I would like to begin with an apology for taking my eye off the ball with regards to the Canadian elections. It is no excuse to claim that I was in good company, as today's Vancouver Sun notes in a headline "Canadian Election Barely Registers in U.K. Media. Israel National News cannot fall to the same low standards as the Telegraph, Times and the Economist; we have to do better.
We will try to make amends in this piece and in another article that will appear as the electoral trends emerge.
An excuse for this seeming apathy was that a week ago it appeared that what happened in the last 2 elections (Canada is going to its 4th election in 7 years) would repeat itself in the current election as well. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative party would receive the largest number of seats, but would have to settle for a minority government despite Harper's attempts to secure an outright parliamentary majority.
Prime Minister Harper's campaign was predicated on the premise that he had to target the Liberal Party as the main obstacle to that majority. He felt that poaching votes from the Conservatives' traditional rival for power was the best electoral bet. The Conservatives could hardly expect to win over votes from the Bloc Quebecois after condemning French separatism nor could they expect to seduce voters of the New Democratic Party.
Harper was a staunch supporter of the war on terror and favored a policy of reduced government expenditures and lower taxation. The New Democratic Party wanted out of Iraq and Afghanistan and supported greater government intervention and presumably the taxation that would go with it.
The Conservative policy was therefore to attack the new liberal leader Michael Ignatieff as a remote intellectual ,out of touch with the people and essentially a carpetbagger having lived most of his life abroad. The Conservative campaign may-- no pun intended --have played it too conservatively by keeping Harper under wraps to avoid his making a mistake.
The Conservative campaign succeeded in marginalizing the Liberal leaderm but since Harper was kept on a leashm the main beneficiary of the Liberal nosedive was the New Democratic Party and its leader Jack Layton. Layton was born in Montreal but made his political career in Toronto. He was therefore well placed to campaign both in Quebec and Ontario for his party.
Another surprise in the polls has been the weakening of the Bloc Quebecois and this has worked to the advantage of the New Democratic Party. As Canada went to the voting booths today some polls saw the Conservative lead over the New Democratic Party cut to 34% to 31% with the Liberals lagging far behind.
Of course since Canada has a British first past the post system the main question assuming the predictions hold up is the distribution of these percentages and also the voter turnout. The young have been trending towards the New Democratic Party but the young generally show up less at the voting booths and the voting rate in Canada has declined to under 60%.
Given the breakdown in old loyalties, the exit polls may find it difficult to rely on previous electoral patterns and we might have to wait for the actual electoral results in the various parliamentary districts or ridings in Canadian parlance.
The Canadian elections are important for Israel. Stephen Harper has been a very good friend. While the liberals on the one hand proclaim their friendship for Israel, at the same time they insinuate that Harper has gone overboard in his friendship and this has cost Canada diplomatically, for example in terms of a seat at the Security Council. T
he New Democratic Party is even more problematic. Its deputy leader Libby Davies aroused controversy a year ago by claiming that the Israeli "occupation" stretched back to 1948 a comments that elicited a reprimand from Layton and a half-hearted apology from Davies for causing confusion.