The Liberals' and NDP's Strategies of Mutual Destruction

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Jack Layton is criticising Stephen Harper. Michael Ignatieff is criticising Stephen Harper. It's a strange country we live in where the main goal these two men have in attacking Stephen Harper is not to steal votes from Harper but to steal votes from each other.

But it's true. The sad fact is the the NDP sees its best chance for growth in siphoning from the Liberals, and the Liberals see their best chance for growth in siphoning from the NDP. Both parties seem to think that Harper's 35-or-so percent is more or less carved in stone, and as yet they haven't made much of an attempt to take votes from the two seemingly 'single-issue' parties.

As Harper himself seems eager to paint them as natural coalition partners dying for the chance to jump in to bed with each other, it may seem bizarre to see these two 'infighting' so much. It must seem, from the outside, counteractive as hell - and there are many who consider it the surest way to get Harper's Conservatives a majority.

Is it?

Well, what I've done here is looked at the results of the 2008 election. And then what I've done is determined what the composition of the house would look like if we shifted support only between these two parties. So that suggests a scenario where everyone who voted CPC, Green or BQ last time does again this time, and the only fluidity is between the Liberals and the NDP, in a completely consistent and predictable fashion across the country. For the sake of consistency, the graph I've generated looks only at increments of ten percentage points, even though a shift of merely 1% is enough to get seats changing colours. So when it says, for example, "LIB-10%", that imagines a scenario where one in ten Liberal supporters starts voting NDP - in each riding, one-tenth of the 2008 Liberal vote is shaved off the Liberal tally and added to the NDP tally. Obviously this is going to see Liberals lose seats and the NDP gain seats, but it can also effect the other parties too: a riding where the Liberals finished first, the Conservatives finished second and the NDP finished third is likely to turn Conservative sooner than turn NDP as in this scenario Liberal support bleeds to the NDP. To what extent is this a problem?

Well, the results are interesting. The centre column of the graph shows the Commons composition that actually resulted from the 2008 vote. When we start to move left from there, as Liberal support goes, ten percentage points by ten percentage points, to the NDP, we see that the Liberal seat count drops swiftly and the NDP seat count rises. Ten percent gone and the Liberals lose ten seats, another ten percent gone and they lose another seventeen seats. Yet where the Liberals have lost 27 seats, the NDP have picked up only ten. Where have the other seventeen seats gone?

Amazingly, to the Conservatives. With no other factors affecting voting preferences, the defection of one in five Liberals to the NDP gives the Conservatives a majority. That is to say that in my scenario the Conservatives get not a single voter more than they had in 2008, yet this movement on the 'opposition' side gives them their majority.

It continues from there - to a point. If the Liberals shed 30% of their vote to the NDP, then the NDP pick up eleven seats, passing both the Liberals (now down to a mere 33 seats) and the stable BQ to form the official opposition - but to a further strengthened Conservative majority. The NDP's success at the Liberals' expense in this scenario has handed the Conservatives a remarkable 22 seats, which is even more than the NDP themselves have been able to pick up. In these 22 ridings, the Liberal vote has dropped below the Conservatives, but the NDP vote hasn't risen enough to pass the Conservatives. Yet, I hasten to add, though while the model continues, past here I think it really stretches the boundary of 'possibility' into 'strictly theoretical'.

But let's carry on: an extra ten percent reduces the Liberals to an eight-party rump, and this time it's just the NDP who benefit: the Conservatives and the Bloc stay more or less the same, while the NDP seat count vaults from 58 to 83. When we reach the 50% mark, the point were one in two 2008 Liberals have left the party and are now voting NDP, the Liberals have disappeared from Commons altogether and the NDP have now hit the 100 mark. One hundred MPs and a turnaround where the Conservative numbers are now starting to drop again - but at this 50% point, even if the 100-person-strong NDP caucus unites with the essentially-unchanged 50-strong Bloc caucus, and even in the unlikely event that Bill Casey and André Arthur side with them, the opposition is still not enough to topple Harper. The Conservatives still have a majority.

