The myth of the 'blue storm'

And it’s true – the Liberal vote is collapsing across the country.

But the hidden story of the election so far is that if the Liberal vote is sagging – so is the Tory vote.

Using the figures in the most recent EKOS national survey, were the election held at the beginning of June, the Liberals would face losing a staggering 1.4 million supporters.

But Harper’s Tories would also do poorly – their current level of support would see them pulling in half a million fewer votes than the combined vote of the old Alliance and PC parties that ran separately in the last election.

We shouldn’t be talking about a "blue storm". We should be talking about a Tory and Liberal morass.

So where have these almost two million ex-Liberal and ex-Tory voters gone?

You might be surprised to know that they have gone, in overwhelming numbers, to the NDP and to some extent, the Greens. In Quebec, which has to be examined separately, the other big beneficiary is the Bloc Québécois.

The NDP, based on early June polling, is attracting more than 1.3 million more supporters than in the last election. The Green Party has attracted almost half a million new supporters.

There is only one way to describe this phenomenon – it is a mass shift to the left in electoral politics, a shift that is being totally obscured by the election coverage in the establishment press.

The Tories and the Liberals are both open parties of big business. Major corporations for decades, routinely hedged their bets, giving millions of dollars to both parties.

The NDP is the historic party of the trade union movement, and anathema to big business. For in excess of one million people to switch from the Tories and Liberals to the NDP is a fantastic development.

The Green Party is more complicated. Its current leader, Jim Harris, is a former Tory. Its policy positions are a mixed bag. But without question, the vast majority of the people who look to the Greens are looking to the left. They are rejecting the parties of big business.

The story in Quebec

The Tories are stuck in neutral, with almost the same number of supporters in Quebec as in 2000.

It is not clear if this shift left will be reflected in the final results on June 28. NDP supporters are under enormous pressure to "vote tactically" and support the Liberals to prevent Stephen Harper taking office.

But half way through the election campaign, the unwritten story is of a mass break from the traditional parties of big business, and a shift to the left in the politics of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Canadians.

Cynicism and anger

Every election, millions more Canadians choose not to vote.

There is a widespread sense that politicians of all parties are not to be trusted.

This is rooted not just in the practice of the Tories and the Liberals, but also of the NDP.

While the NDP has attracted more than one million more supporters this election, it is still 250,000 away from its peak of support in 1988, when it captured almost 2.7 million votes.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was an "NDP storm" which led to a rapid increase in NDP support federally, and saw it elected to office in several provinces, most notably, for the first time, in Ontario in 1990.

But in 1993, the NDP vote collapsed to less than one million.

Three years of Bob Rae rule in Ontario had disillusioned millions with the party.

Rae eliminated student grants, hired welfare cops, began the process of downsizing the health care sector, and imposed the hated Social Contract – ripping up collective agreements, and imposing wage rollbacks on 900,000 public and para-public sector workers.

Bitterness towards Rae translated into bitterness towards the federal party, which was severely punished in the 1993 election, and is only now starting to recover.

This bitterness towards the NDP goes a long way to explaining the rise of the Greens.

There are many thousands who hate the Liberals and the Tories, but no longer trust the NDP. Supporting the Greens seems, to many, like a good alternative.

All of this has to be factored in to our understanding of the current political climate. There is real anger and discontent. There is a mass shift to the left – a reflection at the level of electoral politics of the mass anti-capitalist and anti-war movements that have dominated politics since the late 1990s.

But there is also cynicism towards established parties of all stripes, including the NDP.

A big NDP vote on June 28 will be a good step towards rebuilding a left in this country.

But the most important arena for advancing that project in the days following the election will not be in the halls of parliament, but on the streets, in the workplaces and in the schools, building the struggles against the cuts, against the corporations and against imperialism that can be the real basis for a new left in this country.