Canadian by-elections 2021-2022

[CumbrianLefty]

Tories will try to spin not going down much, but this is still a pretty awful result for them.

[DL]

With just over 2/3 of the polls, the percentage gap has closed somewhat between the Liberals and the Conservatives to 51.1-35.6%.

It is possible the Conservatives will not decline significantly from 2021 when all the votes are counted.

Looks like a minor decrease, 38% in the 2021 general, and 37% in the by-election. It's the Liberal vote that has increased to 51% from 44% in the general. It was the decrease in votes for the other parties here; People's, NDP, Green that looks to have gone Liberal in this two-horse race.
Turnout looks like 23K votes vs the general at 56K.

I doubt if anyone who actually voted NDP or Green or PPC in the 2021 general election turned around and voted Liberal in the byelection. More likely it’s a repeat of an age old pattern that support for minor parties and candidates tends to evaporate and stay home in a byelection where they are not seen as contenders and they have no national campaign to coast on.

Normally byelections are an easy place for people to register a protest vote against the incumbent government. It’s normally very unusual for the main opposition to lose ground in a riding in a byelection unless the government is extremely popular and in some sort of honeymoon phase, which is not the case right now

[Tintrlvr]

The polls have been closed for over 2 hours, and only 75 out 234 polls have been reported, with 4,256 totals votes.  That's an average of 56 votes/poll. With 40 candidates I wonder how much extra paperwork is needed.
The following candidates have yet to record a single vote:

Samuel Jubinville

Alain Lamontagne

Pascal St-Amand

Darcy Justin Vanderwater

Ysack Dupont (Edit forgot to add him)

In the end, everyone got at least 1 vote. (Alain Lamontagne only got 1 vote. There's one poll that still hasn't reported, so maybe he will get another.)

[Hatman 🍁]

The Greens actually increased their vote share. I guess it helped that Elizabeth May did some campaigning.

[toaster]

Not good news for the Conservatives - this is where they need to win (or at least increase their vote share) to be in contention.  Perhaps the moderates that came before Pierre P actually were better in the GTA.

[The Right Honourable Martin Brian Mulroney PC CC GOQ]

Tories will try to spin not going down much, but this is still a pretty awful result for them.

HQ might, but the supporters are furious. With current polling numbers, this should be a close race. Sousa's name recognition probably gave the Libs a few % more than otherwise, fine, but it still shouldn't be a blowout in a riding that hasn't had a blowout since 2004.

Turnout was a measly 26%. That's embarrassing from a "healthy democracy" standpoint, but even more embarrassing for the CPC. The worry with Poilievre was whether he could flip Liberal voters, but there was no doubt that he could energize right-leaning people. Well, here we had a byelection where most swing voters probably didn't turn out, considering the low turnout rate, so the question was who could energize the base more. But Poilievre didn't even try, he basically sat out the first big test of his leadership. His backroom staff and overall political instincts looked top-notch in the leadership race, but his leadership so far has been pretty uncharacteristically tepid and risk-averse, which is not what you want from the Official Opposition

[The Right Honourable Martin Brian Mulroney PC CC GOQ]

Not good news for the Conservatives - this is where they need to win (or at least increase their vote share) to be in contention.  Perhaps the moderates that came before Pierre P actually were better in the GTA.

With turnout so low (like, 1/3 of what you'd see in a general election), I wouldn't necessarily draw that conclusion. When turnout is this low, you're not likely seeing many people changing their vote, it's usually the most partisan people who turn out.

But that's no excuse, because how on earth are you not able to turn out your vote? In a byelection? Against a governing party on its eighth year and with weak approvals? When you have a huge fundraising advantage?

The reason I supported Poilievre over Charest was because I believed (and still do) that a Charest leadership would have atrophied the base to the point of any potential swings not really making a difference. Poilievre's risk was that he wouldn't be able to swing votes, but we were confident that he would at least maximize the number of right-leaning people who come out to vote CPC. But if he can't even do that (largely because he can't be bothered to campaign apparently), then what's the damn point?

[Hatman 🍁]

How much "base" is there in Mississauga Lakeshore of all places?

[The Right Honourable Martin Brian Mulroney PC CC GOQ]

How much "base" is there in Mississauga Lakeshore of all places?

Considering the Conservatives regularly get high 30s-low 40s, there's clearly a base. Smaller base than the Liberals', but it's there to turn out if you put in the effort. In a low turnout environment and a "meh" economy, the opposition party should have the turnout advantage

[DL]

Normally even popular governments lose byelections or at least lose ground in them. The only exception is in some rural ridings in Quebec and Atlantic Canada there have been cases where the governing party will win byelections because people still have this vestigial attitude that if you don't elect an MP from the government side - your roads will never get paved again. But that would never be a consideration in an upscale suburban riding like Mississauga-Lakeshore.