As we preside over the final destruction of the Liberals here, as we watch 60%, 70%, 80%, 90% and finally every last Liberal vote cross over to the NDP, these numbers switch. At 60%, the Conservatives lose their majority. At 80%, the NDP passes the Conservatives and we finally see the spectacularly unlikely face of Prime Minister Layton (provided Harper doesn't form a coalition with Duceppe...). And at the terminus of 100%, we have the point at which the Liberals and NDP have entirely combined to form a new party - a different 'unite the left' scenario - we see the NDP/Liberal party with 152 seats to the Conservatives' 113 and the Bloc's 41, and Casey and Arthur still laughing. But still no majority.

Which raises and entirely different point: that for all the talk of a divided left, that neither the NDP nor the Liberals can sneak to a majority by reaching into each other's pockets. In more than half the ridings in Canada, the theoretical combined Liberal/NDP vote remains less than the actual vote given to the Conservatives or the Bloc - there is simply no way either the Liberals or the NDP can get a majority without stealing votes from the Conservatives or Bloc, and there's no way they can get a functioning coalition without working with either of them. Not based on 2008's numbers, anyway.

Excepting that I've completely ignored the Green vote here. The Green vote could serve as a spoiler in a number of ridings, I don't know. That might be another thing to look at on another day.

However, I've only looked at half of the above graph. As the current Liberal caucus is much larger than the current NDP one, obviously the game of dominoes I've set up tumbles more entertainingly when we watch the Liberal vote shift to the NDP vote. But looking in the other direction, we see a very different story indeed.

Superficially, much is the same: the NDP number drops quickly, to the point where it takes a 50% vote shift to kill of the NDP completely (meaning that if half of all 2008 NDP voters in every riding in the country cast their votes this time out for the Liberals, the NDP would not win a single seat). We have to go all the way to 70% to see the Liberals pass the Conservatives as the party with the largest number of seats - what Harper would like to call 'the winner' (it was 80% for the NDP, though the 70% number was pretty close). And of course the end point is the same - as it should be, since 100% NDP support going to the Liberals is much like 100% Liberal support going to the NDP. The Liberals are as unable to vault to a majority on NDP backs as the NDP are on Liberal backs.

Yet there is a huge difference between these two scenarios: bleeding support from the NDP to the Liberals never pushes the Conservatives into majority territory - in fact, it never results in anything greater than a single seat gain for the Tories. In fact, as an NDP-to-Liberal bleed starts peeling seats away from the Bloc much faster than the other way round (since the NDP were much less of an issue in Québec in 2008 than they're shaping up to be thins time round), NDP-to-Liberal transfer immediately improves the total combined Liberal/NDP seat count.

A million other factors muddy the issue to the extent that nothing here has any value outside of the strictly academic, I concede. Yet when viewed strictly on the basis of this information here, the outcome is tough to overlook: to the extent that 'vote splitting' between the Liberals and the NDP can be seen as a 'key to a Conservative victory', it's really only true whenever the NDP manage to take votes from the Liberals: the Liberals can fearless steal from the NDP as much as they want without risking a Conservative majority, while the NDP can make no such claim.

A surprising result, perhaps. But one with many repercussions for the campaigns over the next month.

Ontario and Other Kingmakers

So there's a belief that you come across every now and then that Ontario determined federal elections; that what Ontario wants, Ontario gets. Historically, this claim has most often been made in connection to so-called 'Western Alienation', the feeling that the Western provinces are left outside the halls of power. In fact, as often as not that claim is made not merely of Ontario but of Ontario and Québec in combination as 'Central Canada' or the whole of the country east of Manitoba as 'Eastern Canada'. As those geographic blocs, however, form a majority of seats in parliament, I'm not sure how meaningful it is to talk about them dominating politics. To take my point to an extreme, if someone from the North complained that 'the provinces' held too much power, they would by any definition be factually right, but it would be tough to argue it as a failing of democracy.

