Get Prepared For The Very Real Possibility That Harper Will Win This Thing

Cue Those Blue And White Balloons. You Can Almost Hear The Cheers From Harper’s Flock Now – “FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!”

A Commentary by Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper

The sunny, warm days of summer are behind us, the clouds in the sky are looking steely grey and cold, and the Begonias in the pots on my back patio are getting ready to wither and die.

Is another four years of Stephen Harper in charge of Canada possible? Look at the most recent polls.

It is a setting fit for the recent round of polls I’m reading on where this federal election is going across Canada.

If you share my nightmare of Stephen Harper and his Tory gang managing to pull off another four more years of majority government – aka dictatorship – with less than 40 per cent of the popular vote, start bracing yourself for the worst.

A number of polls released in these late days of September, now generally show the three-way Conservative, NDP, Liberal tie of the last three or four weeks (with some counts looking like the NDP was perched to pull ahead) giving way to Harper’s Conservatives in the lead, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals either tied or running second, and Tom Mulcair’s NDP almost always coming in third.

Two typical examples are a Nano Research poll showing Harper’s Tories with 33 per cent, the Liberals with 31.6 and the NDP with 26.9 per cent, and a CBC Poll Tracker with Harper’s party at 32 per cent, the Liberals at 30.4 per cent and the NDP at 27.6 per cent.

Predicting the outcome of an election is often a crap shoot. But I’ll admit that I felt from the moment this one was called in mid-summer, I had myself convinced that Mulcair, given his smarts and experience in federal and provincial politics, had the best chance of burying more than nine years of Harper doing his “when I get through with Canada, you won’t recognize it” thing.

As for Justin, I didn’t feel he had anywhere near the gravity his exceptional dad had. So I predicted, ever so wrongly, that it would be a two-way race between Harper and Mulcair.

But then you’d have to be the blindest of partisans not to notice that Mulcair has not caught fire.

He wasted the first week or two of the campaign boring the crap out of us while he was trying to get Harper to stop using the word “contraction” and admit that the country’s economy was in recession.

Then, instead offering us something more inspirational like his vision of a better future for Canadians, we were treated to him and Trudeau and sometimes Harper (when the ladder wasn’t just standing back watching and gloating) making like hyenas ripping away at each other’s flesh. Our patience has also been

Not that there hasn’t been a sprinkling of promises around health care, seniors’ pensions, environmental protection and the like but many of those came across like an, ‘Oh by the way, I am here to announce our party’s plan to ….’ while the air was still thick with smoke from the last fight.

And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather spend all day watching a couple of guys playing paddle ball on TV than be exposed to any more of this, ‘my party will wipe out the deficit faster than your party does’ or, ‘our party will allow in more Syrian refugees than yours’. ‘I see your 25,000 refugees and raise it to 50,000.’

Please give us a break from all that . And what is a leader of the NDP doing sounding like the former U.S. president Ronald Reagan and almost sounding like Harper on the subject of deficits? My 24-year-old daughter and many of her millennial friends are more concerned about how they are going to be able to afford to go to college or university, and whether there will be any decent-paying jobs (as opposed to unpaid internships) out there when they graduate.

But save for the Green Party, you hardly here a thing about young people. It is almost all about seniors and “the middle class,” whatever that is.

At this point, some out there might be wanting to ask me, ‘Why are you picking so much on Mulcair? The other guys are just as bad, if not worse when it comes to this stuff.’

Well maybe some of us are getting disappointed in Mulcair because we expected so much more from him than we did from Trudeau where the expectations were initially so low. And we knew what to expect from Stephen ‘stay the course’ Harper. And what a shame that Mulcair nas wasted so much time talking about that than saying more about what he would do to make life better in this country for young, old and everyone in between.

At this point, there must be a lot of people who have grown disappointed in Muclair because look at what has happened to him in the polls – and less than three weeks left before voting day.

Not to much time left for Mulcair and his NDP to get the momentum back.

Fortunately, I have some friends across the border who’ve promised I can come live in their basement if Harper wins another majority.

For more detailed election poll information click on – CBC Poll Tracker .

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