Main federal opposition parties losing relevance
For the two main federal opposition parties, 2017 cannot come soon enough. They are fading on the vine. The New Democrats, in particular, have entered the zone of scorched earth.
At first blush, given the result in Monday night’s byelection in the Alberta riding of Medicine-HatCardston-Warner, the Conservatives — led by interim leader Rona Ambrose — are healthy enough. As expected, they held the riding, with retired police officer Glen Motz taking nearly 70 per cent per cent of those cast. The second-place finisher, Liberal Stan Sakamoto, garnered 25.6 per cent. It wasn’t even close.
As in a pair of byelection results in Alberta in 2014, and in the general election last October, the red team grew its vote share at the expense of the New Democratic Party. The NDP, for all intents and purposes, vanished.
On Oct. 19, 2015 the Liberal candidate in Medicine Hat won 18 per cent of the popular vote, whereas the New Democrat garnered 9.7 per cent. Monday the NDP’s candidate, Beverly Ann Waege, won all of 353 votes, one per cent of those cast. Christian Heritage candidate Rod Taylor doubled that with 702 votes.
For the NDP in Alberta this is a catastrophic continuation of a multi-year trend. In 2011, for example, the NDP candidate in this riding won more than 13 per cent of the vote, ahead of the Liberal standard-bearer at 10 per cent. If this can be considered a bellwether, the federal NDP are toast in Alberta, which helps the Liberals considerably.
Though this poses no threat to Conservative hegemony in rural Alberta, it doesn’t bode particularly well for them in Edmonton and Calgary, where the Liberals made vote-margin gains last year.
The NDP leadership vote isn’t until the fall of 2017. The ensuing drift manifests in the House of Commons as a perpetual strategic fog. In the recent brouhaha over CETA, the European free trade deal, the NDP’s position has been to oppose it, but not so much that it would necessarily vote against it. A single, coherent line of argument is absent.
And the same goes, more surprisingly, for the Conservatives, who for days have been preoccupied with personal attacks on the International Trade Minister, Chrystia Freeland, for her show of near-tears last Friday as she abandoned talks in Belgium. The decision to stop talking and walk away is an eminently defensible negotiating tactic. It is what the Tories themselves would be doing, one hopes, were they in the position of having to finalize this deal, seven years in the making.
Rather than say that, or be even modestly constructive, the party has lunged for the lowest-hanging, partisan fruit. Until Tuesday’s question period, the CETA brouhaha had all but eclipsed the commendable achievement of Conservative MP Michelle Rempel, who prodded the government to support her motion recognizing the Yazidi genocide, and proposing a rescue.
As it enters its second year, the Trudeau government is vulnerable to criticism on multiple fronts; cash for access, the continuing absence of an innovation strategy, pipelines mired in protest, electoral reform running aground, inadequate defence spending, conflict with veterans, a dearth of new ideas for health care reform, lack of transparency on the military mission in Iraq, an uncomfortable, if necessary, new relationship with China.
Amid this cornucopia, with CETA on the brink, the official opposition Monday put up trade critic Gerry Ritz, patronizing the trade minister, who is 48, saying she needs “adult supervision?” This is rhetoric in the style of the late Harper era, which is odd, considering hard losses usually teach hard lessons. The Conservative party will choose Stephen Harper’s successor in May.