Two interesting pieces

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Media commentary

Paul Adams

Keith Boag had an interesting piece last night on The National in which he argued two things:

1. That despite the very real economic issues in the Canadian economy  and turmoil in the financial markets, unemployment remains low in historical terms and that the two elections in recent decades that have turned on economic issues — 1984 and 1993 — both occurred in periods of high unemployment; and
2. The Canadian government actually has relatively few levers to deal with the sources of economic instability at the moment — at least at a macro level. (Of course, it is possible to spend money on particular sectors — intervening at the micro level, as it were; and it is possible to act to alleviate the consequences of economic distress.) He doesn’t address this, but I think there is some evidence that voters increasingly understand that governments have fewer economic levers than they once did, which may be part of the explanation for the general fall in the salience of politics in the West.   

 In this morning’s Globe, Brian Laghi has an interesting piece arguing that the reason the the Liberals have lost their mojo may be in part because they have allowed their traditional appeal to the centre-right to atrophy, so that they have become just another party of the left. The old saw about the Liberals governing from the right and running campaigns from the left had something to it: of course the governing part is what gave them the bona fides with many voters and supporters to tilt left at election time.

[Conflict alert: both Keith and Brian are former colleagues and friends. But you know what, that shouldn’t be held against them.]

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.