Hébert: Robocalls: Conservative support rock solid despite vote controversy
MONTREAL—If then-prime minister Paul Martin had not gone on a mad-as-hell national tour in the spring of 2004, would the sponsorship scandal that he ranted about from coast to coast to coast have loomed as large in the subsequent election?
Most independent analysts would readily answer that question in the negative. Martin’s public show of indignation was meant to dissociate him from a blooming scandal in the lead-up to his first campaign. Instead it did more to establish the sponsorship affair as a ballot-box issue than any amount of opposition rhetoric.
With allegations of vote suppression swirling around their party, no one should be surprised that Conservative strategists have gone in the opposite direction.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s expressions of dismay at the suggestion that persons apparently sympathetic to his party may have tampered with the electoral process have been, to put it mildly, excessively restrained.
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1142566--hebert-robocall-conservative-support-rock-solid-despite-vote-controversy
