Deep thought

I'm pretty sure that the next time the Cons lose power after an election, that too will be spun as part of Six-Dimensional Chess Master Stephen Harper's Grand Master Plan (TM).

The aftermath

Alice has the definitive rundown from last night's by-elections - which from the standpoint of wanting to see the most progressive candidate win turned into about as gory a train wreck as possible. So let's take a look at what went wrong, and how to improve matters in future trips to the polls.

Obviously the biggest disappointment came in Winnipeg North, where Lib Kevin Lamoureux narrowly beat out the NDP's Kevin Chief in the seat that Judy Wasylycia-Leis had previously held for a decade.

Most of the talk in the wake of last night's results has surrounded Lamoureux as a candidate, and I don't think there's much room for doubt that his personal profile enabled him to win a seat that otherwise might not have been in play. But it's worth noting as well that the NDP spent much of the campaign on unfriendly policy ground which may have helped to push votes out of its column.

Nearly all of the coverage I saw of Winnipeg North was framed around the concept that crime was issue #1 for the riding's residents, and that all three parties were presenting similar messages in dealing with it. But that means that the main focus was placed on a policy area where the Cons have spent years building up their brand (even if it didn't seem to help them in the by-election result), while Lamoureux was able to run against Manitoba's provincial NDP in creating a bit of space for voters to lean his way.

Of course, it may be that Lamoureux was well enough positioned to take on whatever campaign the NDP could develop. But I have to wonder if some more time spent changing the topic of conversation to health care, poverty and other more NDP-friendly issues might have made all the difference.

As for the other seats, there wasn't much news for the NDP. While the party's vote share in Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette improved somewhat, I'm not sure it can be seen as much more than the expected gain from running as the alternative in a riding that received more attention than usual. And the much-ballyhooed Con/Lib contest in Vaughan looks to have completely silenced the other parties, including the NDP.

The end result is that all of the parties have at least some success to point to - but both Winnipeg North and Vaughan saw turns for the worse in their party representation. And that figures to make it all the less likely that we'll see much accomplished in Parliament until the next general election.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted material for your weekend:

- Your latest Con copyright talking point: if someone from an opposing viewpoint hasn't presented draft legislation, they deserve to be ignored. Which makes for an interesting political strategy: presumably the goal is to provoke somebody to draft something that the Cons can attack, but isn't there some serious risk involved in dwelling on procedure while allowing the opposite side to argue on principle?

- From the standpoint of dealing with short-term deficits without damaging (and indeed perhaps even improving) the theoretical long-term incentive to boost economic development, Andrew Jackson's suggestion of a one-time capital levy makes a world of sense. Needless to say, I never expect to hear of it again.

- Michael Harris weighs in on the Libs' latest Afghanistan capitulation:

The chill Stephen Harper has put on parliament is still looking for a spine to run up in the Liberal Party. The only Liberals standing up for anything are men and women whose loyalty requires official silence outside of caucus. Dion’s questioning of the training mission is a thundering rebuke of the elitist appeasement that plagues the party at the top.

- Finally, the Free Press's coverage in Winnipeg North paints a rather stark distinction as to how two of the campaigns are doing in actually getting people interested in participating:

Chief, a political rookie, is facing Liberal Kevin Lamoureux, a strong constituency man and formidable campaigner who has represented 75 per cent of the sprawling federal riding at one time or the other in his 18 years as an MLA. The NDP hopeful boasts a team of more than 300 volunteers.

The other main contender is Julie Javier, acting executive director of the Philippine Canadian Centre, who has run a low-profile campaign in which she has avoided two all-candidates meetings and ducked media interviews (she only consented to a brief telephone interview for this piece and refused to pose for a photograph, emailing one of herself instead) to concentrate on door-knocking. She said this week she has 10 volunteers working on her campaign.

And the distinction looks to be more a matter of bad news for the Cons than anything: doesn't it seem downright stunning that a governing party would be unable to summon up more than 10 volunteers from one of Canada's ten biggest cities for a by-election campaign?

On fakery

With the Libs' mock outrage machine running at full capacity, I don't expect them to pay much attention to the facts about Lloyd Axworthy's now-public views about NDP candidate Kevin Chief. But for those actually interested in whether Axworthy's praise actually reflects his personal opinion...

