(update 7) Rolling Canadian Election Discussion

147 thoughts on “(update 7) Rolling Canadian Election Discussion”

1. despite the fact that they’re still well behind in third place, then it’s just more proof as to how fucked up the FPTP system is with more than two parties.

   My completely random guess is:

   Conservative – 138
   
   NDP – 84
   
   Liberal – 67
   
   Bloc – 18
   
   Other – 1 (either May or a random Independent)

   I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’m betting the amateur predictors around the interwebs are going to be just as off.

2. His model for his predictions is old and clunky, and takes quite a lot of the numbers weighed in from pre-election and the pre-debate period. He’s not catching the NDP wave in Québec, and barely catching up elsewhere.

   Conservative 132
   
   NDP 104
   
   Liberals 54
   
   Bloc 17
   
   Independents 1 (Helena Guergis!)

3. Is it just me or does the Liberals seem . . . stale in their messaging.  Liberals front page is “watch the speech everyone is talking about” and it’s the party leader forming this rhetorical flourish around “so what?” regarding Canadian’s reactions to Harper’s ethical standards. At the end he keeps repeating this isn’t about the Liberals and Harper must be stopped. It impressed me as though he was saying between the lines “I’ll be the attack dog, I’ll fight Harper tooth and nail. Vote NDP, give them the reigns if it means Harper’s defeat.” Compare that to NDP’s very positive messaging to the Liberals . . . bland and boring tone.

   It reminds me in 2004 Dem caucus in Iowa. Dean leads and the establishment was desperate to stop it. I always felt Gephardt felt the task fell to him to be the attack dog and take Dean out so another could win it, in that case Kerry. I feel right now Harper/Cons are in the Dean seat, Michael Ignatieff/Liberals are playing Gephardt, and Jack Layton/NDP are playing the role of Kerry.

   Or maybe I’m just stupid. We’ll see Monday. Any result that doesn’t have Harper as PM is a good one in my opinion.

4. Con 132
   
   NDP 98
   
   Liberal 64
   
   Bloc 14
   
   Green 0

   Hard to say but with the Toronto Star Endorsement the NDP wave could sneek into Ontario as well and then anywhere from 110 to 120 seats is in play for the NDP.

5. Not being from Canada, I’m wondering how serious this actually is.

   Sen. Larry Campbell says it’s time.

   http://www.canada.com/news/dec…

   http://news.nationalpost.com/2…

   Others say it’s nonsense.

   http://www.ottawacitizen.com/b…

   One other thing I find interesting is the difference from the national parties and the local/provinicial parties. Four provincial Liberal parties (Alberta, British Columbia, Quebec, and Saskatchewan) have severed ties with the federal Liberal party.

   Like in British Columbia. You have a Liberal government with the NDP as the official opposition, but it’s mainly because the Liberals have moved to the right and made the Conservatives non-existent.

   Or in Saskatchewan where the Liberals and Conservatives seem to have merged into the Saskatchewan Party to counter the NDP.

   And one other thing I find interesting is how in Saskatchewan, the NDP has been highly successful locally, yet since 2004 the NDP has been shut out of federal seats in the province. Or Manitoba, where they’ve had success and have the government, but only have 4 seats federally.

   I can kind of see that in America where for instance in the South state and local Democrats had success, but not at the presidential level. Or in areas like the northeast where moderate and liberal Republicans had success at the state and local level, but not at the presidential level.

6. I found a pretty good all around resource in Canadian Election 2011:

   http://www.electionalmanac.com…

   If you want to have fun with Swings and Splits with the actual map of Canada visit:

   http://predictor.hillandknowlt…

7. The NDP. Quite strongly, too.

   http://www.thestar.com/opinion…

8. I’m going to guess that we’ll continue to see erosion of the NDP surge to a certain extent this weekend, particularly in Ontario (as to why, nine simple words: “Remember the good old days of the Rae government?”). I think correspondingly, we see some recovery for the Liberals, who, in my opinion, have not actually run that bad of a campaign. Polling seems to indicate that they have some potential to actually win outright in a three way in Ontario.

   I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that the Liberals, in the end, eke out a narrow second place finish over the NDP; mostly because outside of 5-8 ridings in Quebec, they have absolutely nothing resembling a GOTV machine there. Couple that with a modest Liberal recovery in Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada, more than a few soft NDP voters getting cold feet in the ballot box, and….it’s just enough to save LPC from absolute disaster.

