PM needs fiscally conservative voters
MONTREAL— If you have an outsideQuebec postal code and Paul Martin was prime minister the last time you voted for the Liberals, then you are a primary target of the Conservative bid to launch a pre-emptive strike on Justin Trudeau.
In fact, as a lapsed blue Liberal you can expect a full-court press from both parties between now and the 2015 election.
For without the support of the fiscally conservative centrists who have gone back and forth between the Liberals and the Conservatives over the past two decades, there is not another majority mandate in store for Stephen Harper and possibly not a fourth mandate at all.
With little prospects of growth in the Conservative-hostile Quebec microclimate, this prime minister needs them more than Brian Mulroney or Jean Chrétien ever did.
But by the same token, a standalone Liberal party cannot come back to power without wooing a lot of them back; not at a time when the NDP is at a historic high in voting intentions. In this nascent battle, the attack ads on Trudeau’s competence are only a beginning; a move to keep an existing but still unan- swered question on the radar.
If you voted for Martin in 2004 and/or in 2006, the Conservatives understand you could switch back to the Liberals. They also figure your political DNA does not predispose you to consider the NDP as an option, regardless of the centrist efforts of leader Thomas Mulcair.
They suspect that you would like the prime minister to be nicer and that you are not enamoured with his take-no-prisoners approach to doing politics. But what they really want is your attention.
In the end, they have cause to believe that — more so than any other group of voters — the only box on your election score card that matters is the one that deals with economic stewardship. That’s why Conservative spin doctors screech like scalded cats when Jim Flaherty’s low profile in the House of Commons or his foregoing of a national post-budget tour are raised. In the battle they are waging, anything less than a fully operational finance minister will not do. That is also why Harper increasingly needs some wins on the energy front. The business-oriented constituency whose loyalty he is trying to bind may not take to the streets on Earth Day but should the Conservatives’ laid-back approach to climate change turn out to have harmed Canada’s economic prospects, then Harper’s environmental record will start to weigh heavily in its voting choice. There was a time not so long ago when it was assumed that the Conservatives could only pry rightleaning Liberals from their party when they were led by a red Tory. Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney, Kim Campbell and Jean Charest all hailed from the progressive side of the conservative family. Over the past decade, Harper has turned that assumption on its head. But he could not have done it without help from the Liberals. Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff had other qualities but on the economy, they presented voters with a blank slate. Trudeau is no less vulnerable. It will not be enough to have him sit in front of a blackboard covered with numbers — as he did in this week’s party ads — to bring fiscally conservative Liberals back to the fold. Trudeau’s caucus does feature a front-line economic trio. But the combination of Ralph Goodale, a former finance minister, John McCallum, a former top bank economist and Scott Brison, a former investment banker ultimately failed to add gravitas to Dion and Ignatieff’s light economic credentials. There is no reason to believe they will do better with Trudeau.
In the 1990s, Chrétien put the issue of fiscal competence to rest by installing Paul Martin in the Liberal window. If he is really going to go the distance in his match against Harper, Trudeau has no less need of an economic superstar. Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.