majority of votes to win a majority in Parliament.

Stephen Harper has a lot riding on this truism as he enters the final leg of the federal election campaign: the Conservative dream of an uninterrupted mandate hangs on the belief that a 39-percent base of rock-solid support can translate into a Commons majority, if augmented by wins in a dozen or so swing ridings.

But the latest results of a survey done for Maclean’s and 680 News underline the problems with this theory, as harder-edged policies aimed to please the Tory base appear to be stoking opposition toward the Prime Minister and his party across the country. So too are damaging stories about G8 and G20 spending, leaving the Conservatives mired in minority territory once again, with just 12 days of campaigning to go.

Continue…

Your seat projections have arrived (UPDATED)

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, April 18, 2011 at 7:46 PM - 124 Comments

Above is a summary of the latest seat projections from a variety of sources. As can be seen, the consensus has the Fascists (Conservatives) short of the 155 seats needed for a majority, with the Visitors (Liberals — the former Crooks (2004/6) and Not a Leaders (2008)) making only a slight improvement on their dismal showing last time out. The Commies (NDP) and Traitors (Bloc) are down slightly from their 2008 totals, though these projections may not reflect the rise in NDP support the polls have been picking up in recent days.

Oh, and the Ewocs (an acronym, from the immortal Tabatha Southey epithet for the Greens, “Europeans without cigarettes” — though it also has a pleasing furry-critter connotation)? Shut out again.

In sum: at this point everybody is losing.

UPDATE: Refreshed with new numbers from Ekos and ThreeHundredEight.com!

Farid just doesn’t seem to get it

By Rick Mercer - Friday, April 15, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 22 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

My friend Farid is from Iran. This will be the first federal election in which he is eligible to vote.

Being somewhat of a sap, and knowing what a hard-working new Canadian he is, I was immediately moved by this notion. I could only imagine that after a lifetime of persecution in Iran, after making his way to Canada with nothing, after receiving his Canadian citizenship, he would be overwhelmed with the notion of exercising his democratic right to a vote.

No dice. He is entirely underwhelmed by his choices. “Rick, if it was a choice between PC or Mac, that I could understand, but this election it seems the choice is one lousy PC and another lousy PC—why does it matter?”

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$2.2 billion in compensation for Quebec's sales tax harmonization

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 6, 2011 at 5:37 PM - 0 Comments

The Bloc Québécois is asking the federal government to pay Quebec $2.2 billion in compensation for having harmonized the federal and provincial sales taxes in 1992. Ontario and British Columbia received similar compensation for introducing the HST.

Federal support for the forestry industry

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 at 6:53 PM - 0 Comments

The Bloc Québécois wants the federal government to reduce the eligibility requirements for employment insurance for forestry workers, as well as implement a system of tax credits and economic stimulus to help Quebec’s struggling forestry industry.

Who will save us now (part III)?

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, April 4, 2011 at 8:50 PM - 103 Comments

I wrote this some days ago, but before I could post, Jeff Simpson’s column appeared on a similar theme. But since no one’s responded to his piece, I’ll pick up where he left off:

Here’s a subject I don’t imagine any of the party leaders will want to bring up — but someone really should. That is, who among them is best placed to deal with the coming crisis in Quebec?

Sometime in the next couple of years a provincial election will be called (the last was in Dec. 2008, so in theory they could push it off into 2013). On present levels of support, the Liberals haven’t a prayer. Which means that, barring a miracle, we are about to enter the third cycle of Parti Québécois government. In each of the first two, 1976-1984 and 1994-2003, the PQ launched a referendum on separation-with-association, and while the Clarity Act may be thought to have placed some boundaries around the debate — the province can hold a referendum on any subject it likes, but the feds are constrained in what they can negotiate — it must be expected the Péquistes will try every trick in the book, up to an including a quickie referendum. This is, after all, very likely their last shot.

So, on the perhaps shaky assumption that whomever we elect on May 2 is still Prime Minister then, it really would seem timely to ask: Which of the parties and their leaders is the best choice to deal with this situation? Who best combines finesse and toughness, understanding of Quebec and fire in the belly for Canada? Will it be the Anglophone from Toronto who wanted to build a firewall around Alberta? Or the Anglophone from Toronto who was out of the country for 30-odd years? What about the Anglophone from Toronto whose party is rumoured to be conspiring with the Bloc to defeat federalist candidates in the Montreal area?

Certainly no clear federalist choice has emerged in the province. While all three national parties have been pandering as fast as they can — Look here! An arena! No, an airport! What about these snowmobile trails, huh? — each is mired around 20% in the polls. Meaning the Bloc will likely take about 50 seats, as usual. Suppose Duceppe then retires from federal politics, to replace — as many Péquistes hope — the unpopular Pauline Marois as PQ leader. If recent polls are any guide, he’d sweep the province. And facing him? A shattered, leaderless provincial Liberal party in Quebec City, and a hung Parliament in Ottawa — possibly with the Bloc holding the balance of power.

As I say, I doubt any of the leaders will be anxious to raise this question. They don’t want to be seen to write off Charest, they don’t want to stir the pot, whatever. But the rest of us should certainly be thinking about it.

Who’s blue now?

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, April 4, 2011 at 9:54 AM - 1 Comment

Graham Hughes/CP

Many moons ago, when Conservative party strategists dreamed of a majority government, their thoughts turned to Quebec. The Conservative brand of laissez-faire government was a natural fit for the province’s bevy of soft nationalists, tired of the scandal-plagued Liberals and the perpetual opposition of the Bloc Québécois. And there was a precedent: Quebec was the gateway to Brian Mulroney’s sweep of the country in 1984. For Stephen Harper, it was a matter of boning up on his French and promising Quebec a UNESCO seat and—voila!—the party garnered 10 seats in the 2006 election, not bad for a party led by a Toronto-born, Calgary-bred politician.

What a difference five years makes. Other than a by-election win, giving it a total of 11 seats, the party has failed to capitalize on this advantage. Today, several Conservative MPs are struggling just to hang on. The Tory position was never bulletproof in Quebec—Conservative MPs in the ridings of Montmagny-L’islet, Roberval-Lac-Saint-Jean and Beauport-Limoilou won with five per cent or less over their opponents. And they now face sustained political opposition from the Bloc—as well as an increased presence by the other federalist parties. “It’s going to be very close,” says Dominic Maurais, host of a morning show on the populist CHOI-FM radio station in Quebec City. “The Conservative challenge will be to convince the disenfranchised Liberals out there to go and vote for them.”

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They're coming after your family

By John Geddes - Monday, April 4, 2011 at 9:17 AM - 23 Comments

Photograph by Cole Garside

In the final days leading up to the campaign of 2011, Stephen Harper largely dropped out of sight. The Prime Minister stopped showing up for question period when his government’s fall became inevitable. After the opposition voted down his Conservative minority, he read a muted response from a podium in the ornate foyer of the House, and took no questions. There was reason to suspect he might be setting the tone for the race to come. After all, polls showed him well ahead, and a classic, minimalist front-runner’s strategy would be to do nothing to risk shaking things up. But Harper had other ideas.

From the steps of Rideau Hall after visiting the Governor General to set the campaign in motion, and at every stop after, he lashed out at his main rival, Michael Ignatieff—accusing the Liberal leader of intending to break his word and join forces with the NDP and Bloc Québécois. In return, Ignatieff indicted Harper for “a systematic pattern of falsehoods.” “He wouldn’t recognize the truth if it walked up and shook his hand,” he said.

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