Breaking the country into four blocs - the West, Ontario, Québec, and the Atlantic - is practical as the four contituent parts each hold a large amount of seats (at present 92, 106, 75 and 32 respectively), and as they're each terms with historical merit ('The West' is the most nebulous term, really, consisting of four provinces each with very distinct voting trends, but when totalled, trends do emerge).

In this exercise, I've gone back to Diefenbaker's 1958 landslide, and in each case I've looked at the total number of seats per party returned in each of the four regions, and I've also considered what Parliament would look like if it were composed of the whole country minus the region in particular. In other words, a "minus-Ontario" result would be the combined seat totals for the West, for Québec and for the Atlantic (the North as well - in each case I include the North's three seats in relevant national totals, but otherwise ignore them); as if Ontario had seceded from the union prior to the election.

The point of this math is to consider scenarios where the actual government formed by the election in question (which party, and whether it was a majority or a minority) differed from the "-Ontario" result; if removing Ontario from the equation would produce a different government than actually occurred.

The overview results are interesting themselves: In 17 elections, the nation as a whole has returned 6 Liberal majorities and 4 Liberal minorities, 3 PC majorities and 2 PC minorities, and two Conservative majorities. So Liberal domination, but a relatively healthy bipartisan mix. Looking at the regions, though, shows quite a difference: the Atlantic considered alone returned 9 PC majorities, 8 of them straight, between 1958 and 1984; after that, they switched teams decisively, electing 7 liberal majorities, interrupted by their only plurality: the surprising result in 1997 when the Atlantic returned a plurality of PC MPs.

Québec looks similar. Though they went PC for Diefenbaker and Mulroney (being largely responsible for Canada's only two near-consensuses in recent history), otherwise it was Liberal pre-Mulroney (7 straight majorities, one plurality) and BQ post-Mulroney (6 straight majorities). The West, despite an amazing volatility in BC and intermittently strong NDP results in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, have been remarkably consistent in their affections. Trudeaumania took over BC in 1968 enough to return a Liberal plurality, but otherwise it's been non-stop PC majorities from 1958 to 1988, non-stop Reform/CA/Conservative majorities since.

That leaves Ontario, which perhaps is the Bellwether, based on how consistent the other three regions have been. Ontario has returned 11 Liberal majorities, 2 PC majorities, 2 PC pluralities and 1 Conservative plurality.

Overall, the West has swayed the winning party on three occasions (1962, 1979 and 2006), while Ontario has done so on three occasions (1979, 1997 and 2004), and Québec on four occasions (1963, 1965, 1972 and 1980 - remarkably a Québec-less Canada would have returned the PCs every year from 1958 to 1988 except in 1968). The Atlantic since 1958 have not once swayed an election.

Looking down the years, then:

• In 1958, Diefenbaker won a decisive majority. Each region gave a majority of seats to the PCs, so obviously each 'minus parliament' also did so. It's interesting that while the Liberals tend to be 'Canada's natural governing party', the only true landslide sea-to-sea consensuses we've seen have both been PC.
• 1962 brought a PC minority, the first of three minorities. The coasts stayed majority-PC, while Ontario returned a Liberal majority and Québec a Liberal plurality. 1962 definitely shows that the 'Central Canada' thesis has holes in it: Ontario and the Atlantic had no affect, while Québec held the PCs to a minority (a minus-Québec parliament would have returned a PC majority) and the West actually chose the PM (a minus-West parliament would have been Liberal minority).
• 1963, though, shifts the numbers just enough to prove the West's point: a Liberal minority brought about by the coasts returning majority PC MPs and the 'centre' returning Liberal majorities. But the minus-numbers tell an interesting story. Again, Ontario and the Atlantic had no effect, while the West this time kept the Liberals to a minority and Québec turned the tides, from a PC minority to a Liberal one.
• 1965 was another Liberal minority, and everything I've said for 1963 applies here too, except that a minus-Atlantic parliament would have been an even split: 116 Liberals to 116 'others'. I think technically that's a Liberal minority, but I'm not entirely sure how to classify it.

