[Bush Lady]

I'll start.

Survey Says: This is probably true, but the scandal's impact may be
overstated. About 40% of English Canadian voters surveyed said they
were "very angry" about the sponsorship scandal, and roughly another
40% said they were "somewhat angry." If the vast majority of those
people took out that anger by voting for the opposition parties, the
Liberals would undoubtedly have been defeated. But they didn't.
A third of the people who voted Liberal in 2000 said they were "very
angry" about the scandal, but half of them wound up voting for the
Liberals again. And in the final days of the campaign, large numbers
of people who were "somewhat angry" decided to put that anger aside
and vote Liberal.

Conventional Wisdom: "Scared" NDP voters, concerned about a possible
Conservative victory, deserted their party in droves in the final
days of the campaign in an outbreak of mass strategic voting.

Survey Says: Fifteen per cent of all voters surveyed at the beginning
of the campaign favoured the NDP, and of those, more than
three-quarters wound up voting for the party. Liberals and
Conservatives each gained 10% of the defectors. There was no massive
strategic shift away from the NDP in the last few days of the
campaign. Many of those who did leave did so because they preferred
Harper or Martin to Layton.


--------------------------------------------------------------



The first 2 years of Mulroney's administration were marked by
indecision and scandals in his Cabinet, but by the spring of 1987 he
had launched the 2 important initiatives that would mark his first
term: the negotiation of the MEECH LAKE ACCORD
(see MEECH LAKE ACCORD: DOCUMENT) and the conclusion of a Free Trade
Agreement with the US, which was reached that October. The FTA became
the central issue in the 1988 federal election, and the Conservatives
overcame a resurgent Liberal Party around whom opposition to the FTA
coalesced. The FTA went into effect 1 January 1989. However,
the Meech Lake Accord slowly unravelled, and its collapse in
June 1990 was at least partly attributed to Mulroney's widely
quoted "roll of the dice" in scheduling the final first ministers'
conference so close to the deadline. His government reached a new low
in popularity with the imposition of the new Goods and
Services Tax (GST), which went into effect 1 January 1991. Mulroney
had to stack the Senate with supporters in order to get the bill
through the upper house.