A Chief campaign spokesman said he had been given permission by Axworthy to report Axworthy had made a "significant" donation of more than $100 to the Chief campaign.

Axworthy noted Chief had approached him for permission to use a photo of the two of them from their time working together on the U of W's Innovative Learning Centre.

Axworthy said it was a public event and a media photo and he could not stop him.

But the photo that appeared was not that photo so Axworthy asked Chief to stop using the brochure and he complied.

However, Axworthy said it is unfair of anyone to suggest he has no connection to Chief or that he does not in fact admire him.

"He's got a very nice touch with people," he said.

So by all indications, Axworthy:
- made a publicly-disclosable donation to Chief's campaign;
- had no objection to one photograph of him with Chief being used in campaign literature, and had his concerns addressed when a different photo was used instead; and
- as a matter of fact, does have a positive personal take on Chief. Which would seem to close the case as to whether or not the Libs have a leg to stand on in pretending there's something wrong with that being pointed out.

To be fair, Axworthy is complimentary toward Lib candidate Kevin Lamoureux as well. But that doesn't affect the accuracy of his explicit and implicit praise for Chief - and the more the Libs pretend that accurate words are somehow "fake", the more it shows their desperation going into Monday's by-elections.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday.

- Harron Siddiqui takes on the Cons, Libs and media alike for pushing Canada into an Afghanistan extension which most citizens don't want:

Harper’s flip-flops — won’t cut and run; won’t stay a day longer than July 2011; okay, will stay until 2014 — are functions of political posturing. Ignatieff’s position springs from his written conviction that the Afghan war was essential to Pax Americana, Empire Lite.

Regardless of motivation, Harper and Ignatieff are the eager errand boys of America in Afghanistan.

And much of our mainstream media are their cheerleaders — as they were for Bush’s war on Iraq. Good luck to the two-thirds of Canadians who oppose the Afghan war in getting fair news coverage.
...
NATO is on a treadmill going nowhere. But it won’t admit defeat, least of all Barack Obama. Battered in the midterm election, he cannot afford to give any opening to Republican and Tea Party warmongers. The 2014 deadline will neutralize Afghanistan as an issue in the 2012 presidential election.

Harper and Ignatieff are happy to oblige. The rest is propaganda.

- Sometimes, the system works!!!

- You know a political party is in trouble when its supporters are reduced to arguing that one of its competitors somehow shouldn't want the influx of high-profile figures crossing party lines to join it.

- Finally, while Rick Mercer's rant this week has already received plenty of attention, it's well worth including here as well:



[Edit: fixed wording, added and removed Axworthy link.]

Across party lines

As tends to be the case, anybody looking for the most thorough and informative coverage of the ongoing by-election races will find it at the Pundits' Guide. And as part of a remarkably thorough roundup, Alice points out one noteworthy bit of cross-party support in the Winnipeg North campaign:

Also recently seen campaigning with (NDP candidate Kevin) Chief is former Liberal candidate and well-known Métis musician Ray St. Germain. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in some quarters that aboriginal people don't participate in canadian electoral politics, Chief's campaign is said to have signed up some 600 new members in that riding.

Now, I'm not sure how deep St. Germain's roots were within the Libs. But it certainly has to help Chief's cause that a prominent former candidate who was willing to challenge Pat Martin in what was then a reasonably promising target for the Libs (thanks in part to the efforts of Kevin Lamoureux himself two elections before) has joined the NDP's efforts to hold Winnipeg North. And based on the NDP's strong starting position in the riding, it's worth wondering whether the obstacles facing Lamoureux will prove insurmountable even if the race figures to be somewhat closer than the margins posted by Judy Wasylycia-Leis in recent elections.

Races may be closer than they appear

Eric Grenier's by-election projections certainly make for an interesting read, and it's a plus to see at least some commentary based on voting patterns rather than conjecture. But with two of the three seats projected to be won by 40+ points, I have to wonder whether the nature of a by-election will cause problems for a model developed for general elections.

Without having crunched any numbers myself, it seems that by-elections generally tend to produce closer races - which makes sense as the parties throw everything they have into one riding, eliminating the gap in expenditures and narrowing the difference in manpower necessary for a candidate to run away from the pack. And that would lead me to expect both Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette and Winnipeg North to produce far closer races than projected, even if the projected winners sound about right absent some major change over the course of the campaign.