E.R. Campbell said:Glen McGregor, of the Ottawa Citizen, tweeted an interesting (and unnamed) poll showing a tight (within the margin of error), essentially a tied three way race after: a) the Alberta election; and b) the vote on Bill C-51:
Edited to add:
In it's own story the Ottawa Citizen says: "The poll, conducted from May 6 to 10, appears to be from national polling firm EKOS."
Further edited to add:
David Akin posted a better version of the poll and confirms it is from EKOS:
It looks like the CPC and the Liberals have been in a state of graceful degradation (a way we used to describe a failing radio network) since February 2015 while the NDP have been trending up in the same period. But, the trends are not very steep: only 6% ↓ for the CPC and Liberals and (a much better) 11% ↑ for the NDP.
E.R. Campbell said:
Kilo_302 said:
Time for the Liberals to face some hard truths about Justin Trudeau
Scott Reid
Published on: May 29, 2015
It’s hard truth time for the Liberal Party of Canada.
And for the Conservative Party of Canada. And for the federal New Democrats too. But, the hard truth is that it’s particularly hard truth time for the Liberals.
Locked in a three-way tie atop the race to win the next election, each party faces the gut-wrenching challenge of making choices soon that will lead to winning or losing later. That makes it an exhilarating time. Play it smart and you end up running the country. Play it wrong and you end up kicked to the curb. Chances are, success or failure on Election Day will be traced back to the decisions that each party is about to take. It’s the summer before the storm.
Because the risks of a misstep are so high, it can be tantalizingly easy to hold fast and do not much. You can even convince yourself that’s the courageous choice – stay the course, steady upper lip, cross your legs and hold it. All that manly mantalk. But logic dictates that for at least two of the three parties, the course they’re on now cannot be a winner. How to know what adjustments to make? Or when? A dose of honesty is usually a good place to begin.
And so, for the Liberals, the first hard truth to face is that it’s not working — at least not well enough. After a fairly brutal winter, the spring was supposed to be better. Duffy was back, like a bad rash across the government’s inseam. The Conservative budget was a long-delayed wet firecracker. Most of all, a new Liberal tax plan focused on fairness was supposed to land loudly – muting those who complain that Trudeau is light on ideas and weak on the economy. It was reasonable to expect that raising taxes for the rich and cutting them for the rest would generate a big echo. But oddly enough, it hasn’t. At least not so far. Which is a problem because Canada’s middle-class can’t vote for a plan that they’ve not heard about. And they won’t vote for a plan that isn’t made understandable to them. A renewed marketing effort is clearly required.
The second hard truth for the Liberals is that they are suddenly locked in a knife fight with the NDP. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. By now, they had hoped to be the uncontested destination for voters seeking change from the Conservatives. They’re clearly not. Mulcair has impressively defended his Quebec base and received a welcome boost in the rest of Canada thanks to Rachel Notley – or Jim Prentice, depending upon how you look at it. To make matters even more challenging, Trudeau cannot win his battle with the NDP by attacking Mulcair. That only risks driving away voters the Liberals need. Instead, he must prove himself to be the superior alternative – more appealing, more inspiring and more assuring. And more skilled at articulating the shortcomings of Stephen Harper.
Which takes us to the most important hard truth of all for the Liberals: Justin Trudeau. Doubts, cultivated by millions in Conservative advertisements, have taken root about his readiness to govern and his ability to lead. Unhelpfully, he has added to those doubts. It follows, therefore, that Trudeau himself is best positioned to address and overcome those concerns. To answer his critics, silence the cynics and rally the uncertain.
Trudeau is the question. But for the Liberals, he is also the answer. He has to be. There is no other.
It was Trudeau, after all, who single-handedly brought the Liberal Party back to life after the cataclysm of the 2011 election. He personally lifted it from third place in the Commons to first place in the polls. He re-professionalized the party’s operations, nursed it back to financial health and excited Canadians with an electric dose of generational change. Now the job needs finishing.
Two things are required of Trudeau before the formal campaign begins. Two things that only he can personally deliver.
First, he must be the better un-Harper. There is a competition underway to show who most clearly stands for change. The two-thirds of Canadians looking to show this government the door want to see a champion. Someone able to peel the paint off Harper’s Conservatives but also able to articulate a brand of change that has street-level resonance. That takes something more than policy. It takes a plan – one that is easy to articulate, to repeat and to understand.
