If you had doubts about whether the Harper government intended to make terrorism and the mission against Islamic State an election issue, they should have been resolved on Monday.
In St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, police were still examining the crime scenewhere a driver had mowed down two soldiers. But Stephen Harper couldn’t wait. Prompted by a planted question from a Saskatchewan MP about “unconfirmed reports” of a possible terrorist attack, the prime minister announced that he was extremely troubled by what he had already heard.
Recent polls, including one just released by EKOS, make it clear why Harper couldn’t resist linking himself politically to this horrifying incident. The government’s tried and true line about being a “steady hand” on the economy no longer has any bite. The Conservatives are in a stubborn second place behind the Liberals and, at current levels of support, could fall to third in seats after the next election.
They need a new issue.
Let us set aside for the moment the pieties about politicians ignoring the polls when they make decisions about matters of war and peace. It may be true up to a point that the prospect of Canadian men and women dying in a foreign land sobers even the most politics-drunk mind. But having made their decisions, you can hardly expect party leaders in the year before an election not to exploit them for what they are worth.
So here’s the good news for Stephen Harper:
A clear majority of Canadians supports the Harper government’s decision to participate in the U.S.-led mission against Islamic State.
This is a classic “wedge issue” because it puts the government on one side — which happens to have the support of the majority — and all the opposition parties in the other.
Put another way, while the Conservative party in this same poll had the support of just 26 per cent of Canadians, its position on ISIS has the support of 58 per cent. That’s an awful lot of Canadians who find themselves offside with the parties they support, siding instead with the Harper government.
Moreover, at a time when the Conservative party needs to consolidate its dwindling base and start winning back some of the voters it lost to the Liberals over the last year, 90 per cent of its own supporters back the ISIS mission, as do the majority of Liberal supporters.
Conservative parties are generally perceived as better guardians of personal security than more progressive parties, which is why they have an advantage on issues like crime.
In the West, anxiety about external threats to security peaked (naturally enough) after the September 11 attacks and then gradually subsided. But it’s on the rise again. Although the Harper government is for the moment handling the Ebola crisis in a responsible public-health mode, it’s possible that it might at some point begin to exploit it, too.
From the government’s perspective, one challenge is that foreign policy issues — even ones involving military operations abroad — tend not to figure large in Canadian elections. In the 2006 campaign, at a time when Canadian soldiers were moving into more exposed positions in Afghanistan, there was not a single foreign policy question in the televised leaders’ debates.
That’s why Monday’s attack on the soldiers in Quebec is so crucial to Harper. It allows him to draw a connection between Islamic State so far away and our safety and security at home.
So what does this mean to the opposition parties?
For Thomas Mulcair’s NDP, this should not be an agonizing moment. The party traditionally has been leery of military adventures and its supporters also break that way by a margin of nearly two-to-one. By opposing the ISIS mission, the party consolidates its base and heightens its appeal to left-leaning Liberal supporters.
Critically, Quebecers are less supportive of the ISIS mission than other Canadians, and Mulcair’s first task in the next election is consolidating the grip on Quebec established by Jack Layton.
It’s obviously Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party that has been cross-pressured the most by the Islamic State mission. Prominent former Liberal ministers, including Lloyd Axworthy and Ujjal Dosanjh, have spoken out in favour of the Harper government’s decision. And as we know, a majority of Liberal supporters — a small majority — supports the mission against Islamic State.
Much has been made of Trudeau’s mishandling of the issue, and it’s true that his gag about Canada whipping out its CF-18s to “show how big they are” seemed like the product of an unserious mind. But the choice for the Liberals was not an easy one, ideologically or politically.
That having been said, the test of whether Trudeau’s opposition to the ISIS mission is a political success is not the short-term verdict of the pundits who have been giving him a pounding lately. It’s how his position looks in six months — or, more crucially, a year from now.
Two factors may work to the advantage of both Trudeau and Mulcair. First, unless the U.S.-led mission goes exceedingly well, Canada is likely to come under pressure to increase its commitment. There’s little appetite for that among Canadians:
Canadians seemed prepared to dip a toe in this latest Middle East conflict — but not much more.
Second, the history of these things shows that Canadians tend to be much more enthusiastic about military missions at the outset when they can feel the warming glow of moral purpose. They tend to be less pleased with the messy, bloody reality. Jean Chrétien’s decision to stay out of George W. Bush’s Iraq war became more and more popular as the failure of the war became more apparent.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: By Paul Adams
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