Hacks & Wonks

I remember this announcement and remember telling you that your assessment was wrong initially and it's wrong now (mostly). The diesel fuel tax cut immediately makes the most environmentally-friendly transportation mode (rail) more affordable which will help every farmer, logger, rancher, whatever. Yeah, a lot of those votes were banked anyway, but just because you can count on those votes doesn't mean you don't throw them a bone or two during the election. Beyond that though, it will reduce the cost of shipping lots of manufactured goods from overseas and from Canada as well (assuming we still manufacture stuff). During an economic downturn, anything you can do to keep the cost of staples down is not a bad thing.

Where I agree with you is this. Although we don't yet know what parliament will look like until the votes are counted, I doubt the results will be a hell of a lot different than before dissolution. We had a prime opportunity to whack the libs when they were least likely to survive and we kinda blew it. Too many gaffes, too many examples of folks not quite ready for primetime or getting a bit too cocky too early on. And, considering the theoretical resource advantage we were too silent over the past couple of weeks - ceding way too much of the media vacuum to the other guys.

Yeah I know the base is still motivated, the ground war favors us, and we can dominate the airwaves for the final push. But we let them back into it and I can't imagine that was ever part of the strategy.

I'm still convinced that the environment is not really a 'kitchen table issue', to coin a Laytonism.

Most Canadians do not sit down at the kitchen table after the kids have gone to bed and worry about the environment. They worry about taxes, paying the bills, whether they're going to lose their job, who's going to pay for Grandma's medication, and how they're going to pay their kids' university tuition.

Canadians only fret about the environment when there's nothing else to fret about, ie when the economy is strong and lots of money is being pumped into health care and education. When the economy started to stumble, as was inevitably going to happen, and the media found something else scary to report about, the environment fell way down the list of peoples' priorities.

If there was any chance the environment was going to a ballot box question in the first place (slim to nil), it was completely obliterated by the recent economic developments. I will wager you dollars to donuts that the vast majority of people in places like industrial and northern Ontario, the interior of B.C., and yes even Quebec (outside of Montreal, naturellement) don't give a rat's ass about the environment right now - they see their life savings going down the tube. They see the factories and businesses closing down and they wonder when their job will be next.

Nobody except a few urban elites and environmental activists were going to vote based on the environment, and the Tories were never going to appeal to those people anyways. The economy was Harper's Achilles heel in this election, not his stance on the environment, because he did nothing to assure middle Canada that he had a plan to deal with it.