What I saw at the reformation: Jack Layton's 115th dream

Just for giggles, I decided to check the Elections Canada website last week to take a gander and the independent and minor party candidates running in my riding in next month's federal election. As I've said before, I haven't voted for a major party since 2000. This is because the Conservatives aren't very conservative, I'm genetically incapable of voting for the Liberals because they're swine and I'm not a socialist, which precluded my supporting the NDP.

Small problem. There are no independents or minor parties running in my riding this time out. Not even the Greens. Which means that I'm screwed. Under no circumstances will I reward Stephen Harper for his economic reign of error over the last five years and I'm almost certain that I can't biologically re engineer myself enough to support the Liberals.

That leaves me with the devil's choice of voting for the NDP or not voting at all. And you know what? I'm not as uncomfortable with either option as you might think. I've publicly mused about voting for the Dippers before, if only because I have long thought that they would be the ideal opposition to a Tory government, be it minority or majority. This is because they actually oppose things from time to time. And when they have dealt with Harper, they've usually gotten something out of it, which can't be said of the Grits.

In opposition, the Liberals have been the single most useless motherfuckers ever to walk the earth. For all of Stephen Harper's endless lying about the dangers of a coalition government, he neglects to tell you that there already has been one for the last five years. The Grits under both Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff have voted with the government hundreds of times. They have enabled Harper at almost every turn.

This has turned out to be problematic in that it's hard to run against the record of a government that they've supported so frequently. For all intents and purposes Michael Ignatieff's record is Harper's record. And the fact is that the Grits supported the Tories so often because they were too cowardly to force an election. This was made easier by the fact that the Liberal Party of Canada doesn't actually believe in anything other than political positioning. They're nothing more than an odd hybrid of the Conservatives and the NDP, and they have been for nearly fifty years. They exist only to steal policies from whichever party seems to be polling well at any given time. The Grits are whores, and singularly cheap ones at that.

Historically, that worked out for them because Canada didn't tend to have an ideological electorate. We tend to be far more pragmatic than Americans are, and our elections tend to be more issues-oriented. Canada doesn't often have campaigns built around nonsense like "restoring honor and dignity" or the fucking pledge of allegiance.

Unfortunately for the Liberals, that's less and less true and the electorate has been slowly becoming more rigidly ideological. I don't necessarily like it, but I can't pretend that it isn't happening. The result of that is that the Liberals are being frozen out and the NDP is eating their lunch.

A campaign that has until now been on “auto-pilot” is suddenly turning into an electrifying run to the finish with a change so dramatic for the NDP that it could be in reach of becoming the official opposition, a Forum Research poll done in collaboration with The Hill Times suggests.
The NDP has made its largest gains in Quebec, with an astonishing surge past the Bloc Quebecois in decided and leaning voter support, but the party has also moved up in British Columbia, and Saskatchewan and Manitoba, where a rise in support can turn into new House of Commons seats for the party.

(...)

Nationally, the survey gave the Conservative Party support from 36 per cent of decided and leaning voters, 25 per cent for the NDP, 23 per cent for the Liberal party, and six per cent each for the Green Party and the Bloc Québécois. A separate Forum Research analysis, based partly on ridings won and lost in the 2008 election, suggest the survey results would give the Conservatives 149 of the 308 Commons seats if an election were held today, with 71 seats for the NDP, 64 for the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois would have 24 seats.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Jack Layton started this campaign with a busted hip and a prostate the size of a canned ham. His political obituary was being written by everyone in both the blogosphere and Serious Journalism. Just two weeks ago, Liberal commentators - admittedly some of the dumbest assholes on the planet - were openly mocking the NDP. From what I've been seeing this afternoon, they're not laughing now.

My instincts still tell me that the Dippers won't overtake the Grits in the next Parliament, but I have nothing solid to base that on. The arc of this campaign since the debates and all of the data indicate that my instincts are wrong. And if I'm wrong and the NDP becomes the Official Opposition in the next Parliament, you're witnessing the beginning of an irreversible trend and the Liberals - the most successful party in the history of democracy - will begin its final death rattle in the very near future.

