Layton's NDP rocketing in Quebec: CROP poll

It was only days ago that the NDP soundly crested the 20 percent national hurdle, now another poll is showing monumental growth for the party in Quebec.

At 17 percent, Jack Layton’s NDP has registered an earth-shattering nine-point jump over 2006 (and stratospherically above the mere two percent the party got in 2000). The NDP now stands within 10 points of the Conservatives and a mere 3 of the Dion Liberals.

And while it’s totally premature to translate this into prospective seats, consider for a moment what a change in the Quebec electoral dynamic can actually turn into. Based on a deep desire for change in the province, the ADQ in the last provincial election rode a bewildering wave gaining 37 new seats with only a 12 percent increase in the popular vote.

When asked the following day, most ADQ voters said they had voted for change, not the rightist platform of Mario Dumont. Based on the CROP numbers, Layton's NDP, whose policies actually resonate centre-left Quebecers, could reasonably hope to do very well in the province.

Over to you, Elizabeth Thompson …

“Not only does the NDP continue its inexorable rise in Quebec, it is now more popular than the Liberals among francophones … The one guy who's probably smiling this morning is Jack Layton. From the moment the Hudson, Quebec native became NDP leader he has quietly invested a lot of time, energy and resources in a province the party had written off for years.”

The Canadian Nixon

Political observers will recall the devastating “stickiness” that the nickname “Mr. Dithers” had on Paul Martin when it was put on him in the pages of the venerable British magazine The Economist back in 2005.

Is it too much to hope that the same adhesiveness comes with this moniker for Stephen Harper in the UK’s Guardian newspaper?

"The historian Garry Wills once observed that Richard Nixon wanted to be president not to govern the nation but to undermine the government. "

Two years later: The strange disappearance of Gerard Kennedy

If you are among the millions of centre-lefties exasperated by the Conservative government and the Liberal “strategy” of keeping them ensconced in 24 Sussex by abstaining or administering oxygen to his agenda by voting with Harper, there is someone you might consider heaping a large part of the blame upon.

Oddly, it’s someone you may not have even thought of in a while. And someone who through a series of bad choices, some are saying, has all but buried his brief affair with federal politics.

It was precisely two years ago today that Ontario’s then education minister announced his candidacy to succeed Paul Martin as Liberal leader. Gerard Kennedy entered the race with astronomical expectations; remarkable for a party who by sheer force of narcissism and hubris routinely transform the mundane into the monumental.

At times appearing to take more inspiration from his legendary namesake than from the actual candidate, supporters claimed that Kennedy would attract droves of young people to the party; revitalize its atrophied left; and by virtue of his Acadian spouse, appeal to Francophones. In a party hampered by its historic lack of appeal to westerners and in a race without a credible candidate west of the Humber River, Kennedy even won converts by claiming he would run in a western constituency (confused somewhat by a similar boast made to Quebecers).

But two years later that’s all ancient history. Owing to a pact between the two men that the first off the ballot would support the other to defeat either Ignatieff or Rae, Stephane Dion is the man in charge of what remains of the Liberal Party. Today, the man Kennedy boosted into the OLO faces blistering criticism from the left for being unwilling to risk defeating a right-wing government that is irreversibly changing Canada, because he is unprepared for an election. Unable to be lost in all this, is that the man Dion rewarded with the post of preparing the party for a 2007 election was Gerard Kennedy.

In any other party, the king-maker is treated to generous riches and a higher profile. In the Liberal Party, Kennedy appears to have been black-listed by the party elite. He could have been the first of the four seat-less leadership aspirants in the House had he been encouraged to run in the 2006 London by-election. Instead, Kennedy is now the only one not in Ottawa and even the most recent of Kennedy’s “current events” on his website are almost a year old.

In recent days, media have noticed and begun wondering aloud about Kennedy’s strange disappearance.

But along with his cushy gig toiling in the mahogany and exam-sweat infused halls of Ryerson University, Kennedy appears every bit a man who has settled into certain realities. The first of which is that his ploy to help Dion win has left him unloved by the party establishment in the Senate who would have much preferred Michael Ignatieff or Today's Bob Rae to the Professor. The second is that Dion will never be prime minister meaning that the next leadership race will be a pathetically personal settling of scores between two college roommates. The third, as noted this week in NOW magazine, is that Kennedy can’t even count on winning election in his old provincial riding of Parkdale-High Park against the popular and accomplished NDP industry critic Peggy Nash who took Harper on over the US sale of Canadian satellite technology and won.

From provincial cabinet minister with premier potential to being the target of media search parties, Kennedy has fallen a long way in two years. A column in the Toronto Star may have summed it up best:

“Maybe it was more than Gerard Kennedy could handle, too. Maybe he vanished up his own cosmic aberration. Maybe when you single-handedly create the first Liberal leader who might not make it into the history books, you're destined to go pffft before he does.”

Conservatives tumble, NDP breaks 20 percent support

Jack Layton and the NDP are starting to see dividends from their strategy of taking on Harper over issues that impact ordinary people's lives like high gas prices and cell phone charges, and consistently being the country’s number one Harper fighter.

Today’s Toronto Star contains two examples.

The first is an Angus Reid poll commissioned by the Star which shows Conservative support tumbling three points in the last month, while NDP support has soared to the historic level of 20 percent – matching the 1988 election result which saw the party net 43 seats under Ed Broadbent.

