JEFFREY SIMPSON
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
Canadians are unhappy with both the major parties. That has been the storyline of the past two years. That is the storyline of the election campaign. It is too late for that unhappiness to change. And it certainly will not change with the release of the Conservatives' platform.
The unhappiness in part explains the improvement in the fortunes of the three smaller parties: the NDP, Bloc Québécois and Greens. The result will be a dog's breakfast. Forget a majority government. Canadians will have yet another minority a week from today.
The savage downdraft in
Prime Minister Stephen Harper can say, correctly, that the troubles in
Mr. Harper's platform pledges more of the same, only less. Over four years, he promises $6.5-billion in additional tax cuts and $2.1-billion in spending, $200-million targeted at Ontario's automobile industry and $200-million at the aerospace industry, largely located in Quebec.
The tax cuts are piddling compared with those already enacted, including the staggering $60-billion reduction over five years of the GST, plus billions more for lower personal and corporate taxes. The spending commitments are also tiny relative to those promised in the last campaign. It's a steady-as-she-goes approach, at a slower speed, into economic headwinds no one dreamed would be so fierce.
Mr. Harper boxed himself in. He gave so many tax cuts, kept spending going at a fast clip, and handed billions to the provinces to alleviate the "fiscal imbalance" that little is left in the federal cupboard. Even if he were tempted to vary his course and throw billions at the economy, the effects would be marginal. And it would appear like a last-minute "panic," just what he accused the Liberals' Stéphane Dion of doing.
Despite what the opposition parties pretend, there isn't a great deal the government can do in the short term. Mr. Harper is the incumbent, and he wears public anger for the economic downdraft. He didn't create the problems, but he's being blamed for them. The Liberals' so-called 30-day plan of action implicitly acknowledges that not much can be done, since it is long on meetings and short on policies.
The most important actor today is Bank of
Mr. Harper, sweater and photo ops with babies notwithstanding, is not a very empathetic guy. For this, he is being pilloried by critics, as if empathy were a substitute for policy. He does not look as if he feels anyone's pain. This image hurts in
Mr. Harper has always been respected among Conservative voters, and a little bit outside that world. But he's also been venomously disliked by much of the electorate outside that world, and that has been a major obstacle to a Conservative majority. In this campaign, his negative impressions have outweighed his positives among Canadians. That's trouble for a party that has built everything around the leader's image.
If Canadians really wanted to displace the Harper government, they would vote Liberal, the only party capable of forming a government other than the Conservatives.
But Mr. Dion is so poorly regarded by so many Canadians that unhappiness with him is everywhere apparent, including throughout his own party. His Green Shift, whatever its intellectual merits, is a political deadweight.
The Liberal Party has also vanished from such large swaths of
Both the Conservative and Liberal leaders now evoke strong negative reactions among a majority of Canadians. That's why both parties might win a smaller share of the popular vote than in 2006.