Pollsters understand the news cycle as well as anybody else..So it’s no accident I’m sure, that as the Party of Pierre goes into its Quebec convention a poll lands indicating that if an election had taken place yesterday, the Conservative Party of Canada transition team would be picking out offices in the Langevin Block today..Thus 338Canada, an aggregator of electoral projections based on opinion polls, electoral history and demographic data: The Poilievre Conservatives would win 179 seats, knocking the Liberals down from their present 160, to a measly 103 where they can’t do any harm..The leader’s convention keynote speech should write itself..That said, should the NDP-Liberal arrangement hold, the election is not for another two years..Our old friend Jay Hill just happened to be by the office today, for a sit-down with Cory Morgan, so I put it to him: “If you were a Liberal strategist, unhappily tasked to do a ‘Yes but…” for a friendly TV station, what would you be telling the CBC?”.Hill didn’t even think about it. “Polls are for dogs and if a week is a long time in politics, two years is too long to tell. Our sheep will return to the fold, when confronted with a stark choice, etcetera and so on.”.Not for nothing was Hill an MP for 17 years. And that of course, is about all a Liberal could say..But inasmuch as a good negative campaign has worked for the Liberals before, that strategist might even be right about returning to the fold. Time for a negative campaign and some good old lies? It's worked before..Unfortunately for them, Poilievre is not making it easy this time..He has insulated himself against familiar Liberal purple-dinosaur innuendos that under a Conservative government abortion will be banned and abortionists sent to Arctic concentration camps: He has repeatedly said in both languages officielle that he is pro-choice..All a smarty-pants reporter would have to do to be humiliated would be to ask Poilievre if he could assure Canadians that a Conservative government would not make abortion illegal… If you’ve watched him reduce the prime minister to ‘honey-I-shrank-the-kids’ proportions during Question Period, you know what I mean..Meanwhile, the installation of the charming and effective Melissa Lantsman as deputy leader of the opposition insulates him against any accusations that gay marriage is in any danger from Mr. Poilievre..That leaves the lies option. Sounds crazy of course, but when the Liberals get truly desperate, they do crazy things..Back in 2006 when Stephen Harper won office, the Grits had an ad on their website that, to the beat of drums and martial music, announced, "Stephen Harper actually announced he wants to increase military presence in our cities. Canadian cities. Soldiers with guns. In our cities. In Canada. We did not make this up.".Actually, they did..Back to square one, then: Umm, maybe we could say Poilievre's a Russian agent?.Nevertheless, without prejudice to the success of a more imaginative dirty tricks campaign than I can imagine, there is a reason why this poll rings true and in my view, it won't do the Liberals any good to punch below the belt..Pundits are saying the Liberals have been losing popularity this year. .How about since 2015?.That was the year they came to power, with 6.9 million votes..In 2019, they won a second election, but were down to 6 million votes..In 2021, they logged just 5.6 million votes in an electorate enlarged by population growth..Read that again; the Liberals have lost 1.4 million votes in six years, or 20% of the votes they had in 2015, and have since needed the support of the NDP to govern..Now, 338 says the Liberals are in worse trouble yet, and would win only 29% of the popular vote, or a little under 5 million votes..There is a simple dynamic here..The first time you do something foolish, people forgive you. Likewise the second time..By the time you're up to a dozen, voters have forgotten what the first screw-ups were, but they do remember you're always doing something foolish..And when you try to explain it away, you've been sounding like a hypocrite. That's when they get tired of you and are ready to drop you..Certainly, from blackface through his admiration for the Chinese Communist government to the SNC Lavalin scandal and the foolishness of the special rapporteur appointment, this prime minister and his government have brought themselves into utter disrepute..That they have compounded their errors of ethics with blundering stupidities that hurt people, such as being warned increasing immigration will make the housing shortage worse and increasing immigration anyway merely layers on incompetence to an already withered reputation..It's almost impossible to come back from that..The Conservatives have much to celebrate in Quebec City this weekend. And the next election is theirs to lose.
