Gee this sounds somewhat like my column from the other day.
http://www.thestar.com/FederalElection/article/498604
Layton's flawed strategy
Sep 14, 2008 04:30 AM
Angelo Persichilli
"I'm applying for the job of prime minister," Jack Layton said last Sunday.
It sounds like a joke, but it's not. Layton knows that his supporters have had enough of being members of the fourth party and the NDP being just a parking space for the conscience of the nation. They now want their party in government.
But there's a problem: Layton could only become prime minister as the leader of a coalition supported by all the centre-left electorate. This means that if he wants the job, he has to deal with the Liberals first.
It's highly unlikely that federally we will ever have two left-leaning parties in government and in opposition at the same time. Even when the Conservatives were destroyed in 1993, the NDP didn't succeed in becoming the official opposition.
Layton is doing the right thing in applying for Stephen Harper's job, but I hope he knows that convincing Canadians that the Conservatives are bad is only half the challenge. The most difficult part is convincing the centre-left electorate that his party, not the Liberals, is the alternative.
Unfortunately for him, while Harper is building a centre-right coalition, the centre-left vote is split between the Liberals, NDP and now also the Green party.
The collapse of Brian Mulroney's leadership in the early '90s split the conservative vote into three parts: Quebec nationalists went to the Bloc; the right went to the Reform party, mainly in the West, while moderates stuck with the Progressive Conservatives.
In the last election, Harper brought Canadian Alliance voters and most Progressive Conservatives back into the same tent. In this election, he is trying to recapture the conservative votes in Quebec. At the same time, the centre-left electorate remains fractured.
So who is going to unify the left in Canada? Who is going to lead it into a two-party system?
Considering that the monothematic Green party can mainly be just a temporary shelter for dissatisfied Liberal and NDP voters, the answer is restricted to these two parties and, in a two-party system, one of them will go. Currently, the NDP looks to be that party.
The strategic vote is the first and strongest signal of this trend. Political hatred for the Conservatives is much stronger among some socialist voters than their loyalty to the NDP. If the Tories are strong, NDP support is weakened by strategic votes cast for Liberals in the hope of stopping the right.
This also means that the more the NDP leader attacks the Conservatives and demonizes its leaders, the more his supporters are scared and vote for the Liberals. In fact, the first victim of the political demonization of the Mike Harris Conservatives in Ontario in the late '90s was NDP Leader Howard Hampton, and the NDP lost party status at Queen's Park – twice.
The federal NDP will always be in this unhealthy situation until its leaders solve this dilemma and understand that in a two-party political system, they have to deal with the Liberals first. The best time to do that is when the Liberals are weak, as they are now. It almost happened in the '80s with Ed Broadbent.
In this election, the NDP fight to increase popular support by a few percentage points will only help the Conservatives to remain the governing party. You may or may not agree with Buzz Hargrove's ideological creed, but he has clearly understood that the presence of two parties fishing in the same centre-left pond will weaken both.
Pretty soon Layton will be forced to fish or cut bait.