Tag: jack layton

Strategy in a nutshell

Now that Stephane Dion has indicated that he won’t force an election before the fall, it might be a good time to look at the overall strategies of the four federal party leaders as Parliament winds down into the last days of the spring sitting before summer break.

Stephen Harper’s strategy is as it has been since Dion became leader of the Liberal party but has become much more evident with the Conservative leader’s latest chess moves. The Prime Minister aims to demoralize Liberals both partisan and reluctant. By making Stephane Dion eat the Harper secret agenda and ask for seconds rather than go to an election, the PM is showing Liberals that their leader is more interested in survival than in standing for principled positions. Just a few of the major capitulations by poor Stephane to mean Stephen have been the Liberal leader’s support of the extension of the Afghan mission to 2011, the wholesale Liberal surrender on the Conservative immigration bill and now, as we may still see, the reluctant and red-faced approval bill C-10 (it might as well be called the McVety bill to the Liberal base, but to Stephane Dion, it’s five minutes of oxygen). Stephen Harper wants to allow Jack Layton to rhetorically ask which party will stand up to the Conservative agenda.

Gilles Duceppe for some reason has indicated that he wants to go to an election. Perhaps he just wants to finally retire from politics. Duceppe stands to gain from having the House sit for some time longer as the Prime Minister’s branding of the Quebecois as a nation has not only taken fertile soil but has put down roots for Harper in the province inhabited by the nation. The damage is already done for the Bloc on this issue and Duceppe’s hope should be to tap into potential future RCMP and/or Elections Canada embarrassments for both the Conservatives (in-and-out) and the Liberals (on Adscam and Dion’s debt). This will allow Duceppe to point to the only other viable options in Quebec and say that those federalists are all the same. For a party that has no purpose left in Ottawa but to ensure the continued growth of their federal pensions, scandal seems like a better option for BQ sustainability than defense of Quebec’s non-interest in sovereignty.

Stephane Dion’s strategy has and will continue to be survival. The Liberal leader finds it more critical to parry the daggers at his back rather than thrust towards Stephen Harper across the House divide. The beleaguered Liberal leader would rather pass Stephen Harper’s agenda than face his own party. Therefore, the strategy that Dion will continue to employ is his threatening of the government and his insistence that everyone stands at the precipice of election. However, the threat is really meant for his own party as they cannot dispose of Dion so close to a potential campaign that Harper stands to win big if the Liberal party is left without, well, a leader. If Dion were to say that he will only cause the government to collapse after one year, senior party officials and those with ambitions on leadership would see such a window as a perfect opportunity to safely dispose of Dion. When Dion threatens election, he is only holding off those Liberals that are balancing the dispatch of Dion and the worser option of a (significantly more) disastrous election causing a potential Harper majority, with a faulty campaign led by the man that says it could happen any day (it really is Dion’s last refuge).

Jack Layton is probably rubbing his hands gleefully at thought of being the party of principle of the left that can be seen to oppose Harper. Ironically, this is being done as Layton effectively works with the Prime Minister to destroy any semblance of Liberal identity as liking the colour red and Gerard Kennedy’s taste in eyewear may not be enough to sustain party support under Dion’s leadership. The likes of Buzz Hargrove and Maude Barlow will carry less weight if they encourage NDP supporters to Stop Harper by voting Liberal. Indeed, the voting record shows that even when Dion is in the position to stop the Prime Minister’s agenda, he would rather make his stand defending Stornoway from the growing number of Liberal invaders. Jack Layton’s strategy is to play Harper’s game but he cannot do so too visibly without alienating his own base. However, there is a lot of room here for Layton to maneuver as only the Greens, despite their actual status as a Liberal proxy under May, stand to gain from any anger that the socialist base may have for Layton for strategizing to split the centre with Harper.

Election factors

As Parliamentary break week comes to a wrap in Ottawa, politicos are watching perceived paradigm shift of sorts as suddenly the chatter has moved from Dion’s effectiveness, for the first time since his election as leader, to mounting Conservative troubles capped by the so-called In-and-Out “scandal”. As Ottawa shifts and regroups before parliamentarians return to their seats next week, let’s assess the political landscape and consider the maneuverings and motivations of the federal parties.

