Read the entrails: A federal election is in the offing
The words `12-point lead' are a real inducement, writes Lisa Van Dusen.
Considering all the ways in which so many of the mechanisms of electoral politics have become subjugated to a combination of digitization and the curse of expertise, the question of when to call an election remains a remarkably old-school, gut-check process.
Yes, there are polling numbers flooding our timelines. In mid-size, taupe hotel conference rooms across the exurban archipelago of this great nation and in both official languages, focus groups are busy nodding, wincing or spit-taking to a deluge of tag lines juggled into every possible sequence and alliterative jumble. Ministers are tweeting from the road and the rails. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has shaved his beard. In pre-election haruspicy (hairuspicy?) — the practice of divination, traditionally using chicken entrails — sudden beardlessness is always a sign, excluding the Mulcairian deviation that proves the rule.
If elections are called by minority governments when, to put it simply, the reasons to go outweigh the reasons not to, then it would seem the critical mass of election speculation by people who do this for an almost-living is more than just the usual summer content clamber. Even before a handful of polls landed that amounted to a frontal assault on any remaining hesitancy in Trudeau's choice architecture, all the major haruspicy inputs were trending toward a campaign sooner rather than later.
In policy terms: First, the COVID -19 pandemic has been largely tamed by a successful vaccination push, with any possibility of a delta-variant-fuelled fourth wave all the more reason to jump now. Second, the Canadian economy remains under close observation for its lingering susceptibility to vaccine volatility or lockdown knock-ons. But overall, the timing and ultimate success of the inoculation blitz pre-empted a major crisis and the bounceback swing of the GDP numbers (except for a 0.3 drop in April) has prevented the two consecutive quarters of negative growth that would signal a recession.
Flutters of inflation-based overheating anxiety and the chances of Canada's housing blimp bursting spectacularly also add up to an argument for making the economic case, while “Building Back Better” remains irony-free.
In political terms, the words “12-point lead” — as the Liberals registered against the next-closest Tories in an Abacus Data poll that landed Tuesday — are always a potent election inducement. While that survey was done June 10-15, it would be easier to pin it as an outlier if Ipsos hadn't also clocked a 12-point spread for the Liberals (38-26) June 17-22 and Frank Graves at Ekos hadn't registered a nine-point lead June 7-14.
More recently, a Léger poll published Tuesday showed a narrower lead of 33 to 30 for the Liberals, but that may just be Canadians responding to recent trial balloons floating a Berlusconi-style comeback for Stephen Harper by performing a bit of precautionary defibrillation on Erin O'toole.
Beyond the Liberals and Conservatives, everyone agrees that NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, having defied expectations in the 2019 campaign, could pose a threat of unknown quantity to Trudeau from the left. Also, that Quebec is already emerging as a narrative warfare battleground, leading with Premier François Legault's timely litmus test of a minority language-rights-based constitutional debate, complete with Oedipal notwithstanding clause trap.
Meanwhile, the Green party has been besieged by the kind of wildly avoidable intrigue that often seems terribly complicated in headlines and is even more preposterously complicated behind the scenes. Because of the fog of intrigue, it's hard to gauge how much of the problem stems from Annamie Paul's leadership, how much from internal or external sabotage and how much from an authentic misunderstanding on the part of party insiders as to the link between public cohesion and electability. We may also be seeing the extent to which a consistent slice of double-digit Green support was about affection for Elizabeth May, rather than adherence to policies that have been increasingly mainstreamed by governing parties.
Meanwhile, the man who'll make the call is deflecting. And that's always a sign. Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor and deputy publisher of Policy Magazine. She is a former Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.