Le lendemain

As you may or may not know, I gave Stéphane Dion a hundred bucks back when he was running for Liberal leader (several of my ND friends gave me hell for this; none of them have since recanted and thanked me, strangely). I'm an admirer of his going back to the Clarity Act. I would very much like to see this election result in a Liberal government (minority, preferably), though the chance of that is pretty well at zero. In light of all this, I thought there was some danger that I might go too easy on Dion in my debate reporting. Turns out I might have gone too hard on him. In the debate aftermath, he's gotten the biggest increase in media coverage, and it's been almost entirely positive.

An Ipsos-Reid poll found that 40% of respondents felt that Dion won the debate, well ahead of Duceppe in second at 24%. More significantly, twenty percent of respondents said that the debate changed their mind about who to vote for. That's a significant number. Also interesting is this (desk pound to Paul Wells for that one), which shows that viewers reacted overwhelmingly positively to most of what Dion (and Duceppe) said, and overwhelmingly negatively to most of what Harper said (though a commenter on Wells' blog points out that these reactions took place almost as soon as the leaders in question opened their mouths, suggesting that participants in the study had made up their minds before they actually listened to what the leaders had to say) (Update: Not so, apparently: this is a pie chart showing the participants' political allegiances going into the debate).

Granted, Dion isn't going to perform as well tonight, and granted it's too late for him to win a plurality of seats. But he might be able to salvage the election, and maybe even his leadership, in sort of the same way that John Turner did in 1988. Turner, recall, lost the 1984 election (in fairness, that bit was probably inevitable), with the most enduring moment of the campaign being his telling Mulroney during the leader's debate that "[he] had no choice" but to make a series of patronage appointments. From 1984 until 1988 he was pretty much a lame duck, being plotted against by forces loyal to Jean Chrétien. During the 1988 election, though, fought on free trade, John Turner belatedly emerged as a leader. He lost then too, of course, but he did it with some measure of self-respect and dignity. I believe that 2008 could be Dion's 1988, and carbon emissions could be his free trade. And I even think that if the gap between the Liberals and the Conservatives is less than, say, twenty seats, he might get another chance. But it's possible that I'm being naive here.

Update: Of course, not all the news is good. Don Martin, inexplicably western Canada's most prominent national pundit, suggests that Dion's performance didn't matter, since only the Conservatives and the Bloc have a chance of winning a majority of Quebec's seats. I'm not sure where he's getting that the Conservatives have a chance at winning a majority of Quebec's seats, but they plainly do not; electionprediction.org currently has the absolute best case scenario for the Conservatives as being 21 Quebec seats. Personally, I suspect they'll wind up with as few or fewer than the Liberals. But this is the same Don Martin who went from touting Stockwell Day as the Great Right Hope (from an Alberta base, recall - he had no excuse for ignorance) to complaining that he was all media-pleasing sizzle and no steak, without apparently considering what this said about his own susceptibility to sizzle.