In a non-ideological electorate of sheep, the Grits won simply because they were seen as winners. And even that was largely an illusion. In the last fifty years, only Pierre Trudeau won in the face of any kind of opposition, and he almost lost to Bob Stanfield and actually was beaten by Joe Clark. Lester Pearson won three minorities because of the collapse of the Diefenbaker government, and Chretien was handed three majorities because of the fracturing of the Progressive Conservatives under Brian Mulroney and Kim Campbell.  Since 1958, the Grits only clearly won under their own power in 1968, 1974 and 1980.
Mulroney reduced the Liberals to forty seats in '84 and Stephen Harper steadily reduced their share of the popular vote for three consecutive elections.

Even with Michael Ignatieff running a much better campaign than anyone expected he would, the Liberals just aren't seen as winners anymore. With that dynamic now clearly evident to anyone that's been paying attention, the progressive vote is shifting to the NDP.

Am I surprised that this is happening? No, I've actually been predicting it for over two years now and most of you thought I was insane for doing it. But I am surprised that it's happening this quickly and that the epicenter for it is in Quebec. Not only has the federalist vote coalesced around the NDP, the socialist wing of the separatist Bloc Quebecois has begun to, as well.

If that trend in Quebec continues, the Liberals are going to die more rapidly than even I previously expected them to. They could form governments by winning roughly half of Quebec's seats and dominating Ontario, with scatterings of seats in Atlantic Canada and British Columbia. Since 2004, they've been ruined in Quebec and lost over half of their Ontario seats. Effectively, they've been reduced to a rump in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. A national NDP surge, combined with Harper's singular focus on the 416 and 905 area codes of the Greater Toronto Area, threatens even those Grit electoral fortresses.

If these numbers hold, and I have no idea if they will because the Dippers could be peaking too early, we could be witnessing a fundamental reformation of Canadian politics. Everything I know about the history of the Liberal Party tells me that they won't be able to rebuild. Their MPs and strategists will all start publicly blaming one another for what happened (and if you look around, you'll see that already happening) and their next leadership campaign will be nothing less than a very public, balls-out, scorched earth bloodbath. The LPC's decades-long civil war will finally bury them in a very public ceremony. There won't be any rebuilding from a debacle like this.

A potential coalition in the event of a defeated Harper minority is going to be even more humiliating for the Grits. Even if they have more seats, the NDP has the momentum and now everybody knows it. The days of the Liberals arrogantly demanding that the Dippers renounce much of anything will be long over. Any coalition or accord will be on Jack Layton's terms or it won't happen at all.

As a matter of fact, it will be in the NDP's long-term strategic interest to let Harper govern and envelop himself in waves of progressively worse scandals while the Liberals destroy themselves in public. If I was leading the NDP in a minority Parliament with an even weaker Liberal Official Opposition, I'd let the Grits continue to support a scandal-ridden Conservative government to highlight the distinction between the progressive parties and swallow gradually greater shares of its support.

In the end, it is much better to be an ever more viable national alternative to the Conservatives than it is for them to be the junior partners in a coalition with a Liberal Party that's busy destroying itself. If the Tories start to crumble under the weight of their own Keynesian spending and obvious corruption, and Liberals are finally destroyed by their own hubris and opportunistic stupidity, who's left?

If the NDP surge splits enough ridings to produce a Conservative majority, Layton will almost certainly be the leader of the Opposition, which will consign the Liberals to eternal irrelevance. Either way, the NDP would be crazy to have anything to do with the Liberals before they're well and truly finished.

Will I vote to hasten that process along? I haven't decided yet, but I just might. This election suddenly got a whole lot more interesting than it had any business being.

And to anyone who thought I was insane to predict the decline and fall of the Liberal Party, which I may have been altogether too conservative about, I guess I should have listened when you said this;




Extra-special shout out to The Tiger on Politcs