Category: Other

Strategy in a nutshell

Now that Stephane Dion has indicated that he won’t force an election before the fall, it might be a good time to look at the overall strategies of the four federal party leaders as Parliament winds down into the last days of the spring sitting before summer break.

Stephen Harper’s strategy is as it has been since Dion became leader of the Liberal party but has become much more evident with the Conservative leader’s latest chess moves. The Prime Minister aims to demoralize Liberals both partisan and reluctant. By making Stephane Dion eat the Harper secret agenda and ask for seconds rather than go to an election, the PM is showing Liberals that their leader is more interested in survival than in standing for principled positions. Just a few of the major capitulations by poor Stephane to mean Stephen have been the Liberal leader’s support of the extension of the Afghan mission to 2011, the wholesale Liberal surrender on the Conservative immigration bill and now, as we may still see, the reluctant and red-faced approval bill C-10 (it might as well be called the McVety bill to the Liberal base, but to Stephane Dion, it’s five minutes of oxygen). Stephen Harper wants to allow Jack Layton to rhetorically ask which party will stand up to the Conservative agenda.

Gilles Duceppe for some reason has indicated that he wants to go to an election. Perhaps he just wants to finally retire from politics. Duceppe stands to gain from having the House sit for some time longer as the Prime Minister’s branding of the Quebecois as a nation has not only taken fertile soil but has put down roots for Harper in the province inhabited by the nation. The damage is already done for the Bloc on this issue and Duceppe’s hope should be to tap into potential future RCMP and/or Elections Canada embarrassments for both the Conservatives (in-and-out) and the Liberals (on Adscam and Dion’s debt). This will allow Duceppe to point to the only other viable options in Quebec and say that those federalists are all the same. For a party that has no purpose left in Ottawa but to ensure the continued growth of their federal pensions, scandal seems like a better option for BQ sustainability than defense of Quebec’s non-interest in sovereignty.

Stephane Dion’s strategy has and will continue to be survival. The Liberal leader finds it more critical to parry the daggers at his back rather than thrust towards Stephen Harper across the House divide. The beleaguered Liberal leader would rather pass Stephen Harper’s agenda than face his own party. Therefore, the strategy that Dion will continue to employ is his threatening of the government and his insistence that everyone stands at the precipice of election. However, the threat is really meant for his own party as they cannot dispose of Dion so close to a potential campaign that Harper stands to win big if the Liberal party is left without, well, a leader. If Dion were to say that he will only cause the government to collapse after one year, senior party officials and those with ambitions on leadership would see such a window as a perfect opportunity to safely dispose of Dion. When Dion threatens election, he is only holding off those Liberals that are balancing the dispatch of Dion and the worser option of a (significantly more) disastrous election causing a potential Harper majority, with a faulty campaign led by the man that says it could happen any day (it really is Dion’s last refuge).

Jack Layton is probably rubbing his hands gleefully at thought of being the party of principle of the left that can be seen to oppose Harper. Ironically, this is being done as Layton effectively works with the Prime Minister to destroy any semblance of Liberal identity as liking the colour red and Gerard Kennedy’s taste in eyewear may not be enough to sustain party support under Dion’s leadership. The likes of Buzz Hargrove and Maude Barlow will carry less weight if they encourage NDP supporters to Stop Harper by voting Liberal. Indeed, the voting record shows that even when Dion is in the position to stop the Prime Minister’s agenda, he would rather make his stand defending Stornoway from the growing number of Liberal invaders. Jack Layton’s strategy is to play Harper’s game but he cannot do so too visibly without alienating his own base. However, there is a lot of room here for Layton to maneuver as only the Greens, despite their actual status as a Liberal proxy under May, stand to gain from any anger that the socialist base may have for Layton for strategizing to split the centre with Harper.

BoJo takes London

Great news today from our Conservative friends across the pond. Former Tory MP Boris Johnson has won the London mayoral election according to The Times. The charismatic Johnson known for his sharp wit has penned correspondence for first the Telegraph and then the Spectator for time spanning over a decade.

Johnson’s writing became known to me a number of years ago via his blog. He was an early adopter of the political niche of the self-publishing medium and it served as a useful tool for the distribution of his politically-inspired musings and hey, constituency outreach too!

Today’s news means that Ken Livingston – a charismatic man in his own right, yet a brutally ardent socialist with connections to Hugo Chavez – will leave the mayor’s office after holding it for the last eight years. During this period, of course, London and the UK as a whole churned internally as the western worldview became reconfigured since the events of September 11th, 2001 and then the Iraq war. Livingston, dubbed loathingly by his detractors as “Red Ken” famously referred to U.S. President George W. Bush as “the greatest threat to life on this planet” and shirked his diplomatic responsibility and organized a counter-demonstration to the President when the USA’s greatest ally in the Iraq war made a state visit in 2004.

Johnson’s election guarantees that the drama of London politics will continue for at least another term. Most importantly, now we’ve got our favourite member of London’s dramatis personae centre-stage.

Congratulations Boris!

Election factors

As Parliamentary break week comes to a wrap in Ottawa, politicos are watching perceived paradigm shift of sorts as suddenly the chatter has moved from Dion’s effectiveness, for the first time since his election as leader, to mounting Conservative troubles capped by the so-called In-and-Out “scandal”. As Ottawa shifts and regroups before parliamentarians return to their seats next week, let’s assess the political landscape and consider the maneuverings and motivations of the federal parties.

Ottawa observers in the press gallery have predicted that we’ll quietly move into summer as the Liberals and Conservative regroup to do battle in the fall as a few parliamentary hurdles are surpassed and Canadians have time to assess the mathematics of In-and-Out that has everyone in this town both confused and hungry for more details.

However, there are a few factors which indicate that both the Conservatives and Liberals are moving towards preparing for a summer election.

Sources of mine close to Liberal preparations have quietly passed on that Grit organizers in southern Ontario have activated their volunteer base in at least 15 ridings. In fact, Stephane Dion had a campaign photo shoot within the past week in order to get, among other things, his visage wrapped around Liberals buses. The Liberals may be moving ahead for a June election for a variety of reasons including the fact that Stephane Dion’s leadership debt – a staggering $800,000 owed to creditors – comes due at the end of June. What will Elections Canada have to say about this, if anything? If the government body acts to rebuke Dion, this will take some punch out of Liberal scandal-mongering on In-and-Out.

Conservatives on the other hand are making a few preparations. On the party side, a handful of Conservative nominations have been released in order to secure candidates as soon as possible. When it comes to the Prime Minister’s office and recent messaging, Mr. Harper at a rally last night in Montreal tested a few lines on Stephane Dion’s countless opportunities to bring down the government. One assumes that if the Liberal leader feels an urgency to send Canadians to the polls that the Conservatives will underscore this as opportunism instead. On the policy front, in the past week Stephen Harper has been messaging on what will likely be the key message of an upcoming campaign: the economy. Canadians are uncertain about the future economic climate as the US goes into recession and as the Canadian economy bellies up to the same line. In the past week, the Prime Minister has linked immigration to improving Canada’s skilled worker capacity, has emphasized stronger trade relations with India, spoken about targeting economic spending to bolster strategic Quebec industries such as aerospace and space and health sciences, and has had a tri-lateral meeting with US and Mexican leaders on SPP as a compliment to NAFTA.

In a future election campaign, Liberals in Dion’s office have told me that they will run on a theme of “wrong direction” meaning that in the climate of scandal that has been constructed, the Liberals will suggest to Canadians that the Prime Minister is taking the country along the wrong path and that the policy of this government just emphasizes this. Of course, this will be problematic for Liberals as they’ve been effectively rubber-stamping every Conservative policy that has moved through the House by abstaining from votes.

Emphasizing scandal can be risky for the Liberal campaign as it leaves campaign scripting vulnerable to unforeseen events such as the RCMP’s warning that more Liberal charges are coming with respect to the sponsorship scandal. Such a development would be uncomfortable for Dion as Canadians are reminded of Liberals stealing other people’s money to fight elections (rather than spend their own as Conservatives have done with In-and-Out).

If the Liberal intend to go to an election this summer, the knee-capping factor may be the NDP. Jack Layton’s party would not want to see the writ dropped on perceived Liberal momentum as any narrative that has Dion within arms reach of Stephen Harper would cause the “Think Twice” coalition of pseudo-socialists to reconvene and urge Canadians to vote Liberal. The ideal election scenario for Layton is a ballot question that splits Canadians left and right on an issue that leaves Liberals without any semblance of cohesion. The NDP can rest assured that Harper, the strategic chess player that he is, has crafted such a scenario. The NDP knows that going to an election on Liberal terms would be a disasterous scenario for their party as their seat count would diminish and their $1.83 per vote lost would decrease the party’s war chest by millions over the period of a future Conservative or Liberal government. The NDP has been working quietly to give a soft-landing where they can for Conservatives (the Lukiwski scandal was relatively easy on the Tories and handled much better than the freelancing done by Irene Mathyssen on James Moore) and aggravating Liberal planning where they can.

Observers that think that the Prime Minister is looking for an opportunity to orchestrate an election should take stock of a few factors. On the partisan side, Conservatives are looking forward to a policy convention scheduled for the fall. Not having had a convention since 2005, the party is preparing for the event and would rather avoid an election that would jeopardize the gathering. Most importantly however, while everyone else is distracted by the narrow scope of the daily street battle of Ottawa politics, the Prime Minister is reconfiguring the broader electoral and political landscape for sustained decades-long effect. The more time that the Prime Minister has to restructure the Canadian state, its identity and political brands, the more permanence his agenda will have. Whenever the election, of the men that will seek a mandate from the exercise, one seeks the Prime Ministership as a means to an end, while the other aimlessly covets it for no other reason than to remedy the dissonance of a desanguinated party that stands for nothing else.