And that's exactly what has happened so far.
Just a hair under two weeks in to the campaign the Conservatives have launched an all out onslaught on the policy front, making announcement after announcement every single day, the most noteworthy of them being the GST announcement and the Child Care Scheme. But with their support holding and even in a few polls dropping the strategy thus far doesn't appear to be paying off. The reason for this is Canadians are far more savvy than they used to be when it comes to deconstructing policy. In Canada It used to be like the United States where you could just say "Tax Cut" and it would automatically get you a 5 point bump. Things aren't like that any more, Canadians are the smartest people in the world and we show it by how we respond to the promises our politicians make.
The reason that Conservative support hasn't jumped is simple: The Liberals are offering better ideas, or at least ideas that average Canadians find equal.
This article from the Halifax Chronicle Herald demonstrates the point:
The impact of a Conservative pledge to reduce the GST has been blunted by a Liberal counter-promise to cut personal income taxes, an exhaustive new survey suggests. A sweeping Decima poll offered exclusively to The Canadian Press provided some insight into why the Conservatives remained nine points behind the Liberals in popular support, despite grabbing headlines with splashy announcements in the campaign’s early days...
...The Conservatives’ GST promise has been by far the most-noticed promise of the election campaign, with a whopping 91 per cent of respondents saying they were aware of it. The impact of the announcement was negated somewhat because voters were equally impressed with a Liberal Pre-election promise to cut income taxes by $30 billion ... The same can be said of the Liberals’ 18-month-old plan to invest billions in a national day-care system, which is at least as popular as the new Tory announcement of cheques for parents.
Now, of course things can change. The debates are coming up this week and they could really shift public support out of the ranges it's been in since the 2004 election. In my view however, the Liberals have the advantage when it comes to policy, simply because of experience. The Liberals have been in power for twelve years now, they've been working on policy for all that time. They know the system, they know the electorate, and most importantly they know what they can and can not afford.
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