So what are leader debates for anyway?
So what are leader debates for anyway?
The Campaign
By Dave Taylor
Otawa Bureau Chief, CBC Radio News
(from CBC.ca)
June 22, 2004
David Taylor
Many things I presume, but picking the winning party in the election isn?t necessarily one of them.
Last week?s debates seem to have confirmed a pattern that we?ve seen in the last few elections. Perceived winners don?t necessarily reap huge benefits. Jean Charest was judged to have won the 1997 debates, but his party still finished fifth overall when the votes were counted. Joe Clark was the pick of the leaders in 2000, but saw his party?s popular vote and seat count decline from the levels Charest attained three years earlier.
The punditocracy and some polling suggests that Stephen Harper came out on top in the English debate on Tuesday, Gilles Duceppe the winner on Monday. Since then the media polling suggests that public opinion is pretty much static. The Bloc maintains its huge lead in Quebec. The Liberals and Conservatives are in a statistical heat nationally. The New Democrats are a strong third.
So with one week to go, the debates are ancient history. There is everything to play for in this election.
These are uncharted waters for our major parties. None of the senior players in the Liberal, Conservative and NDP campaigns has seen something this close in their careers. They came of age in an era of sweeps and majorities. The old hands have only the most distant memories of 1979. The 1972 cliffhanger is ancient history for the leaders and the teams around them.
What is a party to do?
Willie Sutton once said he robbed banks because "that's where the money is." There is the political corollary to the bank robber's credo. You go to where the voters are, and in this election most of them are in Ontario.
This week the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP are spending the bulk of their time in Canada's largest province seat-wise. In a race so close, the sense is that bringing the leader in to help a local candidate may be the difference between winning and losing.
Get a load of Jack Layton's Friday itinerary: Timmins, Sudbury, Sault Ste Marie, Windsor, London, Kitchener, Cambridge, and Guelph. He wants to touch every living, breathing, x-marking NDP supporter in the province if he can.
While the Tory and Liberal tours may not manage eight cities in one day, expect them to be just as busy. On Tuesday, for instance, Stephen Harper pops up in Ottawa, The Soo and Toronto.
This is where the "airwar" intersects with the "groundwar."
The leader tours are the "airwar," the commanding heights of the campaign where the big themes are rolled out. They get the bulk of the attention. The "groundwar" is the riding-by-riding battle where organization, volunteers, persuasion and committment matter most. In all 308 ridings, the parties have armies of volunteers who work the phones, go door-to-door, attempt to identify their vote and do whatever is necessary to get it to the polling place on Monday. Good organization on election day can make the difference between winning and losing on June 28.
Just ask Leeds-Grenville MP Joe Jordan. In 2000, the Ontario Liberal knew he was in a tough race with his Canadian Alliance challenger Gord Brown. A superior Liberal organization on election day helped Jordan pull off the tightest race in Canada, a 55 vote margin. (Jordan and Brown are facing off again this time. Jordan is viewed as having the better organization, but Brown doesn't have to compete against a Progressive Conservative.)
As this week unfolds, local campaigns will be attempting to polish off their last canvass and figure out the shape of the vote poll by poll. Then things turn to election-day planning and delivering those votes to the polling place. Need help with getting registered? The campaigns know how. Want a ride to your polling place? The campaigns can oblige. Feeling reluctant about voting? If the party has identified you as a supporter or leaning that way, expect a phone call trying to persuade you to mark your X.
(My favourite election-day canvass story. In the 1985 Ontario provincial election I lived in the downtown Toronto riding of the late Larry Grossman, a Tory cabinet minister. He had lost a tight leadership race to Frank Miller earlier in the year, and was facing a tough challenge from the Liberals and NDP. On election day, late afternoon, I got a knock on my door and there was my Tory candidate, urging anyone who looked like a potential Tory voter to get out and vote. I was a scruffy university student at the time, so it must have struck him as a wasted conversation. He was running, literally, door-to-door. He won. Sometimes that's what you have to do to win.)
The next week is going to be fascinating to watch, both from the air and the ground. In a race that appears as tight as this one, it could be the small battles, in hundreds of different places across the country, that make the difference for the winners and losers.
The Conservative candidate is a 30-something hot female lawyer. At a local level the choice is very clear for me. 
