Is Canada on the verge of Toolemania?
IF ONE STEPS BACK A
BIT, THE MOTIVATION
FOR THIS ELECTION IS
CLEAR. — MURPHY
Is it too soon to declare that the country is in the grip of Toolemania? Well, I’ll disappoint you: It is. But, you know, there is some weird stuff lurking in the cross tabs of the early polls for our federal election. On Sunday, Ekos published a new poll that created a stir because it gave the Conservatives a microscopic overall lead (literally twofifths of a percentage point) in nationwide voting intention.
Some stat freaks noticed a curious feature of the deeper numerical breakdowns. Conservative Leader Erin O’toole, who is a full year younger than Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau but would probably admit to seeming 15 years older, has a not actually microscopic lead among voters aged 18-34 and a wider one in the 35-49 band.
We all know the basic reason this is possible: The NDP and its leader Jagmeet Singh are, at the moment, doing pretty well in those groups, and taking votes away from the Liberals. In the 18-34 group, the NDP has 20 per cent support, the Liberals 28 per cent and the Conservatives 33 per cent, which is perhaps nothing to write home about. These cross tabs are counterintuitive enough that some observers took them as a sign that the overall poll itself is noisy, or the product of some ephemeral flicker in sentiment.
In other very recent polls, we don’t see quite the same drama. On Friday, Angus Reid brought out a new update that offered age-plusgender breakdowns. In that one, the Conservatives do lead the Liberals among males 18-34 (by 30 per cent to 26 per cent, with the New Democrats at 24 per cent), but they take a beating among women in the same age band (where the NDP have 40 per cent, the Liberals 29 per cent and the Tories just 15 per cent).
Mainstreet’s latest national tracking, which has the advantage of fine detail and the arguable disadvantage of being taken by Mainstreet, has the Conservatives slightly ahead of the Liberals with 18-34s and the NDP ahead of both. Ipsos, reporting Aug. 17, said “the Liberals (32 per cent) and NDP (28 per cent) are fighting for top spot (in the age group), with the Conservatives (24 per cent) not far behind.”
When you add it all up, you might not decide to trust the Ekos result per se, but it’s hard not to notice that O’toole’s Tories are at least giving the Liberals a run among the youngest potential voters.
In the last few days, O’toole has been hammering his pro-choice credentials and saying nice things about harm reduction policies on drugs — including safe injection sites, which a lot of Conservatives really despise. He is running pretty far to the left of his party in some ways, perhaps on the premise that he may have one crack at electoral victory and if he gets it he’ll be forgiven anything. Which is true.
Acting like a winner is usually good strategy, all else being equal, and who is really to say that young voters won’t look seriously at a pinkish Conservative who puts out sage middle-aged vibes? I for one have spent the last few years wondering where all the competent, unglamorous middle-aged dudes went: it could be that it is an opportune moment for one to turn up.
What I really thought of when I was studying the fluctuating youth cross tabs was how little the news media made of the Liberal government’s eleventh-hour flat-out bribe to senior citizens. In the 2021 budget, the government announced that it was sending a $500 cheque to pension-eligible Canadians 74 and over.
The justification for this was not well explained, but the Liberals were careful to emphasize in the budget that this gift wouldn’t count against next year’s planned 10 per cent hike in Old Age Security (OAS) payments, and wouldn’t require any seniors to send back the mid-pandemic insta-cheques they had already received, and certainly wouldn’t affect the Liberals’ earlier lowering of the age cutoff for OAS and the Guaranteed Income Supplement. Perish the thought.
The government then milked the $500 bribe for all it was worth, making a separate announcement on July 7 of exactly when the cheques would go out — which they did, on schedule, during the first week of the election campaign.
As an Albertan, I can promise that if a Conservative government did this kind of thing, we would literally never hear the end of it. Some people are still furious, 17 years later, about the $400 “prosperity bonus” the Alberta government sent to all its citizens irrespective of age in 2004, when the province’s budget was in surplus and the next election was two years off.
But the Justinbucks for seniors, a self-evident bribe, were absorbed by the media corps half-heartedly. Sigh, politics as usual, on with the show. Even fiscal hawks didn’t screech much. No one thinks the $500 sweetener for the wealthiest age group will pay any sort of stimulative return, or that there is any special necessity for it, or that anyone but the youngest working-age Canadians will have to cover the tab.
If young people have noticed that their lifeblood is being used as electoral vote-fertilizer, and the prime minister’s progressive signifying just makes them angrier, maybe it’s about time.
HE IS RUNNING PRETTY FAR TO THE LEFT OF HIS PARTY IN SOME WAYS ...