As her campaign enters its final hours, incumbent Churchill-Keewatinook Aski MP Niki Ashton has lost one of her key selling points – or has she?
At the start of the campaign, when the New Democrats were riding high in the polls, Ashton could for the first time credibly claim to be part of the next government.
But now polling suggests Canada has moved back to its traditional default position: the Liberals and Conservatives duking it out for first place with the NDP a distant third.
An average of polls released by CBC last Sunday, Oct. 11 suggests the NDP has the support of 23 per cent of voters compared to 32 per cent for the Conservatives and 34 per cent for the Liberals.
A Globe and Mail election forecast published two days later gave the NDP a one per cent chance of capturing the most seats in parliament.
Polls aren’t always accurate, of course, but the trend across weeks and different pollsters is obvious. For whatever reason, the NDP has blown the lead it recently held in the court of public opinion.
Fortunately for Ashton, the polls also indicate that neither the Liberals nor Conservatives will form a majority government.
If the Liberals form a minority government, as seems likely as of this
writing, they are certain to turn to the NDP to stay in power. This may or may not take the form of a formal coalition, but whatever you call it, the end result will be the same.
If the Conservatives form a minority, it seems unlikely they’ll get away with humiliating the Liberals into propping them up, as happened during the minority years of 2006 to 2011.
Instead, the Liberals and NDP would quite likely take down Harper and form their own government. And with the Bloc Québécois a non-factor, the resultant coalition would not be tarnished by a reliance on folks who want to break up Canada, as infamously happened with the would-be coalition of 2008.
It would be a curious mix, this Liberal-NDP tandem. The former gave us deep social spending cuts the last time they were in power; the latter has confidence in government to solve most every societal woe.
Still, either scenario would see Ashton (if she wins re-election) gain the power of a government MP, something northern Manitoba hasn’t had in nearly two decades.
Another possibility is that Rebecca Chartrand wins northern Manitoba for the Liberals as the beneficiary of an anti-Harper vote that has coalesced around her party.
The Liberals were a non-factor in the riding in the last election, but they are like Super Mario – just when you thought they’ve fallen off the cliff for the final time, it turns out they’ve got one more life.
Of course not everyone views a Liberal-NDP team-up as inevitable or desirable. In his re-election campaign, incumbent Desnethé-Missinippi-Churchill River MP Rob Clarke, a Conservative, has warned of economic chaos if those two parties rule the country.
What’s striking about that claim is a simple reality: the federal government exerts very little influence over the economy and the day-to-day lives of everyday people.
What I find motivates voters is emotion, or the stories they tell themselves about each of the parties. The fact that their lives are no different, nor is the country a particularly unrecognizable place, no matter which 300-plus folks sit in a chamber in Ottawa, matters not.
Don’t get me wrong. Voting is important. So this Monday, Oct. 19, vote for whom you love, vote against whom you hate or vote according to what your intuition tells you.
You don’t have to justify how you vote to anybody. But please do vote.
Local Angle is published Fridays.