Ottawa observers in the press gallery have predicted that we’ll quietly move into summer as the Liberals and Conservative regroup to do battle in the fall as a few parliamentary hurdles are surpassed and Canadians have time to assess the mathematics of In-and-Out that has everyone in this town both confused and hungry for more details.

However, there are a few factors which indicate that both the Conservatives and Liberals are moving towards preparing for a summer election.

Sources of mine close to Liberal preparations have quietly passed on that Grit organizers in southern Ontario have activated their volunteer base in at least 15 ridings. In fact, Stephane Dion had a campaign photo shoot within the past week in order to get, among other things, his visage wrapped around Liberals buses. The Liberals may be moving ahead for a June election for a variety of reasons including the fact that Stephane Dion’s leadership debt – a staggering $800,000 owed to creditors – comes due at the end of June. What will Elections Canada have to say about this, if anything? If the government body acts to rebuke Dion, this will take some punch out of Liberal scandal-mongering on In-and-Out.

Conservatives on the other hand are making a few preparations. On the party side, a handful of Conservative nominations have been released in order to secure candidates as soon as possible. When it comes to the Prime Minister’s office and recent messaging, Mr. Harper at a rally last night in Montreal tested a few lines on Stephane Dion’s countless opportunities to bring down the government. One assumes that if the Liberal leader feels an urgency to send Canadians to the polls that the Conservatives will underscore this as opportunism instead. On the policy front, in the past week Stephen Harper has been messaging on what will likely be the key message of an upcoming campaign: the economy. Canadians are uncertain about the future economic climate as the US goes into recession and as the Canadian economy bellies up to the same line. In the past week, the Prime Minister has linked immigration to improving Canada’s skilled worker capacity, has emphasized stronger trade relations with India, spoken about targeting economic spending to bolster strategic Quebec industries such as aerospace and space and health sciences, and has had a tri-lateral meeting with US and Mexican leaders on SPP as a compliment to NAFTA.

In a future election campaign, Liberals in Dion’s office have told me that they will run on a theme of “wrong direction” meaning that in the climate of scandal that has been constructed, the Liberals will suggest to Canadians that the Prime Minister is taking the country along the wrong path and that the policy of this government just emphasizes this. Of course, this will be problematic for Liberals as they’ve been effectively rubber-stamping every Conservative policy that has moved through the House by abstaining from votes.

Emphasizing scandal can be risky for the Liberal campaign as it leaves campaign scripting vulnerable to unforeseen events such as the RCMP’s warning that more Liberal charges are coming with respect to the sponsorship scandal. Such a development would be uncomfortable for Dion as Canadians are reminded of Liberals stealing other people’s money to fight elections (rather than spend their own as Conservatives have done with In-and-Out).

If the Liberal intend to go to an election this summer, the knee-capping factor may be the NDP. Jack Layton’s party would not want to see the writ dropped on perceived Liberal momentum as any narrative that has Dion within arms reach of Stephen Harper would cause the “Think Twice” coalition of pseudo-socialists to reconvene and urge Canadians to vote Liberal. The ideal election scenario for Layton is a ballot question that splits Canadians left and right on an issue that leaves Liberals without any semblance of cohesion. The NDP can rest assured that Harper, the strategic chess player that he is, has crafted such a scenario. The NDP knows that going to an election on Liberal terms would be a disasterous scenario for their party as their seat count would diminish and their $1.83 per vote lost would decrease the party’s war chest by millions over the period of a future Conservative or Liberal government. The NDP has been working quietly to give a soft-landing where they can for Conservatives (the Lukiwski scandal was relatively easy on the Tories and handled much better than the freelancing done by Irene Mathyssen on James Moore) and aggravating Liberal planning where they can.

Observers that think that the Prime Minister is looking for an opportunity to orchestrate an election should take stock of a few factors. On the partisan side, Conservatives are looking forward to a policy convention scheduled for the fall. Not having had a convention since 2005, the party is preparing for the event and would rather avoid an election that would jeopardize the gathering. Most importantly however, while everyone else is distracted by the narrow scope of the daily street battle of Ottawa politics, the Prime Minister is reconfiguring the broader electoral and political landscape for sustained decades-long effect. The more time that the Prime Minister has to restructure the Canadian state, its identity and political brands, the more permanence his agenda will have. Whenever the election, of the men that will seek a mandate from the exercise, one seeks the Prime Ministership as a means to an end, while the other aimlessly covets it for no other reason than to remedy the dissonance of a desanguinated party that stands for nothing else.

