• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Parties Play Blame Game Over Holiday Election, but is the Public Listening?

Posted on: Monday, 14 November 2005, 21:00 CST

By JIM BROWN

OTTAWA (CP) - The opposition and the governing Liberals, apparently fearing a voter backlash, are pinning the blame on each other for the prospect of a holiday season campaign.

It's not clear, however, whether the public will want to punish anybody for the timing of the vote. For every pollster or pundit who believes the electorate will rise up in anger, there's another who believes most folks don't care.

"Once the election is called the date isn't going to matter that much," says Nelson Wiseman, a University of Toronto political scientist

"Forty per cent of the electorate doesn't vote anyway, so they never want an election, it's just an inconvenience to them. Does that mean we never have an election?"

Darrell Bricker of the Ipsos-Reid polling firm agrees it's rare - though not unheard of - for timing to be a potent enough issue to affect the outcome of a vote.

His guess is that, even if people are upset at the prospect of a campaign spanning the Christmas-New Year holidays, they'll likely get over it - especially since voting day itself probably wouldn't be until January.

"Campaigns take on their own dynamic," says Bricker. "It will be about a lot more than simply when and why the election was called by the time we get to the end of it."

Michael Marzolini of Pollara, who did the polling for the federal Liberals under Jean Chretien, isn't so sure.

He says there can be a measurable negative impact - of about four to six percentage points in public opinion - on any party that is seen to be forcing an unwanted trip to the polls.

"It's not just Christmas, it's any triggering of an election that is not deemed to be absolutely necessary," says Marzolini.

He adds, however, that a party can overcome initial public reluctance if it offers "a good explanation and good messaging" about why an election is indeed necessary.

The evidence is mixed at best on how easy it is to do that.

Ontario voters punished then-premier David Peterson for launching a campaign in 1990 for no apparent reason, other than that he thought he could win. Peterson's Liberals were turfed from office by Bob Rae and the NDP.

The same thing nearly happened to Chretien in 1997, when he went to the polls several months earlier than anybody expected. He had to put on a late-campaign sprint to salvage a majority government.

The federal Liberals fared much better in 1979, when they brought down Joe Clark's short-lived Tory minority government just before Christmas, then went on to win a handy majority.

On that occasion, however, there was a well-defined issue that sparked the campaign - a Conservative budget that saddled taxpayers with a gasoline surtax nobody liked.

"The debate was about how much sacrifice people needed to be asked to make," says Bruce Anderson of the Decima polling firm. "The economic context (now) is quite a bit different."

In the current debate, the main reason advanced by Martin's opponents for cutting his term short is the federal sponsorship scandal.

It's problematic, however, whether that issue can hold up through an entire campaign.

"I don't think it's going to be enough," says Bricker. "You've got to have bigger agenda - in all the parties."

Marzolini, for his part, worries that without an overriding issue to put before the public the campaign will descend into a nasty personal battle.

There's plenty of precedent for that in the last campaign, in 2004, when Conservative Stephen Harper berated the Liberals for being corrupt, while Martin retaliated by painting the Tories as intolerant on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.

"It gets down to name-calling and negative ads," says Marzolini. "The public would like some decent discussion of issues like health care that haven't been resolved yet."

"I think the public would reward any party that comes out with good, credible public policy."

Source: Canadian Press

More News in this Category