What’s ahead for 2014? Not a charm offensive
Each year at this time, for fun, I offer up a few bold and foolhardy predictions for the year ahead, to be measured against reality 12 months later. Before we move on to the 2014 edition, let’s assess last year’s effort. Sadly, it’s a very mixed bag.
We begin with the obvious. “We don’t need a crystal ball to predict that (Justin) Trudeau will win the Liberal leadership contest, to be decided in April,” I asserted in this space on Dec. 31, 2012.
“Once Trudeau becomes leader, and perhaps sooner, the Harper Conservatives will kitchen-sink him. That is, they will throw at him everything in their arsenal, including the customary wicked attack ads. Trudeau’s every move and utterance will be parsed as never before.”
Nostradamus, eat your heart out. Given the lay of the land in late 2012, no other outcome was remotely likely.
And it was a foregone conclusion that the Conservatives would attack the new Liberal leader personally and early, which they did in April, in a series of mocking, nasty ads. That had long been the governing party’s preferred method of welcoming a new Liberal leader.
I was wrong though, in thinking the attack-ad campaign would be sustained. The early ads were red meat to the Tory base but backfired with the centre, reinforcing the Conservatives’ negatives and alienating swing voters.
For the time being, the governing party’s approach appears to be to wait for an unforced error, then leap all over it with tweets and re-tweets.
Next came a big, wrong prediction: “... a charm offensive, personally led by Stephen Harper, which will be surprisingly effective. Expect to hear more from Harper this year. Plus, early in July the cabinet will acquire a dramatically fresher, younger and more feminine face.” Ah, the charm offensive. Hope springs eternal. I first anticipated the charm offensive in 2007, was wrong about it then, and have been wrong about it since.
The latest grand opportunity for such a transformation came in August, during the PM’s annual Arctic tour. It failed to materialize. Likewise, last summer’s cabinet shuffle could have put a fresh face on the government. Though a few younger faces joined the mix, the tone did not budge one iota.
Rounding out last year’s column: On the international front I got some of it right, predicting that Iran’s leadership would “undergo an eleventh-hour conversion on the nuclear question.”
But I also got some of it quite badly wrong.
“Late in 2013 he (Syrian dictator Bashar Assad) will be tried for war crimes,” I wrote a year ago. Instead Assad is more firmly entrenched than ever, though he has agreed to give up his chemical weapons.
Right then: What’s ahead for 2014? Here goes nothing.
On the federal scene, as the Trudeau Liberals extend their lead in the polls, and with the Conservatives neck-deep in the Senate expense scandal (which I utterly failed to anticipate, mea culpa), Harper will continue to resist the siren song of personal re-invention. That ship has sailed. The hockey book is out, the musical performances have become routine, but the PM remains who he has always been. His aversion to the media is locked in.
That said, Harper in 2014 will make a visible effort to re-engage — likely through more frequent speeches, perhaps even more frequent press conferences. He will do so not by choice, but by necessity.
The Wright-Duffy mess, the sheer scale of the venality and dishonesty exposed within his own office, among people he appointed, has shaken his personal standing. The only practical remedy is to shore up his positives, namely his reputation for competence and intelligence. He can only do so by communicating.
But the most interesting political fight in 2014, by far, will be between Liberals and New Democrats, with the focus narrowing ever more closely on Quebec.
It appears clear now that NDP Leader Tom Mulcair will make no inroads in the West, and that his hopes of a breakthrough in Ontario, outside Toronto, are limited. As the year progresses he will therefore focus all his efforts on preserving his Quebec beachhead.
Trudeau also will spend ever more time in Quebec, battling for what he hopes will be a major seat reversal with the NDP there in 2015.
There will be no major strategic new direction, on the part of any party, in 2014. What you see now, is what you get, for the foreseeable future.
Overseas, the combination of U.S. engagement with Iran and the chemical-weapons deal with Syria will continue to reduce the threat of a broader Middle Eastern war.
This will be the year that the focus of geopolitical concern moves to the Western Pacific, where China is engaged in an increasingly tense regional standoff with Japan, centred on ownership of the Senkaku Islands.
We’ll check back a year from now, to see how I did.