1568...Scott Tribe Informs Moi

That I missed the Strategic Counsel poll that has the Tories with the slimmest, one point, lead over the Michael Ignatieff's.

This is Mr. Tribe's excellent post fully and completely:

Cons 31, Libs 30. New SC poll. Prorogation hurting Cons: pollster

Posted by Scott Tribe on January 13, 2010, at 2:39 pm |

There are a lot more “elitists” out there that care about their Parliament getting unnecessarily prorogued then cabinet minister Tony Clement thinks apparently, if this new SC poll is any indication:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has paid a large price in popularity for shutting down Parliament, with his Conservatives effectively tied with Liberals in a new poll by The Strategic Counsel. Conservatives are at 31 per cent, compared to 30 per cent for Liberals, in the poll conducted by Strategic Counsel late last week, as controversy was starting to build over Harper’s prorogation of Parliament until March 3.

“Proroguing of Parliament has hurt the Tory brand,” said Tim Woolstencroft, the managing partner at Strategic Counsel, who believes that Harper’s Conservatives must be seeing the same kind of numbers, because the government has appeared to be in a defensive posture all week. “I think the government is worried about it,” Woolstencroft said.

As cheery as these numbers will make Liberals, I will still agree with the SC pollster that the Liberals need to do a lot more then sit around and let things happen. I will again point to Steve V’s blogpost and again agree with him when he says if the Liberals want to try and position themselves as the party for those Canadians angry with this prorogation to use as their vehicle of discontent, they need to have a proposal of democratic reforms to propose to the public; preferably sooner rather then later, when the risk of this anger dying down is greater (preferably within the next couple of weeks, just before or just after the scheduled CAPP rallies are taking place).

EDIT: In the meantime, I’d love to hear a journalist ask Tony whether he underestimated the amount of elitists living in Canada.

UPDATE @ 4:38 pm: Steve V talks about this poll and another one released by Angus-Reid. It has a wider gap of 6, but thats down from a margin of 9 from the last AR poll. More interesting is the concurrent poll that Angus-Reid took on Canadians views on Harper’s prorogation of Parliament. They aren’t impressed, and as Steve says, dangerous numbers for Harper.

WFDS