Serenity and denial: Michael Ignatieff and the fall of Berlin
So I got a robocall yesterday evening from Micheal Ignatieff his own self, a first in this campaign. I live in one of the safest Liberal constituencies in all of the Dominion. If my MP loses, the Liberal Party of Canada will be well and truly annihilated. There will be, simply put, nothing left. All will be lost and there will be nothing to rebuild.
Professor Ignatieff was kind enough to invite me to a rally at the Montecassino Hotel in the adjoining riding of York Centre tonight. And he's bringing a friend, the Right Honourable Jean Chretien, 20th Prime minister of Canada and the last guy to secure himself a majority government. That riding is represented by former leadership candidate and legendary goalie Ken Dryden, who is in deep, deep trouble.
Some history might be necessary here for my foreign readers. Chretien owed his reign to a divided Conservative movement that allowed him to dominate Ontario and win roughly half of Quebec's seats. It would have been extraordinarily difficult for him not to win a majority under those circumstances, although he nearly pulled it off in 1997. Even after the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Reform Alliance parties merged under the Conservative Party banner in 2003, the Grits still managed to hold all but two of Toronto's (area code 416) 24 ridings and the majority of the 905 belt surrounding the Center of the Universe.
If nothing else, that kept the Liberals competitive in Ontario. Even the hapless Stephane Dion managed to hold the Greater Toronto Area, which allowed the party to focus its resources elsewhere, although to little effect. Nearly a third of their seats are in 416 and the rest are in 905 and Montreal.
Long story short, if Ignatieff feels it absolutely necessary to bring Chretien into 416, they are fucked beyond repair and they know it. The apocalypse is upon them and there is no escape. Their bones are being crushed into dust nationally and there is little to no chance that they'll even remain as the Official Opposition in the next Parliament. Even when Paul Martin and Dion were busy losing, they kept the le petit gars de Shawinigan as far away from Toronto as possible. Chretien himself rarely campaigned here as prime minister, since his presence was wholly unnecessary and therefore a giant waste of time and resources.
They're fighting for their lives in 416 itself now. Reasonable people fully expect the Grits to lose both Dryden's York Centre seat and the neighboring riding of Eglinton-Lawrence. This is the political equivalent of the final defense of Berlin from marauding Soviet troops in April of 1945 and I now expect it to end about the same way. Once those ridings fall, all that's left is the Hitler's bunker of downtown Toronto, and the NDP Power Twins, Jack Layton and Olivia Chow, already hold two of those seats. Not only do the Grits have to worry about a Tory incursion into the north west of 416, the NDP could very well retake Parkdale-High Park. If that happens, Iggy's own riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore could be at risk. I'm actually shocked that the Ford brothers haven't been working their backyard hard for Harper. That could start a pincer movement that could drive the federal Liberals directly into Lake Ontario in the very near future.
Besides bringing Chretien into Fortress Toronto, Iggy appears to have written off British Columbia, leaving it for the Conservatives and New Democrats to fight over. The map is finally too daunting for anyone to ignore. Worse, Canada's most reliable pollster, Nik Nanos, has (albeit belatedly) confirmed the NDP surge (PDF.) Layton's New Democrat's are ahead of the Liberals nationally and well within the margin of error in Ontario, jumping four points here over the weekend.
So how is the national Liberal campaign responding? By pretending that it isn't happening is how.
Despite a surge of NDP support in Quebec and an apparent decline in Liberal support in Ontario, the head of the national Liberal campaign has informed top strategists the party will execute its original campaign plan even though there are reports of nervous party troops and indications Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff remains unpopular at the doorsteps in some regions of the country.
In the aftermath of two public opinion polls that had by Tuesday found the NDP passing the Liberals nationally and surging past all three main parties to take the lead in voter preference in Quebec, a senior member of the party’s campaign in Ontario told The Hill Times that—other than strategic changes to its arsenal of attack ads and normal adjustments to campaigns in close riding races and swing ridings—national campaign director Gordon Ashworth told top levels of the Liberal team the battle plan remains the same.
“Obviously the campaign team is engaged every day and so there are phone calls, but I can tell you Gordon Ashworth, who is in charge of the campaign, he put very aptly, ‘Some time ago we developed a plan, we put that plan in place and we’ve executed it well and we continue to execute the plan because it really is about bringing forward a platform that addresses the needs of middle-class Canadians, the average Canadian, and we’re not deviating from that,’” Jeff Kehoe, one of the party’s three co-chairs of the Ontario portion of the campaign, quoted Mr. Ashworth as telling the campaign overseers following the stunning events over the past week.
