Canadian Election 2019

[EastAnglianLefty]

It's interesting that Singh's approval ratings seem to be best in Atlantic Canada, given that the NDP are likely to win very few seat there. It sort of seems like Canadians have decided to really like Singh to make up for the fact they're still planning on voting Liberal.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The thing is, the "non-Liberal/Cons" vote is fractured evenly between the NDP and Greens, which should theoretically make winning  a majority easier. But an increase in Bloc seats makes it harder.

Potentially also relevant that most of the places where the Greens do well are good for the NDP or vice versa, which tends to mean more of the "non-Liberal/Cons" vote is wasted.

But then again, I'd assume the Greens will also do better where the Liberals do better, so the only beneficiaries of that would be the Conservatives, who aren't in a position to win enough Quebec seats for an easy majority.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The NDP rise in the polls is interesting. Do Canadian polls tend to show a shift towards the big-two at the close of the campaign as people begin considering tactical voting, and if so when does this usually start to make itself felt?

[EastAnglianLefty]

It isn't something that one could ever prove, but there might be practical - governance, discourse - implications to less and less detailed information like that. I do sometimes wonder if some of the more bizarre and inexplicably stupid political blunderings seen in this country over the past decade might have been... if not averted then maybe lessened... if our politicians actually knew who was voting for them. Uniquely, of course, they have no real idea at all.

This is possible, but some MPs will have good enough canvassing data to be able to answer that question with reasonable certainty. And I see no evidence that they're actually any better at lining up their perception with reality.

[EastAnglianLefty]

What's the likelihood of either Wilson-Raybould or Philpotts winning as an independent? I guess that might be relevant to the electoral calculus if Lib + NDP is about the same as Con.

[EastAnglianLefty]

One thing I don't understand is why the Liberals didn't use their majority to push through ranked ballot legislation when they had the chance.  It would have set them up for almost perpetual majority governments.

And I REALLY don't understand why the Ontario Liberals didn't do it too.

But would that not allow the NDP to survive on the long run.  I would think LPC would prioritize having no viable rivals on the Left as much as winning the next or any election.  Losing to CPC would still mean next election LPC can still come back. Leaving NDP around means there is always a risk that NDP would displace LPC as the main party of the Left and wipe out LPC completely.   

The NDP came back from the 1993 federal election - long-term, the Liberals can't kill them, because there is a block of voters who are never going to be entirely happy with the Liberals because Liberal policy is going to be primarily targeted at voters well to their right.

Equally, it's hard to see the Liberals ever getting wiped out, and ranked majority voting would dull the impact of elections like 2011, as they'd hold up better in seats where the NDP can't win.

However, this time round it'd probably primarily hurt the Liberals in Liberal/NDP seats, because Tory voters seem to prefer Singh to Trudeau.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The only way I can see the NDP doing well is if the Liberals underperform. Almost all the close NDP seats (certainly outside the Prairies) are Liberal/NDP marginals. It's a little difficult to see the NDP taking most of those without the Liberals also suffering in Liberal/Tory marginals.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I was interested to look at the NDP ceiling and floor, so I took a quick glance at the projections on 338.

There are 18 ridings where the projection gives the NDP a lead above 5% (8 in BC; Saskatoon West; Churchill; 6 in Ontario; Rosemont; St John's East.) I wouldn't say they're all safe, but if they're only getting those then they're doing badly relative to expectations.

There's a further 18 ridings where they're ahead in the projections, but by less than 5%. 7 of those are held seats. And there are 12 ridings where they're behind but within 5%, 7 of which are held seats.

Finally, there are 10 ridings in Quebec where they're they the incumbents but the projection has them out of the running.

In 10 of the marginal ridings (ie a margin within 5%) they're competing against the Tories, in 20 they're competing with the Liberals, in 3 with the Bloc and in 2 with the Greens (5 of them are three-way fights.)

All of which suggests that at present they're still on course for a worse result than 2015; and that for their seat count they benefit much more from the Liberals slipping in the polls than the Conservatives.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I guess a lot of the majority talk depends on who's switching and where. Is it about Con/Lib swing voters or anti-Tory voters coming home to the Liberals, and if so is that just in the swing seats or will it also hurt the Bloc or the NDP where they're competing with the Liberals.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The best comparison for the Canadian federal Liberals is the UK Conservative party. They are the party of old money and the well connected, reluctantly embracing change and more concerned with power than policy at the end of the day. Unlike the UK Tories, however, the Liberals have never found common cause with any truly radical right wing politics (nor left wing, really, notwithstanding the Liberals' right-leaning opponents tiresome insistence to the contrary).

Neither party would welcome the comparison, but it is accurate.

In this analogy, would Liberal historic dominance amongst voters from visible minorities be analogous to the surprising success Conservatives had with working class voters in the decades after 1867?

For that matter, why have the Liberals been so good at keeping the support of those voters (with the partial exception of the Chinese)? In principle you would expect them to be a much stronger demographic for the NDP.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Why did Singh almost lose in Bunaby-South?

He's from Ontario, not BC; the riding is just short of 40% Chinese and the Conservative candidate was of Chinese heritage; the non-NDP vote was less evenly split than in the by-election.

[EastAnglianLefty]

At the end of the day, what a race. I think it has to be seen as a repudiation of Andrew Scheer & the Conservatives, though. He claimed he's put Trudeau "on notice," but that's what my 5th Grade teacher Mrs. Fox did when she wrote names on the whiteboard. Scheer isn't a teacher, & Trudeau isn't a 5th-grader.

As it stands, the Conservatives have received around 6.1 million votes. That's about 500,000 more votes than they received in 2015, & this was the election where it came out that the PM wore blackface more times than he could remember.

