On fixers

Following up on last week's preliminary post about the Libs' expenditures in the 2008 federal election, let's take a closer look at where the Libs did and didn't spend money - and what the choices say about the decision-makers involved.

To start with, the Libs don't appear to have skimped in all areas: indeed, their spending on polling more than doubled that of the Cons, and was roughly in line with their expenditures the previous two elections. Which would tend to offer reason to think that the Lib braintrust had an excellent idea of the likely outcome during the course of the campaign - even if they didn't bother telling their leader.

With that in mind, it's worth highlighting just where the Libs actually stood, and what that meant for the election as a whole. Remember that as the results actually shook out, the Cons ended up short of a majority government by only 12 seats. And a quick look through the Pundits' Guide's elections page shows just how close the Libs came to bringing about exactly the outcome which they and all the other opposition parties presented as something which Canada couldn't afford.

Of the 42 seats which were decided by 5% or less, 9 were won by the Libs over a Con second-place finisher, and 6 involved Cons finishing second to the NDP in races where the Libs obviously didn't have much control over the outcome. Which means that by pulling their late advertising, the Libs didn't just cede any prospect of forming the largest party in Parliament, but also gave the Cons a substantial opening to form a majority government.

That raises the question of why the Libs would choose that as a possible result. And lest there be any doubt, it wasn't a matter of lacking any choice in the matter, as they had lined up funding for a maximum-level campaign before deciding not to use the money available.

As I noted when the possibility of the Libs holding back was first mooted, there wasn't any real incentive from a financial standpoint to avoid spending on the election: any money spent would have been immediately reimbursed at a 50% rate, and would have also helped the Libs out in terms of the federal per-vote subsidy. And even if the party wasn't happy with the ads actually developed on Dion's watch, there's little reason to think the same people who held the power to cut off the flow of spending entirely couldn't have instead insisted on it being used toward more productive ends.

So I don't see much room for any conclusion but that the Libs made a conscious choice to pursue a strategy which was obviously flawed from a Lib-centric basis - whether one's goal was building party finances or maximizing election results. Which raises the question of who stood to gain from the Libs doing less well than they could have.

Of course, the answer there is fairly obvious. If the Libs had stayed within striking distance of their previous seat count and avoided the "worst percentage of the vote ever" outcome, would Stephane Dion have been toppled as quickly and painlessly as he was? And if Dion had managed to hang on as leader for another election cycle, wouldn't that likely have closed the door on Michael Ignatieff's prospects of taking over the party?

In sum, then, the Libs' decision to fold in the 2008 campaign had the obvious potential for disaster for Canada as a whole in setting up a path to a Harper majority which would never have existed otherwise. As a result, rather than merely supporting Harper from vote to vote in Parliament, the Libs nearly handed him four years of unfettered control over the country in exchange for a bloodless internal change of power.

Now, rather than being held to account for their actions in 2008, Ignatieff and those who have pushed him forward within the party have instead been promoted to become the face of the Libs. And that surely has to raise some serious questions for anybody who thought Stephane Dion had anything useful to bring to the table, or even who merely agreed with the message from any of the opposition parties that stopping Harper is actually a desirable course of action.

Update: Pundits' Guide notes that the original numbers were incorrect within the chart. But the correction only increases the amount the Libs spent on polling, so the point above would seem to stand.