The failure of negativity

If it's not too late to draw a lesson from the just-completed federal election, may I mention the following observation? All three opposition parties from the last parliament used, to a greater or lesser extent, the same essential message during their campaigns. The message roughly translates as: “Vote for us because we're not them (them being the Conservatives). They are bad. We're the only party that can save you from them.”

It didn't work for the Liberals. As many of them had sat on their hands during critical votes in the last house (or, like Michael Ignatieff, just absented himself during such votes), their cries of wolf! wolf! once the writ was dropped lacked credibility, coming as it did with an almost complete lack of positive alternatives.

For the Bloc, the old rallying cry of “not them” had worn out its appeal to the voters of Quebec. The NDP ran a far more positive campaign in Quebec, and it paid off big time. In British Columbia however, the NDP, especially in the final days of the election, sent out a very different message in the hope of winning over “strategic voters”. The message here was “only NDP candidates can defeat Conservatives in BC”. It proved to be a hollow claim. While NDP candidates did defeat several incumbent Liberals, they only managed to wrest one single riding from a Conservative backbencher. The Green Party actually did better: Elizabeth May defeated a Conservative cabinet minister, a considerably greater feat. 

The lesson here is surely that unmitigated negativity does not wash with the electorate. Sure, mistakes of the past can be noted, but positive solutions are far more appealing. Fortunately, the Green Book is brimming with positive solutions. Let's keep them shined up.