Canada 2011 Official Thread

[Filuwaúrdjan]

In Brome-Missisquoi, the former NDP candidate (2008) is leading for the Bloc 32-26% over the NDP and the Liberals who are tied for second. The NDP has no business doing that well in what was a close race between the Liberals and Bloc in 2008...

There's a certain logic in the Dippers doing well in the Eastern Townships though, isn't there? In the 'were they not in Quebec...' sense, which may not be reliable.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Full Environics figures... Con 39, NDP 25, Lib 22, BQ 7, Greenies 6

Ontario: Con 43, Lib 29, NDP 18, Greenies 8
Quebec: NDP 41, BQ 28, Lib 15, Con 12

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If that's anything like correct (and holds), then the Tories would almost certainly win a majority and the NDP would almost certainly become the official opposition. And there would be very few Liberals left standing beyond the GTA.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Atlantic.

Apparently there's a slight difference.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Pollsters usually give a breakdown for "The Prairies", which is Alberta, Sask and Manitoba. They show the Conservatives flat, the NDP up and the Liberals down on 2008, none of the changes all that large, but who knows how accurate that is.

Some done over the past week or so have shown considerably more movement, but I think we'll have to wait and see on that. I wish a few proper polls of each province would be done; breakdowns are worth fyck all for the most part, especially for smaller provinces.

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The NDP have an excellent candidate (at least on paper) in Desnethé-Missinippi-Churchill River and some decent ones elsewhere (Palliser for one; which is always a bit of an odd duck as it includes Moose Jaw). I can't imagine Goodale actually losing as he's such an institution, but so was Nystrom (in Yorkton-Melville, that is, not his last riding) so I guess it can't be ruled out. D-M-CR will depend on turnout in the aboriginal communities, as always.

Edit: in some ways I almost wonder whether there might be greater grounds for relative optimism wrt Saskatchewan than Manitoba as it's now the latter that 'represent' an unpopular provincial government. Yeah, yeah... the Sask NDP have hardly excelled themselves in opposition so maybe not so relevant a point. Still, it's something to consider, especially given past patterns in both places.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

New EKOS poll... Con 33.7, NDP 28.0, Lib 23.7, Greenies 7.2, BQ 6.2

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Looks too good to be true, but I live in hope.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Worth a read: http://www.punditsguide.ca/2011/04/rubber-hits-the-road-for-parties-and-seat-projectors/

Not sure what to make of that.

There might be some deeper - and more interesting - reason, but I suspect it's the usual problems that come with regional breakdowns, even ones with decent sample sizes. We need some real polls of provinces (sorry to sound like a stuck record, but we do).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The NDP support electoral reform - naturally, as it would benefit them - but they've never made it a signature issue.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Another EKOS poll, apparently. Looks all but identical: Con 34, NDP 28, Lib 24, BQ 6, Greenies 7 (figures rounded by me).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Rumours - stress on that word - of an Angus Reid poll showing the NDP on 30.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Makes me feel like a LibDem, circa May 2010.

Way to ruin the mood

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Post details people

I'm all for believing that the NDP is doing very well, especially in Quebec, but some of these numbers are starting to look downright ridiculous.

Oh, absolutely. But in Canadian elections the ridiculous does sometimes happen, so there's a better than... say... 10% (?) chance of it being 'real'. Of course the tradition is also for the NDP to loose support in the last week.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Chicoutimi-Le Fjord: BQ 35, Con 29, NDP 23, Lib 11, Green 3
Jonquière-Alma: Con 36, NDP 30, BQ 26, Lib 5, Green 3
Roberval-Lac-Saint-Jean: Con 54, BQ 28, NDP 11, Lib 5, Green 2

All by Segma Rechereche

Richmond-Arthabaska: BQ 47, Con 21, NDP 20, Lib 6, Green 6

By 'Cara Telecom'

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Can anyone spot a pattern there? Obviously there's increased NDP support in all, but the scale is totally different and so is all else...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Fwiw...

NDP %'s in 2008

Chicoutimi-Le Fjord: 7.8
Jonquière-Alma: 4.9
Roberval-Lac-Saint-Jean: 4.7
Richmond-Arthabaska: 8.7

i.e. except for Roberval, massive increases. Nothing quite on the scale hinted at by recent poll breakdowns ('cept for Jonquière. And after what happened in 2004, who'd be surprised at anything there?), but impressive regardless.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Anyone have a link to information about the Angus-Reid poll? It's not on their website that I can see, and none of the mainstream news outlets are going bonkers over the NDP polling at 30%.

I tried looking earlier and couldn't find anything. Might be a bizarre windup?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Apparently the breakdowns do be as follows...

BC: Con 44, NDP 30, Lib 16, Greens 10
Alberta: Con 60, NDP 21, Lib 12, Greens 6
Man/Sask: Con 50, NDP 33, Lib 16, Greens 1
Ontario: Con 37, Lib 30, NDP 27, Greens 6
Quebec: NDP 38, BQ 29, Lib 16, Con 14, Greens 2
Atlantic: Con 35, NDP 32, Lib 29, Greens 4

Out with the salt and all that.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

These projections, especially ones from Grénier, basically get destroyed in the current post (linked earlier in this thread I believe) from Alice Funke at the Pundits Guide, who is a way better and more numerate commentator.

