Canadian by-elections 2021-2022

[DL]

The Saskatchewan Party have won a by-election in Athabasca, a remote northern riding. The right has never held the seat before.

That not quite true - that seat was a Saskatchewan Liberal seat almost continuously from the 1930s to the late 1970s - and in those days the Saskatchewan Liberals were very much "the rightwing party" in Saskatchewan.

[DL]

Legault has finally announced the date of the Marie-Victorin by-election, and it will be held on April 11th.

The candidates are:

Party	Candidate
Parti Québécois	Pierre Nantel
Coalition Avenir Québec	Shirley Dorismond
Québec solidaire	Shophika Vaithyanathasarma
Liberal	Émilie Nollet
Green	Alex Tyrrell
Conservative	Anne Casabonne
Climat Quebec	Martine Ouellet

and today a new poll by Leger on provincial vote intention in Quebec has the once great PQ down to just 10% of the vote and in FIFTH place...if they lose Marie-Victorin it may be a sign of that party's imminent death.

[DL]

Also, the New Brunswick by-elections for Miramichi Bay - Neguac and Southwest Miramichi - Bay du Vin have been called for June 20th.

Seems weird to call byelections over three months in advance!

[DL]

I sorta agree with Josée Legault that M-V won't be that important for the PQ. Either they're comatose like Joe Clark's PCs or die completely like the UN, and I don't think another leader would do much better than PSPP.

Its interesting to look at formerly powerful parties in Canada that have died. The classic example is the Union Nationale which went from being the government of Quebec in 1970 to losing all seats in 1973 and after a dead cat bounce in 1976 - basically ceased to exist.

Other major parties that have died would include:

Alberta Social Credit (Government 1936 to 1971, sputtered with a handful of seats in the 70s and then vanished)
BC Social Credit (Government 1952-72 and again 1975-1991 - then got annhilated and subsumed into the current BC Liberal Party)
The provincial Liberal parties in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba were all going concerns as recently as the 1990s and 00s - and are all now basically dead.

[DL]

I suspect the UCP will easily win the byelection in Fort-MacMurray because if there is one place in Alberta where the NDP can never wins its Fort Mac and secondly the UCP candidate is Brian jean who is openly running as an anti-Kenney candidate pledging to dump him as leader and to run for the leadership himself - so if you live in that riding by voting UCP in the byelection you get the best of both worlds - you get to register dissent against Kenney AND you can also reject the NDP.

[DL]

Also the Fort MacMurray byelection would be VERY different if the UCP nomination had gone to a Kenney loyalist and Jean was running for the Wildrose Independence Party or if he was covertly telling people to vote “anything but UCP” to send a message to Kenny

[DL]

There is a Manitoba byelection next week in Brian Pallister's old seat of Fort Whyte which as an extremely wealthy Winnipeg suburb that is usually considered the safest PC seat in Winnipeg. Apparently things are not going so well for the PCs and they may have a close race - possibly more with the normally dead Manitoba Liberals than with the NDP. This is one of those extremely rich ridings (see River Heights) where people will cast a protest vote for the Liberals but could never "slum it" with the NDP which represents those icky working people.

[DL]

Fort Whyte is the richest riding in Manitoba. It’s the equivalent of very rich bedrock Tory seats in the southeast of England that might vote Lib Dem as a protest against the Tories but would never vote Labour

[DL]

Fort Whyte is the richest riding in Manitoba. It’s the equivalent of very rich bedrock Tory seats in the southeast of England that might vote Lib Dem as a protest against the Tories but would never vote Labour

Is it? I would have guessed River Heights for the wealthiest. In any event, things don't break down quite so well in Canada, given that unlike in the UK, in Canada the wealthiest ridings nationally are mostly Liberal, although the wealthiest polls tend to vote Conservative and of course very wealthy places essentially never vote NDP.

Not entirely true. I live in a very wealthy part of downtown Toronto where everyone makes a six digit income and my polling subdivision went 65% NDP in the last Ontario election

[DL]

According to Wikipedia it is not particularly heavy in visible minorities. According to friends in Winnipeg it’s where nouveau riche WASPs go to buy monster homes and McMansions

[DL]

The PCs eek out a 195 vote win in what is usually one of their safest seats. Very bad sign for them. That seat is way too rich for the NDP to ever be competitive but I suspect the NDP is pleased the Liberals did not win since the last thing they need is for the moribund Manitoba Liberals to get any oxygen

[DL]

So the extent to which it is a harbinger of good fortune for the Liberals is pretty limited?

For the Manitoba Liberals its a case of "close but no cigar". If they had won they would have had a 4th seat which would have given them official party status and more money and profile and would possibly have given the appearance that they have momentum. But they lost and in a general election next year that will be totally polarized between the PCs and NDP - I suspect they will be lucky to keep 2 seats

[DL]

I can't say that I have any "horse in the race" in Marie-Victorin. When push comes to shove, I guess I'd like to see the PQ lose since I don't like turncoats and Nantel is now running for his third different party and I think the PQ is now a totally defunct party and losing here would hasten their pathway to death as a political party. a will not shed a tear for that

[DL]

Results (prelim, excluding mail-ins):

NDP: 56.8% (+5.5)
SP: 37.0% (-9.1)
Lib: 2.6%
Buf: 2.4%
Grn: 1.2% (-1.4)

Turnout: 37.5% (-18.8)

NDP HOLD (2 party avg swing: +7.3%)
 

Its worth noting that in 2020 over 1400 votes were cast by mail in Meewasin and they broke for the NDP over the Sask Party by about 900 to 500...so look for the NDP margin here to further expand

[DL]

Progressives have won Scarborough North before. Remember Rathika Sitsabaiesan?

The boundaries were different when she won in 2011. It was Scarborough Rouge River and if we t further east. It was less Chinese and more Tamil than the current Scarborough North

[DL]

Presumably the Mississauga Lakeshore byelection will be in Spring 2023. One thing that could help the Liberals is the way the provincial Tories under Doug Ford are squandering political capital like crazy right now and will be more and more of a liability for the federal Tory party

[DL]

There is no way Trudeau waits until November 26 to call the byelection since that would make election day New Year’s Eve! Although if I’m not mistaken the slaw says he has to call the byelection by Nov. 26 but he could set a date in late January if he wanted

[DL]

And the good news for the Liberals is that by December 12 memories will be very raw of the way the Ontario PCs messed up education and the federal Tories could be hurt by “brand cross contamination”

[DL]

Apparently a Manitoba provincial byelection has to be called very soon in the Winnipeg riding of Kirkfield Park. Could be interesting. It used to be a safe Tory seat but went NDP in 2007 and 2011 and if the swing against the Manitoba PCs that we see across the province is extrapolated to this seat - the byelection could be dicey for the PCs even though they won it handily in 2019.

[DL]

There will be a Manitoba provincial byelection on December 13 in Kirkfield Park. It could be one to watch. Although it went to the PCs by a 49% to 25% margin in 2019, the PCs have become extremely unpopular since then and polls show a huge PC to NDP swing compared to 2019. Kirkfield Park is relatively upscale and has historically been a PC stronghold but the NDP won it in 2007 and again in 2011 so its not outside of the realm of possibility that they could win it again under the right circumstances.

I think and NDP win would be a bit of an upset - but the likely PC margin will be worth watching

[DL]

Just a reminder that the Kirkfield Park byelection is on Tuesday and a brand new Manitoba poll by Probe had the NDP leading the PCs province wide by 11 points 46-35 which would represent a massive 27 point swing since the last election. The poll has NDP support in Winnipeg up to 55% which is astonishingly high and would point to winning all but a ha evil if seats in the city

[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

[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...   

[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... 
 

[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