Election outcome contest

Okay, folks, some 200 of you participated in the Open Election Prediction thread.  As you may have heard, The Fascists won 167 seats, The Bolsheviks 102, those of us in The Rudderless Third Party 34, the Traitors 4, and the Green Lady 1.

So who came closest to that final result?  (Certainly not me; I didn’t think a majority would happen, and nor did I see the Bloc-heads falling as far as they did.)

Nothing after polls closed counts, naturally.  That would be cheating, and cheating isn’t permitted in Stephen Harper’s Canada, except and unless you are a member of his cabinet or caucus.

Do we have a winner?


Unity: the way forward

Walkom, writing the column every progressive should read:

“…any talk of cooperation will not be easy. Liberal activists are used to fighting the NDP and vice versa. In parts of the West, the word “Liberal” is viewed as a curse word by NDP voters. In parts of southern Ontario, the reverse holds.

More important, the NDP is riding high on its election triumph. It’s the official opposition. It has seats in Quebec. Old dreams of squeezing out the Liberals and turning Canada into a two-party, left-right state have been revived.

This euphoria cannot last. NDP voters will soon realize that, even as leader of the official opposition, Layton has no influence over a Harper majority government. He will also be hard-pressed to navigate between a party that is traditionally centralist and a new Quebec voting base that is anything but.

As well, the Liberals are not a spent force. What happened Monday was not a repeat of the 1993 tsunami that left the old Progressive Conservatives with just two seats in the Commons. The Liberals still have MPs from every province except Alberta.

Eventually, both parties will be forced to face the mathematics of the situation. Each wants to be the one to defeat the Harper Conservatives. Neither can do it alone.”

 


Post-earthquake bits and pieces (updated)

  • I spent a lot of yesterday talking to Liberal friends. Most of them were quite fine, thank you very much – and a surprising number were upbeat, because they said that the long-overdue revamping of the Liberal Party of Canada can now begin in earnest, with new blood, new ideas, new approaches. Personally, I feel the same: unless the Lord takes me home, I want to be part of the rebuilding process, and take a shot at running again. I’m an Alberta Liberal: I don’t freak out when my party gets hammered, you know?  Anyway, columns like this and this are premature/off the mark, to say the least. Lots of obituaries were written when the Conservative Party was reduced to two seats in November 1993, and they ended up doing not badly in 2006 and beyond.
  • Cognitive dissonance is right. Maher, per always, nails it here. Let’s perform my little test again: do you know the name of the president of the Conservative Party of Canada? Recall anything he/she has ever said? Exactly. Party presidents should raise money, and leave the talking to the elected people. This party president in particular. (And, by the by: why doesn’t he do what his leader did, yesterday? Liberals are asking that, too.)
  • Speaking of resignations: Ignatieff did the honourable thing, yesterday; he didn’t mince words, he took responsibility, and he quit.  As noted, Apps should, too, for his role in this fiasco.  And, if the voters hadn’t resolved the question first, quite a few of us would be today demanding changes for Ignatieff’s Chief of Staff (who was ultimately responsible for the maladroit strategy that got us here); his so-called “Chief Operating Officer” (who was supposed to ensure we had election/organizational readiness, and didn’t); his policy director (who put together the platform that nobody, Liberals included, found either compelling or saleable); and his unilingual and comms-inexperienced Director of Communications (who should have never, ever been made Director of Communications).  I wish all of them the best of luck, however, in their future political endeavours.
  • Alternation? Chris’ column today is worth a read, as always, but the provincial Grits I know – unlike their cousins – are very, very (very) ready for the October 2011 election. What’s more, there is a simple political reality that is always at play in Canadian politics, one the Ontario Progressive Conservatives need to heed: Ontarians don’t like one party running the whole show. Thus, Chretien begat Harris, Mulroney begat Peterson, and so on and so on. Here’s the elevator conversation, one you’ll be hearing lots of times in Ontario in coming months: “The Cons run the GTA, and the country. Do you want the same party running Ontario, too?”
  • Case in point: Health care, again the number one issue in Ontario and the nation. Harper talked about the coming health care battle in his election night speech, and with reporters afterwards. Ballot-type question: “Who do you want protecting health care at the bargaining table with Harper? McGuinty? Or Timmy Hudak, who shut down nearly 30 hospitals, fired thousands of nurses, and last month cancelled his policy convention – where his health care plan was supposed to be revealed – to accommodate his federal boss?”
  • Lopinski’s Observations: My Ontario Liberal war room colleague Bob Lopinski came up with a brilliant assessment of the post-election coverage, yesterday. Like him, I found that (a) no pundit or pollster really saw it coming and (b) they’re all sort-of making it up as they go along. Thus, Bob’s take, which you can clip and save:
“I do really wish there was more science in political science.  