• 1968 is Trudeau's big year, and a Liberal majority. It's interesting to note, looking back, that Trudeau's party-poopers were not the West so much as the Atlantic. The West brought a threadbare Liberal minority, while the Atlantic decisively stuck with favourite son Robert Stanfield, giving his PCs 25 in 32 seats. 'Central Canada', of course, went deep red. This was a Liberal majority, and no single region could have changed it from a Liberal majority.
• Trudeau won 1972 too, but by two seats. The Atlantic kept its PC majority, the West returned to a PC majority (never again to waver), and Ontario went to a PC plurality. Thus, it seems like 1972 was Québec's year, with their decisive Liberal majority keeping Trudeau at 24 Sussex. And indeed, Ontario and the Atlantic had no effect, while the West held Trudeau to a majority, and a minus-Québec parliament would have been a PC majority.
• In 1974, Trudeau got his majority back, and the numbers are similar, just shifted in the Liberals' favour. PC majorities in the West and Atlantic, Liberal majorities in Québec and Ontario, and the notion that 'Central Canada' runs the country quite firmly established by now. This is certainly the case in 1974, with neither the West nor the Atlantic having any sway, with Ontario enough to shift it from a Liberal minority to a Liberal majority, and with Québec's vote enough to move from a PC minority to a Liberal majority.
• 1979's PC minority was interesting. This time out Ontario joined the West and the Atlantic in returning PC majorities, while Québec returned another Liberal majority. Only the Atlantic had no sway this time: were it not for the West, the PC minority would have been a Liberal majority. Were it not for Ontario, the PC minority would have been a Liberal minority. And were it not for Québec, the PC minority would have been a decisive majority. No wonder the government was doomed to failure.
• 1980 brought Trudeau decisively back, with another Liberal majority. With the West returning only two Liberals and Québec only one PC (PC majority and Liberal majority respectively), it increasingly looks like Ontario really is the kingmaker, its fickle preferences dictating results when the West and Québec are so decisive in their support for their 'home teams'. In fact, both it and the Atlantic 9for the first time) went Liberal-majority. Only Québec can lay claim to holding sway, though, as minus-parliaments for the other three regions still return Liberal majorities, while a minus-Québec again brings a PC minority.

• 1984 is our second landslide, with Mulroney's PCs gaining a majority in each region (in each province and territory, in fact) and reducing the Liberals to 40 seats. There's little to say here - electing Mulroney was a nation-wide effort, and no individual region could have stemmed that tide (or wanted to, as it transpired).
• 1988 was another PC majority, but less decisively. Ontario gave the PCs only a plurality, while the Atlantic returned a Liberal majority. With the West handing the NDP their best-ever result (while still going PC-majority, though), it seems like Mulroney had Québec to thank, proving that after years of kingmaking for the Liberals, La Belle Province could play kingmaker for the PCs too. Interesting, then, that after this election Québec will decisively turn away from affecting federal outcomes, remaining by and large on opposition benches henceforth. As it turns out, though, no single region kept Mulroney in power. A minus-Québec would have still been PC, but minority, while the other three regions had no effect.

