Harper's Hopes Fading

It's also despite the fact that the Liberals are still leaderless and that their campaign, according to the same poll, has failed to engage one in two voters and to produce a popular front-runner. On that particular score, the poll results are at best a mixed bag. The Liberals may be having a four-way race to the top but for the Canadian public, their campaign is primarily a two-way contest between Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff, with Gerard Kennedy and Stéphane Dion making up a somewhat distant second tier. And while Rae emerges as the favourite for Liberal leader, it is Ignatieff whom poll respondents find more likely to bring the Liberals to victory in an election. Those contradictory findings could be a sign that when respondents of all political persuasions select their preferred choice, they sometimes do so on the basis of their own partisan interest, by looking for the leader least likely, at least in their minds, to do their own party damage, rather than with an eye to the best chances of the Liberals. But if the Liberals, based on the tepid public response to their leadership campaign, are not holding the Conservatives back, then it follows that the government is failing to build efficiently on its gains from the last election through its own actions or lack of them. Indeed, even with the same score as last January, the Conservatives are probably further from their goal of a majority than they were on the morning after the last election, and certainly more removed from it than at the peak of their honeymoon last spring. In Quebec, the bottom is falling out from under Harper. His party has now dropped to third place, well behind the Bloc Québécois (44 per cent) and four points behind the Liberals (21 per cent). http://tinyurl.com/tukb6

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