Choose Your Stench

Like many Canadians, I’ve tuned out the election for a couple of weeks. I haven’t written much about it here over the holidays and though I’ve done some reading, I haven’t followed the stories too closely.

But this can’t be passed up. The Liberal campaign is in absolute shambles. If Paul Martin stood up and announced his favourite book was Hitler’s Mein Kampf, it would scarcely be worse for his fortunes than what’s happened so far.

The Adscam sponsorship scandal has been haunting the electoral battlefields from the very start. It set the context but didn’t define the campaign. The first real blow to the Liberals came from Scott Reid, the Liberal’s director of communications, when he criticized the Conservative child care plan to give families $100 a month by saying “Don’t give people 25 bucks a week to blow on beer and popcorn”.

Now simply called “beer and popcorn”, that major misstep was seized on by opposition party leaders and their supporters who savaged the Liberals. The Libs followed that up with another stunning self-inflicted blow by Mike Klander, executive director of the federal Liberal party in Ontario, when he compared Jack Layton’s wife Olivia Chow to a chow-chow dog on his blog. He posted a picture of her next to a picture of the dog titled “Separated at Birth” and captioned “Chow and Chow Chow”.

Klander has since resigned and his blog has been taken down, though it has been mirrored here. Another minor controversy erupted when Liberal Industry Minister David Emerson said Layton had a “boiled dog’s head smile”, an insult that sounds odd because it is Chinese (he learned it from his wife, who hails from Hong Kong). As a minor bit of mudslinging, this blew over quickly, though it hardly contributed to an atmosphere of constructive debate.

This is all old news for you political junkies, but a little context helps for those who’ve been tuned out over the holidays. The real bombshell was Wednesday’s announcement by the RCMP that they have launched a criminal investigation into the federal government because of the possibility of insider trading stemming from the Ministry of Finance.

Canadian bloggers have kept the fire burning under this issue ever since it was first reported. (Click that link if you want to read what started it all.) The RCMP investigation announcement comes after weeks of speculation and increasingly damning evidence that something stinks. Bad.

Finance Minister Ralph Goodale has refused to step down over the allegations and Martin has backed him up. Which is an admirable bit of political stupidity – admirable for his loyalty in backing up Goodale, stupid because I think Canadians want to see heads roll.

The odour coming from the federal Liberals is overpowering and the polls are reflecting it. Canadians are starting to hold their noses. Unfortunately for Canadians uninterested in Prime Minister Harper, those Canadians are turning to the Conservatives, not the NDP. Support for the NDP is flat while the Conservatives are now tied with the Libs in some polls.

Harper’s fortunes are also buoyed by the campaign the Conservatives have been running. I’m not going to let my dislike of the Conservatives stand in the way of pointing out that they’ve been running a competent campaign. First, they started by putting social issues like gay marriage out on the table to counter claims of a hidden agenda. Second, they focused on making policy announcements. Third, they have simply managed to avoid screwing up: no beer and popcorn statements, no trashy blogs, no criminal investigations.

Policies are what Canadians want to hear about in elections. This is an area where the Liberals should be strong, but they are getting creamed. The Liberal national child-care program policy is superior, I think, to the Conservative $100 a month idea, but beer and popcorn ruined that advantage for them. On the other hand, the Liberal handgun-ban policy is just plain stupid, and a Liberal Party staff member I spoke with admitted as much.

“It might appeal to some people”, he said, “but it’s just a stupid policy.” He works for a Liberal MP and he’s already looking for a new job, because he thinks his boss is going to lose.

As for the NDP, so far this election has played out like usual: the Liberals and Conservatives battle it out while Layton says things in the background that I just can’t make out, either because the media has his microphone on low or because he’s just not loud enough.

At this rate, a Conservative minority government isn’t just possible, it’s likely. This could, as Ryan pointed out before, “give them a chance to play nicey nicey with voters and give them a shot at a majority” when the next election rolls around.

Or perhaps, when Canadians realize the Conservatives smell as bad as the Liberals – a grimy industrial, chemical stench, more like slag pits than the rank cheesy whiffs coming off the decaying corpse of the Liberal Party – they’ll finally give the NDP a chance.