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Call it a study in contrasts.
In Quebec, politics is a hotly contested game. Voters pay attention. They care about what happens and that’s reflected as clearly as the way they punish the Canadiens when they lose and reward them when they win.
Within the past decade voters abandoned the traditional Bleu (Parti Quebecois) and Rouge (Parti Liberal) teams for the Coalition Avenir Quebec or CAQ led by former PQ cabinet minister Francois Legault. Commentators wrote about a fundamental shift in voting patterns and then - poof - the CAQ dominance disappeared and now folks are talking about the PQ’s double-digit lead over the CAQ and a successful spring sitting of the legislature for the PQ.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, meanwhile, the most recent poll available shows the Pea Seas ahead of the Team Furey-ous Liberalish Sort of Whatever-they-call-themselves-today Bunch, but not by much.
Thing is, the Narrative poll is basically unreliable junk if you want to figure out election results or actually figure which party might win a general election. The sample is small, the margin of error is ludicrously large (plus or minus 6.8 points, 19 times out of 20) on the whole poll and the sub-sub-samples (broken down by region) are even wilder.
But if you step back and look at all the whole set of results - not the way Narrative deceptively represents them - you can actually see something useful.
Forty-one percent (41%) of respondents made no choice when asked which party they’d support in the next election. That’s almost double the percentage that picked either Blue or Red. The Orange bunch don’t matter. They are irrelevant and rejoice in their irrelevance.
*That* tells you that neither Red nor Blue are connected to voters, They’ve each got their tiny, hard core - likely less than 15% based on the past 20 years of data - and a bit more but that’s it. Blue is at something like 24% and Red is at 22% of all responses.
Holy motherforkin’ shirtballs, kids.
That sucks for everyone.
And when the best you’ve got is showing up for a scrum at a hospital opening in blue scrubs so you look like a doctor, that’s a pretty good confirmation you don’t know how to connect with voters. There's yer fundamental political problem.
The Best Premier question results aren’t any better. Red Team Andrew Furey gets 33%, Blue Team Tony Wakeham gets 26%, 23% are undecided/won’t vote/won’t say, and the margin of error is a smidge over five percentage points. One in four voters - roughly - aren’t decided and the difference between the Blue and Red leaders is inside the full range of the margin of error. The blue scrubs don't help The Image, obviously.
This is what happens with two parties that are unsure who they are or what they stand for. And if they have some sort of vague clue, they don’t know how to tell people in way people understand it care about.
The political challenge in Newfoundland and Labrador reminds me of a line from this mash-up from Tony Blair’s farewell speech to the Labour Party, re-edited as a cover of The Clash’s “Should I stay or should I go?”
All this indecision’s bugging me.
That’s what’s bugging voters.
Indecision.
There’s no solid line from either Blue or Red they can latch onto and judge. Hasn’t been for the past 15 years for sure. Both parties are fighting over the same tiny patch defined by what appears to be popular at the moment. The result is actually not stability or anything good but a highly volatile, fragile political state in which the government spends more and more time wondering which of the cabinet or back-bench in a bare majority government is going to bolt for the Exit door at a moment’s notice and in the process possibly bring on a deadly election. Or worse, an indecisive result like the last two. And when they aren’t doing that, the government crowd is scrabbling together this announcement or that unveiling that involves money we don’t have.
You wanna see something different read Tony Blair’s good-bye speech to the Labour Party.
Watch it and follow along with the text.
Experience the speech. Now remember the last time in this century *any* political leader in Newfoundland and Labrador delivered a political speech one tenth as clear, as confident, or as compelling.
Even Danny at his most bullying was the worst public speaker imaginable. Flat. Monotone. The rhythm of a dead octopus. And his vision, such as it was, seemed to come from nothing more than the taunting of his inner demons. Since then, we’ve had one whiter shade of beige after another.
That blank spot in your memory is precisely what is wrong with this province today. Not your failing memory because your memory is accurate. There is no such speech. Not a syllable like it nor anything near Tony Blair or even Barack Obama, another not-so-great orator. There’s an abyss in Newfoundland and Labrador politics and we’ve been staring into it fir so long that the political abyss stares back into us. We have become what we see, which is nothing at all.
Since neither the Blues nor the Reds want to rebrand fir real - as something specific - all this makes you wonder what would happen if another party, along the lines of CAQ or Quebec Solidaire, came along. A party that had a clear message. Clear identity. Clear proposition for voters.
Would most voters still pick none of the above?
Ed Hollett you are 100% right. An alternate party, that clearly stands for things, is exactly what the province needs. Libs and PCs now are Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dumb. Exactly the same thing. In the US this scenario would be called a Uniparty, where the two sides represent the same thing.
As one HUGE example. Where do they stand on the mounting debt being passed down to everyone's children and grandchildren? A very basic question. The Libs are spending like Drunken Sailors every time I turn on the news. And yet Tony's crowd arent sayin a damn thing about the spending. This PC crowd are conservative in name only.
I expect when paving season starts this summer, everyone will get pavement right into their toilets.
Last night I attended a discussion at the Harris Centre , ostensibly about Globalization. One young questioner spoke briefly about neocolonialism. I wanted to borrow Janis Joplin’s line and say, It’s all the same fu**ing colonialism man.
Overall the lack of Commies, socialists, anarchists and other radicals was noticeable, although there were a couple of young women wearing keffiyehs as shawls against the air conditioning
Another pet peeve of mine was the use of ‘social‘ or ‘economic’ modifying the word ‘development’. Perhaps it is time to drop ‘development’ in favour if ‘improvement’ or ‘growth’ or ‘enlightenment’; either way we still aren’t getting it right.