PCs want voters to be very afraid
Poll numbers prompt risky, desperate tactics
Anywhere else, he’d be a dead man walking.
In any other province, Jim Prentice would be looking at the public opinion polls with one eye and watching the blade fall with the other.
But when I catch up to the Progressive Conservative leader on the campaign trail this week, he seems remarkably spry. He doesn’t look like a man facing the guillotine.
In a one-hour meeting with the Journal’s editorial board Thursday, he gives his usual articulate and competent performance touching on issues including the provincial budget (“We brought forward a plan that has not been universally popular, it wasn’t structured to be universally popular, it was structured to be the right thing to do”) and the timing of the campaign (“I felt very strongly we needed to have an election … because the province is at a turning point.”)
Likewise when he talks to reporters Thursday night in advance of the PC leaders’ dinner at the Shaw Conference Centre in Edmonton: “We’ve run a good campaign, we’ve gone flat out, we’re working hard, we’re not going to stop until the end.”
Prentice does not exude the stench of death.
But there is an unmistakable whiff of fear. It doesn’t just seep from the PC campaign, it’s being pumped out like a fumigation fog.
The PCs are afraid and they want everybody else to be afraid, too. Public opinion polls indicate people are fed up with the PCs and would vote for the NDP “if an election were held tomorrow.”
But an election is not being held tomorrow, it’s being held Tuesday and that gives the PCs time to try to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, even if victory already seems to have been swallowed whole.
Prentice and the PCs are focusing all their attention on the NDP, hoping to scare enough NDP tire kickers into changing their minds or, at the very least, staying home.
The problem for Prentice is that NDP Leader Rachel Notley is not a scary person. In fact, public opinion polls indicate she’s the most popular leader in Alberta.
So, Prentice is trying to replace Notley in people’s minds with the federal NDP leader, who is not particularly popular in Alberta.
“We don’t need a pipeline policy that feels like it’s been scripted by Thomas Mulcair,” Prentice said during his leaders’ dinner speech. “Fundamentally, the NDP could undermine the heart of Alberta’s economy.”
It is a tactic of desperation. So, too, a PC radio ad that warns listeners, “An NDP government in Alberta is closer than you think.”
That’s a risky tactic. Yes, it might motivate PC supporters, but it might motivate NDP supporters, too. It certainly elevates the NDP onto the same level as the PCs, which has never happened in an Alberta election campaign.
And then there was Friday afternoon’s preachy news conference organized by five businessmen with close ties to the PCs.
“We don’t need amateurs running this province through these difficult times, and I’m very much a believer that we’ve got to stay with the government that has gotten us to where we are today,” said Tim Melton with Melcor Developments.
And John Cameron of Keller Construction attacked the NDP’s proposed policy of raising the corporate tax rate from 10 per cent to 12 per cent. “Why is it always the corporations?” he asked. “Why? Why is it me?”
That might motivate PC supporters, but it might just as easily irritate those who think the corporations should indeed be paying higher taxes.
PCs are in a bit of a panic because public opinion polls continue to show the NDP in a clear lead with the Wildrose second and the PCs third.
In any other province, we’d be predicting an NDP government for Tuesday.
But this is Alberta, where the usual laws of political gravity don’t apply. This is a province where the PCs have won 12 consecutive majority governments since 1971, even when the party was weighed down by old age and scandal. Nobody can really say what is going to happen Tuesday.
Pollster Marc Henry with Calgary-based ThinkHQ Public Affairs says the NDP is set to bulldoze the competition in Edmonton. But other than that, he’s not sure: “The problem is that outside of Edmonton the numbers are highly competitive,” Henry said. “There’s a three-way split. There’s a lot of dynamics that, even within the margins of error, if somebody has a good end to the campaign and really does a good job of identifying their vote and getting it out, they can turn the tide in some of those ridings.”
The PCs are still showing signs of life. That might just be muscle memory like a chicken running around with its head chopped off. Or it might be a sign that it’s not quite time to measure Prentice for a body bag. gthomson@ edmontonjournal.com