Ipsos Reid finds that the Conservatives lead the Liberals 37%-29% and that Canadians think Stephen Harper would make a better prime minister than Michael Ignatieff 46%-21%. After two full months of almost no political coverage other than prorogation stories, how can that be? Some pundits might offer the Olympic afterglow effect benefiting the government, but here is an alternative explanation: Ignatieff’s support of abortion within the context of a foreign aid plan to address maternal health struck Canadians as loopy. It is a plausible explanation because the only political story to have any legs aside from Harper’s decision to prorogue in late December has been the widespread criticism of Ignatieff’s extreme abortion position. It could also help explain why Canadians’ have a poorer view of the Liberal leader than they had three months ago (down in almost every aspect of leadership that Ipsos asks about), when he has done practically nothing objectionable in the lapsed time. Canadians do not ideologues on the left or the right and Ignatieff’s umpteenth reintroduction to the Canadian people has revealed the Liberal leader as a left-wing ideologue. To be fair to the National Post’s John Ivison does concede that Ignatieff and his new OLO staff has done a poor job “re-packag(ing) their man and focus(ing) his message on bread-and-butter issues like youth unemployment, rather than on subjects he might have debated while he was a human rights professor at Harvard.” And why is that? Precisely because he’s talking about exporting abortion to the developing world.
