Numbers hinting toward
Conservative election win
I’m over at the fabulous Alberta Motion Picture Industries Association annual luncheon at the Sheraton Suites Hotel chatting with local movie impresarios Edmund Oliverio and John Labow when Calgary South Centre MP Lee Richardson makes a cameo appearance.
Now, Lee and I go back some 35 years together, and he’s one of the most astute individuals you’ll ever find in politics.
One day he’s going to have a major starring role in a Conservative government cabinet.
Despite the seeming lock that shipping tycoon Paul Martin and his motley crew have on the public opinion polls, Richardson appeared not the least worried.
“The scales have to tip sooner or later, and most likely sooner,” says my longtime friend.
He thinks the tide is going out for Canada’s most infamous tax haven specialist.
Just a week earlier, I’d bumped into Calgary North Centre MP Jim Prentice and he seemed quite jovial, too.
The Liberal-dominated Eastern news media may be tearing Conservative Leader Stephen Harper apart, but Jim appeared unfazed.
Scandal atop scandal have been heaped upon Martin’s government.
David Dingwall treats the Royal Canadian Mint as his private bank account, Paul Coffin steals $1.5 million of the taxpayers’ money and then preaches to others about ethics in business, and Immigration Minister Joe Volpe bills us $138 for a single pizza.
It’s hard to see why Canadians coast to coast aren’t frothing at the mouth over this administration’s utter lack of ethics and morality.
Yet, ethics and morality start at the top and flow down.
None at the top, none to flow down. The Grits just wallow in guano.
So the two MPs may have reason for their quiet optimism.
Although an Ipsos-Reid survey gives Martin’s bunch of pirates a 10% lead over Harper’s Conservatives, the Conservatives own polling has that lead far narrower.
Polls that frequently divide the undecided up in percentage figures akin to the decided have to be suspect, as Harper himself told me several weeks ago.
If 15% of voters are undecided, how can one assume that 37% of those undecided would on election day vote Liberal?
It doesn’t make sense.
A voter can be undecided—or unsteady—for many reasons—but as the trash pouring out of the Martin regime continues rolling out one has to assume disenchantment amongst voters with Martin’s crew has to grow.
A government knee-deep in scandal—and a government that sees no harm in the scandalous behaviour of its cabinet ministers, MPs, and appointed figures—can hardly be attractive to common sense voters.
Internal Conservative polling—and independent polling—has the party well ahead of the Liberals in various regions of the country and ahead on various issues.
Even the Ipsos-Reid poll gives Harper’s team 31% of the vote in seat-rich Ontario and a jump of a bare handful of points, just five, could turn into 25 or 30 seats.
With that, Martin and the Liberals would be out at sea with the flotsam and jetsam and Harper would be prime minister.
Recall, in 2004, the Conservatives were poised to oust the Liberals until Premier Ralph Klein—for reasons still not explained—scared voters with talk about major changes in health care.
That gave the unscrupulous Martin the hammer he needed to blow the Conservatives out of the water in Ontario, driving the party down by an average of 10 points in a matter of days.
But for Klein’s recklessness Martin would have been doing what Dingwall did just days ago, handing in his resignation as his government capitulated.
They say Harper is a boring fellow without the pizzazz, say, of Brian Mulroney, who ran up the two largest majority governments in Canadian history.
Yet if Harper is boring, what’s so attractive about the flustered-faced, dithering Martin?
My guess is if the Conservatives run a positive and dynamic campaign—ignoring the CBC, Toronto (Red) Star and the Globe and Mail, and getting their message across in friendly media—they could turn the polls around quickly.
Don’t forget, in 1984, Mulroney’s Conservatives were as many as 20 points behind John Turner’s Liberals when the campaign started, then on election day whipped the Grits 211-40 seats.
Harper should keep Mulroney’s strategy firmly in mind.
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