Tories, NDP fail to capitalize on Liberal mistakes
NDP, Tories ignoring Liberal vulnerabilities
For the two main federal opposition parties, 2017 cannot come soon enough. The New Democrats in particular have entered the zone of scorched earth.
At first blush, given the result in Monday’s byelection in the Alberta riding of Medicine Hat-Cardston-Warner, the Conservatives, headed by interim leader Rona Ambrose, are healthy enough.
As expected, they held the riding, with retired police officer Glen Motz taking nearly 23,932 votes, just under 70 per cent. The second-place finisher, Liberal Stan Sakamoto, garnered 8,778 votes — or 25.6 per cent.
It wasn’t even close. Drilling deeper though, Tory brows will furrow because, as in two Alberta by-elections in 2014 and the general election last October, the red team increased its vote share, at the expense of the New Democratic Party. The NDP, for all intents and purposes, disappeared.
In the general election, the Liberal candidate in Medicine Hat won 18 per cent of the vote, whereas the New Democrat garnered 9.7 per cent. Monday, the NDP’s Beverly Ann Waege won all of 353 votes — one per cent. Christian Heritage candidate Rod Taylor doubled that with 702 votes.
For the Dippers in Alberta this is a catastrophic continuation of a multi-year trend. In 2011, for example, the NDP candidate in this riding got just over 13 per cent of the vote, before the Liberal standard-bearer at 10 per cent. The track is simple: if this can be considered a bellwether, the federal NDP is toast in Alberta, which helps the Liberals considerably.
Though this poses no threat to the Conservative hegemony in rural Alberta, it doesn’t bode particularly well for it in Edmonton and Calgary, where the Liberals increased their share of the vote.
The cause of the NDP’s continuing rout is not hard to spot. This is a party that symbolically turned its back on Alberta and Albertans when its members voted to consider the far-left, anti-oil, anti-capitalist Leap Manifesto at their convention in Edmonton in April.
That occurred over the objections of NDP Premier Rachel Notley, who all but begged delegates not to go there. It was compounded by the decision to seize their relatively centrist, relatively pragmatic leader, Thomas Mulcair, and toss him overboard with heavy chain looped around his ankles. Mulcair has continued in a much-diminished caretaker role, over the whispered grumbles of some NDP MPs.
Meantime the Alberta NDP has shed public support, as Notley struggles to implement social democracy amid a crushing oil-pricedriven recession. Shades of Ontario, 1992. It is a perfect storm of awfulness, from an orange perspective.
The NDP leadership vote isn’t until the fall of 2017. The ensuing uncertainty manifests in the House of Commons as a perpetual strategic fog. NDP MPs have insisted the Liberals’ carbonreduction plan is toothless, for example, even though this provides the government some of the cover it needs to sell the plan to centrists and conservatives. In the recent brouhaha over Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (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 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 in advancing what is, after all, a core conservative value — free trade — 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 … the list goes on.
Amid this cornucopia, with CETA on the brink, the official opposition Monday put up trade critic Gerry Ritz, patronizing Freeland, 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.