An Obama in Canada?

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Media commentary

Karim H. Karim

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama frequently says that his story is only possible in the United States. It seems reasonable, given our vaunted multiculturalism and employment equity policies, that we should be able to make a similar claim for Canada.

Sadly, visible minority representation in the federal parliament lags far behind their numbers in the population, despite their energetic involvement in Canadian electoral politics. According to research conducted by Jerome Black and Bruce Hicks, they comprised 7.1% of all MPs elected in 2004 – which was less than half their percentage in the population. 

Immigrants from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa comprise the bulk of newcomers to this country. Given these trends, Statistics Canada projects that visible minorities will form a fifth of Canada’s population by 2017. But the issues relating to immigration generally remain under the radar during elections. Politicians avoid the topic studiously, and the media usually follow their lead. This is surprising given that a number of the key seats in urban areas have significant proportions of immigrants.

A series of studies have shown that recent newcomers have significantly lower rates of income, despite higher educational and skill levels than earlier immigrants who arrived from Europe. It appears half a century after John Porter alerted us to the “vertical mosaic” that stratifies Canadian society, his description is even more apt and now has a racial dimension. This does not bode well for race relations in this country and should be of concern to all parties. 

There was a hint that the media may be waking up to this issue. CBC Radio 1’s campaign coverage had three major immigration-related items in last week. Anna Maria Tremonti and guest host Jan Wong brought in a series of guests to discuss the participation of immigrants in politics in two separate editions of The Current, and The World at Six ran a feature story. This seems unprecedented for coverage during an election period, and is even more surprising that it should appear in the first week of a campaign.

But journalists are not yet asking politicians the hard questions about immigration and the lack of appropriate employment for visible minorities. It remains to be seen whether last week’s momentum will pick up or be buried under puffin poop.

Karim H. Karim is the director of the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University.

Where there’s agreement/where there’s not

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy

Paul Adams

There continues to be a disparity among the three polling companies who are gathering nightly numbers: EKOS (where I am involved in the polling), Nanos, and Harris/Decima.

The disagreement is about how strongly the Tories are running. H/D has them in majority territory, Nanos a bit shy of that, and EKOS continues to have them tracking well away from where they would likely win a majority. EKOS will release new numbers tonight (Sunday) at about 9:0O p.m. ET.

Where there is agreement, however, is that the Conservatives are well ahead of the Liberals. It seems like it would take a considerable change in the dynamics of the campaign to erase this. The Liberals, meanwhile, in all the polls, continue to chart ahead of the New Democrats — not by a huge margin, but clearly ahead nonetheless. It is certainly too early to say whether this will hold.

And the Greens, for their part, continue to show well. The question for them is whether they can hold their vote as we get closer to election day. They are still well short of winning any significant number of seats because their support is broad, but thinly spread across the country. Will the newbie Green supporters drift back to the Liberals or the NDP to stop the Conservatives on election day? Or will the Greens start pushing into contention at the seat level and hold their vote? There is also a generational story here with young voters much more intensely attracted to the Green. They have tended not to vote in large numbers in the past, but maybe the Greens can create new dynamic, playing to a degree on the Gen-X and Gen-Y resentment of us baby-boomers.

Canada continues to be in a period of structural change in the party system, a change that began with the Liberal loss of Quebec in 1984, and has progressed in larger or smaller steps in almost every election since. This one probably won’t be any different.

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.

Mr. Ordinary

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

Paul Adams

For the second day running, the Ottawa Citizen has a fine political feature on its front page, this one by Don Butler about the political cult of the “ordinary guy”, which dictates that our political leaders, who practically by definition are extraordinary people, need to be made over as the schmoes  next door. Witness Harper the sweatered family man and Dion the cross-country skier and fisherman.

In fact both the leaders of our two major parties could be properly qualified as “intellectuals”, which nowadays seems everywhere to be a dirty word politically, perhaps with the exception of France.

In addition, Harper is that rarest of animals in political life, an introvert. Extroversion is so nearly universal a characteristic of political leaders that the media and the public hardly know how to handle it when one comes along who is not an extrovert.

