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| Great White North |
| Polls may prompt Harper to call an election |
| 2007-04-13 |
| Canada's political parties have been making campaign-style swings across the country in the past few weeks in anticipation that Prime Minister Stephen Harper will cash in on a rise in the polls by calling a snap election this spring. Analysts think the next few weeks present Mr. Harper's Conservative Party its best chance to win a majority in the House of Commons, and signs indicate he could call an election when Parliament returns from its Easter-Passover break next week. What the prime minister lacks is a valid excuse to dissolve Parliament, and so far none of the opposition parties has given him one. They had an opportunity to bring down his government when his budget came up for a vote last month, but the separatist Bloc Quebecois party used its 50 parliamentary votes to support him -- which meant Mr. Harper could go on ruling for another year at the head of a minority government if he so desires. Thwarting him by giving him what he wants: now there's a winning strategy! Recent opinion surveys show that the Conservatives have been making steady gains against their chief rivals, the Liberals. The latest Decima poll results, released April 5, showed the Conservatives ahead with 39 percent of support across the country, compared with 30 percent for the Liberals, 13 percent for the New Democratic Party, and 8 percent each for the Bloc Quebecois and the Greens. Those results fell just one percentage point short of what the Conservatives need to win a paper-thin majority with 155 seats in the Commons. However, they are a lot better than the figures of January 2006, which gave the Conservatives a minority of just 124 seats. (The Conservatives got another seat when a Liberal defector from Ontario joined them a few weeks ago.) |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #1 Those national polls are about as useful as our national Presidential polls. For example, BQ has 8%. But that 8% is all in Quebec, so it's something like 20-30%, and even that is concentrated in certain areas. The Greens' 8% is presumably spread around more, so there are very unlikely to win any seats, except for the odd college town. |
| Posted by: Jackal 2007-04-13 22:43 |