New Liberal Leadership Poll Results

According to a poll done by the Strategic Counsel, reported in Wednesday's Globe and Mail, Michael Ignatieff has an extremely slim lead among members of the Liberal Party with stiff competition from Bob Rae and Stephane Dion.

Mr. Ignatieff is the first choice of 19 per cent of Liberals surveyed, with Mr. Rae running a tight second at 17 per cent and Mr. Dion just behind with 13 per cent. Gerard Kennedy and Ken Dryden — with 9 per cent each — are tied for fourth. Scott Brison garnered 3 per cent of the vote and Joe Volpe 2 per cent, while Martha Hall Findlay got 1 per cent and Hedy Fry less than 1 per cent.

Twenty-seven per cent said they didn't know or were undecided.
[...]
The poll was conducted from party membership lists provided to The Globe by the campaigns of Mr. Brison, Mr. Dryden and Mr. Dion. The poll of 1,000 Liberals was taken between Sept. 12 and 18 and is accurate to within 3.1 percentage points, 95 per cent of the time.
[...]
Only 20 per cent of the public is following the race closely, for example, and the Liberal enthusiasm is missing: Only 6 per cent say the contest is exciting.

No wonder. This has been one long, drawn out campaign (yawn).

I watched the online video of the candidates debate last nite and I just can't see how Ignatieff will succeed after getting trounced on his stances on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by Rae and Dion. I could feel Ignatieff cringing from here. I haven't put my support behind any candidate because I'm not a Liberal party member. I do favour Rae, however, because I think he'd move the party back to the left. I also like Stephane Dion's personality and overall policies, but I think he should have dumped his blog campaign co-chair Jason Cherniak during the Israel/Lebanon war because Cherniak's comments overwhelmingly supporting Israel without criticism caused probably more than a few people to turn away from Dion as their choice. That, plus the times Cherniak couldn't even state Dion's position on crucial issues, certainly didn't help either. Enough about Cherniak though.

Back to the debate, it's unfortunate that Hedy Fry comes with so much baggage because she's a power-packed woman who could have made a difference. Martha Hall Findlay: not quite ready for prime time. Gerard Kennedy: well, he's boring (sorry). Joe Volpe: blew it when he collected money from the kids. Ken Dryden is much more philosophical than I thought. That suits his senatorial role and I like the guy but I'm just not sure he's PM material yet.

The leadership convention is happening Nov. 28 to Dec. 2 in Montreal. What's this? September 19th? Sigh. Can we just get this overwith, please?

Sidebar: I haven't read all of the candidates policy statements yet but I am on a few of their mailing lists and I follow the news. Once I've done that, sometime next month since I still have lots of time, maybe I'll let my readers know my number one choice. Then again, maybe not.