June 27, 2004

Last-minute reading

Have the Liberals succeeded in turning around the momentum enough in Ontario and Quebec to form a minority governmnent? (A hefty Ekos research poll puts the Liberals ahead by 8 seats on the strength of recent gains in the party's central-eastern strongholds. The poll also has a riding analysis which suggests that "Landslide Annie" may not eke out a win this time around.)

Will Stephen Harper's stealth conservatism campaign survive the repeated "let me tell you what I really think" faux pas of his party's MPs? (Sure it will ... why, it's just another desperate attempt by the Liberals to blah, blah, blah ...)

Can the NDP stem the flow of the so-called soft voters worried about a Conservative government? (Jack Layton is engaging Paul Martin directly on the strategic vote.)

Has Gilles Duceppe succeeded in sidestepping Bernard Landry's enthusiastic separatist musings (not to mention his own comments revealing his party's shameless opportunism)?

And might the Green party actually win a seat? (Despite an endorsement from the Ottawa Citizen, Ottawa Centre seems safely headed to Ed Broadbent, but look for a possible Green, or even two, in British Columbia.)

Tune in tomorrow. I'll hopefully be watching coverage at the Canadian High Commission in Canberra. Until then, here's some interesting last-minute reading (apologies for the limited sourcing; my work is eating up most of my news-reading time of late):

  • The Globe and Mail's John Ibbitson -- trying to answer the question "what does Stephen Harper stand for?" -- writes about the intellectual cabal behind the Conservative Party leader. Why is this piece only being published now? (Another article, in The Star, examines how Stephen Harper has managed to avoid his past during the campaign.)
  • Linda Silver Dranoff, a Toronto lawyer, argues in a G&M comment that "critical legislative advances that improved women's lives came from the Liberals and the NDP, not from right-wing Conservatives." See comment above.
  • Several sources are talking about the importance of the new election financing rules, which mean that each party will get $1.75 per vote cast. We may not have proportional representation (yet), but this should dispell some cynicism about whether "every vote counts."
  • The election's actually getting quite a bit of attention outside Canada (see Google News for a survey of headlines and stories), with foreign media trying to decipher the sponsorship scandal and the inability of the Liberal party to capitalize on its leader's pre-scandal popularity.

Posted by anatole at June 27, 2004 11:34 PM
Comments