2021 Canadian general election - Election Day and Results

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It's worth recalling here that Newfoundland is a place apart; it is not a Maritime province and results in Newfoundland are not necessarily generalizable even to the Maritimes, let alone to the rest of the country.

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Obviously, it's still early on, but is it possible that any LPC to CPC flips in the Atlantic provinces could be balanced by any CPC to LPC flips in the Prairies? Note, I'm quite the novice at following Canadian election results.

The Tory-held seats in Alberta the Liberals are targeting are Edmonton Centre, Edmonton Mill Woods, and Calgary Skyview, all of which are seats that were Liberal in 2015. In Saskatchewan they're targeting Wascana, but that's not going to happen. All the polling suggests that the Liberals will get crushed in British Columbia, so it'd be a good night for them if they broke even in the West.

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Obviously, it's still early on, but is it possible that any LPC to CPC flips in the Atlantic provinces could be balanced by any CPC to LPC flips in the Prairies? Note, I'm quite the novice at following Canadian election results.

The Tory-held seats in Alberta the Liberals are targeting are Edmonton Centre, Edmonton Mill Woods, and Calgary Skyview, all of which are seats that were Liberal in 2015. In Saskatchewan they're targeting Wascana, but that's not going to happen. All the polling suggests that the Liberals will get crushed in British Columbia, so it'd be a good night for them if they broke even in the West.

I forgot to mention Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River in Saskatchewan; the Liberal candidate there, Buckley Belanger, was a longtime NDP MLA, and his switching parties and switching to Ottawa suggests that he's being picked out as future ministerial material. I'd be surprised if he didn't win.

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Singh should of course go, after two disastrous elections in a row now, but there is nothing NDP voters love more than losing while feeling superior about themselves, so they will of course keep him.

This is right. On CBC the NDP woman they had was talking about how proud everyone was of Jagmeet; it doesn't matter whether they won or not, what was important was that they made such a great stand by making the turban man their leader. It's the attitude that comes from being in permanent opposition. Nobody got into the NDP because they wanted to win, so nobody can even imagine what winning would be like. It's not surprising that Rachel Notley has tended to keep her distance from the federal NDP, because she is a winner and they are losers.

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Why is the Bloc so uncompetitive in Montreal proper? I know a lot of the ridings there are English speaking, but it seems odd they cant win more than a single riding there.

The Bloc has never done especially well in Montreal because a large portion of the island will not vote for a pro-independence party under any circumstances, but Gilles Duceppe represented a Montreal riding and under him the Bloc did much better on the island than it does now. This is because the Bloc under Duceppe emphasized that it was a social democratic party. Nowadays the Bloc is focused on winning the votes of supporters of François Legault, meaning that it focuses on cultural grievances. Naturally this has little appeal in the city. In Duceppe's old riding, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, the Bloc finished in a distant third place with 20%; NDP candidate Nimâ Machouf didn't win, but she's clearly captured a substantial portion of the old Bloc vote.

The NDP seems to have succeeded in a limited sense in Montreal; after all the churn of the last decade, its position in Montreal is at least as strong as in Toronto. Alexandre Boulerice's seat is safe enough and there's obvious and readily identifiable room to grow, which the NDP certainly didn't have in Quebec twenty years ago. Aside from the special case of Berthier—Maskinongé, the NDP vote across the province has held up in the sort of places you'd expect; in Sherbrooke, for instance, despite running a new candidate against the Liberal incumbent and a Bloc star candidate, the NDP managed 14% and third place. That's not exactly a good number, but it's indicative of the sort of people that are voting NDP in Quebec at this point.

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Major issue with the NDP is that, once in power, they do not govern in a way that lives up to their federal promises. It's noticeable that Horgan and Notley have had no coattails here. In this context a personal campaign around a fairly popular leader makes sense, but that didn't work either. I don't think a change of leadership would help here. There needs to be a fundamental change in the federal party's objectives. They need to figure out their base that wins them provinicial seats (working class, indigenous, young folks) and act like the Bloc - if its good we vote yes, if its bad for them we vote no.

