Well, you say, governments often go through troughs in support at mid-term. The Tories have been behind before — after Michael Ignatieff became Liberal leader in 2009, and again after Thomas Mulcair became NDP leader in 2012 — and soon recaptured the lead.
Yes, but they never fell this far. And that’s a puzzle: looking at a chart of Environics Research polls going back to 1978, I can see two previous cases of a governing party falling below the 30% mark: the Liberals in the early 1980s and the Tories in the early 1990s. Understandably enough: each had the misfortune to be governing in the middle of a crunching recession.
But that’s not true today. While the economy is not quite at the peaks it reached just before the last recession, it remains in remarkably good shape by any historic standard, with unemployment at 7.2%, inflation below 2%, mortgage rates at record lows and poverty rates the same. You have to go back to the golden years of the 1960s to find a better record.
So it can’t be the economy that accounts for the Tories’ unpopularity. Indeed, they are generally credited with having managed the financial crisis tolerably well. If the odd sourpuss grumped at the plunge into deficit that followed, it would be hard to argue the nation’s finances were in any serious jeopardy today.
Yet 50% of those polled tell EKOS they think the country is “moving in the wrong direction,” up from 30% five years ago and the highest such figure in at least a decade. An even greater proportion, 57%, say the government is moving in the wrong direction, again a recent high.
Perhaps that is the result of some difficult decisions on the government’s part, the kind of drawing down of political capital that governments often do early in their term. (For example, the Mulroney Tories fell briefly below 30%, in 1987, at the height of concern over the free trade negotiations.) Yes? And what would those be? What major new policy initiatives has it undertaken since it won its majority? Raising the age of OAS eligibility by two years, two decades from now? Amending the Navigable Waters Act? That’s about as far-reaching, or as controversial, as it’s got.
By and large, this is not a government that goes in for “harsh but necessary.” It much prefers to deliver populist crowd-pleasers like the GST cuts or the crime bills, when not sticking to the kind of safe, middle-of-the-road strategy the pros advise. Hardly a day goes by without ministers being sent out across the country to announce new tax breaks for this and government grants for that. Tens of millions of public dollars have been spent on upbeat advertising for the government’s Economic Action Plan. So it can hardly be a matter of the Conservatives “failing to get their message out,” either.
Maybe it’s all just a case of Trudeaumania, the inevitable honeymoon phase for a new leader, especially one with a famous name and charisma to burn? Except the Tory slide was well under way long before Justin Trudeau became Liberal leader; neither does it seem to have been arrested by the wave of attack ads the party launched the same day.
And whatever Trudeau’s appeal, it can hardly explain the decline in Stephen Harper’s public approval numbers, to just 28% versus 50%-plus disapproval. Again, this is for a prime minister governing in good times, with a famously incremental agenda, precisely crafted to avoid the sort of ideological excesses that were supposed to have torpedoed the party in the past.
Let me venture to suggest this is not accidental. If today both Mr. Harper and the party he leads are actively disliked by more than seven voters in 10, it may be because they have gone out of their way to alienate them in every conceivable way — not by their policies, or even their record, but simply by their style of governing, as over-bearing as it is under-handed, and that on a good day.
When they are not refusing to disclose what they are doing, they are giving out false information; when they allow dissenting opinions to be voiced, they smear them as unpatriotic or worse; when they open their own mouths to speak, it is to read the same moronic talking points over and over, however these may conflict with the facts, common courtesy, or their own most solemn promises.
Secretive, controlling, manipulative, crude, autocratic, vicious, unprincipled, untrustworthy, paranoid … Even by the standards of Canadian politics, it’s quite the performance. We’ve had some thuggish or dishonest governments in the past, even some corrupt ones, but never one quite so determined to arouse the public’s hostility, to so little apparent purpose. Their policy legacy may prove short-lived, but it will be hard to erase the stamp of the Nasty Party.
Perhaps, in their self-delusion, the Tories imagine this is all the fault of the Ottawa media, or the unavoidable cost of governing as Conservatives in a Liberal country. I can assure them it is not. The odium in which they are now held is well-earned, and entirely self-inflicted.
Original Article
Source: fullcomment.nationalpost.com
Author: Andrew Coyne
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