Martin-Taber Election Speculation

Last week Jim Flaherty gave a speech in which he warned of the fiscal dangers of a Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition, which Don Martin interpreted to mean that the Tories want to force a fall election. The Conservatives responded by saying that they will not force a fall election, which is a prudent move given the trends in the polls. Well now Jane Taber wants to weigh in by saying "Stephen Harper’s Conservatives are trying to quash rumours that they’re gunning for a fall election despite the fact some of their own are fuelling them". Really? I'm sure that all the Tory strategists are telling the Prime Minister "we have been stagnating in the low 30s in the polls, what we need is an election that nobody other than allegedly Guy Giorno wants."

Don Martin, Jane Taber, and friends are trying to create the narrative that the Conservative government wants to engineer their own defeat this fall despite a prolonged trend of weak polling numbers. Even Liberal pollster, donor, and culture warrior Frank Graves injected his voice into the debate, prognosticating that the gun registry vote "shifts the prospects of either Liberals or Conservatives achieving majority mandate from implausible to unimaginable." While I disagree with a number of his partisan talking points; he does make one good point that while there may be 14 opposition members who flipped their votes on the registry, there are 22 Conservative MPs in Quebec and the greater Toronto area where it is popular.

I don't know if the Tories will lose votes in pro-registry ridings for sticking with the same policy position that they have had all along. All those people who voted Tory in Quebec and Toronto, did they not know that the party campaigned on scrapping the gun registry? Where opposition MPs flip flopped from their previously stated positions, the Conservatives have at least stayed true to their word on this issue. I don't think that the saving of the gun registry is going to vault the Conservatives into a majority government, but I disagree with Graves’s partisan opinion that it is "unimaginable". The Liberals have not fought an election since the following picture was taken, and it is really easy to imagine the outcome if the ballot box question is Tory majority or Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition.