Give Your Head A Shake Howard

The reason the provincial ndp have gained some support is that the disillusioned ndp wingnuts in the last election were running scared because they saw they place at the trough disappearing so they got conned by the promises made by McGinty and deserted the sinking ndp ship. Layton is a joke and giving him credit for any gains by the provincial party shows you are grasping at straws....you are much more intelligent than that.

Resurgent NDP trouble for McGuinty
Oct. 18, 2006. 01:00 AM
IAN URQUHART

While today's Star/EKOS provincial poll shows Dalton McGuinty's Liberals still in front of the pack, there are danger signs on the road ahead.

Namely, the New Democrats are back.

Long a dormant force in provincial politics since being turfed from power in 1995, today's poll shows support for the NDP among decided voters at 19.6 per cent — or, rounded off, 20 per cent.

It is the latest in a long string of polls that has put the provincial New Democrats at or above 20 per cent.

In the last two provincial elections, in 1999 and 2003, the New Democrats fell to historic lows with 12.6 per cent and 14.7 per cent of the vote, respectively.

Now they have returned to the 20 per cent level, their traditional floor prior to 1999.

And both common sense and the polling numbers tell us that the NDP is regaining the lost ground largely at the expense of the Liberals. Any further encroachment would reduce the Liberals to minority status, or remove them from power altogether.

What is the explanation for this turnaround, especially given that the NDP has the same leader (Howard Hampton) and roughly the same policies as it had in each of the last two elections?

Hampton himself answered the question during an interview in his office yesterday.

"One factor is that we're doing better at the federal level," said Hampton. "For most people, whether it's the NDP federally or the NDP provincially ... it's the NDP."

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