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Did Harper give Trudeau too much time to get 'ready'?
James Mennie, Montreal Gazette
More from James Mennie, Montreal Gazette
Published on: October 16, 2015 | Last Updated: October 16, 2015 7:19 AM EDT
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, right, and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau shake hands following the Munk Debate on Canada's foreign policy in Toronto, on Monday, Sept. 28, 2015. Did Harper's strategy that long campaign would favour the Conservatives backfire? MARK BLINCH / REUTERS
By the time this column is posted we will be beginning Day 76 of a 79-day election campaign, the last 10 of which probably being the only ones that actually got your attention. Those 10 days certainly got Stephen Harper’s attention, if only because a growing number of polls suggest Justin Trudeau, the Liberal leader who was perceived as the Conservatives’ main political target when this campaign began last Aug. 2, is enjoying a growing momentum of support among voters sufficient to propel him into Harper’s job and the Liberals into what some are forecasting will be a “strong minority” government.
Of course the only poll that matters is that conducted of the electorate on voting day, and opinion surveys have been wrong – sometimes drastically, jaw droppingly wrong – before. But it’s intriguing to note the same polling establishment that now suggests the Liberals are poised to form a minority government found that Harper’s Conservatives were within striking distance of a potential majority on Sept. 22, which is to say just 51 days after Harper asked the governor-general to dissolve Parliament. Of course nothing lasts forever, and in the three weeks since Sept. 22, the Liberals have swapped the statistical lead with the Tories on an almost daily basis while Tom Mulcair and the NDP watched their chances statistically evaporate with each passing day.
Then, on the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, 70 days after the election call, the Liberals seemed to be genuinely breaking away from the Tories in the daily Nanos poll conducted for CTV as well as in a Forum poll published in the Toronto Star. On Tuesday of this week, Day 73, an Ekos poll seemed to confirm the Liberal momentum was not a 48-hour fluke (and also the the Tories were losing ground) as did an Ipsos survey published the same day. And yesterday, Day 75, the latest Nano poll suggested there was no sign of the Liberal momentum slowing while one analyst suggests the Liberals might sweep ridings in metro Toronto, the very piece of political real estate that sent the Harper Tories into a majority in 2011.
All of which brings us back to Day 51, and whether in that last full week of September someone in the Conservative war room may have felt a twinge of regret when they saw those ever so promising poll numbers.
When Harper called the election back in August, the conventional wisdom was that he was doing so because the Tories were rolling in dough and had the financial wherewithal to wage a relentless campaign over the course of nearly three months, compelling the Liberals and NDP to answer dollar for dollar every Conservative salvo and, in doing so, exhausting their war chests well before election day. Problem is, it didn’t quite work out that way, as the opposition parties husbanded their campaign funding and didn’t really start to spend until last month. The early call also forced Harper to spend August dealing with questions – relentlessly posed at every campaign stop – about the revelations produced during the last leg of the breach of trust trial of senator Mike Duffy, a Harper appointee whose case required the much anticipated testimony of Nigel Wright, Harper’s former chief of staff, concerning a personal, $90,000 cheque Wright wrote to Duffy to cover the latter’s apparently iffy expenses.
Those 79 days also allowed the leaders to participate in five debates (only two of which were aired on network television and that in French only). And while Trudeau’s lack of experience with this sort of thing was apparent during the first debate organized by Maclean’s Magazine on Aug. 6 (Day 4), what also showed up was an apparent passion for taking the verbal fight to Harper, a zest that was honed and used increasingly in the debates that followed.
At this point it’s interesting to note that while there is no maximum time allotted for a federal election campaign period, the minimum has been established at 36 days – just 15 days short of what appeared to be that statistical sweet spot for the Tories back in September, and 43 less than were spent to finally get us to the ballot boxes this Monday.
Does Harper regret pulling the trigger so early on this election campaign? Probably. Because even if the plan was to bankrupt his adversaries’ ability to finance their campaigns, in doing so, the prime minister gave those adversaries, particularly Trudeau, something infinitely more valuable. Time.
After beginning this 79-day campaign as longshot, the odds this week on the Liberals have narrowed dramatically, and when I say “dramatically,” I mean that quite literally.
Over the course of this campaign, Trudeau’s past as a drama teacher has been jeered at by his opponents and his conduct during the debates dismissed by some as theatrical. But if the latest polls are to be believed, it seems the Liberal leader’s not just been campaigning, he’s been successfully auditioning for the most important job in the country.
And thanks to Harper’s 79-day campaign, it looks like as if Trudeau had plenty of time to rehearse.
