pre-mortem

pre-mortem

The Canadian election campaign is all over but for the voting, which is going on right now. If the polls are to be believed (and I for one do not believe them), then the Conservative party is on its way to forming a minority government, with an outside chance at a majority.

If the polls are right, then when historians look back on the 2005/06 campaign, they will see several events that changed the course of the campaign; all of these were negatives for the Liberals. First, there was Prime Ministerial aide Scott Reid's comments about the Conservative plan to give $1200 per year to parents for every child under the age of six, to assist with childcare. Reid mocked the plan, saying Canadian parents would waste the money on beer and popcorn. Reid has been curiously absent from the remainder of the campaign.

The next major event was in late December, when the RCMP announced an investigation into the Finance department over a series of large trades immediately prior to Finance Minister Ralph Goodale's announcement on income trusts. This reinforced the image of corruption within the Liberal party.

The third major event, and probably the one which did the most harm to the Liberals, was a series of 12 ads attacking the Conservative party. Had there only been 11 of the ads, which focused on painting Conservative leader Stephen Harper as a scary, extreme, right-wing ideologue beholden to George Bush, then they might have worked. It was the 12th ad however, which suggested that a Prime Minister Harper would impose martial law in Canadian cities, that may have been the final nail in the coffin for the Liberals. Average Canadians hold the understaffed, underequipped military in high esteem, and this ad was so over-the-top that when it appeared on the Liberal party website it caused an uproar across the country, largely due to the efforts of the blogosphere and later CTV, which kept all the ads on their own webpage. To make matters worse, the ads were all done in the same style, with a picture of Harper slowly coming into focus, accompanied by ominous drum music and stilted sentence fragments; the Soldiers ad ended with a sentence that is ripe for mockery, straight out of Dave Barry: "We are not making this up". As a result, the other 11 ads reminded everyone of the 12th ad. These ads were also ripe for parody.

Will these things be enough to put the Liberals out to pasture? I'd like to think so, but I doubt it. We'll find out tonight when the polls close.

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