If the Liberal campaign is feeling what The Hill article quotes as a "feeling of serenity on the ground," they're in full-blown denial. Hitler knew that the jig was up by the time he was driven into the bunker, but Gordon Ashworth apparently doesn't.
Mr. Ashworth's strategy was always half-crazed and premised on his perception that voters are even dumber than I think they are, which happens to be plenty. The strategy, as far as I can determine, was to run against the Harper record, unify the left-leaning vote and peel off enough soft Tory support to deny the Conservatives a majority. If the Conservatives had a reduced minority government and if the Grits picked up a dozen or so seats, they could then defeat the government in a confidence vote this spring and form an accord with the Layton New Democrats.
That was flawed to the point of absurdity because, as I've mentioned before, Harper's record is the Liberal record. Dion and Ignatieff kept the Conservative minority afloat several hundred times in the last five years. It appears that the voters concluded that if they absolutely must unify around an opposition party, it may as well be one that actually opposed something from time to time, which is how the NDP surge was born.
If the NDP displaces the Liberals as the Official Opposition, or even comes close to it, the Liberals are effectively finished. If Ignatieff winds up losing seats, especially in Toronto, he'll be beheaded by his own party on election night next Monday, which leaves the Grits leaderless and in the throes of a leadership campaign.
Assuming that there even is a Conservative minority (which is getting harder to do every day,) defeating them on a confidence motion would require the Governor General to decide whether to invite a coalition or an accord to assume government or to hold yet another election. That would require some kind of assurance that said coalition could hold for at least two years. I don't know how a leaderless Liberal Party can make such an assurance to David Johnston.
There are also large swaths of the Liberal Party that want nothing to do with the NDP, and that segment of the party can be expected to run for the leadership. Or there might be sufficient opposition in caucus to defeat the idea outright.
Barring a coalition or an accord, another election would utterly break a bankrupt Liberal Party and English Canada would be divided up between the NDP and the Tories, almost certainly resulting in a massive Conservative majority.
After spending weeks asking the question, no one has been able to tell me why Jack Layton would even want to get into bed with the Grits. As I've explained before, it isn't in his strategic interest. Harper's fear-mongering about a coalition is adorable, but it assumes that Layton is stupid enough to still be afraid of the Liberals at this point. He pretty clearly isn't, and seems to know that if he just waits a few months, the Grits will collapse all on their own, leaving him as the only credible alternative to the Tories.
Regardless of Monday's outcome, the Liberals won't be able to raise money (which is already a giant problem for them) or recruit halfway serious candidates (which they haven't focused all that much energy on anyway.) By Tuesday morning, anyone with any brains will see the future of the left in this country, and it isn't going to include the Liberals.
The Liberals who were behind or endorsed the merger or strategic cooperation talks last year never really thought through the consequences of what they were suggesting. Strategic cooperation, meaning that the two parties wouldn't run candidates against one another, would ruin both financially because they would be denied millions in the per-vote subsidy from Elections Canada.
Moreover, the merger idea was framed under the almost unbelievably arrogant Grit premise that the NDP would renounce all of their principles just to join a Liberal Party that was incapable of winning an election on their own and only got 28% of the vote in the previous campaign. And for their trouble, Jack Layton might have been named junior minister for dildo training, but only if he promised not to talk about dildos that much. It was such an insulting offer that it only could have come from a Liberal.
No, it had to come to pass this way. Even during their ascendancy, Reform-Canadian Alliance weren't so fucking haughty that they believed that they could merge with Progressive Conservative rump on their own terms. In fact, it was the Alliance that was crumbling, with a dozen of their members sitting as Independents because of Stockwell Day's reign of error. The Grits, on the other hand, honestly believe it is their natural birthright to govern this country, and they only grudgingly tolerate elections. There could never be a working agreement with the NDP so long as the Liberals thought that they had any kind of future at all.
Well, as of Monday, the window closes on that future. The Liberal Party of Canada will be halfway in the grave, and even they won't be so dumb as to not notice it. If these polls hold up for the next five days - and there's now no reason to believe that they won't - the Grits will enter their final death spiral and likely won't survive the next election.
And you know what? I'm going to help bury them. I live in a riding where it doesn't matter who I vote for, and I've been denied my usual luxury of voting for an independent or minor party. So I'm going to do something that I never seriously thought I would.
I'm going to vote for the NDP.
