If Stockwell Day published a how-to guide for national campaigns, it probably wouldn't crack many best-seller lists. But the more you see of Paul Martin's strategy heading into the upcoming federal election, the more you wonder if he may have somehow obtained an advance copy.
To everyone's great relief, the prime minister has not yet turned up for a press conference in a skin-tight wetsuit, nor has he lamented the southern flow of a north-flowing river. But for reasons best known to himself, Mr. Martin has adopted what might have been Mr. Day's most disastrous tactic of all.
One of the enduring images of the 2000 campaign, and perhaps the one that finally sealed the Canadian Alliance leader's fate, was Mr. Day whipping out his handwritten "NO TWO-TIER HEALTH CARE'' sign in the midst of the televised leadership debate. It was breathtakingly amateurish, especially since he apparently freelanced the idea without consulting his advisers, but the bigger problem was that it epitomized his ill-advised attempt to fight the election on his opponents' terms.
In pulling out his sign, Mr. Day ensured that the debate's most memorable moment focused on two things: his own quirky personality, and the Alliance's health-care policy. But a savvier leader would have realized that those were both losing issues for his party.
Fairly or not, most Canadians inherently mistrusted the Alliance on health care, and they mistrusted Mr. Day for his eccentricities. The Liberals knew that was where the opposition party was vulnerable, which is why they tried to turn the election into a referendum on those two issues. And Mr. Day, then and throughout the campaign, played right into their hands.
Our new prime minister has been around a lot longer, and he's surrounded by a much more professional team. But in his handling of the sponsorship scandal, he seems to be working straight from Mr. Day's playbook.
Some suggest that Mr. Martin should have brushed off Adscam from the start, rather than escalating the situation with his "Mad as Hell'' tour. But in fairness to the PM, he didn't have a whole lot of options. What worked for Jean Chretien - in a nutshell, playing dumb would have seemed horribly glib coming from him.
Proving his indignation and determination to get to the bottom of what happened, though, should have taken a few days. A week, tops. Then, the smart strategy would have been to get Canadians talking about something else.
Instead, Mr. Martin has inexplicably made Adscam his bread and butter issue. He has spoken to every TV host, every newspaper interviewer, and every radio call-in show he can find, and turned up at shopping malls, coffee shops and town hall meetings to feel Canadians' Adscam pain.
All the government's priorities have been framed in the scandal's context, and if the coming election is put off, it will apparently be so he can spend more time convincing us that everything is under control. To some voters, this may all seem very noble. But however good he looks, it will always be a losing issue for his party. That's why, despite his own solid approval ratings, the Liberals continue to lag in the polls.
Never will anyone go to vote with sponsorships top of mind and opt for the Liberals. If the election becomes a referendum on Adscam, as Mr. Martin seems intent on making it, they will lose big.
Mr. Martin's strategists might contend that he has no choice - that he can't duck the biggest issue in the country. But with his outrage a matter of public record, and with the scandal mostly in the hands of a judicial inquiry, it wouldn't be at all offensive to use the present parliamentary session to shift the focus to a couple of provocative policy debates.
Back before Adscam broke, though, the biggest knock against Mr. Martin was that he seemed to lack any concrete policies to match his lofty rhetoric. And that, perhaps, is the problem now. Having taken office without a clearly defined agenda, despite all the time he had to prepare one, the PM may be grabbing onto Adscam simply because he doesn't know how else to define himself.
The other possibility is that, as concerned as he may be with winning the election, Mr. Martin is even more concerned about looking better than his predecessor. If so, the verdict will be more mixed. Compared with Mr. Chretien's ethical record, Mr. Martin's may be spotless. But he might not even get a third of the way to matching the former PM's electoral success.