• 1993, of course, is where everything changed. I imagine most Canadians old enough to remember could tell you that Ontario and the Atlantic sent decisive Liberal majorities, while the West sent a Reform majority and Québec a BQ majority. What all this means, though, is that ultimately not one region could be said to have turned this election, however it appears. A minus-West election and a minus-Québec election would have unsurprisingly returned Liberal majorities. So would have a minus-Atlantic parliament. A minus-Ontario parliament would have returned a minority, but the Liberals would still have won it.
• 1997 was perhaps even more interesting. The only regional overall change from 1993 was that the Atlantic went plurality-PC (thus each of the four regions preferred a different party). Like last time, neither the West nor Québec nor the Atlantic could have prevented a Liberal majority, but this time the majority was all Ontario's - two-thirds of Chrétien's MPs were from Ontario. A minus-Ontario parliament would have returned, of all things, a Reform minority. But it would have been almost completely dysfunctional, with 60 Reform MPs, 54 Liberals, 44 Bloquistes, 21 New Democrats and 19 PCs. God know what kind of bills, if any, that parliament could pass.
• 2000 was 1993 again: Liberal majorities in Ontario and the Atlantic, a barebones BQ majority in Québec, and another majority for the Party-Formerly-Known-as-Reform in the West. A Liberal majority, that without Ontario would have been a minority, but otherwise no region could have changed.
• The Liberals won in 2004 too, if a minority mandate can truly be called 'winning' and 'merely not losing'. The regions once again still look the same, though that western party is now called the Conservatives. Neither Québec nor the Atlantic could have swayed a Liberal minority, but but for the West it would have been a Liberal majority, and but for Ontario it would have been a Conservative minority. As indeed it was about to be.
• 2006 brought Harper's Conservatives a minority, elected through regional majorities: the BQ in Québec, the Liberals in Ontario and the Atlantic, and the CPC in the West. So while all four regions have returned the exact same results in each of the previous three elections, the result has shifted from Liberal majority to Liberal minority to Conservative minority. And quite clearly the West were kingmakers this time, as no other region could have prevented a Conservative minority, but a minus-West parliament would have been another Liberal minority.
• By 2008, the Conservatives had been able, with a pickaxe, to slowly pick away at Liberal support in Ontario to the point that this time out they'd tipped the balance - a CPC plurality in Ontario. The other three regions have stuck with their favourites for the sixth time in a row (excepting the Atlantic in 1997) though, suggesting again that Ontario is where elections are made and broken. In fact, though, we have Québec to thank for the current government makeup. None of the West, Ontario or the Atlantic could have changed a CPC minority, but were it not for Québec, Harper would have had his long-dreamed-of majority.

What to do with all this information? Well, what it shows me is that the West is more of a kingmaker than Westerners might think but that ultimately Québec wields the most power - especially before the birth of the BQ. It's also interesting to see just how little power the Atlantic actually have. Unsurprising, perhaps, in terms of overall numbers, but seeing how independent-minded they can be, still unexpected.

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Canada: Understanding BC

Image via Wikipedia

I realise I'm properly due a 'part two' on the youth vote. But I got stuck in regionalism, I guess... nah, I'll get back to it, hopefully in a day or two. I was just intrigued by something that I've been noticing in EKOS polls for weeks now, something that's being called to attention this week: the existence of a true and proper four-way race in BC. The current EKOS shows the following for BC voters' intentions:

• Conservatives: 33.6% (1.9% above the national vote)
• NDP: 26.9% (9.5% above the national vote)
• Liberals: 19.8% (6.4% below the national vote)
• Green: 16.8% (5.3% above the national vote)
• Others: 2.9% (10.3% below the national vote)

A few things to consider: the BC 'other' vote is actually identical to the national 'other' vote: when I say there's a difference of 10.3%, that actually reflects BQ support, averaged across the whole nation. Accepting that the existence of a non-national party in Québec makes it more difficult to compare nationwide and provincial votes, we can still see that the NDP and Green poll much better in BC than in the rest of the nation, and the Liberals poll significantly lower. BC is actually the only part of the country where, above the margin of error, the Liberals are polling less than second-best. Intriguingly, the Vancouver numbers are practically identical to the province as a whole: I say 'intriguingly', because historically this has not always been true.

A heightened level of support for the NDP and a lowered level of support for the Liberals suggests a bipartisan system of 'left party' vs. 'right party', with the centrist party as a minor 'third party': a political playing ground that exists in a lot of places, but has tended not to exist in Canada. Looking back over BC's voting trends in recent federal elections, we can see this:

