Martin is pronounced Mar-tin. He’s English by birth. Martin isn’t really doing much; he’s a mediocre leader who became leader more by noblesse oblige and lethargy than anything else.
The Liberals will win, but only because of the disastrous incompetence of the new Conservative party. Martin deson’t really seem to have a platform, which in a normal election spells disaster.
But the Conservatives have blown it, and they’ve been blowing it since the idiotic merger-that-wasn’t-a-merger that killed the Reform Party just as it was gaining some legitimacy.
For our American friends, let me explain. Up until 1993, Canada had three parties; the Liberal Party, the Progressive Conservative Party, and the New Democratic Party. The Liberals and Conservatives had won every election ever held in the history of the country; the Liberals had a winning record but it was close. The NDP, a relatively modern invention, was sort of the socialist junior party, always winning a few seats but never even close to getting out of third place.
By 1984, however, the Conservatives had a long losing streak going and so nominated Brian Mulroney for Prime Minister. Mulroney promised to unite both Western conservatives and Quebec nationalists. And he did; the PC party won the '84 election by a mile, absolutely annihilated the competition, and won by a healthy margin again in 1988.
By 1993, however, the party was flying apart at the seams. The Quebec nationalists, unhappy they had not gotten the sweet constitutional deal they were promised, left and became the Bloc Quebecois. The Western conservatives, dissatisfied with the party’s mismanagement of the economy and corruption, became the Reform Party. In the 1993 election the PC party was dealt was might have been the worst electoral defeat for a sitting government in the entire history of Western democracy. The Bloc and Reform Party became the leading opposition parties.
The Bloc has kind of faded in relevance. The Reform Party hasn’t. Reform was led by Preston Manning, a decent man but a poor politician. Manning had the same weakness his party did; they could not accept waiting for power. When they lost the 1993 and 1997 elections they just could not seem to accept it, demanding the Prime Minister’s resignation for all manner of stupid crap, demanding election calls, and their members openly doubted if the party would ever win an election.
Following 1997 the party inexplicably decided that two losses meant they would never win, and opened talks with the Progressive Conservative Party to merge. In a bizarre move, they decided to merge without actually getting the PC party to agree to it, renaming the party the Canadian Alliance and basically saying “All you PC guys come on over!” Few did, so in effect they just changed their name.
They also picked a new leader, Stockwell Day. Day was, in all honesty, probably the stupidest man to ever lead a federal party in the history of Canada. The Alliance ran the 2000 election campaign like total amateurs; it was impossible for the casual observer to ascertain what their platform was. The Liberals won a third straight election.
The Alliance thus determined that since the name change had not worked, what they needed to do was change their name again. The fact that they had run a ridiculously bad campaign led by an imbecile never entered into their post-action thinking. Anyway they have, at least, succeeded in convincing the Progressive Conservative Party to merge with them, about ten years too late.
The prevailing “wisdom” has always been that the dual existence of the Reform/Alliance Party and Progressive Conservatives was splitting the conservative vote, allowing the Liberals to win by default. This was accepted fact by both parties and loudly trumpeted by the conservative press as fact. The fact that many ridings were won by the Liberals wheer the combined Reform/Alliance and PC vote was greater than the Liberal vote was often cited. The problem is that this theory happens to be absolutely false, because the Progressive Conservative Party wasn’t really very conservative. PC voters - like, say, me - are just as likely to become Liberal voters as they are voters for the new Conservative Party. The Reform/Alliance/CPC is NOT the default second choice.
So the new Conservative Party has already driven away a lot of its social liberal/economic conservative voters, crippling it. The other problem is that the party does not have a leader and nobody who wants to be leader is really up to the job; the largest candidate now is Stephen Harper, a smart man who isn’t popular, and Tony Clement, an Ontario cabinet minister of mediocre skills who, to be kind of cruel, looks exactly like a kissing gourami.
It is thus not only certain that the Liberals will win, but it is quite likely the new Conservative Party of Canada will be utterly destroyed. The Liberal Party has the dual advantage of being a sitting government in good economic times AND representing the face of change to the public; a widespread perception is that Paul Martin will represent a big improvement over Jean Chretien. The CPC therefore has essentially zero appeal.
My prediction is therefore that the Conservative Party is doomed. They not only will lose the election; they will be decimated and will lose more than half their seats, especially if an Easterner like Tony Clement becomes leader. Their only hope is that an unexpected champion steps forward to save their ass from oblivion.
Out of 301 seats:
Liberal 219
BQ 43
CPC 24
NDP 15