James Mennie, Montreal GazetteMore from James Mennie, Montreal Gazette
Published on: October 16, 2015 | Last Updated: October 16, 2015 7:19 AM EDT
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, right, and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau shake hands following the Munk Debate on Canada's foreign policy in Toronto, on Monday, Sept. 28, 2015. Did Harper's strategy that long campaign would favour the Conservatives backfire? MARK BLINCH / REUTERS
By the time this column is posted we will be beginning Day 76 of a 79-day election campaign, the last 10 of which probably being the only ones that actually got your attention. Those 10 days certainly got Stephen Harper’s attention, if only because a growing number of polls suggest Justin Trudeau, the Liberal leader who was perceived as the Conservatives’ main political target when this campaign began last Aug. 2, is enjoying a growing momentum of support among voters sufficient to propel him into Harper’s job and the Liberals into what some are forecasting will be a “strong minority” government.
Of course the only poll that matters is that conducted of the electorate on voting day, and opinion surveys have been wrong – sometimes drastically, jaw droppingly wrong – before. But it’s intriguing to note the same polling establishment that now suggests the Liberals are poised to form a minority government found that Harper’s Conservatives were within striking distance of a potential majority on Sept. 22, which is to say just 51 days after Harper asked the governor-general to dissolve Parliament. Of course nothing lasts forever, and in the three weeks since Sept. 22, the Liberals have swapped the statistical lead with the Tories on an almost daily basis while Tom Mulcair and the NDP watched their chances statistically evaporate with each passing day.
Then, on the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, 70 days after the election call, the Liberals seemed to be genuinely breaking away from the Tories in the daily Nanos poll conducted for CTV as well as in a Forum poll published in the Toronto Star. On Tuesday of this week, Day 73, an Ekos poll seemed to confirm the Liberal momentum was not a 48-hour fluke (and also the the Tories were losing ground) as did an Ipsos survey published the same day. And yesterday, Day 75, the latest Nano poll suggested there was no sign of the Liberal momentum slowing while one analyst suggests the Liberals might sweep ridings in metro Toronto, the very piece of political real estate that sent the Harper Tories into a majority in 2011.
All of which brings us back to Day 51, and whether in that last full week of September someone in the Conservative war room may have felt a twinge of regret when they saw those ever so promising poll numbers.
When Harper called the election back in August, the conventional wisdom was that he was doing so because the Tories were rolling in dough and had the financial wherewithal to wage a relentless campaign over the course of nearly three months, compelling the Liberals and NDP to answer dollar for dollar every Conservative salvo and, in doing so, exhausting their war chests well before election day. Problem is, it didn’t quite work out that way, as the opposition parties husbanded their campaign funding and didn’t really start to spend until last month. The early call also forced Harper to spend August dealing with questions – relentlessly posed at every campaign stop – about the revelations produced during the last leg of the breach of trust trial of senator Mike Duffy, a Harper appointee whose case required the much anticipated testimony of Nigel Wright, Harper’s former chief of staff, concerning a personal, $90,000 cheque Wright wrote to Duffy to cover the latter’s apparently iffy expenses.
Those 79 days also allowed the leaders to participate in five debates (only two of which were aired on network television and that in French only). And while Trudeau’s lack of experience with this sort of thing was apparent during the first debate organized by Maclean’s Magazine on Aug. 6 (Day 4), what also showed up was an apparent passion for taking the verbal fight to Harper, a zest that was honed and used increasingly in the debates that followed.
At this point it’s interesting to note that while there is no maximum time allotted for a federal election campaign period, the minimum has been established at 36 days – just 15 days short of what appeared to be that statistical sweet spot for the Tories back in September, and 43 less than were spent to finally get us to the ballot boxes this Monday.
Does Harper regret pulling the trigger so early on this election campaign? Probably. Because even if the plan was to bankrupt his adversaries’ ability to finance their campaigns, in doing so, the prime minister gave those adversaries, particularly Trudeau, something infinitely more valuable. Time.
After beginning this 79-day campaign as longshot, the odds this week on the Liberals have narrowed dramatically, and when I say “dramatically,” I mean that quite literally.
Over the course of this campaign, Trudeau’s past as a drama teacher has been jeered at by his opponents and his conduct during the debates dismissed by some as theatrical. But if the latest polls are to be believed, it seems the Liberal leader’s not just been campaigning, he’s been successfully auditioning for the most important job in the country.
And thanks to Harper’s 79-day campaign, it looks like as if Trudeau had plenty of time to rehearse.
