On hope gaps

I'll agree with Scott Payne that there are some important differences between the current Canadian political scene and that which existed at the time of the 2006 election. But I don't entirely agree with his take on the most important distinction.

Payne gives the Cons credit for presenting far more of an alternative than they actually seem to have done at the time:

Have the Opposition parties just not found the right issue yet? Perhaps, but the sponsorship scandal wasn’t the only factor that lead to the 2006 eradication of the Liberals thirteen year hold on government. The other ingredient to that fateful turn of political events was the existence of a clear and viable alternative.

By 2006, Stephen Harper and his newly united Conservative Party of Canada had spent three years defining and disseminating a compelling counter-narrative to the then moribund Liberal legacy. It was an alternative that gave Canadians, tiered of the Liberals and angry over their corruption, somewhere to go in the face of a scandal that couldn’t be spun out of existence.

Indeed, it is that that very narrative that is now being used to tarnish this government. Integrity, transparency, accountability, openness: these were the catch words of a new government that caught the political wind of an exasperated electorate and gave disaffected voters a place to land.

It wasn’t enough that Canadians circa 2006 wanted to vote against the Liberals, they needed something to vote for instead. The Conservative alternative gave them that option and created the political dynamics in which we now find ourselves.

Now, it's well worth noting that there were doubts at the time as to whether the Cons were indeed offering much of an alternative to vote for. While they'd spent years criticizing the Libs, they didn't unveil much by way of policy of their own until the campaign, and then they were seen as doing so fairly amateurishly and without any of their own proposals serving as huge drivers of votes. So if anything, 2006 looks to serve as an example of a change in government propelled mostly by a "throw the bums out" sentiment rather than any particularly widespread support for an alternative.

But it's worth distinguishing between the message which convinced the general public to shift votes out of disgust, and the one which managed to help motivate the Cons' own supporters into putting everything they had into the campaign. And as I've noted before, that looks to be the main point of distinction between the Cons then and a Lib party which has spent years running away from any prospect of changing governments: no amount of outrage against a sitting government is going to accomplish much if it isn't paired with a reasonable hope of replacing it.

That's where the Libs' strategy of downplaying any talk of a coalition does the most damage, as it ensures that supporters of all opposition parties see little light at the end of the tunnel. And if we're indeed headed to a campaign in the near future, it may already be too late for the Libs to correct their course to motivate their own base in the interest of foreseeable change.