Conservatives Don't Lose; Liberals Don't Win

As political polls get trotted out one after another one gets the impression that all we've been seeing is little more than statistical noise fluctuations that contain about as much information as pure white noise. That is, none at all. In this most recent poll by Ekos, as reported by the CBC, Ignatieff has this rationalization for the current noise fluctuation that has the Conservatives and Liberals in a dead heat:

Ignatieff has claimed his party has seized momentum from the Conservatives following a summer-long bus tour across Canada that featured the Liberal leader speaking unscripted and taking questions from audience members.

This is nothing more than an empty attempt Ignatieff to claim that the poll result is due to his efforts over the summer, which in reality few people paid attention and resulted in nothing new in the Liberal platform or did little, if anything, for his appeal to voters. It's merely the sort of empty rhetoric we get from the majority of our politicians.

The Liberal party is not gaining much traction with voters, but rather I suspect that the poll, if it means anything at all, tells us two things: the Conservative party is making a steady series of policy blunders that each alienates some segment of the country's population; and, the sponsorship scandal is passing into history, and is increasingly not being considered by voters when they consider their preference. None of this is impacted by Ignatieff's presence.

Each small blunder by the Conservative government reflects badly on Harper's leadership since, rightly or wrongly, they each get laid by his feet since he is so clearly the primary decision maker. This is, for him, a disadvantage of the degree of control he exercises over his cabinet and caucus, in that by not delegating authority he also cannot deflect blame. My perception is that he does not seem to understand that what he considers as minor policy decisions meant to incrementally progress his political agenda are cumulative irritants over the large body of the electorate.

Perhaps Igantieff can exploit this beyond immediate polling figures, not by attacking Harper but by crafting better governance structures as a policy objective. Writing in the Globe and Mail, Lawrence Martin describes this tremendous opportunity for Ignatieff and the Liberal party to reverse the centralization of power.

Ever since Pierre Trudeau started overcentralizing the power structure four decades ago, we’ve been regressing into what former Quebec Superior Court justice John Gomery, who headed up the federal sponsorship inquiry, described as “one-man government.”

Both major parties have followed the same unwritten policy, much to the detriment of our democracy. It is now a large flaw that cannot even be swayed by our votes. We all know that our elected representative no longer represent us (other than a few mavericks like Cadman and Casey) since their votes are dictated by a small cabal of power brokers around the Liberal and Conservative leaders, and sometimes the leader alone. It's gotten to the point that more and more of us know how ineffectual our vote can be in getting what we want, which I believe is leading to unreliable polling data: voting preferences are volatile since we don't trust those vying for our votes.

If not governance, the economy is no longer Ignatieff's policy card. Going back in this blog's archive, almost one year ago I declared that it was already too late because the economy was bottoming and an election during the inevitable upturn would favour the government, even though the government can take little of the credit.

The truth is that neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals are responsible for either the recession or the coming economic resurgence. The economic cycle is almost entirely due to what is going on in the United States. With our economy so closely dependent on commodities exports to the US, we are simply going along for the ride. The Liberals hope to ride this wave to renewed popularity and a majority government by 2011.

This is even more true today since everyone can see that we are on the first steps of a long-term economic recovery. Sure, there are many bumps along the road and risk of a relapse, but with every passing day it becomes increasing likely that the worst is truly behind us.

The finance minister, Jim Flaherty, is now beginning to attract the degree of respect that Paul Martin had in that role a decade and more in the past. Even more so than the sponsorship scandal, the Liberal party's reputation for fiscal responsibility is becoming a historical event, and not something to which the Liberal party of today can lay claim. The nail in the economic policy coffin for the Liberals was this pronouncement by Stephen Harper:

"All the signs are that the economic action plan has been effective, but if we want to be effective in the future, the next step will be to get some of our deficits down and make sure that we're providing good incentives to the private sector to continue to move the economy forward."

Of course the Conservatives are not any more fiscally responsible than the Liberals, it just that they spend and cut differently: Conservatives cut taxes and trim social programs and spend on the military, while Liberals have tended to keep taxes and social programs steady, and cut the military. The specifics are in reality more nuanced than my simple description, but the fact is that if you want overall spending controls there is little reason to prefer one of these parties over the other since both must operate in within the constraints of the country's overall economic health.

In closing this post, I don't expect either Harper or Ignatieff to rush to the polls anytime soon. Both know they have poor prospects of forming a majority and therefore an election would doom either or both leaders' positions. Coming back to governance, we should be thankful for the prospect of continuing minority governments so that neither party can behave as a five-year dictatorship. Even more than the polling split, who we really have to thank for this state of affairs is Quebec and the Bloc Quebecois.

I don't say this facetiously; I really mean it. With 15% to 20% of the country's seats out of reach of both of both the Conservative and Liberal parties for the present, it would take a wild swing in the polls for a majority to be possible for either of them. They may endlessly bemoan and threaten us over this state of affairs, but without some real governance reforms -- which could require constitutional changes, and are unlikely at this time -- minority governments serve us better than majorities. They are also more entertaining.