FEDERAL ELECTION LOOMING, MAYBE WITH SURPRISES
Liberal election preparations have moved from busy to frenetic. The call could come soon for a national vote in September.
Liberal candidates and campaign workers are being bombarded with events planned by party central. The most interesting, according to a batch of messages passed on to me, is for a “weekend virtual boot camp” on Aug. 14.
This is a giant cheerleading session that typically precedes the formal writ drop. Some expect the call to come Aug. 15 for voting on Sept. 20.
That would mean a 36-day federal campaign, the minimum required.
But campaigns can last up to 50 days. The federal chief electoral officer, Stéphane Perrault, told a Commons committee in June that he prefers a campaign longer than 36 days, a rare public opinion from the person who runs the voting.
“There is merit to a longer writ period in a pandemic, because everything takes more time,” Perrault said, quite reasonably.
This suggests the call could come earlier in August or the voting later in September.
It gets confusing, but those involved in Liberal campaigns are pretty sure of one thing, the election will be over by the end of September.
According to The Hill Times, candidates have been told to secure two-month leases for campaign offices.
In Alberta, some people involved are being encouraged to cancel holidays set for August and September. Nominations, mostly by acclamation, are rushing ahead.
All this could be cancelled on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's whim, of course. It's still a ludicrous feature of our system that the person with the deepest self-interest gets to set the date.
But the machine is in top gear now. Postponing for weeks or months would demoralize candidates. Far worse, from the Liberal viewpoint, the government could be faced with a fall wave of COVID -19.
The conventional wisdom among Liberals is to get this over while there's still some public afterglow from billions of dollars in pandemic supports, as well as success in supplying vaccines.
Recent polling, notably an Ipsos survey for Global News, shows the Liberal lead slipping a bit and the Conservatives starting to come on. Further erosion could threaten the majority the Liberals so ardently want.
The Alberta numbers in this poll are fascinating, and possibly unprecedented.
They show the Conservatives at 36 per cent, far below their typical support of well over 50 per cent.
The Liberals sit at 24 per cent — high enough to give them a shot at a couple of urban seats, most notably Calgary Skyview.
But the real Alberta shocker is federal NDP support; it's 31 per cent, only five points behind the Conservatives.
The reason, Ipsos concludes, is that “(Premier) Jason Kenney's troubles continue and serve to boost federal NDP fortunes within the province.”
If true, it's remarkable that a UCP premier could be both hurting the Conservatives and helping the federal wing of his NDP opposition.
NDP MP Heather Mcpherson already holds Edmonton Strathcona, the federal riding that includes provincial leader Rachel Notley's own turf.
Mcpherson is the only non-conservative MP in the province. She could soon have company.
An NDP breakthrough of even a few seats would be a genuine first in Alberta. And the Liberals would have themselves to blame.
Many young progressives, from Edmonton and Calgary to Toronto, were furious when Trudeau backed out of his 2015 election promise to bring in proportional representation.
Most federal Liberals wanted nothing to do with it. The old winner-take-all system has served them well over a couple of centuries.
But Trudeau had cynically made that promise to attract young urban progressives in 2015. Breaking it was one reason why, in 2019, the Liberals lost all four Alberta seats they'd won in 2015. He isn't likely to win them back now. And the NDP is all in for proportional rep, which allocates seats to parties based on their percentage of the vote.
This election won't shake Alberta's Conservative landscape. But it could come with surprises.