Heat has already alluded to this, but since Tommy Douglas the only NDP leader who was even sort of from the west was Audrey McLaughlin, who grew up in Ontario and moved to the Yukon as an adult. With that possible exception, they've all been easterners. The federal NDP should fare much better in the west than it does; it's hard not to imagine that this has something to do with its constant longing for what is not there.

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He was. Unfortunately he was also a poor leader of the new federal NDP. Not really his fault - it hardly being a surprise that an agrarian socialist who saw politics in essentially moralistic and religious terms struggled to connect with the 'new Canada' emerging in the 1960s - but an important warning that success in one context does not lead automatically or inevitably to success in others.

And the fact said "poor leadership" didn't prevent Douglas from being reverentially embraced by the party, or being voted "Greatest Canadian" by CBC online vote in 2004, tells you a lot about why it's jumping to conclusions to declare Jagmeet to have been a "disaster" in both '19 and '21.  It's simply the nature of the electoral beast.

It seems obvious to me that Tommy Douglas's canonization has a lot more to do with his time as premier of Saskatchewan than with his tenure as leader of the NDP, which was not successful by any measure I can think of. I don't really know what "the nature of the beast" being referred to here is, but I am reasonably sure that the NDP is not a Dutch-style confessional party that is content simply to get its message out; its purpose is to win elections, and given that Jagmeet Singh is not doing that and is not doing anything to bring the party closer to that, I'm not sure by what standard he could be considered anything but a failure. Maybe in forty years he'll be named one of the Greatest Canadians, but I wasn't under the impression that that is why the NDP exists. Maybe I'm wrong.

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It seems obvious to me that Tommy Douglas's canonization has a lot more to do with his time as premier of Saskatchewan than with his tenure as leader of the NDP, which was not successful by any measure I can think of. I don't really know what "the nature of the beast" being referred to here is, but I am reasonably sure that the NDP is not a Dutch-style confessional party that is content simply to get its message out; its purpose is to win elections, and given that Jagmeet Singh is not doing that and is not doing anything to bring the party closer to that, I'm not sure by what standard he could be considered anything but a failure. Maybe in forty years he'll be named one of the Greatest Canadians, but I wasn't under the impression that that is why the NDP exists. Maybe I'm wrong.

You realize that within a parliamentary democracy, "winning elections" isn't bound to winning government outright, as opposed to on a seat-by-seat basis--and also that "failed" bids at one level of government can act as practice runs for another level.  Indeed, there's many symbiotic levels at which elections, and running in the same, work; and they're not crudely bound to simply "winning".

Elections are a network of routes btw/ Point A and Point B which infer infinite routes beyond, they aren't a simple boring GPS-guided Interstate corridor.

Sure, I'm aware that there are ways for an election to be successful that aren't forming government. In 2011 the NDP didn't form government, and yet that was the most successful election in party history because they took concrete steps on that path. Now, though, we don't even have to talk about forming government, because to do that you have to win new votes and win new seats and right now the NDP is not doing either of those things in any significant sense. As far as I can tell, there has not been any actual argument made for why Jagmeet Singh has been successful, only arguments that what we see as his failure isn't what matters.

You talk about a network of routes between Point A and Point B; what is Point B for the NDP? How exactly are their current leader and electoral strategy advancing them toward it? It doesn't appear to be by winning votes. If the election was a success because all the NDP candidates got valuable experience running an election campaign, well, the NDP runs a full slate at every election. By that standard, every election is a success for the NDP because it participates so fully in the democratic process. Maybe that's the purpose of the NDP, but I'd like to think there's something more. There certainly seemed to be something more when Jack Layton was leader.

And with all of this hand-wringing over the NDP and its purpose...anyone want to speculate on the future of the Conservatives, O'Toole's leadership, etc?

I think the reason we're talking about the NDP so much is simple; most of us are inclined toward the party and would vote for it if we were Canadian. I agree that the fate of the Conservative Party is interesting and I'd like to discuss that, too, but it doesn't have any emotional valence because I don't have any particular desire for the Conservative Party to succeed.

