How many bad days can Michael Ignatieff have in a row?

The votes are in and the conclusion is that the four federal byelections held Monday are definitely …. over.

Phew. So much punditry devoted to so little. Other than polls taken when no election is in sight, byelections may be the most over-analyzed events in federal politics.

Reuters opens its coverage of the results with this:

Canada’s ruling Conservative strengthened their grip on power on Monday when they unexpectedly won two extra seats in Parliament in special elections, making it even less likely they will be brought down any time soon.

Hmm, what exactly does that mean, “strengthened their grip on power”? Before the byelections, the Tories had a minority government. Now … they have a minority government! They have two more seats than before, but can still be defeated by the combined forces of the opposition. So, how is that stronger?

It must be true, though, because Bloomberg takes a similar line:

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party moved closer to a majority in the country’s national legislature with two victories in local by- elections.

“Closer to a majority”. That’s like, when I wander down to the National Post cafeteria, I’m closer to Australia than I used to be. Before the byelections, the government was 12 seats short of a majority. Now, excitingly, they’re 10 seats short. Wow, that means… they’re still … short of a majority. And unless there’s another general election, it will stay that way. So nothing has changed. Wow!

The Globe and Mail, not surprisingly, doesn’t buy this thesis. Everything that happens in Ottawa is significant, if you’re the Globe and Mail. Daniel Leblanc writes that the government’s pick-up of a Quebec seat from the Bloc was a “shocker”.

While a by-election is just that, the upset suggests Quebec will be the scene of interesting races in the next general election, and that even the safest Bloc seat can be in play. For Gilles Duceppe, the result provides the biggest challenge since he briefly quit as Bloc Leader to run for the leadership of the Parti Québécois in 2007.

That’s a good theory, except that Tory fortunes in Quebec tend to bounce around like a kid on a pogo stick — up, down, up, down, and no one ever seems to know where they’ll head next. They were fine until the middle of the last election, when an ill-advised Harper remark on culture sent them plunging. Then the coalition came along and Harper’s attack on the Bloc was seen as self-immolation, ending any hope of a comeback. Yet now the government steals a seat from Gilles Duceppe, and suddenly nothing’s safe.

CBC’s Kady O’Malley as usual manages to be entertaining without having to decide who won, grading each race on a smugness scale:

The Conservatives are allowed to be entirely smug over Montmagny–L’Islet–Kamouraska–Rivière-du-Loup. As to the riding of Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley, they are granted a limited licence to gloat quietly, at least in public, since really, it would have been a very bad sign if they hadn’t managed to win that seat back. Port Coquitlam is, however, declared a smugness-free zone, since they got smoked by the NDP by any metric one cares to employ.

As with most commentators, she concludes that Michael Ignatieff clearly had the worst day, since “the Liberals have failed to meet the minimum qualifications for any smugness licence.”

Mr. Ignatieff seemed just as confused about the importance of the results as anyone. “The by-election results last night show that we have a lot of work ahead of us,” he eventually said in a statement. “Canadians want an alternative to the Harper Conservatives. Our job in the months ahead is to earn the confidence and support of Canadians.”

Canadians “want an alternative to the Harper Conservatives”? So they show it by electing more Conservatives? Odd people, these Canadians.

Kelly McParland
National Post

Read it here.

Let’s play pretend.

You are the leader of the opposition, and you dearly want to become prime minister.

The country is facing a budget deficit somewhere north of $50 billion. You have promised to eliminate it. You have also promised no new taxes (sort of) and no cuts to any important program. (No instance of unimportant program has ever been identified by a governing party in Ottawa.)

Someone asks you a hypothetical question. If you were prime minister, which would you commit to first:

1. $175 million for a new hockey arena in Quebec, so it can try to attract an NHL hockey team

2. $20 billion, roughly, for a high-speed train from Quebec City to Windsor.

The correct answer is: “As prime minister my first priority would be to eliminate the deficit and return the country to a sound financial footing, and big new spending projects would have to wait.”

Michael Ignatieff’s answer: The choo-choo. “But I’d really like there to be a hockey team in Quebec City, that’s for sure.”

National Post

Read it here.

Bad time for a promotion

L. Ian Macdonald, National Post Published: Friday, October 09, 2009

At first, in the wake of Denis Coderre’s resignation, Michael Ignatieff said he was thinking of abolishing the post of Quebec lieutenant in the Liberal Party of Canada. Then he said he would name a replacement, after all.

And on Wednesday, he did, sort of, by naming Marc Garneau as his, uh, representative to the board of directors of the party’s Quebec wing. And then in the next breath Iggy referred to Garneau as his Quebec lieutenant.

So, if we understand it correctly, Garneau will represent the leader’s views to the party in Quebec, but he won’t be the political boss. Or will he?

He certainly won’t be the chief organizer, and that’s a good thing, because far too much authority was vested in Coderre in both roles, and he was none too shy about throwing his weight around. He had a gift for organizing, but also for annoying MPs and rank and file alike.

Garneau will bring a healing disposition to the role of leader’s representative, lieutenant, whatever. There isn’t a nicer, or more considerate, man anywhere.

The former astronaut had a rough entry into political orbit in 2005, when he was recruited as a star candidate by Paul Martin in the suburban Montreal riding of Vaudreuil-Solanges. He discovered that his fame was no heat shield against aggressive media who goaded him into comments about the possibility of civil war, and his leaving the province in the event of Quebec independence. He has since learned not to answer hypotheticals.

In the 2008 election, he was given a safer course to Ottawa as the candidate in Westmount-Ville Marie, one of the surest Liberal seats in creation.

But for all that, the sum of his political experience is exactly one year in Parliament. And he becomes the leader’s spokesman, representative, lieutenant, whatever, at an extremely bad moment in the life of the Liberal party.

A quarter century after he became the first Canadian in space, he may

find that was a much smoother and less hazardous ride. An Ekos poll yesterday showed the Conservatives breaking out to a 14-point lead over the Liberals nationally. More to the point, in Quebec, the Bloc is at 39%, the Conservatives are at 22% and the Liberals are falling to Earth at 21%. This clearly reflects the Coderre effect, and the blowback in Quebec as elsewhere in the country, from Iggy’s disastrous gambit in trying to force an election nobody wants.

Looking ahead to two byelections in Quebec called by Stephen Harper for November 9, the Liberals face a very daunting task.

Both Quebec seats are held by the Bloc, and the Liberals aren’t likely to be competitive in either one of them.

In Hochelaga, in East End Montreal, the good news for the Liberals is that they should finish second to the Bloc’s Daniel Paille, a former Parti Quebecois cabinet minister. The bad news is that the Liberals should lose by about 30 points.

But in the Lower St. Lawrence riding of Montmagny-L’Islet-Kamouraska-Riviere-du-Loup, the Liberals will settle for finishing a distant third, and will be lucky to beat out the NDP at that.

With the Conservatives becoming the competitive federalist alternative again in area 418 — Quebec City and east — this shapes up as strictly a two-way race between the Bloc and the Conservatives. In the general election, the Bloc won the seat by 15 points, 45% to 30% over the Tories, so it’s within reach for the Conservatives.

They have a strong local candidate in Bernard Genereux. He has strong connections to the provincial Liberal party, and Jean Charest is certain to put the Big Red Machine behind him as the candidate of the only federalist party with a shot at the Bloc.

The rest is massaging and the Conservative message to the voters is that they have a choice of being in opposition, or in government. Or as they say in Quebec: du bon bord. – L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy Options.

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New poll gives Harper’s Tories a majority

Posted: October 08, 2009, 2:01 PM by Mary Vallis

A new Ekos poll released this morning suggests Stephen Harper and the Conservatives could win a majority government if Canadians voted in an election today.

The poll found 39.7% of respondents would vote for the Conservatives, up 3.7 percentage points from the previous week. Meanwhile, 25.7% of respondents said they would vote for the Liberals, down by four points from the polling firm’s data from the previous week (29.7%).

What’s more, the results peg Mr. Harper’s approval rating at 39%, while Mr. Ignatieff trails significantly at 19%. A majority of respondents — 51% — said they disapprove of the way Mr. Ignatieff is handling his job.

“The Liberals are now in danger of branding themselves as the party of political instability, or the party of election threats,” said Paul Adams, executive director of Strategic Communications for EKOS Research Associates. “Every time people wake up and pay attention to Michael Ignatieff, it’s because he’s threatening an election. It’s pretty clear from everybody’s polling, not just ours, that Canadians don’t want an election.”

“It’s allowed the Conservatives to brand themselves around being stewards of the economy and the government more generally,” Mr. Adams added.

Mr. Harper’s approval experienced a “little bit of a jump” after he took the stage a the National Arts Centre and played a Beatles tune on the piano over the weekend, Mr. Adams said.

The pollsters call the results a “dramatic setback” for the Liberal Party.  The results suggest the Liberal Party’s traditional lead among women, immigrants and university educated voters has been “erased,” they say.

The poll showed 12.5% of respondents would vote for the NDP (up from 13.9% the previous week). The Green Party and the Bloc each claimed the support of 9.7% of respondents.

Forty-one percent of Canadians named economic issues as the most important election issue, while 33% said it was social issues and another 17% named fiscal issues.

The poll was conducted between Sept. 6 an Oct. 6, 2009 and includes responses from 3,333 Canadians. the results are considered accurate within 1.7 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. The full report can be found here.

