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| Warren Kinsella. |
I called the last Canadian election wrong. I thought the highest likelihood, as I recall, was for a Conservative minority. If not, an NDP minority. But then, most people got it wrong.
So, one day out, what about this time?
I expect a weak Liberal minority.
That is what the polls predict. The polls, we find recently, can be wrong, and they tend consistently to be wrong in the same direction: they underestimate the conservative vote.
But I think Scheer may have been hurt by the last-minute revelation that he was paying Warren Kinsella to subvert the PPC.
That sends a bad message to Scheer’s base. Firstly, a lot of them have been sympathetic to Bernier’s platform, but planning to vote Conservative strategically. This revelation underlines the sense that there really is no difference between the Tories and the Liberals anyway: in the backrooms, Scheer was in cahoots with an arch-Liberal operative. They’re all the same bunch, it seems. And he was hiring Kinsella to push the same divisive message as the Liberals, that those on the right were all “racists.” A false claim enough conservative voters have themselves been victimized by. To this basket of deplorables, Scheer must now look like an enemy agent. Or at best, someone you cannot trust.
At the same time, this tends at a stroke to discredit any and all charges against the PPC of racism. One must now assume they were all mocked up by Kinsella. Many people may now give them a second look.
The likely result is that some of Scheer’s base will stay home, having lost their enthusiasm. Others will vote PPC when they would before have voted Tory for strategic reasons. This should shift a few percentage points away from the Conservatives, and in this race, a few percentage points are the whole hockey game.
For these times, I think Scheer chose the wrong campaign strategy. His idea was the old one, of triangulating to win the centre from Trudeau. My sense is this no longer works, because with social media, they can go back and see what you said before. Now, consistency counts more.
The polls seem to confirm this. Scheer’s attempts to fudge and shuffle to the middle have bought him nothing. His polling has not budged beyond the traditional Conservative base. The parties that have gained support through the campaign are the ideological ones: the NDP and the BQ.
Polls show the PPC so far down that I doubt they will elect anyone other than Bernier. But at least, with this last minute bombshell, they have the potential to surprise. For one thing, it puts them at the centre of attention just before the vote. It positions them as the one party to vote for to really buck the establishment. And the bogus label of racism is now discredited.
Perhaps the next question is who will be the new Conservative leader?
