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Tom Bateman - Report Card Results

Week Five (June 20 to June 27) Grades

Political Parties

Bloc Quebecois

Duceppe is a confident, relaxed leader of a party with little to lose and lots to gain from any party configurarion in the House of Commons. He has done well to exploit the groundswell of resentment aginst Liberal corruption among Quebeckers. Many Liberal campaign signs in Quebec have had "voleur" scrawled across them. In the end, the Bloc may not get the massive number of seats it has angled for but it will nonetheless enjoy a great deal of influence in the coming months. Bernard Landry's comment about Quebec sovereignty sounds like a crisis only of the media's making. The Bloc is both a party of protest and of nationalist aspiration. No surprise here.

Conservative Party

Discipline among one's candidates and operatives is crucial in an election campaign, especially as election day apparoaches. The Conservatives have lapsed a bit on this score. The Tories should have been keen to run a tight ship, knowing that the Liberals and the media would be out to exploit the smallest gaff. Randy White should have known better than to have been candid in a documentary prior to the election campaign. And the Tories
should have handled regional development issues better. So points off for handing the other guys easy targets.

It seems the Conservatives have not been able to maintain the furor against the Liberals regarding governance and accountability. Did they peak too soon? Harper has not been able to overcome the media elite's suspicions of him. While conspiracy theories are among the lowest forms of political argument, they are unfalsifiable and therefore a narcotic for their adherents. The Conservatives have been dragging the "secret agenda" thing around like a
millstone.

But, points added to the Conservatives for pulling together a fractious coalition in short order to take on a governing party that, months ago, was predicted to win a landslide.

Harper is to be comended for injecting some ideological clarity into a federal political environment usually bereft of ideas. But he has sounded awkward as the great paymaster for medicare in Canada. Is not his promise of billions for medicare at odds with his desire to trim the government's role in the economy?

Liberal Party

Paul Martin has disappointed expectations all around. His party machine has slumped back into old-style Liberal strategy: campaign from the left, govern from the right, say very little about anything substantive, wrap the Liberal party in the Canadian flag, spread fear of parties daring to question Liberal orthodoxies. When Liberals deign to strike an independent pose on a policy issue, that is democracy in action; when Conservative MPs do the
same, that is another "scary" MP giving us a glimpse into a "secret agenda."

But this is not to say that the old Liberal strategy will not be successful. It will certainly stave off a 1984-like disaster and perhaps exceed pollsters' predictions. The fact is that Paul Martin's leaderrship ratings have been consistently respectable and as the campaign ends and people consider who should be prime minister, those ratings become more salient.

Marks off for perpetuating a stifling culture of political correctness in Canada.

New Democratic Party

Squeezed by the relentless logic of strategic calculation, the NDP has probably done the best it could to convince voters to stick with the NDP in the face of a possible Conservative minority. With Martin at the head of the Liberals, the NDP portrayal of the Liberals as Conservatives in drag has the ring of plausibility. Yet there are limits to this tack and strong NDPers who believe the Conservatives are scary Bush-ites in parkas. As a result the NDP is stalled in the high teens and will not play the "central role" Jack Layton has set for it.

Now what's this about American lefties telling Canadians how to vote? I thought Micheal Moore didn't like it when the US went around telling other countries what to do?

The Green Party

Grade: C

Being ignored in the serious scamble for votes in the final days. But the polls suggest the Greens will have a publicly-provided funding base to be a player in future. At this point only the NDP has had reason to be concerned about the Greens. Other parties may become worried in future.

Past Political Party Grades

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