On the move!
Agh! You’re still here? My new site and weblog, ianking.ca is now up and running; new posts are building up over there, never to be mirrored here. Go! What are you waiting for? All the stuff worth keeping has been migrated over to the new server, and I don’t anticipate making any more posts here.
Bloggers and webmasters: Update your links! Simply replace vancouverscrum.blogspot.com with www.ianking.ca in your blogrolls or bookmarks to point to the new site. Old posts will remain on this server for as long as the people at Blogger/Google allow them to remain; unfortunately, I’m not going to bother to come up with any way of converting permalinks on this blog to their corresponding posts on the new site. Yes, I plead laziness. I also realize the irony of switching away from Blogger just it starts to add features that the demanding blog nerds insist upon.
Thanks for reading and linking, and see you over at ianking.ca!
—Ian King, December 13, 2004
Thursday, August 15, 2002
A new survey conducted this week by Ipsos-Reid for CTV and the Globe and Mail reveals lots of things that Candian political watchers have long suspected.
Conclusions include...
:: If given the opportunity to vote at the February Liberal Convention, four in five (78%) Canadians would vote for a leadership convention to choose a new Liberal leader.
:: 73% of Canadians believe that important government business has taken second place to the internal Liberal leadership dispute. What was not reported was whether Canadians thought that this situation was necessarily undesirable.
Current national party support (decided voters and those who are leaning strongly towards a party)
:: Liberals 41%
:: Progressive Conservative 18%
:: Canadian Alliance 16%
:: New Democratic Party 13%
:: Bloc Québecois 8% (33% in Québec)
:: Other 4%
This poll was conducted on August 13th and 14th, several days after Joe Clark announced that he would be leaving as Tory leader next year. The support for the Progressive Convservatives is up 4% over a similar poll taken in mid-July.
The Ipsos-Reid numbers track closely the Environics Focus Canada poll from this month, which shows similar trends in party support.
According to the Reid poll, the Liberals' fortunes at the polls would improve drastically if Paul Martin were to become the new party leader. With Martin in charge, 40% of respondents said that they'd be more likely to vote Liberal. This trend was repeated, albeit not equally, among all party preferences, age groups, education levels, and incomes.
On the other hand, if Jean Chrétien were to remail as Liberal leader, 44% of respondents said that they'd be less likely to vote Liberal, compared with 8% who said that they'd be more likely (46% said that it would make no difference.)
The message from the Canadian electorate seems pretty simple: They favour Jean Chrétien leaving, and are not picky about how he leaves. It seems that the fact that he was re-elected to serve a third term, and the idea that the attempt by Paul Martin to take the party leadership is some sort of coup d'état has not taken hold in Canadians' minds, despite the best spinning of the Chrétienites.
Now, will those Liberals who will decide the party's future pay attention to these numbers? You betcha. Liberals are attracted to power, and there is the old saying, "Party before Country." However, in this case, the best interests of party and country may be one and the same.
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