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I also think Edmonton was quite interesting in its results. Both the Liberals and NDP should be quite happy there. The Liberals regained Edmonton Centre and the NDP won a second seat in Alberta for the first time ever (interestingly Edmonton Griesbach is the successor to the old Edmonton East the NDP won in 1988). The NDP also appears to have really locked down Edmonton Strathcona. And, despite getting third place in Edmonton Centre, they were less than 5% behind first, a legit 3-way race. Using the same format as above (although a little trickier as Edmonton is a 3-party city, unlike Calgary):

Edmonton Strathcona NDP+12.7% - NDP+10.2% - NDP+34.0%
Edmonton Griesbach CPC+5.9% - CPC+26.2% - NDP+3.4%
Edmonton Centre LPC+2.2% - CPC+8.4% - LPC+1.2%
Edmonton Mill Woods LPC+0.18% - CPC+16.7% - CPC+3.6%

I really don't think that these Edmonton results are good news for the Liberals at all. Centre and Mill Woods were the two ridings in the city that the Liberals targeted (naturally, since those were the two they won in 2015) and they made a serious effort in both of them. In neither riding did they meaningfully improve their own share of the vote; for all the work that the Liberal campaign put in, both ridings experienced a straight CPC to NDP swing. In Centre the drop in the Conservative vote was enough to deliver the seat to the Liberals, but voters clearly did not believe that the Liberals were the only non-Conservative option, and come next election Randy Boissonnault will have to defend his seat from both ends. In Mill Woods the NDP candidate did not do nearly as well, but as a result the Conservative vote failed to drop far enough for the Liberal candidate to pick up the seat. Again, this is not a result that is suggestive of any real Liberal strength.

The provincial NDP was much more active in this campaign than in past federal election campaigns, and it seems that at least in Edmonton it hurt federal Liberals that the Alberta Liberal Party is now truly dead. Alberta has never really had a New Democratic tradition, but maybe now one is being invented.

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If the Conservative grassroots turf O'Toole and elect Poilievre as leader, and assuming that Freeland replaces Trudeau as Liberal leader, then the next election will become a repeat of the US election from 2016. 😱

I don't think a ton of Canadians and even a bunch of Liberals have hated Chrystia Freeland for more than 20 years.

Still, she oozes "Laurentian Elite", and the Cons would have a field day with that.

As opposed to the son of Pierre Trudeau, who does no such thing?

Actually, Justin's electoral saving grace is that he comes across as just the right bit of touchy-feely and light-in-the-loafers--that is, flaky-relatable enough to counteract the Laurentian-Elite stigma.  Or as some people say, his mother's son even more than his father's son.  (Of course, it's those same qualities that fuel Conservative social media's high-minded knocks against him.)  Chrystia, by comparison, is *ultra*-Laurentian: the affluent learned elite class--a haughtier proposition, and a harder sell in the heartland.  Like Iggy without the fatal "just visiting" stigma.

In a way, Chrystia would be to Justin what Hillary is to Bill.

This analysis makes sense to me. Stranger things have happened (and this is Canada, so strange things happen all the time), but the idea that Chrystia Freeland—a Liberal politician from Toronto who has not lived in Alberta in decades—would have some sort of appeal in Alberta strikes me as something that only Torontonians would believe.

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LPC came last in Battlefords-Lloydminster (SK) behind NDP, Maverick and PPC. Decent result for Maverick with 7%.

There was a Green candidate there, so not last.

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In terms of Rachel Notley pulling off another majority government, it seems like the NDP will have to get a near 2015 result in Edmonton, win a strong majority of seats in Calgary, and pick off a few small city/rural ridings. You mention the issue for the federal NDP in Calgary. The Alberta NDP still has its work cut out for it.

On the current provincial polling numbers this will not be difficult.

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In the specific case of Kenora, it's worth remembering that it's the only place in the country with a genuine Lib-Lab tradition. Bob Nault made use of this during his political career, and even though the Liberal vote fell off this time around it presumably still has an impact.