This campaign has turned out to be quite a surprise to me. I was confident a majority gov’t was within reach. The NDP? What happened?
"The NDP? What happened?"
What is happening is a protest vote run amok.
The same as what happened in Ontario in 1990. In that case the protest was against an opportunistic election call by Premier Peterson when only 3 years into his mandate. Peterson was heard to remark at one point during that campaign that "the voters are cranky".
In this case the protest is against the Bloc Québécois in Quebec and against the Grits in the rest of Canada. Neither protest can favour the Tories because the supporters of both the Bloc and the Liberal parties are leftists.
The NDP is traditionally party to use to cast a protest vote for those who would otherwise not vote for them. They are not ordinarily seen as being able, federally, to win a majority or even a plurality sot the protest vote is ordinarily seen as relatively safe. Provincially is another matter, although the 1990 Ontario win shocked even the NDP leader himself.
My hope is that this sudden NDP "popularity" turns some of the riding contests into circular firing squads among the opposition oarties such that the vote split between them allows the Tories to take seats that otherwise might have gone to the Bloc or the Liberals.
After the disastrous Dion, the Liberals decided they needed another Pierre Trudeau, an intellectual politician. so they went to Harvard and talked ex-pat Ignatieff top become their leader, but he’s been pretty wooden and hasn’t caught on.
So, the usually-third-place NDP suddenly became the default place for non-Conservative voters. We don’t know yet if Jack Layton’s 1996 “bawdy-house-bust”, revealed last week, will have any effect (other than ticking off the leftists)
His family, the Grants and Masseys on his mother's side, are very privileged, and he's been more a part of an international academic elite than an ordinary Canadian. It's kind of the Obama thing, except Ignatieff actually does have the academic achievements that Obama's people claim for him.
So I'd suppose that average Canadians would rather be tortured to death than vote for Ignatieff's party this time. Years ago candidates were parachuted in from academia or the diplomatic corps to the top of the Liberal Party -- Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau back in the 1960s. But nowadays Canadians are probably a bit more populist and voters resent being told to vote for "their betters."
The Libs might have done better perhaps with Ignatieff's former college roommate, Bob Rae, an old NDP man who ran Ontario in the '90s, or with Ken Dryden, a former NHL goaltender. Both were in the running for the Liberal top spot. What was the party thinking?