Stephen Harper is going to win the next federal election. That’s a fact.

That may horrify Liberals, presently re-experiencing Trudeaumania. It probably upsets New Democrats, too, because they were in third (and fourth) place for a long time, and they don’t want to go back. But the Conservative Party is going to win the next election. And federal Liberals and New Democrats are the reason.

Harper’s Conservatives won the 2011 general election with money — they have more of it than any other political party. They won with incumbency — they’d been in power for a few years, and Canadians saw they weren’t as radical as many had feared. They won it with discipline — they had a ruthlessly strategic leader and a well-oiled election machine that lived and breathed the Daily Campaign.

But, mainly, they won because their two main opponents were out to lunch. Still are, too.

In 2011, the NDP and the Liberals together received the support of close to 7.3 million voters, about 50% of those who cast a ballot. The Conservatives got far less, about 5.8 million votes, under 40%.

In 2006 and 2008, Harper won power with even fewer votes. Just 36% in 2006, and 37% in 2008.

Exactly a year ago, before he was running for his party’s leadership, Justin Trudeau spoke to a group of students in Victoria. Asked by one of the students about Conservatives winning power with just a third of the vote, Trudeau said: “If, by 2015, with the election approaching, and neither party has got our act together enough to shine and be the obvious alternative, then …” and here he paused. “There will be a lot of pressure for us to start looking at that.”

A year later, Trudeau doesn’t talk like that anymore. He and his team dismiss any talk of cooperation between Liberals and New Democrats. The only Liberal leadership candidate who favours one-time cooperation is Liberal MP Joyce Murray, and she is routinely dismissed as a defeatist crackpot for her trouble.

The same thing happened to Nathan Cullen when he ran for the NDP leadership — he favoured bringing together the progressive majority, too. The front-runner, Thomas Mulcair, didn’t. End of Cullen’s idea.

There’s some political psychology at work, here. Nobody wants to win their party’s leadership simply to turn out the lights. And, among rank-and-file Liberals and New Democrats, there are undeniably deep emotional attachments to their respective party’s histories.

But the outcome of the next federal election shouldn’t be determined on the basis of nostalgia or warm feelings. It should be determined by cold math.

Stephen Harper acutely understands math. He saw conservatives humiliated by Jean Chretien in 1993, 1997 and 2000, and resolved to bring together the warring factions of the right. He did so, and went on to win power shortly thereafter. He hasn’t been defeated since.

Liberals will switch places with New Democrats in 2015. But power will remain with Harper’s Conservatives.

So, after 2015, will Canada’s progressives finally come together — as Liberal Democrats, say — and finally put an end to more than a decade of Conservative rule?

If they don’t, they’ll have only themselves to blame. And that, too, is a fact.

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…and from someone who works there.

Well worth a read.

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This study doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know.

Its findings will be endlessly analyzed and re-analyzed, naturally, but to no effect. You’ve heard it all before. The end result is the same: the traditional media continues to slowly die, and traditional media types don’t know how to stop it.

One of their claims irritates or amuses me, depending on the day. It’s their claim that democracy itself is at risk, because they alone are the people who safeguard democracy.

Their solipsism is breathtaking. It is beyond arrogant.

The reason why big media are dying is because of democracy – not despite democracy. As I wrote early this month, here, it is big media themselves who digitized everything they do, mostly so they could maximize profit.

As historians of the era will note, that’s how they screwed themselves on an epic scale. It was a delicious Marxist irony: with digitization, they placed the means of media production in the hands of average folks. Average folks thereupon took the ball and ran with it.

That isn’t AGAINST democracy, corporate media! THAT IS DEMOCRACY.

This web site (not blog!) has been going for over a decade. Since re-design, it’s had well over six million visitors.

That’s not because Yours Truly is particularly insightful or innovative. I don’t think I’m either, in fact.

Web sites like this one are read because citizens like the idea of citizen media. They don’t like hearing from the same old voices all the time, about the same old stuff. They like being able to contribute themselves, if they are moved to do so.

They think democracy is improved, not diminished, by more voices. And, along the way, if that means that corporate media bosses have to find new ways of doing things, or find new lines of work?

Well, tough shit. That’s democracy.

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Modelled by Son Two and me!

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Here.

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In politics, as in comedy, timing is everything.

On Wednesday morning, Liberal MP Marc Garneau announced he was withdrawing from his party’s leadership race and offering his support to Justin Trudeau. Given that the former astronaut was considered Trudeau’s main opponent — and given how relentlessly critical he’d been of Trudeau — Garneau’s move should have been big news.

It wasn’t. A few short hours later, a bit of white smoke heralded a new pope, and Francis stepped out before the crowds in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican. And that was that for Garneau, and the attendant Garneau headlines.

In politics, timing is everything.

Had they come along sooner than they did, Kim Campbell and John Turner might have benefited from a different result. But when your party has been in power for around a decade — and Christy Clark and Kathleen Wynne know this too well — the timing is all wrong. The timing is against you.

The timing was against Garneau in every conceivable way, too. It was almost cosmically ordained against him.

At a time when the Liberal party had determined it needed “generational change,” Garneau was older and Trudeau was younger. At a time when Grits wanted excitement and passion, Garneau arguably had little — and Trudeau inarguably had both in abundance. At a time when Liberals felt they needed a sharp contrast to Stephen Harper and Thomas Mulcair — both older, grumpy-looking men — Trudeau fit the bill. Garneau, meanwhile, did not appear all that dissimilar from those he pledged to defeat.

Like we say, timing. Trudeau had it, Garneau didn’t.

The papal news notwithstanding, some pundits tried to be upset about Garneau’s departure, ill-timed or not. To them, it exposed the Liberal race as a farce. It was indisputably a coronation, now. It was bad for the Liberal party. It was bad for Trudeau. It was bad, bad, bad.

Well, no, actually. The Liberal leadership race has had as many as eight contestants opposing Trudeau. Few of them have hesitated to take nasty swipes at the front-runner, denigrating everything from his experience to his upbringing.

The race has been many things, but a coronation is not one of them.

Some columnists suggested Trudeau will emerge from the months-long contest untested by adversity. Again, no.

In mid-December, to cite one unforgettable example, a Sun News Network reporter chased Trudeau from an event outside Toronto, repeatedly questioning him about his appearance at an Islamic conference. From the door of the venue to the door of his ride, Trudeau was unflappable, and treated the reporter as if she literally did not exist. (Even Sun News later joked that the reporter had been rendered “invisible.”)

Trudeau’s organizers were upset about the encounter, but they shouldn’t have been. They should have instead made copies of the two-minute video and sent them to every card-carrying Liberal.

It showed Trudeau as all the best leaders usually are — calm, cool and completely contemptuous of the news media.

All of the other criticisms of the Liberal leadership contest are also irrelevant.

Some of those who signed up won’t vote?

The debates haven’t been edifying? The party has been disorganized?

Every party’s leadership race, since the dawn of time, has been similarly criticized. Not one of those complaints is new or noteworthy.

Trudeau will win the Liberal leadership — and the keys to Stornoway after that, and the keys to 24 Sussex after that — because his timing is right. Garneau understood that, and Harper and Mulcair will eventually, too.

And, when your political timing is right, not even a papal intervention can stop you.

That may not be fair, that may not be right, but that’s the way it is.

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This, plus a lot of shuttered businesses still.

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“Droll thing life is — that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late — a crop of inextinguishable regrets.”

From The Heart of Darkness.

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Sorry.

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