Do the math: does a united right add up?

Catholic New Times, Nov 16, 2003 by Marc Zwelling

Progressive Conservative Party leader Peter MacKay and Canadian Alliance chief Stephen Harper say their plan to "unite the right" will create a real alternative to the ruling Liberals. If the rank and file in the parties approve the merger by the next election, expected next year, will the new right be a contender?

MacKay and Harper say do the math. In 2000 the Alliance won 26 per cent of the vote led by the religiously devout Stockwell Day. The Conservatives under Joe Clark won 12 per cent. With a combined 38 per cent a united right would nearly pull even with the Liberals, who won their third straight majority government with only 41 per cent of the votes because of Canada's first-past-the-post election rules.

So much for speculation; turn to the polls for facts.

In the unlikely scenario of no post-merger defections, if the election were today the united right would get 28 per cent (in a June EKOS Research poll), 22 per cent (The Vector Poll in July), or 32 per cent (SES Canada Research poll in August).

But just stacking the two parties' support is misleading. The party that will benefit most from the ConservativeAlliance merger is the Liberals.

The reason is that in 2000 half of Progressive Conservative voters picked the Liberals as their second choice. Only 17 per cent would have voted for the Alliance if there had been no Conservative candidate. (The figures are from the 2000 Federal Election Study conducted by the Institute for Social Research at York University).

If the new party looks like the Alliance in disguise, PC voters will flock to the Liberals on election day (or many will stay home).

Nationally, only 9 per cent of voters in 2000 picked the Alliance as their back-up party. Do the math again. That means in the Alliance's best-case scenario, 35 per cent would have voted for the one right party in 2000. Unfortunately for the right, clocks run forward. Today, the combined right--minus those Conservative defectors--would barely reach 20 per cent.

When Paul Martin becomes Liberal leader, Liberal support will rise. With the prospect of Martin's leadership, Liberal support this year is running at 43 per cent to 54 per cent.

Alliance support meanwhile has fallen to the 10 per cent to 16 per cent range during the past six months. Conservative support in that period has been 14 per cent to 18 per cent.

Uniting the right into a force capable of de-throning the Liberals is an illusion because Conservatives and the Alliance are not identical feathers of the same right wing. They appeal to substantially different voters.

Alliance supporters are pro-life, capital punishers, anti-tax, against liberalizing marijuana, opposed to subsidies to poor regions and enraged over same-sex marriage. Progressive Conservative voters are more live-and-let-live types than Alliance voters when it comes to family values. They are less slavishly devoted to the private sector and more tax-tolerant. If these two parties' voters were destined to cohabit, one party would have disappeared already.

Leadership is not the only motivation in voting. Policies, local candidates and party identification are the other pieces of the voter's decision. On party ID, a staggering one in four Canadian voters is a Liberal, more than twice as many as say Alliance.

Merging the Alliance and the PC's will reduce voter choice. As a result turnout in 2004 may fall even below 61 per cent, the modern voter absenteeism record set in 2000.

Can the Alliance and PCs together stop Martin? A charismatic new leader could format the new Conservative Party into her or his own version and present an appealing alternative prime minister. But who is that Canadian Schwarzenegger?

The conclusion: Canadians do not love the Liberals, but they fear the opposition more.

Canadians want continuity and change. A party leader who gets this will become the prime minister, leading the Liberals, the new Conservatives or the NDP.

Article originally published in Straight Goods.com. Mark Zwelling is president of Vector Research.