Second, he must be real. The worst part of the past few months for the Liberals hasn’t been C-51 or an NDP resurgence. It has been the weakened connection between the Liberal leader and voters. Change voters must hear a change mantra – and they must find it believable. What is Trudeau’s sense of mission and purpose? What is he about? Why is he there? No pat answers about building a better future for his family and everyone’s family. Give us something un-sanded. Something that sticks. Something sharp. What gets his blood up? What would he fight for? After ten years of a prime minister who has locked Canadians out, one way to represent change is to offer people a peek inside.
The Liberals have just as good a chance to win the October election as the Conservatives or the NDP. Probably even better. But the hard truth is that Trudeau is going to have to do it. And in order to do it, he’s going to have to soon do a few things differently.
Scott Reid is a principal at Feschuk.Reid and a CTV News political analyst. He was director of communications for former prime minister Paul Martin.
dapaterson said:
Tories, Liberals face political peril in exploding Senate scandal
David Akin
OTTAWA - For most Canadians, if there’s just one bit of Parliament Hill news they’ve heard about in the last year, it would be Mike Duffy and the Senate expense scandal.
Well, next week, Canadians are about to hear a lot more about both of those things, all of which could be bad news for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives and, to a lesser degree, for Justin Trudeau and the federal Liberals.
On Monday, Duffy’s trial on 31 counts of fraud, breach of trust and bribery continues continues after a three-week break. It is not going to end anytime soon. In fact, when a group of reporters asked one of the prosecutors a few weeks ago if this trial could run until Christmas, the response was “which Christmas?”
So far, there haven’t been any major political bombshells, just a lot of back-and-forth between the defence and the prosecution to set the ground rules and the context for the charges.
From a political standpoint, the big witness will be Nigel Wright, who was fired from his job as Harper’s chief of staff after he tried to make the Duffy problem go away by cutting a cheque worth $90,000 from his own personal account to Duffy which Duffy was apparently to use to re-pay the Senate for expense claims he received which, if they were not illegal, certainly defied political common sense.
When all of this news about Duffy and Wright broke in 2013, the group that seemed most angry about all of it was — grassroots Conservatives! These were the folks who had been sending in $20 a month to a party that they believed stood for cleaning things up in government. And now, here was evidence that the party they’d been sending their money to was no better than those darned Liberals. Many stopped sending those cheques.
But that was 2013. And I believe that while the Conservatives suffered political fallout from the Duffy/Wright revelations in 2013, Duffy’s long trial - by itself — would be unlikely to be a significant factor at the ballot box this fall. A lot of those Conservatives, more worried about the prospects of Trudeau becoming prime minister than the ethics of the Duffy scandal, have resumed their political donations.
But Duffy appears to be just the first of what could be many senators in trouble. In August, the trial of former Liberal senator Mac Harb, on charges of breach of trust and fraud, begins.
Former Conservative senators Patrick Brazeau and Pamela Wallin are already under investigation by the RCMP for expense abuses.
And in week ahead, Auditor General Michael Ferguson will finger as many as 10 more senators as candidates for an RCMP investigation.
Ferguson has spent a colossal sum — $21 million! — to have an army of auditors comb through every travel, food, and housing claim made by just about any senator who sat in the red chamber from April 1, 2011 to March 31, 2013. If you’re a fan of the Senate — and most Canadians are not — his findings will not be pretty.
And so, by the end of the week, Canadians will have one senator — Duffy — already in front of a judge, another former senator about to go on trial, active RCMP investigations into two other senators and a pile of new allegations against another 10.
This is the point at which, I suspect, Canadians throw up their hands and conclude that we need a change in Ottawa. Any change.
That, to a large degree, is what Albertans recently concluded. It was a rot of a different kind in Alberta than we see in the Senate of Canada but it was a rot that a poorly run campaign by the incumbent Progressive Conservatives could not overcome. And Albertans chose change. And the agent of change happened to be Rachel Notley and the Alberta New Democrats.
The Senate scandal now involves and will likely involve politicians who sat in Harper’s caucus and some who sat in the caucus of Justin Trudeau and other Liberal leaders. None have ever sat in Thomas Mulcair’s NDP caucus.
If Canadians are disgusted by what they will see in the Senate expense scandal next week, expect Mulcair to be loudly and often making the case that he, like Notley, can be Canada’s agent of change.
Kilo_302 said:
