Harper looks to recover from summer heat
For Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, it has been a bad month.
Since he kicked off this marathon election campaign Aug. 2, Harper has had to endure fallout from the Mike Duffy trial and the struggling economy.
The death of a 3-year-old Syrian refugee this week only added to the prime minister’s woes.
That Alan Kurdi drowned off the Turkish coast was tragic in itself. But politically, it had effects too. The death of a child whose extended family had been denied refuge in Canada reinforced a belief that the Harper cabinet is made up of hardhearted ideologues.
Even Pat Carney, a former Tory minister in Brian Mulroney’s cabinet, lashed out at the government for “treating this unfolding tragedy as if it were occurring on another planet.”
If Harper doesn’t move to bring in at least 100,000 refugees from Syria, Carney told the Vancouver Sun, “The Conservatives should be swept out of office by a tsunami wave of anger.”
Conventional wisdom suggests that none of this much matters for an election that is still six weeks away.
Canadian voters may find the Syrian refugee story compelling now, the argument goes.
But by the time the Oct. 19 election rolls around, most will be thinking of matters closer to home, like jobs and taxes and traffic gridlock.
Similarly, the fact that Canada was in recession for the first six months of the year may be of little more than academic interest come October, particularly if voters see their individual prospects improving.
The Conservative recipe of boutique tax cuts, coupled with massive negative advertising aimed at their opponents, has worked before. Why shouldn’t it work again? Polls indicate that Tom Mulcair’s New Democrats are currently leading by a nose. But recent history shows that polls — particularly polls taken weeks before the election date — can be spectacularly wrong.
History also suggests that Canadians don’t pay much attention to the ins and outs of election campaigns until the last minute. Harper can take solace in all of this. Still, the first month of this campaign hasn’t been irrelevant.
Among other things, it gave the opposition Liberals and New Democrats leeway to reinvent themselves.
The NDP has completed its metamorphosis from a centre-left to centre-right social democratic party.
With his pledge to make budgetbalancing his prime objective, Mul- cair is hoping to convince voters that an NDP government would be canny with public money.
In effect, the New Democrats have borrowed the old Liberal formula: fiscally conservative but socially progressive. Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have moved to outflank the NDP on the left. Trudeau would tax the rich and borrow billions to build infrastructure.
At one level, this is a repeat of the strategy that allowed Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals to capture Ontario in 2014.
But Trudeau has gone farther. Unlike Wynne, he would deliberately increase the government deficit to achieve his aims.
Right now, the Liberals and NDP spend much of their time accusing one another of duplicity.
The NDP says that the fact the Liberals would countenance deficits now means they would cut social programs later.
The Liberals say the NDP’s pledge to balance the budget immediately means that Mulcair won’t honour his other promises, such as spending on poor seniors.
All of this is good for the Conservatives, who are counting on the two duelling opposition parties to again split the anti-Harper vote.
Still, it is a wide-open race. Little can be ruled out.
So far, it has been a kind of phoney war as the parties probe to find one another’s weaknesses. Now, expect the real ad blitzkrieg to begin, particularly from the well-funded Conservatives.
In the end, the election will come down to the same old questions that held when the campaign began: Are you sick of Stephen Harper? If so, who should be his replacement? Thomas Walkom’s column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.