Despite all the gnashing of teeth about Trudeau's "horrible" performance as PM, & all the sly nods about the shy Tories, it turns out that running without a climate plan, running on maligning your opponents outright, & explicitly supporting misinformation is a losing plan. Based on the regional results, the Conservatives were supported in the West by a larger margin compared to 2015 while losing votes everywhere else. This despite 4 years (& 40 days) of telling us over & over that Trudeau was ruining this country. So something went wrong.

Despite what the CBC was intimating last night, we know this: Doug Ford is a disaster for the province & the Conservatives. Conservative supporters have trumped Ford up as some messiah, despite every indication that fatigue with Liberals granted him a majority, & we have yet more proof in Toronto last night that Ford is an albatross around the Conservative neck. Maybe somebody on the right will admit he was a bad choice? Maybe, somewhere, a cadre of social conservatives are understanding the depth of their mistake in supporting him?

We know this: the anti-carbon tax crusade was a disastrous position to take, let alone clutch to your chest like a pearl necklace. The Greens received 1.1 million votes in this election. They got 600,000 in 2015, & turnout dropped this time around. Right now, we can see that the Canadian electorate is changing. I think in 5 years' time, we'll be able to say that the Canadian electorate has changed.

All of this to say that as we hear whining about Western alienation & separation in the weeks to come, it's important to remember that a party that seemingly ran on a campaign for the last 4 years (& 40 days) crafted to increase their vote count in ridings that they've already won have dug a hole that Western voters are now sitting in. Andrew Scheer & the Conservatives have alienated the West. Andrew Scheer & the Conservatives are now the opposition to a minority government in which they'll have no say in the governance of the country. Andrew Scheer & the Conservatives have systematically turned this country against the West by refusing to budge on issues on which the majority of Canadians disagree. If the West wants in, the West must compromise.

Time to admit, for instance, that climate change is real (not a party position, but one anecdotally espoused by the CPC). Time to admit that a Conservative-originated carbon-tax might be an okay idea. Time to admit that Trudeau might be a bad PM, but not a traitor, nor a criminal, nor whatever denigrating term they're using this week.

If these results continue for Conservatives, they'll once again be shut out of government for a decade. Maybe it's time to rethink what they've done since 2011?

My friends who live in Western Canada say it’s the East who have alienated the west over and over again not the other way around . Which is why they hate the Liberals a lot .


They think the Tories are currently already too pro Quebec and pro East in general

But in electoral terms, your friends are observably wrong. The Tories are getting more votes than they need in the west, they aren't getting enough votes in Quebec or the east (or most of BC, for that matter) to form a government. If they actually want to do something for the West, then they have to do something to win support in those areas, even if it ends up driving away some of their support.

I'm going to be contrarian, and suggest that this is a very good result for the NDP in that it will be a great opportunity for them.

The result is very similar to Jack's first election in 2004. 4th place, 16% of the vote, Liberal-led minority government. The big difference was the gain in seats, but they only won a paltry 19 seats. Another difference was that the NDP didn't quite hold the balance of power. But, now they do. The NDP has more power now than they did in 2011 when they were opposition.

The minority governments of the 2000s were great for the NDP, and ultimately led to the Orange crush in 2011. The same could happen now.

Not too long ago, the NDP were poised for a single digit election night, but Jagmeet pulled them out from that. Sure, it fell rather short from what we hoped, but it's still a relief. Jagmeet is a great campaigner, he's not going anywhere.

I want to agree with this, but I'm not sure I do. Singh is popular in the abstract, but there is a question of where the votes are going to come from to turn that into seats. It wasn't a good election result in the west or in non-GTA Ontario; in BC the Greens continue to be a threat (both in terms of the NDP base and their chances of winning disillusioned Liberals); the results in Toronto were straight-up disastrous, as voters who had no need to vote tactically for Trudeau did it anyway; and you can't blame him for Quebec's median voter being pretty racist, but it doesn't seem likely to change any time soon and that will dull the NDP's prospects there.

It just feels like people like him because it's safe to do so, but when push comes to shove it doesn't transform into anything meaningful.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Yes, I think the question of whether Singh is a long-term success is ultimately probably at least as much about whether he can fix its finances as it is about how he navigates a hung parliament.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The East-West split has been around for quite a few years and has taken different forms in terms of which party does well where. As a general rule, the same party doesn't do well in both urban Ontario and the Prairies (unless it's a big landslide).

And Manitoba takes a middling position between Ontario and Alberta/Saskatchewan.

Rural Manitoba votes basically the same way as rural Saskatchewan. What's interesting is that Winnipeg is so much less Conservative than, say, Edmonton (and this applies double when you consider the suburbs of both urban areas.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Although again the interesting thing there is that British Columbia has ended up on the wrong side of that particular cultural divide.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Six non-Alberta/Sask Conservative ridings had higher vote shares than the top Liberal, NDP, Bloc or Green ridings (albeit five are in Manitoba): Portage-Lisgar (71%), Prince George-Peace River-Northern Rockies (69.9%), Provencher (65.9%), Dauphin-Swan River-Neepawa (64.5%), Brandon-Souris (63.5%), Selkirk-Interlake (62.7%).

5 in Manitoba and one bordering Alberta and with an economy heavily dependent on fossil fuels. So still arguably the same pattern.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I think the argument for Singh isn't that it was a good result, it's that his personal ratings are good and that ought to count for something in an election where people aren't just reflexively voting for what they view as the best anti-Conservative option.

It's not that great an argument, but then again it's more of an argument than you can give for anybody else in the NDP at the moment.