—Mary Vallis, National Post

John Ivison: Ignatieff takes a divided party and makes it worse

Posted: October 06, 2009, 5:49 PM by NP Editor

Full Comment, John Ivison, Canadian politics

Parliament Hill was abuzz with rumours about Liberals crossing the floor to join the Conservatives yesterday – a mystery all the more intriguing because no one could track down the identity of the potential defectors.

Here’s a thought — maybe the apostate is Michael Ignatieff himself. How’s that for a plan so cunning, in the words of Blackadder, you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel? The Liberal leader pursues a scorched earth policy, reduces the party’s support to sub-Stephane Dion levels and then deserts his post for the Tories. Far-fetched admittedly but it’s the only account that adequately explains the leadership’s apparent infatuation for self-immolation.

Okay — not really. But the words “amateur hour” are being whispered by even the most senior members of Mr. Ignatieff’s shadow cabinet.

The latest gaffe defies rational explanation. Mr. Ignatieff nearly blew his own toes off last week in his spat with Denis Coderre, the former Quebec lieutenant who resigned after finding his authority undermined by his leader.

Mr. Ignatieff limped back from Quebec City on Sunday and you might have thought he’d try really, really hard to rally his party around the Liberal standard. Instead, he took aim at his other foot and let loose both barrels. An unprompted press release issued by Judy Sgro, the Liberal seniors critic, said the leader and the party would vote against a private members’ bill that proposes to shorten the residency period required before seniors can claim partial payment of old age security to three years from 10.

The bill’s merits, or lack of, need not concern us. The head-scratching aspect was that it was sponsored by a Liberal MP, Ruby Dhalla, and seconded by foreign affairs critic, Bob Rae. No one on the Hill can remember a party publicly nuking a private members’ bill brought forward by one of its own MPs.

The incident was handled with a cack-handedness that is becoming characteristic. For one thing, the bill is not likely to reach debate stage for another three years. For another, private members’ bills are considered sacrosanct by everyone in politics, with the apparent exception of the Opposition Leader’s Office, since they are the one chance that MPs have to bring forward their own legislation, without regard for party discipline. Ms. Dhalla’s bill was built on older legislation supported in previous sessions by members from all parties and was an attempt to curry favour with a key Liberal constituency, the immigrant community.
Quite why Mr. Ignatieff felt the need to create new divisions within his own party is unclear. The Liberal leader displayed the political sophistication of a bull — which is appropriate given his office is starting to resemble a china shop.

The Sgro press release was likely issued in response to rumours that Ms. Dhalla is set to cross the floor and join the Conservatives. There appears to be no substance to that one — or to related speculation that other MPs like Martha Hall Findlay, Gerard Kennedy or Keith Martin are also bound for the government benches. The Conservatives have been trying to make the most of the chaos on the Liberal side of the House by tempting the disaffected. But one suspects that the big fish won’t bite and any who do make the trip across the two swords length in the Commons’ chamber will be minnows or bottom-feeders.

Mr. Kennedy, Ms. Dhalla, Mr. Martin and Ms. Hall Findlay all ruled themselves out. “I have said publicly many times that, even if someone is no longer happy in their original party, they must sit as an independent until such time as they can put themselves to election under the banner of their new party,” said Ms. Hall Findlay, who lost the 2004 election to Belinda Stronach, only to see her defect to the Liberals.

Still, if the floor of the House of Commons is unlikely to be sullied with Liberals crossing the aisle, that does not mean that anyone – anyone – is happy with the leadership’s performance.

Mr. Ignatieff has been the very antithesis of grace under pressure in recent days, commenting sourly in a Newstalk 1010 radio interview that Stephen Harper’s singing “is not all that much better than mine”.

Mr. Ignatieff was walking the line he himself drew — that everything Mr. Harper does is inept, including his ability to carry a tune.
Since he called time on the government at the Liberal caucus meeting in Sudbury last month, Mr. Ignatieff has been adamant that his party will oppose the Conservatives in Parliament.

The Liberals insist that they will stick with this strategy and vote against all confidence measures in the House. But there is heavy pressure from his caucus for Mr. Ignatieff to declare he will consider legislation on a case by case basis and even support the government on matters of confidence, if the alternative is an untimely election.

“We’ve been too ardent in our opposition and that has to change. Sure [Mr. Ignatieff] would lose face, but he’d save a lot of skin,” said one Liberal.

Mr. Ignatieff’s best, perhaps only, hope is to repeat to himself the consoling advice of Abraham Lincoln that “this too shall pass”, learn good judgment from his bad experiences and resign himself to an extended period in the wilderness of opposition.
If the recovery withers, and fear turns to anger, he may be able to re-invent himself as a credible alternative to Mr. Harper, in the same way that opposition leaders who disappointed early — like Dalton McGuinty and even Jean Chrétien — took advantage of the changing tide of events.

But this would require Mr. Ignatieff to show patience, competence and a compelling slate of policies. There are few signs to date that the Liberal leader has any of those attributes.
National Post
jivison@nationalpost.com

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