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PM, voters out of sync on priorities :tup:
Unite the right? The right's in power! :tup:
By HUGH WINSOR
UPDATED AT 2:03 PM EST         Monday, Jan. 12, 2004
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The initial conservatively oriented policy messages coming out of the Paul Martin-led government are putting the new Liberal regime on a collision course with the expectations of the electorate it is hoping to woo. And all of this new emphasis on fiscal rectitude could backfire, according to some seminal public opinion tracking coming out of EKOS Research Associates.
The Prime Minister and cabinet heavies such as Treasury Board President Reg Alcock and Finance Minister Ralph Goodale have leaped out of the blocks talking about belt-tightening, downsizing government, freezing the civil service, killing capital projects and avoiding a deficit at all costs.
It seems to be a strategy aimed at reducing expectations and appealing to parts of Western Canada where Mr. Martin wants to make gains. It may also reflect advice he and his colleagues have been getting that the public still has a strong appetite for debt reduction and tax cuts.
However, according to the most recent numbers in EKOS's Rethinking Government series, that is not where the public is at all.
The Rethinking Government series has tracked public priorities the past decade with the latest reading taken last month. At the beginning of the Liberals' decade in February, 1994, health care, unemployment, debt and deficit were virtually tied, with about 90 per cent of all respondents giving them a high score as an important priority. About 80 per cent also rated level of taxation as an important priority.
Health care has remained at the top of the priority list, even edging up a bit to 93 per cent in the latest data. But look at what has happened to the others in the intervening decade: Unemployment priority has dropped to 70 per cent, debt and deficit as a high priority has dropped to 62 per cent and level of taxation is down to 52 per cent. That makes a gap of 41 percentage points between the tax cutters and the health-care advocates -- a clear measure to those people drafting the Speech from the Throne.
In a more profound technique for measuring public priorities, poll respondents are forced to make choices between different options. In one form of this ranking technique, EKOS asks respondents to "suppose you were prime minister for a day and you had to choose how to invest an extra $1-billion." Respondents were then asked to choose between randomly picked pairs of priorities: increase medicare funding or create a national homecare program, for example? Help Canadian workers upgrade skills or pay down the national debt? The computer then sorts the resulting tradeoffs to produce a hierarchy of 20 priorities. Health care is, of course, at the head of the list followed by education, child poverty, environment, crime prevention and so on. Reducing the debt was No.11, just ahead of defence. Level of taxation was ranked 15th out of 20. The trend over the decade since the Liberals returned to office indicates growing public support for an activist agenda (not unlike the one the outgoing prime minister Jean Chrétien pushed in his last mandate). Other surveys indicate public opinion has swung back in favour of government intervention, pushed by such preventable disasters as the Walkerton, Ont., water tragedy.
EKOS president Frank Graves said that all of the fiscal tough talk "may be great discipline to lower expectations in caucus but it flies in the face of the trajectory of public expectations. The public is interested in an active investment approach."
There is also a strong linkage between economic confidence, which is at a 10-year high, and public expectations from government. "It will be difficult to sell a reductionist agenda," Mr. Graves said. Could it be the Martin government, responding to a structural cash-flow problem (initiated by the tax-cutting 2000 budget the Prime Minister penned himself when he was minister of finance), may have fundamentally misread the public mind? Playing to the former Reform Party supporters may pay limited dividends in the West, but they could be offset by losses in Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada.
hwinsor@globeandmail.ca
© 2003 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.
:tup:
Unite the right? The right's in power! :tup:
By HUGH WINSOR
UPDATED AT 2:03 PM EST         Monday, Jan. 12, 2004
Advertisement
The initial conservatively oriented policy messages coming out of the Paul Martin-led government are putting the new Liberal regime on a collision course with the expectations of the electorate it is hoping to woo. And all of this new emphasis on fiscal rectitude could backfire, according to some seminal public opinion tracking coming out of EKOS Research Associates.
The Prime Minister and cabinet heavies such as Treasury Board President Reg Alcock and Finance Minister Ralph Goodale have leaped out of the blocks talking about belt-tightening, downsizing government, freezing the civil service, killing capital projects and avoiding a deficit at all costs.
It seems to be a strategy aimed at reducing expectations and appealing to parts of Western Canada where Mr. Martin wants to make gains. It may also reflect advice he and his colleagues have been getting that the public still has a strong appetite for debt reduction and tax cuts.
However, according to the most recent numbers in EKOS's Rethinking Government series, that is not where the public is at all.
The Rethinking Government series has tracked public priorities the past decade with the latest reading taken last month. At the beginning of the Liberals' decade in February, 1994, health care, unemployment, debt and deficit were virtually tied, with about 90 per cent of all respondents giving them a high score as an important priority. About 80 per cent also rated level of taxation as an important priority.
Health care has remained at the top of the priority list, even edging up a bit to 93 per cent in the latest data. But look at what has happened to the others in the intervening decade: Unemployment priority has dropped to 70 per cent, debt and deficit as a high priority has dropped to 62 per cent and level of taxation is down to 52 per cent. That makes a gap of 41 percentage points between the tax cutters and the health-care advocates -- a clear measure to those people drafting the Speech from the Throne.
In a more profound technique for measuring public priorities, poll respondents are forced to make choices between different options. In one form of this ranking technique, EKOS asks respondents to "suppose you were prime minister for a day and you had to choose how to invest an extra $1-billion." Respondents were then asked to choose between randomly picked pairs of priorities: increase medicare funding or create a national homecare program, for example? Help Canadian workers upgrade skills or pay down the national debt? The computer then sorts the resulting tradeoffs to produce a hierarchy of 20 priorities. Health care is, of course, at the head of the list followed by education, child poverty, environment, crime prevention and so on. Reducing the debt was No.11, just ahead of defence. Level of taxation was ranked 15th out of 20. The trend over the decade since the Liberals returned to office indicates growing public support for an activist agenda (not unlike the one the outgoing prime minister Jean Chrétien pushed in his last mandate). Other surveys indicate public opinion has swung back in favour of government intervention, pushed by such preventable disasters as the Walkerton, Ont., water tragedy.
EKOS president Frank Graves said that all of the fiscal tough talk "may be great discipline to lower expectations in caucus but it flies in the face of the trajectory of public expectations. The public is interested in an active investment approach."
There is also a strong linkage between economic confidence, which is at a 10-year high, and public expectations from government. "It will be difficult to sell a reductionist agenda," Mr. Graves said. Could it be the Martin government, responding to a structural cash-flow problem (initiated by the tax-cutting 2000 budget the Prime Minister penned himself when he was minister of finance), may have fundamentally misread the public mind? Playing to the former Reform Party supporters may pay limited dividends in the West, but they could be offset by losses in Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada.
hwinsor@globeandmail.ca
© 2003 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.
:tup: