Question:
Can Stephen Harper win the next federal election?
Answer:
Yes. Absolutely.
He will win as long as the economy — that's jobs, employment security, pensions, health insurance, the whole ball of wax — remains the pre-eminent bundle of issues, or fears, in the minds of Canadian voters. And as long as Harper can maintain his message that, thanks to sound Harper policies, Canada is performing outperforming every other significant country in the whole wide world, including the United States — and that, without Harper's wise leadership, Canada would be a basket case, like Greece.
If he can continue to sell that message — and we know from recent history that the Conservatives are prepared to spend bottomless amounts of their supporters' and taxpayers' money to sell their messages — the rest won't matter.
The "rest" includes: his government's disregard for the environment; its indifference to the widening gap between rich and poor; its disdain for international organizations, especially the UN (serves them right for not giving Canada that Security Council seat, doesn't it?); his penchant for lecturing countries that are not blessed with abundant resources like the Alberta tar (oops, sorry, oil) sands. Not to mention the Tories' contemptuous disregard for Parliament, which no one outside the Ottawa bubble seems to care about.
But, you say, what about the polls? Don't they show Harper's party in a dead heat with Thomas Mulcair's New Democrats? Yes, they do. But the election is not due until October 2015. When it comes to forecasting an election more than two and a half years in the future, today's polls today are as useful as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Older readers (or their parents) may recall the early 1970s. Pierre Trudeau was at the mid-point of his first mandate and his universe was unfolding badly. The Conservatives under Robert Stanfield were closing in on the Liberals in the polls by October 1970, when the FLQ kidnapped James Cross and Pierre Laporte and the Trudeau government responded by proclaiming the War Measures Act.
That show of strong leadership turned the polls on their head. Within weeks, the government's approval rating shot up to an unheard-of 87 per cent, and Liberals opened a lead of nearly 40 points in popular support. They could have won every seat in Parliament. But the lead evaporated. When Canadians went to the polls, two years after the War Measures Act, the Liberals barely survived, taking 109 seats to the Conservatives' 107.
So ignore the polls for now. They will become important as the election draws nearer.
One big difference between 1972 and now is the evolution of negative advertising. The attack ad has become a deadly weapon in the hands of the government party. If the New Democrats (or, just conceivably, the Liberals) are within, say, six or eight points of the Conservatives by the late spring of 2015, expect a tsunami of Tory attack ads that will make the vicious assault on Michael Ignatieff in the lead-up to the 2011 election look like a nursery-school exercise.
In the 1992 U.S. presidential election, Democratic party strategist James Carville framed the issue for Bill Clinton in four celebrated words: "It's the economy, stupid!" If "the economy, stupid" is still the issue in Canada in 2015, Harper will win re-election.
Canadians will re-elect him for a fourth term without any great enthusiasm. Canadians have never really warmed to this prime minister. Chances are they never will. He is too cold, too distant, perhaps too mean, to encourage affection. He is the exemplar of the cult of non-personality, the champion of charisma-free politics in an era when, sadly, anti-intellectualism, rules the national stage.
But he can win — and I think he will win — as long as he commands the one issue that concerns most Canadians: the economy. It's not going to be a whole lot of fun. But Mackenzie King was no fun, either, and he ruled Canada off and on for a total of 22 years.
