Election Ringside: A daily exchange for The Globe and Mail between strategists Tom Flanagan, left, and John DuffyThe Globe and Mail
Election Ringside is a daily e-mail exchange for The Globe and Mail between strategists Tom Flanagan and John Duffy. Check in every weekday afternoon during the 2011 federal election campaign for their insights and opinions about the campaign as it unfolds.
From: Tom Flanagan Sent: Monday, April 11, 2011, 9:15 a.m. ET To: John Duffy Subject: Election Ringside
Hi John, I suggest we talk about general debate strategy today, then go into the debating strengths and weaknesses of the individual leaders tomorrow.
Sometimes you go into a debate mainly hoping not to suffer a loss, but this time I don't think any leader can afford to follow a stand-pat strategy. The Conservatives continue to maintain a healthy lead over the Liberals, but it's not big enough to guarantee a majority. And, as Stephen Harper has been saying, if he doesn't get a majority, the other parties may gang up on him the House of Commons. Michael Ignatieff has ruled out a formal coalition, but he has left the door open for a virtual coalition, in which he could run a minority government with the tacit support of the NDP and BQ. Mr. Harper's life will certainly be simpler if he can win a majority.
The Liberals need to do better than to simply block a Conservative majority. Their virtual coalition will be politically difficult to pull off if the Conservatives come back with close to a majority. Will voters stand for Mr. Ignatieff overturning the Conservative government if he has, say, 75 seats and the Conservatives have 150? The virtual coalition will work much better politically if the Liberals can win, say, 100 seats while holding the Conservatives to 125 or so.
Jack Layton also needs to do better. In most polls, his NDP is running at 15 per cent or even lower. At those numbers, they will lose a lot of seats they now hold, undoing the progress they have made since 2004.
Gilles Duceppe should want to do better as well. The BQ is polling lower in Quebec than in the last election. But his main forum will be the French debate. In the English debate, he just has to give voters outside Quebec the impression that he wouldn't be a scary partner in a virtual coalition-give all that separatism stuff a pass.
With everyone needing to make gains in order to fulfill their objectives, it should be an interesting show.
From: John Duffy Sent: Monday, April 11, 10:48 a.m. ET To: Tom Flanagan
Tom, you're right, and you have touched on something absolutely critical to an understanding of this very odd election. Simply put, there are different victory conditions for the two major contenders. Mr. Harper's Conservatives need to be close to a majority and far ahead of the Liberals to govern. Mr. Ignatieff's Liberals need only be within hailing distance of the Conservatives to find themselves perhaps in government at some point in the life of the next parliament. This situation is unprecedented in Canadian politics. It could dominate the TV debates, and my guess is that it will dominate the second half of the campaign. Indeed, variable victory could well become an ongoing part of Canada's federal landscape.
Historically, the opportunity to govern in Canada has been a fairly open-and-shut affair. Whichever party gets the most seats wins - that is, is called on by the GG to try to govern. If lacking a majority of seats, that party tries and almost always succeeds in gaining the support of another in the House.
Only twice at the federal level has there ever been any challenge to these informal customs. In 1925, Prime Minister Mackenzie King emerged from a bruising election with fewer seats than Tory Arthur Meighen in a minority parliament. Despite furious public and Conservative reaction, King insisted on his prerogative to meet parliament as PM, wrangled the support of the Progressive party's MPs, and clung to power for over a year before resigning when the Progressives were peeled from him by a government corruption scandal.
Subsequent opportunities in which a second-place party could plausibly have governed occurred in 1957, 1962, 1972 and 1979, but in each case, the road was not taken. Then came the coalition crisis of 2008. Since that time, it has been fairly clear to most observers that the "whoever gets the most seats wins" dictum may not prevail.
That basic fact has changed everything. Variable victory means that different parties can win despite different results. Variable victory explains why the Liberals have been curiously willing to launch an election despite being miles behind the Conservatives. And variable victory explains smiling faces on the Liberal bus despite a Tory lead that in other times would perhaps have triggered a mid-campaign leadership revolt. And Tom, you are right that variable victory explains the curious position we see going into the debates, where both major leaders might wind up plausibly claiming a strategic victory in what is supposed to be a zero-sum game.
At the halfway point, the Conservatives remain miles ahead and tantalizingly close to the majority threshold. However, Mr. Ignatieff may be inching closer to his unique victory conditions. The idea of Mr. Ignatieff as prime minister is becoming more plausible with each evening's positive media. What remains is the conversation about the shape of the next parliament. Coalition talk got off to a roaring start at the beginning of the campaign. It will be very interesting to see whether it continues Tuesday night. My hunch is it will. Big time.
From: Tom Flanagan Sent: Monday, April 11, 2011, 12:00 p.m. ET To: John Duffy
Excellent comments, John. I like your concept of "variable victory." Now from the high-minded theoretical level to the brutalities of partisan warfare.
One thing the Liberals have always been very good at is collecting damning little bits of information through opposition research and then releasing at the right time to do maximum damage. A Liberal fave is to realize a stabilizer on the eve of the leaders debate, to throw the main opponent off course. A classic case was the first English debate in 2006, when the Liberals released on debate day a speech that Mr. Harper had given years ago and none of us on his team even knew about.
Well, everything the Blue Team knows about hardball politics we learned by studying the Red Team. Hence I was gratified to see today in the Sun newspapers a story about Michael Ignatieff having voted in Britain and having said he would vote for John Kerry in the 2004 American presidential election. Did the Sun chain ferret out these nuggets by themselves? I doubt it. I see the hidden hand of Conservative opposition research, although, like the CIA with an assassination, they will never admit it. What's encouraging is the Blue Team's ability to hold this back and release it at a time when it will interfere with Liberal debate prep. It takes maturity to pull off an elegant maneuver like this. Thanks to the Red Team for providing so many good lessons over the years.
From: John Duffy Sent: Monday, April 11, 12:43 p.m. ET To: Tom Flanagan
Cue scary-politician music. Blood-dripping graphics. Voiceover: "Michael Ignatieff: He didn't categorically deny voting in the U.S. seven years ago for you."
Hats off to the boys in the basements for digging up and moving this kettle of old fish. I doubt, however, Mr. Ignatieff will have too much trouble handling this. The U.S. story is open-and-shut - he says he didn't vote there and can probably laugh off claiming that he did, assuming the evidence is real. As for the U.K. point, if he did vote there 14 years ago, as is perfectly legal, he can probably argue it's not much different from a Sri Lankan or Nigerian voting in an Ontario municipal election, as Commonwealth citizens were until recently entitled to do. The whole Conservative Ignatieff-is-a-carpetbagger narrative has always carried with it the potential implication that immigrants and expats are disqualified from high office. Look for Mr. Ignatieff to get huffy on this point. Meantime, my sense is that the Auditor-General's allegations of misleading Parliament about the Muskoka G8-G20 schmozzle will land a lot harder than this stuff about Mr. Ignatieff's expatriate political tendencies of decades gone by.
Tom Flanagan is professor of political science at the University of Calgary and a former Conservative campaign manager. John Duffy is founder of StrategyCorp and a former adviser to prime minister Paul Martin.