Stephen Harper's Conservatives Making No Progress

There's been much attention lately given to the fact that in the light of the latest damning report by Justice Gomery, recent polls have the Liberals falling to within a statistical dead heat of the Conservatives. And while that's certainly news, a single or pair of polls should never be taken out of context.

When one looks at the context of the numbers over the past months, a couple of points besides the Liberals precipitous fall become clear:

1. It happened before;
2. It lasted a couple of months;
3. When it happened before, the Conservatives got a huge boost;
4. The Conservatives haven't gotten a huge boost this time;
5. Right now, the Conservatives can't seem to reliably break 30%.

This can't possibly be good news for the Conservatives, because there are no more revelations coming. The Febuary report will be full of very useful recommendations about what to do next, but no more juicy or salacious details. Even if an election were held today, using the best numbers for the Conservatives, a crude estimate suggests that the Conservatives would have an even more perilous minority than the Liberals have now. And with every day that passes between the release of the Part I of the Gomery report, it looks like things are likely to revert back to the numbers of last election.

If this is bad for the Conservative Party generally, it's horrible news for Stephen Harper in particular. Of special interest is a poll of 2000 Canadian adults by Ipsos-Reid over Oct 25-27, which has two interesting nuggets which haven't gotten as much headlines as the Liberal's faltering fortunes. The first is in response to the question, “Which of the federal party leaders would do the best job of cleaning up corruption uncovered by the Gomery Inquiry?”

Paul Martin	25%
Jack Layton	25%
Stephen Harper	22%
Gilles Duceppe	9%
None	12%
Don't Know	8%

and the second is the answer to the question “Do you agree or disagree? - Regardless of what’s being revealed by the Gomery Inquiry, I’m more likely to trust Paul Martin as prime minister than Stephen Harper.”

Agree	51%
Disagree	40%
Don't know	9%

It's one thing for the Conservatives not to be able to consistantly break 30% when the Liberals are mired in corruption and uninspiring government. After all, the Conservative Party is a new party, and Canadians are cautious about giving a new party the keys to the Government side of Parliament. It's another thing entirely for Stephen Harper to be trailing Paul Martin in trustworthiness (although in fairness, it's within the MoE for the first question.)

If the Conservatives can't get into majority-government levels of voting intention now, there's simply no hope of them becoming a governing party in the forseeable future. At some point, people will have to accept that the Reform takeover of the Progressive Conservative party has been a dismal failure, and someone from the Tory wing of the party is going to have to take the reins f power from Harper.