The Written Word
for October 4, 2000

The polls say that Jean Chretien will get another majority winning nearly all of Ontario’s 103 seats again, picking up strength in Atlantic Canada, where votes bought are votes delivered, and doing better in Quebec. Liberals, as they traditionally do at this stage in pre-election proceedings, are bravely predicting some seats in Western Canada. And the polls, as usual, back up the Liberals. The polls as they so often are, are wrong. What these pseudo-scientists who take our pulse, and report the results with the gravitas of an under-worked undertaker fail to tell us, is what we already know – between elections the numbers always favour the Liberals. As a senior cabinet minister remarked to me, "we always do so well with the polls in B.C. until the vote comes."

But the signs are, on the surface, good for the Liberals. Times are good in Ontario where the votes are and there is plenty of lolly to spread around in Atlantic Canada where times are always tough. Jean Chretien, for some reason, is popular in Ontario and the opposition leader is new, green, and head of a party that's just gone through a leadership crisis. Moreover, the bedraggled and hopelessly dated Joe Clark will split the vote in Ontario very much to the Liberals benefit and if all that wasn’t enough, the NDP are no-hopers who will flock, if flock is the right word for a handful of people, to the Liberal banner. Ought to be a walk in the park.

But what if Ontario senses the need for change and is ripe for someone with a clear message of reform? What if the voters in Ontario, who can count, recognize that a vote for the Tories is a vote for the Liberals? What if that intelligence is bolstered by Tom Long rallying the Big Blue Machine behind Stockwell Day?

But there is a much bigger what if? than that. And it strikes terror in the hearts, not of the "pols" in the Liberal Party, but in the backbenchers who have an especially sharp sensitivity to the loss of their seats, a sensitivity that’s far more reliable than any opinion polls. What if Stockwell Day catches a wave as did Diefenbaker in 1957 and Trudeau in 1968?

Close your eyes for a moment and visualize the televised debates. See that old man on the left mouthing platitudes and acting as if he were entitled by prescriptive right to rule? See that youthful looking 50 year old man, cool as a cucumber, spelling out the reforms the Liberals have never felt obliged to make? Visualize the shopping malls with the usual Liberal rent-a-crowd around Chretien and the young, excited, vibrant flock following Day.

Maybe that’s not an accurate vision. Perhaps it doesn’t work that way. But it is the vision that pollsters can never capture.

There is a new crowd out there – one which hasn’t voted much since they turned eighteen 10 or 15 years ago. It’s never seen much point in voting except during exciting times like throwing out the Tories in 1993. It needs a reason to vote and that could just be a fresh face voicing a vision that he has time to fulfill, as opposed to an incumbent just treading water in order write in his curriculum vitae that he won three straight elections.

A great deal can and no doubt will happen in the campaign itself. Stockwell Day has to deal with a hostile media that will pick up and expand upon any gaffe made by himself or the least of his followers. The Central Canadian version of this media which controls what gets on the national news, despises Mr Day because he’s not of them and he has a measured contempt for them.

But people don’t do as they are told any more as the 1992 Charlottetown referendum so amply demonstrated. In fact they may do quite the opposite of what the establishment – which the media represents – demands.

I don’t say it will happen. Hearing only B.C. voices can be very misleading to anyone trying to predict a national result. For all that, though, I sense that something is happening in this country. If I’m right, and what is happening is that the electorate is pissed off at the establishment, watch for that wave.

And look for Stockwell Day to be on top of it.