Its easy to over-interpret byelection results, but they do affect the narrative and this will take a lot of wind out of Poilievre's sails and make a lot of pundits re-think all the hype around him...   

[2952-0-0]

One of the main Conservative pundits is spinning this as not a defeat, since they never bothered to try hard anyway, while acknowledging that the NDP to Liberal shift maaaaay be an issue going forward.

Of course, as everyone else here has stated, if the Conservatives aren't bothering here, then they're not bothering to win.

https://spencerfernando.com/2022/12/13/liberals-hold-mississauga-lakeshore/

[Хahar 🤔]

How much "base" is there in Mississauga Lakeshore of all places?

This is a place where the PCs have always done unusually well provincially, isn't it? It was PC even when they were in third place in the legislature. I'd imagine that demographic change has affected things, but Mississauga—Lakeshore has a PC MPP right now so there should be an obvious right-wing base.

[DL]

One of the main Conservative pundits is spinning this as not a defeat, since they never bothered to try hard anyway, while acknowledging that the NDP to Liberal shift maaaaay be an issue going forward.

Of course, as everyone else here has stated, if the Conservatives aren't bothering here, then they're not bothering to win.

https://spencerfernando.com/2022/12/13/liberals-hold-mississauga-lakeshore/

This argument is a bit bogus. If this was a riding where the Tories have won in the past thanks to a vote split and where the NDP traditionally gets 20-25% of the vote and that had collapsed to 5% - then maybe you could make the case that the Tories lost because the anti-Tory vote consolidated. But Mississauga-Lakeshore is a seat where NDP support has always been negligible. It was less than 10% in the last general election. This is like what happens to Labour party support when there is a UK byelection in a seat that is traditionally a Tory-Lib Dem battle and where Labour is always third - the Labour vote evaporates. Supporters of parties that are perennial non-contenders typically just stay home in byelections.

Even if the NDP had gone from 10% to 15% rather than dropping from 10% to 5% and we assume that 100% of that came from the Liberals - the Liberals still would have won. 

The other spin we see today from Tories is that they lost because they had a bad local candidate who came across as too polished and professional and wasn't enough of a populist loud mouth to rouse the dormant Tory base....yeah right, the Tory base in that riding seems so dormant they may keep sleeping for another thousand years... 
 

[Oryxslayer]

https://twitter.com/MainStResearch/status/1602714323771613189?s=20&t=-1fbCEz...

If the Tories really want to try their hands at spin, they should start with this type of data. That approval I think is worse than his national number, which itself isn't that good except when compared against Trudeau. Then they say that PP's Conservative Party doesn't see these types of seats as a path to forming (minority, cause I really struggle to see them get anywhere without Legault coercing the Bloc) government. Instead their focus is on small-towns or traditional marginals in the West far from the Laurentian bubble.

Now is this a correct strategy or spin? That's more up for debate.

[DL]

That approval I think is worse than his national number, which itself isn't that good except when compared against Trudeau. Then they say that PP's Conservative Party doesn't see these types of seats as a path to forming (minority, cause I really struggle to see them get anywhere without Legault coercing the Bloc) government. Instead their focus is on small-towns or traditional marginals in the West far from the Laurentian bubble.

Now is this a correct strategy or spin? That's more up for debate.

I really don't see the logic of this apparent Tory strategy of winning the next election while giving up on any new seats in Quebec or the GTA. The fact is the Tories are already almost maxxed out on seats in the rest of the country they could conceivably win. To form government after the next election they need to gain about 40-50 seats. They already have virtually every single rural seat in Ontario and the west. Sure you could hypothetically name half a dozen NDP seats in northern Ontario or coastal BC that the Tories could conceivably pick up - but that is only a handful of seats. Sure they might pick up three or four more rural seats from the Libs in Atlantic Canada - but where do they go from there? There simply isn't much low hanging fruit for them after that

[adma]

The reason I supported Poilievre over Charest was because I believed (and still do) that a Charest leadership would have atrophied the base to the point of any potential swings not really making a difference. Poilievre's risk was that he wouldn't be able to swing votes, but we were confident that he would at least maximize the number of right-leaning people who come out to vote CPC. But if he can't even do that (largely because he can't be bothered to campaign apparently), then what's the damn point?

Maybe because the "right-leaning people" most energized by Poilievre (at least, those inclined to support him in the leadership race) are still too far right for Mississauga-Lakeshore?  That is, we may inadvertently be coming back to the square one represented by the glass ceiling for the Canadian Alliance or 2004 Harper.  And the Lorne Park uppercrust isn't the sort to be enthused by a leader tarred by Freedom Convoy apologist associations.

That is, it's the old Trump bugaboo: "energizing the base" means nothing when you alienate too much of everyone else.