Some of the regional breaks are also remarkable, including a strong showing of 19 in Ontario, 17 in Quebec, and in Manitoba and Saskatchewan where Layton leads with an incredible 46 percent of the vote. Even factoring the margin of error for the small prairie sample, the NDP still leads the Conservatives in the heart of the country.

But because polls are just polls, the other piece of good news for New Democrats is this story showing that Layton's pragmatic and principled opposition is being seen as the real force to beat Harper’s agenda -- resulting in tangible benefits in terms of increased NDP memberships, fundraising and momentum.

Political scientist Paul Nesbitt-Larking said Liberal decisions to abstain on high-profile issues has given the NDP room to present themselves "as the true opposition."

Liberal Party? Your recent past is on line one.

The one virtue that has never concerned Liberals is consistency. In recent months alone, the Dion Liberals have flip-flopped on the war in Afghanistan, on "the breakthrough bill" to fight climate change and on gutting the fiscal capacity of the country to respond to the coming economic downturn. They are even helping Harper put an end to the impartiality of our immigration system.

As the old joke goes, on any issue, Liberals have a strong position, and if you don't like that one, stick around - 'cause they've got a whole bunch more.

But now that the Conservatives are in an ethical morass with the RCMP raid looking into their 2006 election spending, Liberals are hoping people will consider them an ethical party once more.

Problem is, Canadians haven't forgotten about the Sponsorship scandal, and aren't about to either.

Because while it's one thing to change what you stand for like the winds, it's quite another to change what you have already done.

The one where Paul Wells says what we are all thinking

Sometimes it happens. And this is one of those times.

Paul Wells has said what we've all been thinking -- this time dismissing Elizabeth May's role as Stephane Dion's "auxiliary backup party leader".

With honesty simultaneously refreshing and exclamation-mark-rich, the Inkless one intones: "THE GREEN PARTY OF CANADA HAS NO SEATS IN PARLIAMENT!!! ... It feels unaccountably more rewarding to pay attention to people with power than to pay attention to people without power."

The Green Party, it will be recalled, has been available for comment since 1982. And yet it has historically merited barely a paragraph of press outside elections. So really, why all the attention now, pollsters, journos and pundits alike?

Is it because suddenly they have a leader whose stated raison d'etre is to have another party form a government, and another party leader become Prime Minister? Is it because Greens are inexplicably seeking common cause with the Liberal Party, and Liberals are doing the same for May - punctuated by a fatuous comparison to Barack Obama?

Treating May as an objective political actor, particularly after her most recent role, is the same as believing "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" were interested in truth.

Wells puts it more bluntly, suggesting the unconvinced ask themselves if it's "really fair for the Liberal leader, who thinks the Liberal leader must at all costs be prime minister, to be joined onstage by a special auxiliary backup party leader who also thinks the Liberal leader must at all costs be prime minister."

For his part, Wells says "NO" (exclamation marks redacted).

Fixing the bi-partisan problem

It seems ages before the RCMP raided the Conservative HQ, and even before the Dion Liberals slipped a disk doing Harper’s heavy lifting on Afghanistan, climate change and the $50.5 billion in corporate tax cuts that now seem destined to push us into the abyss of deficit spending, but it wasn’t that long ago that someone put their finger on precisely what is ailing politics in Canada.

It was only two months ago that Norman Spector, columnist and erstwhile top-Tory in Brian Mulroney’s PMO, speaking before the House ethics committee on the Schreiber scandal-de-jour, said:

“Around the end of Mr. Mulroney's second term, Canada was rated the fifth least corrupt country by Transparency International. When Mr. Chrétien left office we were twelfth. At the end of the Paul Martin interregnum we were fourteenth, which means that this town has a bipartisan problem.”

Spector’s diagnosis is simple: over the past 20 years, politics has become a grinding cycle of Conservative scandal and Liberal scandal and repeat. Why? Because Canadian politics has become a grinding cycle of Conservative and Liberal governments.

Despite their alleged differences on policy (a diminished roster considering the Liberal flip-flop on Afghanistan, cheerleading for corporate tax cuts, and mutual inaction on Kyoto), the Liberals and Conservatives are establishment parties who see in each other their biggest threats as well as their moral measuring sticks.

Why should Liberals not use Sponsorship money to boost their party coffers in the 1990s if the Conservatives rewarded themselves in the 1980s? And why should Conservatives not skirt the election spending rules with their own money today if the Liberals won the 1997 and 2000 elections with taxpayers' money?

Bi-partisanship in Ottawa has become a free-fall punctuated only by one side stopping to shout epithets towards the other and vow to “restore ethics and confidence in government” before resuming downward again.

If Spector’s diagnosis is uncomplicated, his prescription is equally so: give the NDP a chance. Give the one other party that can form a government that is “not centrally implicated in this problem” a turn at the wheel.

From Douglas, Lewis, Broadbent and Layton, Canadians have continually ranked the NDP high on ethical leadership. And there is good reason for that. Even before it was law, the NDP was the only party to maintain a singular ban on corporate donations. And on the Senate, party leaders and premiers could have taken the security and easy money of a seat in the unelected, unaccountable body, but on principle, none ever has.

Ottawa has a “bi-partisan problem” because of two parties who have recklessly and routinely put their interests and the goal of obtaining and retaining power ahead of anyone or anything else.

As Spector, the former Tory admits, New Democrats are not part of this problem. Perhaps its time they were considered the solution.