I first met Stephen Harper when he was a Reform M.P., “class of ’93”. What was quite striking about him at the time was that unlike most of the new Reformers, many of whom came from the know-nothing school of populist politics (though I do not include Preston Manning in this), Harper knew and understood the ideas of his political opponents and the prevailing political orthodoxy. It was just that he disagreed with it.

It could be a thrill listening to him explain his viewpoints in precise counterpoint to conventional political wisdom. He was just so smart and, one might even say, learned.

But he was also quite obviously an introvert, and I would say quite shy. He could be awkward if the wall between journalist and politician were even briefly pierced. I remember walking across from Parliament Hill one day and congratulating him on either getting engaged or getting married — I forget which it was. What would have been an easy, relaxed moment with most politicians, turned out to be rather uncomfortable, as if I did not have the standing to intrude on his private life that way.

Most politicians make it easy for those of us on the journalistic side who sometimes are a little socially awkward ourselves. They are extroverts, and besides, because they love talking about themselves, and the role of politicians and journalists permits and encourages this, they do all the work that needs doing socially during our encounters. Not so Harper.

In later years, after Harper left Parliament for a time, I used to call him up fairly frequently to talk about political events. It was always stimulating; always an intellectual workout. In fact, I soon discovered that I preferred talking with him on the phone, because it spared us the uncomfortable moments of greeting and parting that accompanied an in-person interview, when you are supposed to just chit-chat affably.

Then, there was a hiatus of several years when we did not have any contact while I was in the Middle East with the Globe and Mail. By the time I came back he had become leader of the opposition. Unbeknownst to me, my son was enrolled in the same school his kids attended. As I was standing in the school yard on the first day of school, I had a tap on the shoulder, and there was Stephen Harper all dressed up in the sober blue suit appropriate to his position in life.

In an almost bewilderingly short time, we had each obviously run out of things to say. We could hardly launch into taxes or Canadian unity there in the schoolyard, and I found myself briefly considering “so I hear you are leader of the opposition now” as a conversational gambit. We stared at the tops of our shoes — something I remember well from my years as a student in England, but which actually doesn’t happen much over here, at least literally. 

I, for one, have no doubt that when he talked on the day of the election call about what being a father meant to him, he was sincere. I also have no doubt that it has been a difficult thing for him personally to serve all this up to us as political fodder, though the politician in him understands this needs to be done. And most of all, I wonder why the rest of us should care — why we demand this of our political leaders?

I can tell you, as many others in the Press Gallery can, that this is a very intelligent, thoughtful man. Of course we have also seen other sides of his personality during his years as prime minister — politically relevant sides of his personality, including his instincts for secrecy and control.

All these are worth considering as we go to vote.

But hasn’t history shown often enough that some great parents prove to be poor leaders and some great leaders are disappointments as parents? So what difference does it make as we consider how to vote?

After all, unlike me, most Canadians won’t even run into him at the PTA.

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.

Majority/minority watch

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy

Paul Adams

The excellent Democratic Space website, which will launch its ’08 election site tomorrow, already has a set of seat projections up based on a poll of polls from the first half of the week. They give the Tories 146, Liberals 92, NDP 30, BQ 38, Others 2, and Greens a goose egg. A majority is 155.

Of course, the confusing thing is that since mid-week, one well-publicized poll from Harris/Decima suggested the Tories have been trending upward, while the EKOS poll, also released yesterday, had the trend going the other way.

As more polls are published in the coming days, which trend, if either, is correct should become more certain. So-called “rolling polls” blend results for several days, so if there is a trend, it takes a few days to become evident.

Every pollster will defend his or her own numbers as being correct. From a journalistic perspective, it is a good idea to understand something about sample size, methodology, and so on in order to evaluate competing claims. It is also a good idea, when the information seems to be conflicting, to reserve judgment, rather than throw great weight to one poll or another — even when, as sometimes happens, the storyline of one poll is much more interesting than the storyline of another.  

But from the Conservative perspective, as long as the question of majority or minority continues to be a matter of media speculation, it is not a good thing. In the last election, true, the Tories apparently benefitted a little from a “bandwagon” effect in Quebec as their numbers rose and they started to look viable there. However, there is an even more well-established pattern of at least some voters in English Canada pulling back from the Tories when they think they are closing in on a majority. Judging from the Bloc’s campaign, it seems they think that some Quebec voters may be susceptible to the same reflex this time.

