T1B

Harper's hopes fading
Goal of majority further from reach
Oct. 14, 2006. 08:12 AM
CHANTAL HÉBERT


If this keeps up, Stephen Harper can kiss his hopes for a majority in the next election goodbye and, with them, his dream of turning the Conservatives into Canada's natural governing party.

It would be bad enough for the minority government if today's EKOS poll only confirmed its failure to thrive in voting intentions. At the national level, the Conservative score of 36 per cent basically mirrors the results of the last election.

That's despite the fact that the Prime Minister has had the stage almost exclusively to himself all summer and that he has been pounding away at new policy announcements since the return of Parliament.

It's also despite the fact that the Liberals are still leaderless and that their campaign, according to the same poll, has failed to engage one in two voters and to produce a popular front-runner.

On that particular score, the poll results are at best a mixed bag. The Liberals may be having a four-way race to the top but for the Canadian public, their campaign is primarily a two-way contest between Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff, with Gerard Kennedy and Stéphane Dion making up a somewhat distant second tier.

And while Rae emerges as the favourite for Liberal leader, it is Ignatieff whom poll respondents find more likely to bring the Liberals to victory in an election. Those contradictory findings could be a sign that when respondents of all political persuasions select their preferred choice, they sometimes do so on the basis of their own partisan interest, by looking for the leader least likely, at least in their minds, to do their own party damage, rather than with an eye to the best chances of the Liberals.

But if the Liberals, based on the tepid public response to their leadership campaign, are not holding the Conservatives back, then it follows that the government is failing to build efficiently on its gains from the last election through its own actions or lack of them.

Indeed, even with the same score as last January, the Conservatives are probably further from their goal of a majority than they were on the morning after the last election, and certainly more removed from it than at the peak of their honeymoon last spring.

In Quebec, the bottom is falling out from under Harper. His party has now dropped to third place, well behind the Bloc Québécois (44 per cent) and four points behind the Liberals (21 per cent).

With their support at 17 per cent, the Tories would be hard-pressed to get their 10 Quebec MPs re-elected, let alone win new seats. Their current standing is a full eight points below their score in the last election.

Quebec is also the only province where a solid majority feels that the government is not moving in the right direction, another sign that the Conservative audience in the province is slipping away quickly.

As bad as they are, these numbers cannot be news to the government. Tory strategists are no less addicted to focus groups and public opinion surveys than their predecessors in power.

In fact, it could well be that some Harper strategists have already given up on Quebec. How else to explain the spate of policy announcements and pronouncements of the past few weeks? If the government had wanted to run its prospects down in Quebec, it could hardly have achieved its purpose more quickly than by insisting on its plan to do away with the long-gun registry on the heels of a deadly shootout at Dawson College in Montreal, the abandonment this week of any pretence that climate change is a federal priority, the elimination of a variety of initiatives such as the court challenges and the literacy programs that have long stricken chords in Quebec and the recent musings about a defence of religions act.

Nor is there any sense that those measures — even as they echo negatively in Quebec — resonate loudly outside the core Conservative base elsewhere in Central Canada.

On the contrary, even as the minority government is bombing its own Quebec beachhead, it is also failing to make up for the ground it sacrifices in that province with gains in Ontario. And that, no matter how you look at it, makes Harper's current approach a self-defeating strategy.

Among the provinces, Alberta emitted the most greenhouse gas, at 109.5 million tonnes, followed by Ontario at 77.3 million tonnes.

Liberals, Tories in dead heat

BRIAN LAGHI

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

OTTAWA — The leaderless federal Liberals have caught up to Stephen Harper's Tories in electoral popularity for the first time since the federal election campaign, according to a new poll that shows the parties in a dead heat.

The survey, conducted for The Globe and Mail-CTV News, finds that the two parties would each receive 32 per cent of the votes were an election to be held today.

It also finds that in such an election, Bob Rae would be the favourite Liberal leadership candidate to take on Stephen Harper.

Given the numbers, Mr. Harper would be well advised not to call an election now, said Allan Gregg, chairman of The Strategic Counsel, which conducted the poll.

“I'd be concerned,” Mr. Gregg said in an interview. “But I don't think I'd have my finger between my neck and my collar quite yet.”

Perhaps the most sobering results for the Conservatives are in Quebec, where the party has been in a steady drop since May. At that time, it was the first choice of 30 per cent of Quebec voters, compared with 16 per cent today. The party received 25 per cent of Quebec votes in the Jan. 23 election.

By contrast, the Quebec numbers are good news for the Liberals, who are the first choice of 28 per cent of Quebeckers, up seven percentage points from January and 10 points from last month. The Bloc Québécois continues to lead the pack, with 44 per cent.

Mr. Gregg said Canada's participation in the Afghanistan war is almost certainly affecting Tory popularity in Quebec. The Conservative position on the Kyoto environmental accord and its insistence on holding a vote on whether to reopen the issue of same-sex marriage are also controversial in the province.

“There's a cumulative effect,” Mr. Gregg said. “If you consistently say things that voters disagree with, after some point in time you'll be saying ‘you're not like me and you're not for me.' “ At a national level, the survey finds that the Conservatives have dropped four percentage points from the January election, from 36 per cent to 32 per cent, while the Liberals have inched up two points from 30 points to 32.

When compared with last month, the Liberals jumped six percentage points, while the Conservatives dropped three. The last time the two parties were tied was in early January, again at 32 per cent.

Were an election to be held today, the New Democrats would win 17 per cent of the vote, while the Greens would get nine per cent.

The survey of 1,000 people was conducted between Oct. 12 and 15 and is accurate to within 3.1 percentage points 19 times out of 20.

Mr. Gregg said the Liberals' Quebec numbers may also demonstrate that the stain of the sponsorship scandal is getting washed out with time and that federalist Quebec voters are upset with Mr. Harper and defaulting to the Liberals.

The other trouble spot for the Tories in the poll is in the party's western heartland. Although they still hold a significant lead in the region, they are down seven percentage points from the election, garnering 42 per cent of voters' intentions.

The Liberals are up four to 27 per cent, while the NDP are up two points to 22 per cent. The Greens are up to about 10 per cent in the West.

Mr. Gregg suggested the drop may be taking place in British Columbia, where the Tories have traditionally fluctuated in popularity.

The poll was taken during a week in which Mr. Harper announced the government's plans for new environmental legislation, which was significantly criticized.

“We know British Columbians are far and away the most environmentally concerned and sensitive,” Mr. Gregg said.

In Ontario, the Tory decline is nowhere near as pronounced, with 35 per cent saying they would vote Conservative, down from 37 per cent last election.

The Liberals have the support of 36 per cent, down four percentage points. The New Democrats hover around 19 per cent, the same as at the election.

The Greens are up to 11 per cent in Ontario, a substantial increase from the five per cent they took during the election.

He added that the improving Liberal performance may also stem from the hardiness of the Liberal brand.

Until now, Conservative support has been holding steady at around 36 per cent, prompting some strategists to argue that the party now has a new and higher electoral base from which to work.

The party polled 30 per cent in the 2004 campaign.

Mr. Gregg said Mr. Harper won the election by attracting soft Quebec nationalists, so-called hockey moms and dads in medium-sized cities, and high-income earners. Mr. Harper appears to be losing the soft nationalists, he said.

“It shows how ephemeral the support they were able to garner in the 2006 election [in Quebec] was and just how much that support was a confluence of circumstances that they have not been able to capitalize on.”

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