Sunday Afternoon Links

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- I haven't dealt with the Libs' latest bloviations about the gun registry since it looks to represent just one more attempt to distract from the issues Canadians really care about in an effort to find an elusive wedge against the NDP. But Matt Gurney nicely highlights the anti-democratic nature of the Libs' position:

The long-gun registry vote, held late last September, was a nailbiter. A private member’s bill put forward by a Tory MP was very, very close to dismantling the (registry). The bill had earned the support of several Liberal and NDP MPs, mostly from rural ridings where the registry is deeply unpopular. Ignatieff ordered a whipped vote — he forced his MPs to vote as he wished them to or else face internal discipline. Layton permitted an open vote, and lobbied his MPs aggressively to vote the way he wanted them to. It worked. The registry survived by two votes.
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Layton has the right...to advocate for what policies he will. In taking a stand and persuading his MPs to vote with him, without threatening punishment for those who disagreed, the NDP leader showed true leadership and honoured Parliamentary tradition, where private member bills are settled by a free vote.

The private members bill was really a government bill by any other name, so the opposition has a fair point when they claimed that the Tories were abusing Parliamentary procedure to achieve partisan aims. But they weren’t alone in their maneuverings. The Liberals, by whipping the vote along party lines, broke with Parliamentary tradition and forced their members to vote against the wishes of their constituents. And yet they accuse Layton of being unprincipled on gun control.

Yet more proof that for the Liberals, the only principled vote is one that returns them to power.

- While the top-line results are typically receiving the most attention, perhaps the most telling part of Nanos' latest leadership polling is the utter failure of the Libs' attacks on the competence of Jack Layton and the NDP:

On the issue of competence the leaders' scores on April 23 were: (Change from April 21 in brackets.)

* Stephen Harper: 38.7% (+6)
* Jack Layton: 22.3% (+2.7)
* Michael Ignatieff: 11.2% (-5)
* Elizabeth May: 2.4% (-0.5)
* Gilles Duceppe: 4.6% (-0.9)

- While the Cons' embarrassing effort to shout down any inconvenient questioning surely reflects on the crowd which participated, it's particularly worth highlighting who it was that gave the orders - and who chose not to do anything about it:

A reporter tried to press Mr. Harper on, this asking whether he “really believed” that Ms. Young would not know Mr. Malik, who’s been in the public spotlight for decades due to scrutiny on him after the 1985 airplane bombing that claimed 329 lives.

But the Conservative Leader refused to answer this follow-up query, waiting as the crowd at the Coptic Christian Centre in Mississauga applauded and cheered him for about 60 seconds.

It’s the first time a Conservative crowd has purposely drowned out a reporter’s question of Mr. Harper during the 41st election campaign.

Encouraging were Tory staffers including Marc-André Plouffe, who before the campaign started was a senior adviser in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Which is to say that the fault lies less with the crowd than if it had simply been a spontaneous outcry. Instead, it was Harper and his staff who went out of their way with an apparent strategy to shout down any tough questions - and that responsibility is particularly clear given Harper's failure to let Milewski do his job.

- Meanwhile, the Libs have been caught on tape with their own attempt to make sure other parties aren't able to get their message to voters.

- Finally, Points of Information leaks some of the ads you can expect as the campaign draws to a close.

Rally caps

Nick Kohler rightly notes that Canada currently doesn't have anywhere near the type of political rallies which the Obama campaign has been able to generate. But I have to wonder whether the theories presented as to why reflect a classic case of failing to question flawed conventional wisdom:

Tory MP Jason Kenney says the main reason is because crowd-manufacturing takes work, and our political types have decided it's not worth the hassle. "I think they're of limited utility," he says. "A lot of parties in Canada concluded they don't get much bang for the buck in terms of allocating scarce resources." Nor does the landscape encourage American-style rah-rah-rah. "Where would you go other than an arena in Canada — and if it's winter, where do you go unless it's a covered arena?" asks Liberal MP Joe Volpe. "You can count those on one hand and they're thousands of kilometres apart."

Elections are shorter in Canada, too, so events must be planned just days in advance. And while Volpe argues that large turnouts in the U.S. indicate a certain je ne sais quoi quality to Obama, others attribute them to massive election budgets. Our campaign finance laws discourage monster events, one Tory says, adding his party couldn't afford the $200,000 price tag attached to big rallies, given a budget of $18 million and a travel itinerary that costs $5 million. "Obama has an unlimited budget, so they can finance the advertising and venues and mailings it takes to organize something like that — these things don't happen spontaneously," says Kenney.

Friction between local candidates and the national parties in Canada can also rule out big crowds. Simple door-knocking is more likely to win an MP's seat than an appearance on TV with Steve or Stéphane. "In the U.S., you're not commanding all the people organizing the congressional campaigns to turn people out — they're different operations," says Liberal organizer Mark Marissen. "The people you call [here] are all in the riding campaigns — and they groan."

From what I can tell, the above includes a lot more excuse-making than genuine strategic thought.

Let's start first with the issue about the cost of a rally. While it's true that parties operate under a spending cap during campaign periods, there's nothing at all preventing them from holding events outside a campaign. And indeed, to the extent a party is able to both seek donations at an event and generate added enthusiasm to boost its volunteering and fund-raising capacity, it would seem qusetionable to consider rallies as pure costs rather than opportunities to boost a party's bottom line in the long run.

Now, that might well make for a genuine question of strategy. But it would seem to me to be one where the reward of getting thousands of people excited about one's party far exceeds the cost of a rally.

And that goes doubly during the course of a campaign, particularly when compared to the other possible uses of money. Sure, the cost of three or four large rallies could be spent putting a party's ads in slightly heavier rotation. But particularly given the ad saturation that tends to take place during a campaign, isn't it highly likely that a few well-televised rallies which show genuine widespread public support for a party would do far more to build the party's image than merely putting its top-down message in front of viewers a few more times? (And that's beyond the obvious person-to-person effect generated by those who actually attend the rallies.)

Finally, there's the question of whether riding associations will want to play along. But there too, the answer would seem to be an obvious "yes" if a party can actually generate an enthusiastic public response. Indeed, the attendees at a rally presumably reflect exactly the people which a riding association will want to add to its contact lists and get involved in the party going forward. And the process of holding a rally might make for the best opportunity to add them to the fold.

Of course, it's true that rallies would figure to be a relatively late step in building a party: it would indeed be impossible to assemble an Obama-style crowd without a substantial amount of behind-the-scenes work already being done. But if Canada's political parties aren't now capable of attracting large crowds, that seems to me to say more about their failure to fully engage the public than any limitation of rallies as a concept - and may signal that the first party to assemble the kind of movement which can pack arenas across the country will be the one best positioned to end the current political malaise.

(Edit: fixed typo.)