HOW LOW CAN THIS ELECTION GO?
The most conspicuous movement in this most discouraging election campaign has been the flow of voters away from the Liberals and the Conservatives.
We don’t know who will win or how much popular support they will command on Monday. But the polling suggests the victor will have the lowest share of the popular vote in the history of Canadian elections.
Joe Clark’s Conservatives won 35.9 per cent of the vote in 1979, returning 136 MPS to the House of Commons. In the most recent Nanos Research tracking poll, the Conservatives and Liberals were tied on 31 per cent. Both parties are well off their highs since Aug. 2 (the Conservatives’ high was 37.8 per cent; the Liberals’ 36.9 per cent). Meanwhile, the NDP and Bloc Québécois are at, or close to, their three month highs (the New Democrats were on 19 per cent and the Bloc on 6.2 per cent in the Nanos poll on Friday). One suspects most of that audience decamped from the two larger parties in despair, rather than rushed towards the NDP and Bloc in wild enthusiasm.
It’s not hard to see why. Andrew Scheer has tried to exploit Justin Trudeau’s flexible approach to transparency by suggesting this time around it is the Liberals that have a hidden agenda — that if re-elected, Trudeau would legalize hard drugs, raise the goods and services tax, and impose a 50 per cent capital gains tax on the sale of homes.
Trudeau was asked about the claims and dismissed them all as “entirely untrue” at his press conference in Whitby.
“It’s unfortunate that the Conservatives are making up attacks against us when all they are offering is cuts. Perhaps that’s all they can do,” he said.
But the Liberals are not amateurs in the black art of disinformation. Scheer has been dogged by accusations that he would introduce legislation on abortion if he was elected, even though he has stated point blank he would not. When he was joined earlier in the campaign by pro-life candidate Rachel Willson, veteran Liberal Carolyn Bennett asked on Twitter: “Is the abortion debate really closed?”
Trudeau was asked about the double standard on Friday. “Andrew Scheer has not said he would stand up for access to reproductive services on abortion,” he said, pointing to the case in New Brunswick, where the province’s only abortion clinic is closing its doors.
Trudeau has blamed Conservative Premier Blaine Higgs for the closure, but Higgs has pointed out that the decision to close the clinic was made four years ago. He said Trudeau is using the impending closure as an election issue.
That fact did not stop the Liberal leader from continuing to hammer the issue. “We need a government that will fight for a woman’s rights, which is what we are doing in New Brunswick for access to reproductive rights and services limited by Conservative governments,” he said.
It is almost beyond satire that Trudeau positioned himself as the saviour of women’s rights in a riding previously represented by Celina Caesar-chavannes, who resigned from the Liberal caucus to sit as an Independent over the treatment of Jody Wilson-raybould in the Snc-lavalin affair. Caesar-chavannes said she was met by hostility and anger from Trudeau when she announced her resignation, which prompted her to speak out against the Liberal leader.
The falsehoods on both sides are deliberate and go beyond a straight policy contrast. This is undoubtedly the most nasty and divisive election I have experienced in nearly 20 years of coverage. The reason is that the social media through which the false claims are made are optimized for outrage. Partisanship drives engagement, which means dollars for the big tech companies and votes for the parties. The digital ecosystem encourages people to share things they like and attack things they don’t.
The emotional responses have real life consequences. A teacher approached me after Trudeau’s media availability in Whitby and handed over a Conservative flyer that claimed the Liberals have a “secret plan” to increase taxes on the sale of homes. He said he corrected the record on Facebook and was intimidated as a result. “I’ve been threatened personally. The person said: ‘I know where you live. I’m coming to your house’. That’s scary. I have four kids,” he said. As a former school board trustee, he said his personal information is public. He did not want his name used, for understandable reasons.
That is where we are in this election and it explains, in part, why our next prime minister may be elected with the support of fewer than one in three Canadian voters.
jivison@postmedia.com