Election Winner: Day 0 For the political parties, and even for you, the election announced on August 2nd has been underway for at least a year. One of the first things that each party theoretically attempts to do is define what the election will be about, known colloquially as the ballot box question. A year ago, there were hundreds of potential questions available, ranging from Conservative party misdeeds (they have a former MP and staffer in jail, and have been found guiltly of violating the election act repeatedly), to pork barrel spending, to Canada’s foreign presence, the use of wide ranging omnibus bills that radically changed our approach to social services, the environment, and on and on and on. Instead, the Conservative Party did a masterful job of making the question “who is ready to serve?” and answering with “Not Justin Trudeau.” As recently as this week, the Liberal party responded to this question by saying that Mr. Trudeau was ready. This is a violation of a cardinal rule in debate, politics, or even arguing with your partner: Don’t cede that the question is relevant. The Liberal party had the opportunity to be creative, and do something like create an ad supporting one of Justin’s campaign themes (Say: supporting the middle class, or electoral reform, or approach to Syria), and then attack the Conservatives on how they hadn’t had an original ideas in years. Unfortunately though, we’re going to be spending the next few weeks listening to the NDP and Liberals spend millions of dollars trying to change the question, now that they’ve let the Conservatives create it. The big not-so-secret in the background is that the Conservatives have raised more money than the other parties combined, and have now put themselves in a substantively advantageous position by calling an early election. Each of the other three parties are going to have to borrow enormous amounts of money to spend up to the campaign limit, breaking their ability to be ready for another election in 2016 or 2017 if we leave Election 2015 with a minority government. The implications of this for 2015 are that the Conservatives are going to bombard us with advertising. They are have been way ahead of the other parties in targeting their messages to specific areas, right down to the postal code for printed material, or the radio station of preference for their target market in different regions. They appear to recognize that, based on an interpretation of numbers from threehundredeight.com, about half of Canadians will never vote for them. They also recognize that they don’t need half, they need about 33% of Canadians split into various ridings just the right way. They’ve set the initial question. They have more money than the other parties. They have capped the ability of third party groups like unions and environmental advocates to spend money. It definitely looks like the national leader out of the gate is our incumbent Prime Minister. Last note: Don’t be confused about what this means locally. One poll was conducted and reported in the Guelph Mercury showing the NDP with a lead, and the Liberals and Conversatives close to eachother in second. There is nothing in the data for Guelph that shows Gloria Kovach, the Conservative candidate, has even a remote chance of winning in Guelph.