• 2008: CPC 44.4%, NDP 25.0%, LPC 19.3%, Green 9.4%
• 2006: CPC 37.3%, NDP 28.6%, LPC 27.6%, Green 5.3%
• 2004: CPC 36.3%, LPC 28.6%, NDP 26.6%, Green 6.3%
• 2000: CA 49.4%, LPC 27.7%, NDP 11.3%, PC 7.3%, Green 2.1%
• 1997: Ref 43.1%, LPC 28.8%, NDP 18.2%, PC 6.2%, Green 2.0%
• 1993: Ref 36.4%, LPC 28.1%, NDP 15.5%, PC 13.5%
• 1988: NDP 37.0%, PC 35.3%, LPC 20.4%, Ref 4.8%
• 1984: PC 46.6%, NDP 35.1%, LPC 16.4%
• 1980: PC 41.5%, NDP 35.3%, LPC 22.2%
• 1979: PC 44.3%, NDP 31.9%, LPC 23.0%
• 1974: PC 41.9%, LPC 33.8%, NDP 23.0%
• 1972: NDP 35.0%, PC 33.0%, LPC 28.9%
• 1968: LPC: 41.8% NDP 32.6, PC 18.9%

An interesting picture, not nearly as clear as I'd thought it would be. Though we need to go all the way back to 1968 (42 years) to find the Liberals winning the province, whereas the Liberals have been in power nationwide for most of that time, they've spent longer as #2 than I'd figured. In fact, for the entire Reform/CA era, between the PC's collapse and the 'consolidation of the Right', the Liberals consistently came in #2 in BC. In other words, the splitting of the right-wing vote somehow consistently pushed the centrist Liberals above the left-wing NDP: which makes little sense on the surface.

Before that era and since it, I think we can truly see the makings of a bipartisan system in BC: in 1984, for example, the PC party and the NDP party between them took over 80% of the vote in BC. While there's certainly an element there of Western dislike of Trudeau and his energy policy, NDP support is more difficult to gauge, as they are equally interested in federal intervention in energy policy.

And dislike of Trudeau, and his party as a whole, does little to explain the extent to which, provincially, BC is even more polarised. Remarkably, you have to go back to 1937 to find an election where the NDP (or the CCF before them) polled lower than #2 in total number of votes: in fact, it was the success of the CCF that in 1945 caused the Liberal and Conservative parties to enter into a coalition in order to beat them: a bloc of anti-leftist support that arguably invented the left-right dynamic we see here. The coalition collapsed, and both parties were swept practically off the map by a new right-wing party called the Social Credit Party. By 1975, the SC and the NDP were capturing almost 90% of the total vote, making the Liberals and the PCs 'fringe' parties: at a time when their federal namesakes were the two main parties, nationwide.

What confuses the picture is the fact that, in BC, the Social Credit Party was ultimately replaced on the right by the BC Liberals. For most of the rest of the country, this makes little sense, but names do not tell the whole story: the BC Liberals are usually considered the main right-wing party in BC, and BC Liberal voters are by no means Liberal Party of Canada voters - in fact, there's a good chance they'll support the Conservative Party of Canada.

So if that's the case, how do things stand at the moment? Well, here's a recent provincial poll:

• NDP: 44%
• BC Liberals: 32%
• Green: 13%
• BC Conservatives: 7%

This is still extremely bipartisan, but less than it historically has been: 7% support for a party calling itself 'Conservatives' is unheard of since 1972 (though there has always been a small-c conservative party in either the government or in the opposition in BC).

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Canada: Un-Cult of Un-Personality

Image by John Hansen via Flickr

So I was reading in Metro, the free newspaper/magazine that can be found lining the floors of any TTC subway car or terminal like massive birdcages, about support for the prime ministerial candidates of the three so-called 'major' parties. I can't even find the newspaper now, so to hell with citations. But it didn't present anything we haven't seen a hundred times now: (1) Jack Layton has a net positive ranking - more people like him than dislike him. (2) Stephen Harper has pretty crummy net-negative ratings. (3) Michael Ignatieff gets ratings that make Harper look positively saintly. Inasmuch as it truly is measurable, and I think you could make some good arguments that it's not, support for Michael Ignatieff is abysmal. The man is just not very popular - not even within his own party. I have an EKOS poll that's a few weeks old that tells much the same story - but check out the partisan numbers:

• Jack Layton:
• Nationwide: 43% approve, 26% disapprove, 31% DK/NR
• NDP: 69% approve, 11% disapprove, 20% DK/NR
• Stephen Harper:
• Nationwide: 33% approve, 49% disapprove, 18% DK/NR
• Conservatives: 79% approve, 9% disapprove, 12% DK/NR
• Michael Ignatieff:
• Nationwide: 20% approve, 48% disapprove, 29% DK/NR
• Liberals: 45% approve, 30% disapprove, 25% DK/NR

Apart from the interesting observation that Harper has better party support than even Layton (interesting in that his party is a recent synthesis of two different parties, one of whom he was very clearly partisan), what's noteworthy is (1) Ignatieff has a 'don't know' percentage rougly equal to Layton's, despite the much higher profile of the LPC over then NDP, (2) amazingly, his 'don't know' percentage is still 25% even among self-described Liberals, (3) only one in five Canadians as a whole approves of him, and less than half of Liberals do. Not the party faithful, mind you - just the people who told EKOS they planned to vote Liberal.

This raises three points: (1) Can you trust polls like this, or do they really mean anything? (2) Why has Ignatieff been so unable to engage the public? (3) At what point to the Liberals concede that Ignatieff is perhaps a net loss to the party and, that after three consecutive uninspiring party leaders, there's something amiss about how they're choosing prime ministerial candidates?

It's the first question I'm more anxious to address. I think Canadians like to see our electoral system as a bit more technocratic than, say, our southern neighbours: that the cults of personality that happen down there, exemplified by the recent electoral season where the Democratic primaries offered a more gripping political campaign than the actual election, tend to be less important that partisan politics. Up here, we vote for the party here, not the person - both literally, in describing the Westminster system, and figuratively, in describing our approach to politics. I think there is some truth to that, but less than we might imagine. The CPC, for example, truly is Harper's Party, and it's tough to see how his eventual departure from politics could be anything but earth-shaking for the party. New Democrats rally around Layton all but unanimously, and NDP campaign brochures often feature his mustachioed face more promintently than whichever local candidate voters are meant to vote for. The Liberals, by extension, seem positively headless: a body without a head has neither a brain to control its varied components nor a mouth to verbalise a common purpose. It's tough to imagine how this situation can be anything less than traumatic for the party - and a major reason why stasis has set in among voting intentions at the moment.

Actually I don't think it would be unfair to say that at the federal level, unlike in the UK or in British Columbia, this stasis is the effect of a weak middle: generally speaking, a poll that shows, for example, Conservatives up and NDP down in Canada rarely shows much transferrence between the two parties. Instead, it shows that a certain percentage of people drifting from the Liberals to the CPC is supplanted by an equal percentage drifting from the NDP to the Liberals. A weak centre creates an unbridgeable gap between two precipices: Conservatives on one side, who have put their stakes down to a degree unprecedented on the national scene in decades, and the Continent of Leftist Parties on the other side, where voters may freely wander between parties, or toy with different parties before eventually voting Liberal.

I think the main reason Ignatieff has failed to spark much support is something similar to the criticisms currently being levelled against the Republicans in the USA: that he seems to be against much but for little. Ignatieff gives the impression of someone who has taken too literally the title of "Her Majesty's Opposition": a dedicated insistence on opposing everything Harper says leads to criticisms of politicking for its own sake, and of potential hypocrisy. Ignatieff seems oddly unable to focus the anti-Harper sentiment that exists into any real force, and as such it merely builds and disappates, while pro-Harper sentiment, the mere 30-some-odd percent that it is, solidifies.

The third question is something only the élite at the LPC can truly answer. I think there's a fear that prolonging a stream of lame-ducks from Martin to Dion to, seemingly, Ignatieff and perhaps beyond would be worse for the Liberal brand than propping up Ignatieff past his sell-by date for the sake of consistency. They might also not want to appear too bound to the whims of the public, who after all can change their opinions of people (Ignatieff started off with good levels of support, for example). But it does increasingly appear that Ignatieff is the wrong man for the job: the job he has (party leader) and the job he wants (prime minister). To the extent that the party's fortunes are bound to their leader's fortunes, that's a question the party might want to address soon rather than later.

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