By-election notes

– big loss for Stephane Dion tonight. In by-elections, the number of votes for the government usually goes down. In seat +/-, we see Stephane Dion -1 and Stephen Harper +1.

– Liberals will say that three out of four by-elections is a victory. All four ridings were Liberal, so anything less than holding those four with margins as strong as before is a loss for the Liberals.

– Stephane Dion’s hand-picked candidate lost in Desnethé–Missinippi–Churchill River. This is, of course, the riding in which Dion put an end to David Orchard’s hopes of being a candidate there and cherry-picked an NDP MLA to run as a Liberal. Political observers will remember Dion’s hand picked candidate Jocelyn Coulon in Outremont losing to the NDP in a big by-election upset months ago.

– In contrast, the Conservatives’ weak finish in Toronto Centre is a result of a poor history of electoral success for this incarnation of the Conservative party there and the party’s decision to drop their candidate in the riding. Dion’s move in Saskatchewan was to enhance electoral success, Harper’s Toronto Centre decision was in made in order to prevent divergent messaging that could have an impact outside of this riding in which Conservatives weren’t even competitive.

– Vancouver Quadra is also turning out to be a bitter win for Dion. Liberal vote share in that riding is down and Conservative vote share is up. While Harper is finding it difficult to increase share in downtown Toronto, the Vancouver result is encouraging. It appears that Conservatives are and will be competitive in that riding for the next general election.
UPDATE: Final margin in Vancouver Quadra is 151 votes with the Liberals just barely holding this seat from going Conservative. This is a big upset for Dion. UBC is within the riding and the riding is urban and generally quite well-to-do. This seat should have been solidly Liberal. Quadra just became a target riding for the Conservatives in the next election.

– By-elections are always experimental in that we sometimes see a preview of party strategy for general elections. In the Liberals, we see more of an emphasis on the team rather than their leader. In Conservatives we see primary focus on Harper’s leadership. A general election is leadership focused, however, as debates and daily news coverage have a bias towards leadership. Many voters, in all 308 ridings, cast a ballot for Harper or Dion, rather than the their local candidate or party. Paul Martin de-emphasized the Liberal brand and put his leadership in the front window during both 2004 and 2006 general elections. Dion would be wise to downplay his leadership and emphasize the Liberal brand. Martin hid the brand because it was tainted by the Sponsorship Scandal, and the man dubbed Mr. Dithers believed he provided strong leadership. Is the Liberal brand still sufficiently tainted by scandal? Despite this consideration, Dion’s leadership could not be emphasized over the Liberal brand; whereas we saw “Team Martin” sign instead of “Liberal” signs, we won’t be seeing “Team Dion”.

– Jack Layton also had a bad night. His vote share is down. While he works with the Conservatives to carve up Liberal votes left and right, he may find that he needs more time to accomplish this goal. A general election would hasten the dispatching of Dion, and bring forward a more competitive Liberal leader in most scenarios. Therefore, Layton and Harper should figure out how to loudly oppose each other while sustaining the life of this government for the longer rather than shorter term.

– Dion is going to find his front bench increasingly crowded with alpha candidates for his job. Liberals will be start looking seriously past Dion and it will be difficult for him to catch up.

– Conservative and NDP strategy should be to establish themselves as principled ideologues on the left and the right. Conservatives should emphasize good management and strong leadership. Jack Layton should challenge Harper to a one-on-one debate. Both parties should try to keep the government alive to draw out Liberal divisions.

– Luckily for Harper and Layton, Dion’s strategy is also to survive and the only way this can happen is for the government to survive. Liberals will be chomping a the bit in order to “get back to power as soon as possible” and most realize that this is impossible under Dion and much easier when they hold a leadership race and select a more capable leader. The easiest way for the Liberals to remove Dion is via a loss in the general election. The Conservatives and the NDP would be smart not to provide them with this opportunity. If the hunger gets too strong, the Liberals may start eating their own and we may see Dion swallowed whole. This would immediately trigger a general election as the Conservatives and NDP would be willing partners in increasing their respective vote proportions as Liberal voters stay home on election day.