[adma]

How much "base" is there in Mississauga Lakeshore of all places?

This is a place where the PCs have always done unusually well provincially, isn't it? It was PC even when they were in third place in the legislature. I'd imagine that demographic change has affected things, but Mississauga—Lakeshore has a PC MPP right now so there should be an obvious right-wing base

However, that PC-in-third-place provincial circumstance was back in '87/90, when it was really a different and more genteel party than in the present.  That was before the federal PCs were hollowed out and ultimately displaced by the forces of Reform/Alliance, and before the provincial Robarts/Davis legacy made way for Harris/Ford coarseness--and the backlash to all of that led it to fall to the McGuinty Liberal wave in '03 despite withstanding '87/90.

And sure, Miss-LS has a PC MPP now; but so does everything else in Peel Region, and all the Mississauga seats had the PCs within 5 points of each other in the last election, so it's not like the advantage is any more special than in the rest, other than perhaps the Cons having a higher *floor* here than in the rest.  Indeed, the truer where-that-'87-PC-gentility-vote-went-to barometer is in how the Wynne Liberals (under Sousa) overperformed in defeat in Miss-LS in '18...

[Kahane's Grave Is A Gender-Neutral Bathroom]

The CPC appears to be looking at another election loss while still winning the national popular vote if this continues (although the PPC might change that, though Pierre appeals to them more than O'Toole) .

[adma]

The CPC appears to be looking at another election loss while still winning the national popular vote if this continues (although the PPC might change that, though Pierre appeals to them more than O'Toole) .

Yet the PPC share collapsed, too, to about 1/3 of what it was in '21.  So maybe Pierre *already* appealed to them...only to, once again, alienate a whole lot of others in the process.

[toaster]

How much "base" is there in Mississauga Lakeshore of all places?

I believe the demographics here make this the most "Conservative" of all the Mississauga ridings - so this is precisely where they need to do well.  Is there a road to victory for Poilievre without any Peel wins (other than Dufferin-Caledon)?  York (and Durham) seem like they may be easier targets for Poilievre.

[Hatman 🍁]

How much "base" is there in Mississauga Lakeshore of all places?

I believe the demographics here make this the most "Conservative" of all the Mississauga ridings - so this is precisely where they need to do well.  Is there a road to victory for Poilievre without any Peel wins (other than Dufferin-Caledon)?  York (and Durham) seem like they may be easier targets for Poilievre.

Poilievre does not appeal at all to the old money Tories in Lakeshore at all. He doesn't have a base in the riding. They are mostly voting Liberal now, or stayed home in this by-election.

[Hatman 🍁]

Anyway, close provincial by-election shaping up in Kirkfield Park, Manitoba. This is a suburban Winnipeg seat that usually votes PCs, but the NDP won a couple times before their recent crash.

With 34/48 polls reporting:

NDP: 1,062
PC: 1,030
Lib: 911

[adma]

How much "base" is there in Mississauga Lakeshore of all places?

I believe the demographics here make this the most "Conservative" of all the Mississauga ridings - so this is precisely where they need to do well.  Is there a road to victory for Poilievre without any Peel wins (other than Dufferin-Caledon)?  York (and Durham) seem like they may be easier targets for Poilievre.

Harper won in '06 while being blanked S of the Brampton/Caledon border.  (And the HarperCons picked up but one such seat in '08--interestingly, *not* Lakeshore.)

[King of Kensington]

That approval I think is worse than his national number, which itself isn't that good except when compared against Trudeau. Then they say that PP's Conservative Party doesn't see these types of seats as a path to forming (minority, cause I really struggle to see them get anywhere without Legault coercing the Bloc) government. Instead their focus is on small-towns or traditional marginals in the West far from the Laurentian bubble.

Now is this a correct strategy or spin? That's more up for debate.

I really don't see the logic of this apparent Tory strategy of winning the next election while giving up on any new seats in Quebec or the GTA. The fact is the Tories are already almost maxxed out on seats in the rest of the country they could conceivably win. To form government after the next election they need to gain about 40-50 seats. They already have virtually every single rural seat in Ontario and the west. Sure you could hypothetically name half a dozen NDP seats in northern Ontario or coastal BC that the Tories could conceivably pick up - but that is only a handful of seats. Sure they might pick up three or four more rural seats from the Libs in Atlantic Canada - but where do they go from there? There simply isn't much low hanging fruit for them after that

Bringing the PPC vote back just means winning seats in the wrong places, and not winning where it counts.

It could do Charlie Angus in though in blue collar populist Timmins-James Bay for example.

But yeah, no path to the victory without Quebec or the GTA.

[King of Kensington]

I wonder if King-Vaughan will stay with the CPC.  It's more Italian Canadian/Russian "new money", in contrast to the more "old money WASP" lakeshore suburban ridings.