You can hardly blame the Hair for not wanting to hurry home. He and his hairdresser are touring Europe in style—and Bavaria is so beautiful this time of year. There is nothing good waiting for him in Ottawa. With the daily bombardment from the Senate, poison pen memos from the Supreme Court, the tanking of the economy and the bad-news polls, he should stay in Europe.
Not that his G7 meetings were all that much fun either. He might be one of the senior citizens of that little club but they were not all that nice to him. President Obama is no buddy of his. Not that the Hair gives a damn about carbon emissions in the year 2100. And maybe that is when he will get that trade deal that the Europeans are stalling him on. Canadians think he is just jerking them around about it. With nothing on paper yet, there is no way he can announce it again before the election.
But he is reaping more than he deserves. The Ukrainians lionized him. Why not? They will kiss up to any western leader who will say publicly that Russia’s Vladimir Putin is a putz. He just might be doing it to play up to Canadian voters of Ukrainian origin. It is the same with the Poles. Stopping off in Poland was a good idea. With more than a million voters in Canada with ties to Poland, the Hair knows how his votes are buttered.
With his stop in Rome to spend ten minutes visiting the Pope, you would think that the Hair had all bases covered. And it is amazing when you do the mathematics. The Hair thinks he has Canada’s Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, Italians and Catholics, sewn up. That combination alone should inflate the base Conservative vote to well over 30 per cent.
But it does not. Most but not all of the pollsters are showing the Conservatives in a minority or losing position. And what must be driving the Hair nuts is that he is supposedly locked in what could be a three-way tie. His pollsters are telling him that the Liberals and New Democrats are doing just as well as he is.
What the pollsters do not seem to be telling him is about the votes who say “None of the above.” They do not tell him about the percentage of voters who have parked their vote and will not tell the truth when asked about it. They pick a party at random to confuse the figures. These people might know who they are going to vote for but they do not tell.
The Hair is going to find that this election will be decided after Labour Day. It will be about where the economy is headed by then and the Hair does not know what to tell them. He does not know.
What will be the mood after Labour Day? Will Canadians be up and positive? The Hair is coming home to a troubling summer.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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