Angry in the Great White North

The Liberal Party has come to call it the In and Out Scandal. As you might recall, the Conservatives reported to Elections Canada the transfers of money from the national level to a number of ridings (the "In") who the used the money to buy local advertising from the national headquarters, moving the money back (the "Out").

Nothing illegal here and all dutifully recorded on Elections Canada returns.

The problem is that Elections Canada has since decided that the advertising bought was not local advertising. The ads were national ads with the name of the local riding display on the closing frames. As such the Conservative MPs are not entitled to reimbursements. The Conservative Party disagrees, arguing that the ad clearly names the local riding, and anything else is editorial musing that goes beyond Elections Canada's mandate or competence. Like any two parties disagreeing over an interpretion of the law, they've gone to the courts to seek out a definitive ruling.

Hardly stuff to make your blood boil.

But the Liberals are spinning this as a scandal of depraved corruption. They argue that the whole thing was a "scheme" to run national advertising even after national advertisiing limits had been reached by using local ridings as a proxy. Since schemes are rarely listed accounted for in such exact detail and the evidence filed with government agencies, this would probably be an example of exploiting a perceived loophole, and there is nothing illegal with loopholes. The Liberals have also alleged that the people involved in this were rewarded with jobs as a reward for "violating" Elections Canada rules, and that characterization of the Conservative Party as a criminal enterprise has earned the Liberals a warning that a lawsuit for libel might be coming their way.

But only the Liberals seem to care. You don't see the NDP jumping on this bandwagon. Nothing in a month's worth of media releases makes mention of it.

Why not? Because NDP strategists are working on the "Effective Opposition" meme. Let the Liberals spin their wheels on In and Out, while the NDP uses Question Period to bring up issues of poverty and the environment and such.

Turns out to have been the right decision. With the news that Liberal MP Blair Wilson is embroiled in allegations of serious elections spending abuses (and I mean serious -- unaccounted for donations, cash spending with no receipts) forcing his ejection from the Liberal caucus, the NDP is not dragged in after the Liberals. Imagine the NDP defending its Liberal Party ally in order to prop up NDP allegations of corruptions against the Conservatives. The NDP has dodged that bullet.

And the media doesn't care about the In and Out Scandal either. John Ivison sums it up nicely in today's National Post:

Since Parliament returned this month, the Liberals have been using Question Period to attack Conservative accounting practises during the 2006 election. It's an eye-glazingly complicated tale that has failed to gain any traction in the national media, but which boils down to the allegation that the Tories exceeded election spending limits by more than a million dollars.

The Liberals have been pushing the In and Out Scandal, and have gotten nowhere with it. The strategy seems to have been that the Liberals did not need ideas, because all they had to do was prove the Conservatives were irredeemably corrupt inside of two years of winning an election.

Call it the Ebola virus version of Lord Acton's observation about how power corrupts.

Well, no one is buying it, and the Liberals aren't able to articulate another reason why they should form the government other than the electorate has no choice. It's either the Liberals or the corrupt Conservatives, say the Liberals. What more do you need to make a choice?

Is this incompetence? Ivison seems to think so:

All this [focus on the In and Out Scandal] suggests that Mr. Dion's problems cannot be explained by bad luck, his poor English or his lack of charisma. Rather, it is a question of judgment. Some really questionable strategic decisions have been made by the leader -- or at the very least, sanctioned by him.

I think Ivison is missing another possibility. What if the Liberals are just playing to their constituency? There will always be a certain group of people who will buy into the Liberal story. More than that, they just love the Conservatives are corrupt message.

But this points to serious problems for the Liberals. A confident party can hold its constituency even as the message grows and evolves to draw in more people. A party in a death spiral has to focus on holding on for dear life. That means forgetting the periphery and holding desperately onto the core. If the party has any hope of surviving, it needs that core. They will form the basis of, and provide the funding for, a future rebuilding effort. But what do these true believers want to hear? Partisan mudslinging, of course.

If internal Liberal Party polling has been suggesting that Liberal support cotinues to contract, becoming focused in some urban ridings, than this focus on the In and Out Scandal makes some sense. Taking the fight to the Conservatives on the right or to the NDP on the left is the wrong thing to do. The Liberals will lose those fights as polls might be suggesting that swing voters are moving away from the Liberals and are not going to come back anytime soon. The right thing to do is to staunch the bleeding before it begins to drain the support out of the core. And to do that means reminding the core why the Liberal Party is the only possible choice for them.