The 33% who say terrorism is the most important issue facing Canada are the bottom floor hardcore Conservative base plus a handful of weird neo-con Liberals.
C51 preaches exclusively to the choir. As the details become more widely known even soft Tory swing voters are coming to hate it. The Conservatives made the classic error that always trips up right wingers, of assuming everyone else will see and respond to events the way they do through what they assume is universal but is in fact an exclusively conservative lens.
They thought they had one of Naomi Klein's shock treatment moments after a mentally ill man attacked parliament. He was a drug addled paranoid who just as easily could have been commiting mayhem in the name of fighting alien invaders as jihad.
The Conservatives assumed their visceral response to the event would be shared by all Canadians and maybe it was... For a month or so. The frustratingly long time line of pushing legislation through parliament even for a majority came up against the rebounding natural skepticism of Canadians who watched aghast as George Bush engaged in similar legislative fuckery after 9/11.
We may be watching what political historians will someday call one of the greatest political miscalculations in Canadian history.
2 comments:
It may have been something of a miscalculation for the Cons, but at least most of their hard core base will support it (minus a few Libertarians). But it was a massive miscalculation for the Liberals to support the damn thing. Most of their base dislikes it, and if anything the more engaged, active Liberal supporters probably hate it more.
C-51 really seems to have been a turning point for the NDP; one moderately principled decision moved them back into contention.
Oh their base will definitely support it but that's the point. If you drive the Conservative vote down to just their base, THEY LOSE. Now that they've probably permanently wounded Trudeau expect the guns to turn on the NDP for the next 4 months.
But its probably too late, like the Alberta PCs playing from old playbooks concentrating on the threat from the Wildrose and viewing the NDP as just a useul spoiler on the left, the federal Conservatives may have ignored the real threat too long.
I think the question come October may simply be how willing will the Liberals be to be junior partners in a coalition or will they instead follow the path of the British Liberal Party, and alienate whats left of their progressive supporters by forming a coalition with the Conservatives.
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