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Small point: wasn't the War Measures Act invoked BEFORE Pierre Laporte was actually killed? How do we know the act didn't inadvertently provoke the murder?
And even allowing for the fact that it was a horrible thing that Laporte was murdered, did that actually justify a policy that treated everyone who'd ever gone to an NDP riding association meeting as a potential terrorist? And which would likely have led to Trudeau's OWN arrest(given his past political associations)had he not been prime minister at the time?
As to the Conservative strategy, it appears that the wishes of the party leadership were countermanded by rank-and-file Tory voters, who seem to have voted Liberal just to stop an NDP victory, and also perhaps(you'd hate to think it but it has to be considered a possibility with at least SOME normal Tory voters)to make sure the only WHITE candidate in the race was elected(Lamoureux, as opposed to the Filipina Tory candidate and the FN NDP candidate).
Is this actually true? I don't know because i wasn't there. I'd like to hear what resources the NDP did put into Winnipeg North. How much money was spent? Was it the maximum? How many volunteers worked on the campaign? How did that compare to past elections? Were outside organizers sent in?
I'm not saying that that the NDP did put in the maximum effort it was capable of or not - I don't know. Its entirely possible that they poured everything they could into the campaign and still lost for various reasons. I suppose the party could have chartered a 747 and flown every single staffer on parliament Hill to Winnipeg North for the duration of the campaign and left parliament a mausoleum for the whole month of November - but doing that would have counted partly as money spent and would have broken electoral laws. I suppose there can always be more volunteers - but volunteers are just that - VOLUNTEERS. You cannot force people to canvass if they don't feel like it.
This is not the US where candidates in congressional special elections routinely spend millions of dollars and where its routine to use paid campaign workers. In Canada its all unpaid volunteers once you get beyond the campaign manager.
If anyone has any insiders perspective on what the NDP actually invested in the byelection, I'd like to hear about it.
Has there been any explanation, yet, for why Layton went to Dauphin but NOT to Winnipeg North during the campaign?
That always struck me as a weird omission, and, since he'd have to have flown in to Winnipeg just to get to Dauphin, it wouldn't really have been that hard to schedule appearances in both places. It's not as if Dauphin was ever winnable, as far as that goes.
I dunno. I think there may be something to the theory that some core Tory voters decided to vote for the one white male on the ballot. I'm not sure that i buy the idea that there is much of a pool of Tory "strategic voters" who would go out of their way to go to the polls during a blizzard to elect a Liberal over a New Democrat. Keep in the mind that the Tory messaging lately has been to attack "the coalition parties" and to say that the Liberals and NDP are identical "hug a thug" (sic.) parties when it comes to crime etc...There is also a lot of research that says that blue collar Tory voters in western Canada have the NDP as their second choice more often than they do the Liberals - though that may change if the NDP candidate is an "in'jun" (sic.)
I think Layton was in Winnipeg, just not as much as he needed to be.
He did go to Winnipeg North. He was there right after the byelection was called at the opening of Chief's HQ and he was there again this past Friday and Saturday - two days before the byelection. A week earlier he made one trip to Dauphin as well. So he visted WM twice during the campaign and Dauphin once (and i don't believe he ever set foot in Vaughan).
True. As I said above, Layton was in Winnipeg North, but not as much as he needed to be. Ignatieff was in Winnipeg 4 times. While the NDP is officially saying that it did not take the riding for granted, it looks like the reason Layton wasn't there as much is because he assumed it was safe and so he spent time building support for the future in Dauphin-Swan River.
Are you suggesting that if Layton had not set foot in Dauphin and instead spent that one snowy Friday doing a couple of events in Winnipeg North - the results of the byelection would have been reversed?
Where have you found anything "official" from the NDP saying "we never took the riding for granted". maybe they did and maybe they didn't. i don't know, i have not read the press release.
Quite frankly if I was part of the NDP braintrust (and contrary to popular belief I am not) - I think I'd almost RATHER put out the spin that we were over-confident and didn't put enough into the riding and that now we know better and next time we will put a full court press on Lamoureux, than to say that we put in a massive herculean effort and still lost.
