Canadian politics – voters want something to vote for
Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Photo: ca.news.yahoo.com
In the wake of some resounding election losses — the collapse of the Liberals federally in 2011, the failure of the Ontario PCs in that same year to take a solid lead in the polls to victory, the failure of the Wildrose Alliance in Alberta in 2012, and, most recently, the failure of the BC NDP to turn a twenty point lead going into the election into a win — there’s been a boatload of ink spilled on the question of where it all went wrong.
There’s also been a missing thread in all that analysis. You have parties of the left, right, and centre all failing, so it can’t just be a trend toward one direction or another. Telegenic leaders have gone down to defeat just as readily as obviously wonkish ones.
Still, the missing thread can be discerned. None of the losers gave the voters any reason to vote for them, beyond “throwing the other guys out.”
Canadian politics – BC NDP defeated resoundingly in 2013 election
BC Premier Christy Clark Photo: commons.wikimedia.org
In BC’s recent election, Christy Clark’s biggest asset in going for a fourth term was the same one as always: being the leader of the “not-NDP” party. For the NDP to win, they had to convert “time for a change” (after twelve years of BC Liberal rule) into a reason to go to the polls and select the local BC NDP candidate.
This they never did. Neither did Danielle Smith’s Wildrose Alliance ever actually give Albertans a reason beyond “after over forty years, how about a new type of conservative” to stop voting Alberta PC. Alison Redford’s biggest assets last year were inertia, and the ability to appeal to self-styled “progressives” outside the PCAA.
Offering up endless lists of this and that as election promises, as Michael Ignatieff (and Stéphane Dion and Paul Martin before him) did for the federal Liberals, doesn’t answer the “what are we for” question either. No one remembers all the promises. No one sees the thread running through them.
You need that thread, that connector that says why you’re promising the specifics you are. Otherwise it’s seen by voters as just a grab bag of focus-group-tested items designed to peel off slices of the electorate.
Yes, voters are cynical, after all these years of blatant manipulation.
Canadian politics – Early signs Federal NDP get it
NDP leader Thomas Mulcair. Photo: handout.
Listening to Federal NDP head and leader of the Official Opposition Tom Mulcair earlier this year talk about how “urban affairs” would form the core of the NDP’s 2015 election campaign showed a little bit of what’s needed. He spent an hour in a meeting taking questions, constantly relating his answers about what the NDP disliked in current Conservative policy and what it would do about the issues raised through the urban affairs prism.
It was early days, and there’s a lot of work that party still has to do to flesh everything out, but it’s a sign that they get it.
For all those people who want to see the back of the Harper Conservatives, take a hint, because they got this a long time ago.
Simply putting the “right face” in front of the party without solving this fundamental question of the raison d’être of the party is also a good way to lose. Ontario PCs are rumbling once again about removing Tim Hudak as leader. BC NDPers are doing the same with Adrian Dix. The federal Liberals rallied to elect Justin Trudeau as the one with the youthful face and name recognition they thought they needed. But leadership change without fundamental clarity about direction is meaningless.
The voters know that, too. Ask them, as pollsters do, if they like the pretty face and they’ll say yes. But on polling day that’s not enough to carry the day, and once again everyone scrambles to figure out why the polls were wrong. If the right questions — “do you know what they stand for” and “do you agree with that direction” — were asked, the fatal gap would be exposed.
Canadian politics – Voters wants consistent principles, policy positions
Parties in opposition also sometimes take opposition too far. Yes, it is the job of an opposition party to oppose — to challenge, probe, test, push, criticize what the government’s up to. But there’s opposition and then there’s opposition. Opposition from a principled position also communicates that principle, that unifying thread, as a positive even while the “negativity” of opposition is undertaken. Without it, it’s all just noise, and that’s how the voters perceive it.
Federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau. Photo: Handout.
Voters know that a majority government just has to wait out the noise, and then do what it wanted to anyway.
What they want to see is that opposition players are being critical from a consistent point of view — and that, in their criticism, they have an alternative on offer.
Far too many political consultants of late have advised that an opposition party shouldn’t commit themselves publicly to much, especially far enough in front of the next vote to allow the governing party to steal the good ideas. (A lot of that comes from the endless years in the twentieth century where the governing Liberals would steal one idea after another from the NDP or PCs.)
The BC Conservatives could be the party of entrepreneurs and small business, against the corporate BC Liberals. The Wildrose Alliance could be the party of fiscal discipline and fixing the boom-bust cycle of Alberta’s economics, against the free-spending more of the same Alberta PCs. The Ontario PCs could be putting forward a vision of a twenty-first century Ontario, instead of promising a more austere version of the Ontario Liberals. Federally, the Liberals could be the champions of individual liberty (the NDP are, as I said earlier, staking out being the “urban regions” party).
But note the “could” in all of those — because the focus isn’t there. Without a focus, though, you lose, again and again.
We need better opposition parties, because without them, we’re stuck with the lousy governing ones we have.
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