35% and tumbling

The latest poll puts the Liberals just eight points ahead of the Conservatives:

The new survey suggests that the Liberals' 11-year grip on power is in danger despite Mr. Martin's week-long public-relations push to contain the damage. The Liberals have fallen to 35 per cent in popular support, from 39 per cent last week and 48 per cent only four weeks ago.

The Conservative Party has risen to 27 per cent, up from 19 per cent four weeks ago, and the New Democrats are relatively stable at 17 per cent. In Quebec, the Bloc Québécois has surged to 45 per cent, compared to 31 per cent for the Liberals.

Mr. Martin gave no sign of delaying the vote as he continued his media-heavy strategy to win popular support for his plan to solve the scandal. But Ipsos-Reid president Darrell Bricker said a spring election would be risky.

“When you get down in the territory of 35 per cent, you don't win majorities. . . . I don't think there is anybody now who would be seriously advising [Mr. Martin] to go to the polls on this basis, unless he just wants to completely roll the dice,” Mr. Bricker said.

Meanwhile, Jean Chretien is refusing to say whether he will appear before any inquiry into the sponsorship scandal:

It also shows that more Canadians blame former prime minister Jean Chrétien (29 per cent) for the scandal than the present prime minister, Paul Martin (22 per cent). In his first public comments on the week-old controversy yesterday, Mr. Chrétien refused to say whether he would appear before a newly called public inquiry, dismissing reporters' questions by stating that he is out of government.

“I don't think any more,” Mr. Chrétien said when asked about his thoughts on the scandal.

In the poll, 90 per cent said they would expect Mr. Chrétien to appear before the inquiry to “explain what he knows.” Mr. Martin has already offered to testify.

Sadly, I think I'm with Christie Blatchford on this one: Canadians might be outraged now, but this whole mess will almost certainly die down in record time:

For all the outrage there would seem to be in the land at the federal Liberals now, my hunch is that it will not last, and that once again, I will get the government that many of you deserve.

I expect the fury will endure through to the next election — whenever Prime Minister Paul Martin calls it — only in Alberta, where sensibilities are so different, even separate, from those elsewhere that it is that province, and not Quebec, which ought to be the reference point in discussions about "the rest of Canada," or ROC.

In Toronto, in Ottawa, in the central vote-heavy part of the nation, that sound you hear is the hiss of dissipating anger.

I first heard it myself on Saturday night, or less than a week after the full sponsorship scandal engulfed the PM and his government, at dinner with some bright professional friends.

They said all the right things, of course. They just aren't going to do the right thing, which is to vote anybody but Liberal.

They were deeply saddened by the revelations in Auditor-General Sheila Fraser's report; they were shocked; they were even angry. But one by one, they veered back to the Liberal mothership. "Prime Minister Stephen Harper?" someone said with a delicate eastern shudder. "What are the alternatives?" someone added. Besides, said one of the men, "Don't you believe Martin when he says he didn't know anything?" One of the women muttered ominously, "Abortion."

It's not just in Toronto. The latest poll shows that, inexplicably, the Liberals' support has gone up 5 points in Atlantic Canada. Of course, it wasn't that long ago that Roger Grimes was openly defending a Liberal candidiate who had defrauded the EI system, so maybe we just have more tolerance for this kind of thing down here.

Posted by damian at February 17, 2004 07:16 AM