By now it should be obvious, if only by the bizarre way he has been behaving, and the way him and his Cons have been trying to smear Justin Trudeau, that Stephen Harper has never been so desperate.
And just one look at that much talked about EKOS poll must have given him the shakes, or had him climbing the wall.
Or riding the bomb.
With good reason...
Because with numbers like those he won't be Great Warrior Leader for much longer. He'll be Tiny Shrunken Leader looking for another job.
But although much of the discussion has centred on the suggestion that Canadians are returning to their centre-left roots.
What is even more striking, as Paul Adams points out, is the number of assumptions the poll shatters.
It isn’t just that the EKOS poll shows the Harper Conservatives at a mere 26 per cent in popular support, barely ahead of the NDP. The Conservatives could be headed for third place in Parliament, behind the NDP as well as the Liberals, according to this seat projection by Paul Barber, who is the best at what he does.
The projection, based on the EKOS poll, puts the NDP at 95 seats and leaves 86 for the Conservatives. (The Liberals, at 156, would win the election but fall well short of a majority.) In other words, the Conservatives may be closer to an Ignatieff-style implosion than they are to another majority government.
It's not just that the Cons are tanking, while the NDP is very much alive, and so is Tom Mulcair.
It's where those new Liberal votes are coming from, from the Conservative core itself.
Remember when the Conservative party had a lock on men and senior citizens? Remember when it made up for its losses among the university-educated with a big lead among voters who had attended community colleges? Remember when Harper’s party was breaking into into immigrant communities?
Look again.
The Liberals are no longer clinging to their “gender gap”. In fact, they are even more popular among men these days than they are among women. They have an eight-point lead among those over 65 years of age. They are ahead of the other parties in every educational category, including the college-educated. And the Liberals have more supporters among immigrants than the two other major parties combined.
So much for Stephen Harper's hope to attract more men with his militaristic policies.
And his much vaunted, but never proven, hockey expertise...
And so much for Jason Kenney's desperate attempt to recruit the immigrant vote.
By storming the buffet table at every major ethnic banquet from St John's to Vancouver....
And then there's that other shock. The suggestion that the redistribution of seats isn't going to help the Cons as much as they had hoped.
A great deal has been made in recent years about how the redistribution of parliamentary seats was going to favour the Conservatives because many of the new seats were springing up in the suburban and Western areas they have dominated in the past few elections.
But guess what? When voters desert you, you also lose where you were previously strong. Paul Barber was kind enough to run a seat projection for me on the old boundaries, also based on the EKOS poll. Result: At these levels of support, redistribution makes practically no difference.
Which since the Cons were counting on those new seats to make up for losses in Ontario and BC, must be absolutely devastating, and must have left Lord Harp rolling on the floor, and biting the carpet.
But of course it is just a poll, and we shall have to wait for other polls to see if those numbers stand the test of time.
But if you look at the tracking polls, it's clear that the Cons have been trending downwards for over a year. ...
And what that tells me is that the real reasons for that so-called Conservative drift, is that Harper has been in power for too long, and most Canadians are simply sick of him, and are hungry for change, any kind of change.
And in that case NOTHING can save him.
He's overstayed his welcome.
The writing is on the wall.
And his nightmare rule is almost over...
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3 comments:
Well, good in a way, but I'm not very happy about NDP support leaking to the (bourgeois) Libs. The rise in Green votes is interesting. And I wonder where ex-Bloquistes are parking their votes.
Harper will stoop to any level to cheat this next election, as he did the last election. Harper so called *won* the last election, with his robo-call fraud.
This time, Harper will use ethnic votes to win the election. Jason Kenny and Premier Clark are buttering up the Chinese. How many Chinese in Canada? How many people in India in Canada? How many Jews? People from the Ukraine? How many Polish in Canada? Harper just gave BC's ship building contract to Poland. How much more of Canada will Harper thieve, to gain more ethnic votes?
Harper is completely devoid of dignity. Harper has no ethics nor morals, what-so-ever.
In B.C. there are a lot of Chinese votes and a lot of them are wealthy, but really do they actually vote? Then there are all the Chinese immigrants who are working for little more than min. wage and seeing no improvement in their live styles. They came here for something better and it hasn't happened. Their kids go to university, but they aren't getting jobs because there aren't any. We have American high tech firms opening in Vancouver, but only so they can bring in foreign workers, which they can't bring into the U.S.A.. They aren't looking to hire Canadians.
The Jews and Ukrainians aren't going to vote for Harper based on what he did in other countries. These are two ethnic groups who are well integrated into Canadian society. they will be looking at how Harper managed the environment, how he sold the country down the river to others, how poorly he treated First Nations and Veterans. These groups don't see themselves as a block of an ethnic group. They see themselves as Canadians whose lives have not improved while Harper has been in power and they don't see any improvement. They see a good chance their kid will be thrown in jail if he has too much weed. They see the 1%ers getting ahead and they behind. In B.C. they know they can't afford a house, because in Vancouver that's at least a million and that is for bulldozer bait.
Nothing has improved in this country since harper and his herd came to power. he didn't offer any groups, except his own anything of substance, so they will be looking elsewhere. They may not move over to the NDP but they will have a serious look at the federal Liberals. Because even though Harper and his herd yap on about Israeli and Ukraine, that is all he can do, is yap. We don't have a military which can do much, so its all talk. We can only hope the poll is accurate and harper and his herd are toast, along with those free trade agreements he has been signing everywhere and giving our country away.
This evening we find out the European free trade agreement will limit the number of local wine stores in Ontario and B.C. to a specific number which has already been reached. So how the hell are these two industries going to expand? Not going to win many friends that way. The National health accord still hasn't been signed with the provinces and regardless of your ethnic background, everyone in this country except the 1%ers really do care about our medical system. Dr. Day of Vancouver is still trying to upset our medical system and I'm sure harper and his herd wish him well, the rest of us not so much. I would not put much faith in the ethnic vote this time around. The ethnic vote knows there are more important things to look after, like their lives in Canada; i.e. health care, education, jobs, the usual Canadian things.
Some one did ask how the Greens were doing? That is an interesting question because if we have any more environmental disasters as we have in B.C., who knows Ms. May could be the next P.M. if only so we can breath the air and drink the water. She is starting to have a certain appeal.
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