It was a few pages back, so in case anyone missed it: http://www.punditsguide.ca/2011/04/rubber-hits-the-road-for-parties-and-seat-projectors/

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Very different in many ways. The Alliance actually did not "surge ahead" during the 1983 campaign. In fact, they had reached as high as 50% in the polls as early as 1981. They declined over the course of the campaign (and had been since the beginning of the Falklands War), and by election night were about tied with Labour in the polls, which was more or less borne out in reality.

No, there was a big Alliance surge in the first half of the campaign which faded away to an extent, though they still underperformed when the votes were counted. IIRC different companies showed different details; I don't have the figures in front of me at the moment. This was separate from the main Alliance poll surge, the bizarre thing that was taken out by the Falklands. There was a similar pattern in the 1974 election, although the Liberals never rose into second. 1987 was unusual in that 'the surge' (ahem) happened before the campaign started.

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There is that, but there's also the fact that the LibDems (and their predecessors) were/are/etc an absolute shambles from an organisational point of view (no serious national organisation since the 1920s, no serious regional organisations ever, total inability to cope with sudden poll movement during elections, etc). The NDP has issues with that (especially in Quebec) but they pale into insignificance in comparison.

Of course we know from local elections in places with a heavy use of postal votes that the LibDem poll surge in 2010 was mostly artificial. The big question is whether the same is true of the NDP in this election.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ignatieff has seemed to underperform his Liberal predecessors and has never touched 50%, but I don't see any reason why he would be in trouble... Ford seems to have won his riding though, fwiw. I'm not in Toronto anymore so I can't go check things out myself.

He actually had a swing in his favour in 2008, but a lot of that was due to the underperformance that resulted from his controversial selection in 2006. There would need to be a real Liberal disaster in the GTA for him to fall, I think; although with recent polls, who knows. Long, long ago the NDP did well in Lakeshore, actually winning it once federally when Lewis was leader and repeatedly provincially before the Rae Days. But Toronto isn't Vancouver so that's just a meaningless piece of trivia.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I am going to go out and make a prediction, that the Tories will massively outperform polls on Monday.

That's certainly a possibility, yes. If the Liberals start to look irrelevant and if PM Layton seems like a serious possibility, then what happened to Kinnock might happen to Layton; it isn't as though Red Scares are alien to Canadian political history. Sometimes they've even worked.

However...

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That's a very high number, especially given the tendency of the federal NDP to be dominated by moderates and the fact that most Canadian provinces have elected social democratic governments (including the Lévesque-era PQ in that, btw) at some point. I doubt that the percentage - if you can put a percentage on such things - is higher than 50%. Layton himself is simply not scary; he might once have had an image as a scary fire-breathing lefty (and was the victim of a very effective Red Scare in the 1991 Mayoral election in Toronto) but he's mellowed over the years into an utterly respectable Douglas/Lewis/Broadbent social democrat. Some of which might be the result of a conscious attempt at image-shifting; Of the three national party leaders, which one almost always wears a tie?

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Centre-right you mean, but, yes. That's certainly possible.

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The NDP platform isn't greatly different to the Liberal one and contains little that is especially scary to anyone likely to vote NDP. No, that sort of thing is more likely to motivate right-wing voters than frighten possible NDP ones.

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Is it? I don't remember anyone being frightened of the LibDems. They basically just proposed the status quo in new clothes (i.e. what they've always done). The issue with the LibDems was that their polling bump was at least two thirds artificial and the result of incompetence on the part of Britain's serially incompetent polling industry (pet hate, sorry), and the fact that they are (and have always been) an organisational shambles. That, and the relative stability of the British electorate, certainly when compared to Canada.

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There's also a record of competent (sometimes too competent for their own good, actually) governments in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia (seemingly), and the fact that various policies advocated by Douglas and Lewis were adopted by Pearson and Trudeau, and then became utterly uncontroversial and mainstream.

But if the issue of NDP government's past is an issue, then it's a bigger problem in Ontario than BC. In BC people are used to laughably incompetent government (at all levels) and vented enough in 2000 and 2002; basically the NDP there are part of the furniture and are manifestly non-scary to the sort of people who might be tempted to actually vote NDP. That they're regarded as Communists by most right-wingers there is irrelevant. The Rae government is a different matter, yeah, but it was a while ago.

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How many likely NDP MPs are any of those three things? If they do as well as the polls say they might, perhaps a few, yeah. Plenty of insane Tory MPs, though.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Worth a read: http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/981471--hebert-a-liberal-campaign-of-self-destruction?bn=1

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Rumours of a riding poll in Trois Rivières showing an NDP lead.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

And it's not as if, elephants in the room aside, much of Quebec wasn't natural social democratic territory.

Which has been a big part of the PQ's appeal provincially (especially in its first few decades) and to the BQ federally.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Also seems the Tories are recovering in the Prairies, I wonder if that'll affect gains in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

It looks as though a good Tory sample just rolled on; the problems with Prairies breakdowns are so massive that there's little point in saying what they are. Though 22% in all three would still represent a significant increase on 2008. I wish some proper polls were done of Saskatchewan and Manitoba though; right now it's impossible to work out what's actually going on there.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Speculation on possible NDP pick-up's from a newspaper that doesn't much like them.

Linked to here because it mostly seems to be based on academic commentators that the journalist who wrote the piece up has talked to emailed.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

More CROP riding (har, har) polls from Quebec.

Though, again, we do have to remember that the record of constituency polling is what it is...