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Could the Liberals being doing any worse, three days into Week Two of the federal election campaign?
According to the latest EKOS poll, the Liberals are sitting at 34% of decided voters (a drop of 5% since the outset of the campaign), while the Conservatives continue to gain strength across Canada, with a 30% showing. In Ontario, according to a just-released Ipsos-Reid poll, the two parties are in a dead heat, with 36% support among decided voters.
As Kevin Brennan, at Tilting at Windmills, writes “the Liberals (are) in serious free-fall.” The Ipsos-Reid poll warns that the Liberals may not have bottomed out yet …
The poll suggests 66 per cent of Canadians believe it is time for a change, up from 60 per cent two weeks ago. Those numbers are highest in Alberta and Ontario.
According to the responses given, the leader with the least amount of momentum is Martin. Only 11 per cent of those polled said their opinion of the Liberal leader and his party had improved over the last few weeks, compared to 47 per cent who said it had worsened. Thirty-six per cent said their opinion has “stayed the same.”
Panic has obviously begun to be felt among Liberals, as the Martin forces have turned to disaffected confidantes of Jean Chrétien for help with a campaign that’s stalled and trending towards a minority government (and not necessarily for the Natural Governing Party).
In a wrap-up of today’s news, Global-TV’s Kevin Newman reports that “a national seat projection is raising the very real possibility that Stephen Harper’s Conservatives could form the next government … if we voted today, the Liberals would win 129 seats — 26 fewer than needed for a majority government, the Conservatives keep edging up and would now pull 105 seats, the Bloc would win 53 seats, and the NDP would win 21 seats.”
If this scenario were to occur on election day, neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives could form government without the support of the Bloc Québécois. Needless to say, the deal-making has already started, including “decentralization of federal powers,” as a Bloc bargaining tool.
While campaigning in New Westminster, BC today, NDP leader Jack Layton warned Canadians not to allow an alliance between the Tories and the Bloc, saying “We would have a Conservative party that wants to take the country apart joining with a party that actively wants to split the country apart.”
Calling the election when he did, may well prove to be not only a fatal political error for Prime Minister Martin, but for the country, as well.
