Canadian election 2010/2011

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Does this mean anything or is it just what happens you poll hypotheticals that will never happen?

The latter.

The bottom line to this is that despite all the awful things Harper has done and all the times he's proven to be an incompetent airhead, people resign themselves to voting Tory because they feel (very wrongly, imo) that he's the most competent PM for the economy and because they feel he hasn't done that bad of a job (again, imo, he's the worst PM in a long, long time). Of course, people don't like Harper much and he isn't doing much himself to build a personal following, but they don't like Ignatieff much at all anymore. They like Layton (and Duceppe, but that's an old shtick) but the NDP doesn't seem to be able to transform Layton's likability into votes for the party (though the NDP is polling quite well considering that lately its support waned in non-election mode season). And the Greens are still polling all over the place and probably won't do well in the next election and as long as they're led by that stupid gadfly Elizabeth May. Turnout was very low in 2008, I'd be quite surprised, at this point, if it didn't fall again in 2010/2011.

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Its worth noting that Harper is really not doing all that well either - almost all polls have him several points below what he got last time - which means no majority and a very good chance of a post-election anti-Tory coalition.

As I said, he isn't liked wildly, no. But considering the incompetence of the vast majority of his cabinet, the G20 costing millions upon millions and so forth, you'd expect him to be doing even worse than -2 or -3 on the last election.

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but really not much has happened of substance recently.

This is really the bottom line. Nobody is paying attention to federal electoral politics these days, unless one considers the HST stuff politics.

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The Greenies outpolled the NDP like 13-12 in a poll in 2008 or so (not campaign season) and an hilarious case of poll sampling fail had the Greenies, while at 9-10% nationally, posting a lead in Quebec.

In another case of sampling fail by EKOS, which seems to be the worst pollster these days, those idiots added a subsample for Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver in their polls. I recommend tracking the Ottawa subsample for particular fun!

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I suppose I'll be doing some campaign work for the Liberals if time permits. I'm pretty pessimistic about this election, because good rarely comes out of Canadian politics these last few years.