P.S. Also take a look at Calgary Grit who explains how he does his “probabalistic” seat projections. 

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.

The media and the Green Shift

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Media commentary

Christopher Waddell

A correction from today’s Globe and Mail:

A chart in yesterday’s newspaper on Stéphane Dion’s carbon-tax plan omitted the proposal to cut income-tax rates, to 13.5 per cent from 15 in the lowest income-tax bracket, and to 21 per cent from 22 and to 25 per cent from 26 in the middle brackets.

Christopher Waddell is associate director of the school and a former Globe and Mail Ottawa bureau chief, former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and election night executive producer for CBC TV News.

The forgotten war

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy

Paul Adams

Take a look at Chris Cobb’s excellent piece on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen today (which I mention despite not because of the interview it includes with my EKOS colleague, Frank Graves).

In the 2005-6 election campaign, there was virtually no discussion of the Afghanistan mission, although it very quickly became a dominant issue in our politics afterwards — and rightly so, given the Canadian blood and treasure involved. There was not a single question posed on Afghanistan in any of the leaders’ debates in the ’05-’06 election campaign, and, unprompted, the leaders generally gave the issue wide berth. The media, with a few noble exceptions, did little to fill the gap.

Whatever the virtue of the subsequent parliamentary resolution, which the Liberals supported, to pull out of Kandahar in 2011, it had the consequence of removing the issue of our commitment in Afghanistan from debate, at least so far as the government and official opposition were concerned. Stephen Harper’s apparent pledge this week to pull out of Afghanistan entirely in 2001 was clearly aimed not at provoking a fuller discussion but at further dampening the issue.

There is something wrong with our politics, including the role of the media, that we haven’t had the national discussion we should on our role in Afghanistan. Cobb’s piece is an excellent place to start fixing that.

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.

Vote parking or not?

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy

Christopher Waddell

A combination of Paul Adams’ comments about Green Party strength among young voters and today’s Ipsos-Reid poll in the National Post showing the Greens at 11 per cent creates the possibility for some interesting dynamics in the coming weeks.

The Green Party won 4.3 percent of the vote in 2004 and 4.5 per cent in 2006 so that is probably its base level of support for this campaign as well. Perhaps the Greens at 10-11 per cent or even higher just reflects people parking their votes there for the moment, as they can’t decide among or don’t like the other parties and leaders.

But the longer in the campaign the Greens stay there or move higher, the more problematic it becomes to make seat projections. Those projections are based on the relationship between past election results and current opinion poll standings. No one knows who these new Greens used to support so it is very difficult to factor that into calculations.

Even more interesting, if the Green Party gets 10 per cent of the vote or more nationally on October 14, the Greens will have had a major impact on the election results even if they don’t win a seat. They will turn many ridings into four party races, making some people MPs who never thought they had a chance to win. That’s because the winner could have no more than 30-35 per cent of the votes cast in the riding.

If that happens in enough ridings, look for a revival of talk about electoral reform and proportional representation that died after the crushing the issue took in last year’s Ontario referendum.

Christopher Waddell is associate director of the school and a former Globe and Mail Ottawa bureau chief, former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and election night executive producer for CBC TV News.

More on gender gap

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

Paul Adams

David Akin sent this after my earlier blogs on gender gap:

Ipsos Reid, as you may know, is the pollster retained (hired) by Canwest News Service, which is my employer. More than 1.5 million Canadians subscribe to a Canwest daily paper. The day before you posted this, those 1.5 million subscribers read a poll, taken by a competitor of the firm you work for, which addressed gender issues. I wrote the story. I don’t get paid by Ipsos or have any financial in any polling company but I thought you’d like to know that at least one other pollster has been surveying on this issue.

Here’s the Victoria Times-Colonist’s pick-up of the Ipsos gender poll.

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

Canada’s most eminent political blogger

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Media commentary

Paul Adams

The discerning Paul Wells plugs our site. A snappy dresser too. 

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

Green tease

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy

Paul Adams

EKOS will be reporting on large samples in the three major metropolitan areas tomorrow (Saturday) morning. One interesting finding is that the Greens are running in first place among Generation Y (25 and younger) in Toronto and Vancouver and first among Generation X (26-44) in Montreal.

Now, if people that age would only come out to vote….

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