But another prominent pollster, Nik Nanos of Nanos Research, told The Hill Times on Monday that he believes the angry response over revelations of fraudulent telephone calls misleading voters in at least one electoral district is coming primarily from the two-thirds of voters who did not cast ballots for the Conservatives last year.
Mr. Nanos compared the response—including 31,000 “contacts” and complaints over the past week and a half now under investigation by Elections Canada—to the Facebook and social media outburst over Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) December, 2008, decision to prorogue Parliament to avoid a House of Commons non-confidence vote.
“Prorogation, the challenge to democracy, or the threat to democracy, was never a top issue, never,” Mr. Nano told The Hill Times.
He said the robocall storm to this point is likely being generated by voters who oppose Mr. Harper and his government.
“With the Conservatives at 36 per cent, that means that 64 per cent do not support the Conservatives,” Mr. Nanos said. “This is just another occurrence for those people that are not part of the Harper universe to not like the government. It’s a validating story for them.”
Mr. Graves, however, said the affair could have legs, particularly after Mr. Harper and his government have alienated pockets of voters with earlier controversies, such as the Prime Minister’s decision to float a widely opposed idea for changing the qualification for the federal government’s Old Age Security pension.
“From a polling perspective, I guess the question remains—does this thing have legs? Is it the real deal and what kind of consequences would it have for the government, if it is,” Mr. Graves said.
“I don’t think the answers are clear yet, it has certainly moved beyond a mere north of the Queensway flavour du jour, kind of manufactured irritant. It’s now something which has gained national attention. And it does appear that it comes at a time when the Conservatives are not doing all that well with the public,” he said.
CTV and the Globe and Mail released a Nanos Research poll as the Parliamentary sittings were set to resume on Monday that suggested the early stages of the controversy, ignited by a Postmedia and Ottawa Citizen report on Thursday, Feb. 24, had not yet driven voters away from the governing Conservatives.
The poll—a survey of 1,023 voters across the country conducted from Friday, Feb. 25 to Wednesday, Feb. 29, found favour with the Conservatives, with support at 35.7 per cent—had not changed from a Nanos survey a month earlier. Support for the Liberal Party, whose candidates in swing ridings were reportedly the main targets in the robocall scheme, had risen to 29.5 per from 27.6 per cent. Support for the NDP remained steady from January at 25 per cent.
The biggest bombshell since the controversy began took place last Friday, March 2, when Elections Canada unexpectedly said that it had received so many complaints about election day phoning, following the original Postmedia/Ottawa Citizen report and the ensuing tumult in Parliament, that it was launching an investigation, likely with the support of RCMP investigators, and would present a report to Parliament.
Mr. Graves said Mr. Harper’s government does not currently have the “political capital” it needs to fare a storm if the crisis for the government deepens.
“The directional [opinion poll] numbers and vote numbers are indicative of moral authority, and they [the Conservatives] are not in terrific stead, they’re only within the margin of the NDP,” Mr. Graves said.
“The numbers on direction of country and in particularly federal government are the worst we’ve seen in an awful long time. They don’t have a lot of political capital if this thing does turn into a full-blown scandal. It’s hard to say, but it certainly has the earmarks of that being a strong possibility,” he said.
Mr. Graves said the scandal could turn “catastrophic” for the government. “If it is somewhere even in the middle of the range of claims that are being made from on one hand the benign rogue agents, some kids acting foolishly almost as if this was college hijinks, to the other end, which is this is some kind of an orchestrated web which is that this is skillfully managed from the centre and there is in fact a whole pattern of deceit and manipulation going on, even something in the middle of that would be something that could be quite catastrophic for the government,” he said.
Prior to its announcement last week of a new avenue of investigation into the 31,000 undefined contacts, which could be anywhere from telephone calls to emails to possibly tweets, Postmedia and the Ottawa Citizen quoted court documents to report Elections Canada was investigating robocall calls placed in the Guelph electoral district on voting day last May 2, with voices claiming to represent Elections Canada advising voters, reportedly Liberal supporters, that their polling stations had changed location.
Mr. Harper and Conservative MPs have denied the party was aware of the Guelph phone calls and a Conservative MP’s aide who had worked on the Conservative campaign in Guelph resigned his post with the MP. The assistant, Michael Sona, subsequently issued a statement he was not involved in the elaborate scheme behind the Guelph calls. They allegedly involved an unknown person using the alias Pierre Poutine, residing on Separatist Street in Joliette, Que., using a disposable cell phone to upload the fraudulent voice recordings to an automated dialing company in Edmonton, RackNine, for robocalling to Guelph voters.
Mr. Nanos said Mr. Harper’s early jump into the fray last week is a signal the Prime Minister is aiming his defence at the Conservative Party’s core base of supporters, as opposed to voters from the 64 per cent of the electorate that did not want Mr. Harper re-elected. “The Conservative Party can say absolutely, definitively, that it has no role in any of this,” Mr. Harper told the Commons last Wednesday.
“The reason they have been effective is because their strategy has been to effectively nurture the core, they’re not out to win a majority of popular support, they’re out to win a majority of seats using their core,” Mr. Nanos said.
“That’s why the Prime Minister is engaged on this, and very direct. I think it’s a big risk. I think it’s unusual for a Prime Minister to engage so fast, so definitively on the issue, because it doesn’t leave a lot of room for manoeuverbility if this does go sideways,” Mr. Nanos said.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: TIM NAUMETZ
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