Angry in the Great White North

There is the old cliche that the only poll that matters is the one on election day.  It's true in a technical sense, but really, all those other polls matter too, and their importance increases the closer you get to election day.

So with the election scheduled to happen on October 14, and this being only September 13, why is it that the Toronto Star, a pro-Liberal a media outlet as you'll find in this country, is treating recent polls as if they had been published October 13? 

First, the editorial for today demands to know from Stephen Harper what his Conservatives would do with the majority government he's about to win:

With the Conservatives poised to win a majority, as indicated in today's Star/Angus Reid poll, it is imperative that Prime Minister Stephen Harper tell voters what he would do if he were unfettered by the opposition parties.

To date, Harper has sought to deflect this question by playing down his chances of winning a majority. "We believe in all likelihood it will be a minority," said Harper at his campaign kickoff.

The polls are suggesting he's wrong.

With a Conservative majority in sight, it is fair for Canadians to ask Harper whether he still holds these views and would implement them once in office. And if the answer is No, Harper should use the remaining four weeks of this election campaign to tell voters just what he would do with a majority.

In sight?  Are they serious?  There's a whole month to go.  The debates are still two weeks away. 

And James Travers, always ready to cast the Liberals in the best possible light, writes a column that reads like an obituary:

Liberals across the country are learning fast that the party has more at risk today than when the election began less than a week ago.

Last Sunday the worst fear of those Liberals who can't bring themselves to accept [Stephane Dion] was that he might somehow surprise everyone again by forming a minority government, securing his leadership for at least the life of a mandate.

None of that would be looming now if Liberals had learned the lessons of the last election. Instead of recognizing their deserved defeat as an omen of worse to come, instead of thoroughly reconsidering what it means to be a 21st-century progressive party, they misread the outcome as a timeout, a brief recess before an almost automatic return to power.

Results of that miscalculation are self-evident. Liberal campaign wheels are wobbly because they were never really on. Dion failed to fully grasp that Job 1 for a minority opposition leader is election readiness. Worse, the party failure to construct a new, durable platform left a vacuum that Dion filled with the Green Shift, an omnibus of environmental and economic politics too difficult to be explained in tortured English and too easily savaged by Conservatives as economically destructive and a tax grab.

Barring a sudden turnaround, barring a tactical shift from the hopelessly late attempt to define Dion to a frontal assault on Harper and the Conservative record, Liberals will soon be surveying their wreckage. Then the dilemma changes from finding the most able among the strong would-be leadership successors to who has the time, energy and patience to reconstruct a party that didn't do the job when it had the opportunity.

Dion's reality is more pressing. He now has four weeks to prove he isn't the Montreal Mistake. There will be no second chance.

First, thank goodness James Travers makes explicit mention that the election isn't even a week old and that there are four weeks to go. 

But second, Travers is already dissecting what has led the Liberals to this loss, enumerating the lessons to be learned from this failure, and looking forward at an extended time of rebuilding for the Liberals.

Let's be thinking about this on October 13, not September 13.

Some might think that this is some clever attempt to energize Liberals while striking fear into less partisan Canadians about what Canada would be like if the Conservatives had a majority.

It's possible but not likely.

You energize your troops by being honest about the present, ignoring the past, and depicting the future as wide open and still within their ability to shape.  These two pieces are so depressing that they are far more likely to inspire Liberal volunteers to abandon local riding campaigns.

It's only September.  I know, because the kids aren't bugging me with the question "Is it Halloween yet?" every 15 minutes. When that happens, I'll know we're in mid-October and that the election is well and truly in the final moments. 

Until someone reports on evidence that the Liberal Party has already thrown in the towel, there is still 80% of this election campaign to report on.  Those intervening weeks have not suddenly disappeared.