Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- The good news from the polls just keeps on coming, as Angus Reid and Ipsos-Reid both show the NDP at 33% across Canada (within 5 points of the Harper Cons). But perhaps more importantly, both also place the NDP in second place in Ontario - signalling that any damaging vote split has either already resolved itself in the NDP's favour, or can easily do so by Monday.

- Judy Rebick calls for Canadians to join the NDP's people-powered wave of support while noting the effect of social media in spreading the message:

People are fed up with politics as usual. That’s the sentiment that brought Rob Ford to power in Toronto and as strange as it seems, it’s the same sentiment fueling the NDP vote. Just as economics have been taken over by corporate shills, politics have been taken over by cynical operatives who see elections as number crunching and spinning (another word for lying).
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...I do like Jack and I’ve known him for 30 years. He is a passionate, committed, politician who believes in equality and social justice and has fought with all his energy his whole life for what he believes in. People can see that, which makes him the choice of those who want to get rid of Stephen Harper. Once Quebec broke to Harper, everyone else started to see that the strategic vote and the heart vote was one and the same.

But more importantly, Jack is riding an unprecedented wave of democratic participation. Not since the 1988 free trade election have we seen a greater participation of citizens in an election campaign. Not since the Charlottetown Accord in 1992 have we seen a more profound revolt against the political elites of this country.

But unlike 1988 and 1992, no organization or individual is leading this revolt. It is happening through You Tube, through Facebook, through Twitter, through Vote Mobs, through web sites, through the creativity, humour, audacity of mostly young Canadians. It is the first time we have seen the dynamic of networked politics, which I wrote about in Transforming Power: From the personal to the political work in Canada

No-one over 40 who has a progressive bone in their body can fail to be inspired by the energy and passion of those vote mob videos. And thanks to the willingness of the people of Quebec to take a risk, Jack Layton and the NDP are now the most viable option for those of us who would do anything to get rid of Stephen Harper and his desire to be President for Life of Canada.

- Meanwhile, Glen Pearson is absolutely right in noting that a key driver of the NDP's surge has been the fact that Jack Layton has performed well in response to a genuine opportunity to define himself which the Libs' contenders have lacked ever since the Harper ad-bombing strategy became the norm:

Which I think helps to define Layton’s rise in the polls. Is he a good man? Absolutely. Does he care for people? For sure. A good leader for his party? Yup. His rise in popularity comes in part because Canadians have been permitted to judge him with a collective open mind – something that should come standard with any political campaign. I bet you the Conservative Machiavellian types in their war room now wish they had spent millions passing their untruths on to the Canadian people about the NDP leader. But it’s too late; they, like the rest of us, didn’t see it coming. They are now scrambling, realizing that they’re not so smart after all.
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I’m glad for Jack, to be truthful, because every leader deserves a fair shot at power. His rather obscure rating at the beginning of the campaign has now provided him with an open field to display his skills – he was never placed in a box. Every party leader should have been afforded that opportunity, and in Canada that used to be a given. Jack deserves his freedom; Ignatieff should have had that right too. Regardless of the this election’s outcome, the best thing that could happen wouldn’t just be an opposition win as it would be a sending of the Republican strategists back across the border and a Conservative government humbled by the Canadian people for its deeply devious way of treating its citizens.

- But Adam Radwanski notes that whatever the end result, the election campaign should indeed result in some substantial change for the better in how political parties approach Canadian citizens:

Stephen Harper’s push for a majority government has revolved around the idea that to most voters, the “air war” – the party’s communication efforts, their exchanges with each other, the media’s coverage of it all – is just a lot of white noise. So he has made no effort to engage us collectively. On the contrary, the Conservatives have tried to foster indifference with a stultifyingly boring and repetitive central campaign – all the better to allow them to micro-target just enough swing voters in just enough ridings to win a majority government.

Many pollsters, and some insiders from other parties, entered this campaign sharing the belief that the vast majority of voters aren’t really in play. It was a depressing experience to listen to them explain why, beyond motivating their bases to come out and vote, parties really just had to worry about targeting a relatively tiny number of swing voters in swing ridings.
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(T)he Conservatives, who thought they had this election fully gamed out, have not been nimble enough to respond (to the NDP's surge). They have watched as anti-Harper support has consolidated behind the NDP, putting in jeopardy some of the seats they were counting on, and until the last few days seemingly refused to believe it was happening. And because they didn’t think it was worth speaking to most self-identified supporters of other parties, they’ve been unable to woo many of the disaffected Liberals leaving that party in droves.

None of this is to say that Mr. Harper won’t get his majority. The vote splits could still break that way. And if they do, the strategists will no doubt pat themselves on the back.

But they cannot seriously claim any more to have had the electorate all figured out. And in future campaigns, all parties will know better than to treat us as quite the automatons the Conservatives thought we were.