Actually, if he'd written off Dauphin(which was always known to be totally unwinnable)and focused on Winnipeg North, if might well have made the difference, given the closeness of the margin and the low turnout that caused the NDP defeat. What was the point of his ever going to Dauphin anyway?
Libby Davies said so on Power & Politics with Evan Solomon on Tuesday's show. She was on a panel discussing the by-election results with Scott Brison and Rick Dykstra.
Obviously no party is going to ever admit it took a riding for granted. Why would it be a surprise that this would be the official position? I would expect any party to say the same.
We're talking about two different things here - a leader making a visit and the extent to which an entire party apparatus does or does not pour maximum resources into a riding. There is a party organization in Dauphin and the NDP holds a couple of provincial seats in that riding. The NDP also wanted to make it clear that it was not writing off all of rural Canada and that even after the whole gun registry kefuffle - there was still room for growth for the NDP in rural Canada (and given the 10% increase in the popular vote in Dauphin - that turned out to be true). If Layton had never so much as set foot in Dauphin - we never would have heard the end of it from other people on babble about how "Toronto Jack" (sic.) was writing off rural Canada and couldn't be bothered to even set foot in Dauphin when a byelection was taking place. There are a lot of seats in northern Ontario and in northern/remote parts of the west that the NDP either currently holds or has designs on - you have to show the flag in Dauphin as part of that strategy and in fact when layton visited Dauphin it resulted in some good media coverage of the fact that he was talking about the wheat board and agricultural issues etc...
That kind of thinking ensures that the Conservatives will always have a healthy base in Western Canada from which to build. The point was to challenge Harper on his own turf. The NDP didn't win Dauphin, but its share of the vote shot up massively. Lessons can be learned here as to campaigning in the rural parts of Western Canada.
Stockholm also claimed that Milton Chan is Gerard Kennedy's EA, which I find little amusing given that he is an uber Iggy loyalist. I doubt Iggy has enough control over his caucus to "annoint" EA in rivals' office like Harper does. In fact it is no secret (it is on his facebook status, and he does have a good number of NDPer "friends") that he was the whiz kid that Iggy dispatched to Winnipeg to run the Lamoureux's eday operation. (Though just some perspective, he also ran Adam Giambrone's eday when he first won a few years back.)
Tory voters, when pissed-off, tend to stay home. It looks like a whole lot of them decided that tredging through the snow to vote for a Filipina was not on.
It's odd the way the Conservative results ended up, because Harper even took the trouble of personally going out to Winnipeg North during the campaign, which he apparently has not done before.
Or maybe going out & voting for an invisible candidate was not on
Yeah, what was the purpose of the Cons having a candidate who refused to attend the debates or be interviewed?
There's no chance of going "off message" that way. Though it was amusing when a story in the Winnipeg Free Press described her as a "prominent Filipina"-then added that she refused comment for the story
All I know is based on one time that I saw the Tory candidate interviewed on the CBC. Her ability to communicate in English, and to formulate statements which would explain her policy seemed extremely limited. The interview asked her why she believed she would be better for "law and order." apparently 90% of her platform, and beyond a few mumble words, she had no answer. Even hating Tories, as I do, it was painful to watch the poor person, struggle to explain herself, and realizing that she was failing.
I suppose she could expain herself in her first language, but iit was easy to understand her reluctance to enter an English debate
Then again, that could describe Shelly Glover as well as many others
You wonder why the Conservatives would select a candidate that wasn't really comfortable with the language or with speaking to people.
Perhaps if they spent 1/2 the effort in Winnipeg North, as they did in Hochelaga...?
Because years of rightward drift, mixed messaging about the parties political stands, and less than principled governance by the party when it is in power are demolishing the parties base, the base being the activist core that has propelled the party along despite a hostile media environment. The repsonse to the hostile media has been to try and appease it, and in so doing the NDP has adopted the paradigm that the media projects.
Closing for length.