This is what I have gleaned from the early analysis:

  1. Voters are moving left, unless they are moving right.
  2. Incumbency is bad, unless you were re-elected.
  3. Voters want change AND even more of the same.
  4. On-the-ground organization and sophisticated micro-targeting work, unless you are a bar-maid canvassing in Las Vegas.
  5. The separatists are preparing to ramp up their campaigns, and as a first step have left the Canadian House of Commons.”

UPDATE: And Gardner, on the same subject, here.


In today’s Sun: change

Michael Ignatieff has to go.


There is no other option. He ran a good campaign, he did better on the hustings than anyone expected, he impressed Liberals from coast to coast.


But Canadians weren’t impressed, at any point. From the start, they were unenthusiastic about the former Harvard professor. Liberal lefties thought he was too right wing; Liberal veterans thought he wasn’t ever a politician.


And Canadians didn’t like him.


The multimillion-dollar Conservative attack-ad campaigns didn’t help matters, of course. Those ads were designed to define the new Liberal leader before he could define himself, and they worked. (If there is any comfort for dispirited Libs this morning, it is that the main beneficiary of those attack ads wasn’t the Conservative leader who approved them — it was the NDP leader.)


So, are any Liberals in shock this morning? Not all of us.


Despite what you may read elsewhere, take it from this chastened Grit: The reality of the Liberal Party’s humiliating defeat didn’t actually become known last night, after the polls closed.


Among many Liberals, it was known the party was heading for a crushing loss for about three weeks. In the past week, however, the bad news got even worse. It came into sharp focus when I got a call from a senior member of Ignatieff’s team of advisors.


“We’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do, but I don’t think it will involve Ignatieff,” this Grit said. “The leader is going to lose his seat.”


And he did. Politics is a cruel business, and Ignatieff knew that when he sought the top job. So that’s that.


But Ignatieff’s departure alone won’t solve the Liberal Party’s many problems. It is unfair to blame Ignatieff for everything that went wrong. The Liberal caucus needs new blood. In many cases, Grit MPs have represented their ridings (well) for decades. But we need new blood. We need new ideas, new passions, new people.


We need to get much better at raising money — after all, it was a Liberal government that ushered in the changes to the way federal political fundraising was done. And that’s not all: The Liberal Party itself needs to become a true federation, and not just a loose coalition of regional fiefdoms.


Better election readiness. Better policy-making. Better unity. And — most of all — a better understanding of all of modern Canada, and not just the urban enclaves where the party still has some strength. All of those things are needed if the Liberal Party of Canada is ever again to be relevant to Canadians.


As I watched Michael Ignatieff from the Sun News TV studio Monday night, I felt sad for him. He isn’t a bad guy. He isn’t what those Conservative ads said he was. In the brief period I worked for him, I thought he was a smart man, one with lots of ideas, and a drive to serve his country.


But none of that came across on TV. And Canadians, as I say, never felt comfortable with him.


I wish him luck in whatever he does next. Liberals, too, I wish luck. We have a big, big job ahead of us.


I’m confident we’re going to get that job done.

 


Iggy and us

I just got asked on-air about Ignatieff’s future.

I said he was diplomatic and gracious in his speech, and that he knows that the people of Etobicoke-Lakeshore have now settled the question. I said I expect he will leave in the next few days. He doesn’t have much choice, now.

I said he ran a great campaign, and he did better than anyone expected.

But it’s time for a change in the Liberal Party – from top to bottom.

Oh, and we’ll be back.


KCCCC E-Day: What a voter thinks


  • What do voters think? I think polls and focus groups are interesting, but I generally prefer my political gut over my political head.  I regard my six-pack-like gut on days like today, and say: “What are voters thinking, gut?”
  • My gut grumbled. “They’re pretty busy, so they don’t have much time to think about politics as much as idiots like you do,” said my gut.  “So their analysis tends to be pretty to-the-point.  Here’s what a lot of them think.”
  • Number one: “They’re pissed off there was another election.  It made them grumpy,” said gut.  “They’re taking it out on two guys, mostly, which is Iggy and Steve.  Some of them think Iggy was taking a risk to push for an election, too, when he’d been behind the Cons for a couple years.”
  • Number two:“They like Jack, but they don’t like the other two so much,” my gut remarked.  “They saw Iggy and Steve as similar: kind of aloof and stand-offish, and more right wing than them. Steve and Iggy saw it as a zero-sum game, whatever that is.  They tried to shake loose votes from each other. But those votes that shook loose, alright, and they bounced right over to Jack.  People like Jack.”
  • Number three:“The country is still pretty progressive,” gut observed.  “Sixty-five per cent of them hate, er, Steve’s guts, too.  Iggy should have been more progressive, they felt. So they went to the only guy they thought was more progressive, which was Jack.”
  • Number four: “Attack ads work,” said gut.  “But they work best in a two-way race.  In a three-way race, they don’t work so well, do they?”
  • Number five: “Folks are in a firing mood,” concluded my gut. “Today, they want to fire a few politicians.  Tonight, they’re going to get their wish.”