   As for who I would vote for if I were a Canadian? Harper creeps me out, and Layton reminds me too much of a used car salesman; plus he has some folks who are pretty far out there on the left (Libby Davies in Vancouver East comes to mind). That leaves Ignatieff and the Liberals; while I think they could have picked a better leader (Dominic LeBlanc or Ralph Goodale), they’re not terribly likely to massively screw anything up one way or another.  

9. A pretty solid 4-5% in polls (if not actual voting) and zero seats.  Equally divided their support would be worth 12 to 15 of the total seats, in other words, a voice in government.  

   Given though they are one of four leftish parties, whose emphasis is just different than the others, there seems no path to success, ever.  Unlike the NDP, who have always had the plausible hope the Liberals would collapse, the Greens have to hope for the Liberals and the NDP to collapse, simultaneously.  No way.

   So instead of 5% of the people having a real voice (that 5% would translate into about 10% of a governing left party) they have no voice at all.

   No voice at all is far worse than the voice the NDP or BQ have had for decades.  It’s self-disenfranchisement.  In America it’s no big deal because they amount to well under 1% of the voters, but 5% is a very significant amount of people who are completely ignored in the halls of power.  Minorities normally try to get attention, not get ignored.

10.    Why are there never coalition governments in Canada? In the UK there is a Tory-Liberal Democrat government, and in Germany there is a Christian Democrat-Free Democrat government. Is it possible in Canada to form a coalition government? Could there be a Liberal-NDP coalition government?

11. Forum Research Poll conducted yesterday, just released

    http://www.thehilltimes.ca/dai…

    Ontario with:

    Con 36%
    
    NDP 31%
    
    LIB 25%

    (although they also say the Conservatives are polling at 40% in the GTA, followed by the Lobs with 30%… reflecting a lot of Conservative strength in some suburbs and exurbs, and Liberal strength in parts of the city and inner burbs).

    In Quebec, it is:

    NDP 33%
    
    Bloc: 21%
    
    Con: 16%
    
    LIB: 13%

    They also say the NDP are at 49% in Montreal – but don’t give break-outs for the other parties there. At that rate, the NDP will sweep the vast majority of Montreal seats.

    Atlantic:

    NDP: 30%
    
    Con: 31%
    
    LIB: 26%

    Manitoba/Sask:

    Con: 45%
    
    ND: 33%
    
    LIB: 15%

    BC:

    NDP: 37%
    
    CON: 39%
    
    LIB: 15%
    
    Green: 9%

    —
    
    All told, a pretty incredible set of results for the NDP. In addition to trying to figure out how many seats the wave brings for them, the big question will be if the Liberal collapse in Ontario, especially the GTA, allows the Conservatives to gain many seats there. It won’t be enough for them to make up for their losses to the NDP elsewhere to win a majority, but it might allow them to get out of the election without much of a net loss of seats.

    —

    Only remaining pollster left to report in is EKOS (who has hinted that his results are very similar to this one). Additionally, NANOS is going to release a final set of numbers tonight included polling from today. Yesterday they said they were seeing strengthening NDP numbers, so will be interesting to see if their final numbers also show a continuing surge.

12. picks up on the Orange Surge in Canada, with some interesting tidbits:

    Mr. Harper, by contrast, led a tightly controlled campaign (one woman was expelled from a Conservative rally after organizers discovered that her FaceBook page featured a photo of her with an opposition politician) and often seemed uncomfortable with crowds.

    Desmond Morton, a historian and the former director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada in Montreal said that the pivotal moment for the New Democrats came during a televised French language debate.

    “Layton emerged as a likeable guy with a street-smart accent, a member of a well-known Montreal family,” Professor Morton, a former adviser to the New Democrats, wrote in an e-mail.

    And some storm clouds for the NDP if they do as well as the polls are saying, especially in Quebec:

    If the party’s post election caucus is dominated by French speaking members from Quebec, he said, “their inexperience and their expectations may make the N.D.P. unviable in the rest of Canada.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05…

13. There is a law in Canada prohibiting the publication of poll results on election day.

    As a result of that, many Canadian websites and newspaper sites will be removing the polls from their pages until the polls are closed in BC.

    Not all of them will do this — the law actually probably only actually prohibits publishing a new poll on election day, not keeping old ones accessible to the public. And it would be impossible to expect a discussion site to go through and remove all the references to poll results that can be found on their pages.

    Nonetheless, several polling outfits have announced that they will be taking down their poll numbers at midnight (?Newfie time?). So if you have a poll you want to consult, download it now, because you may not have access to it during the day tomorrow.

    I believe EKOS and Nanos are both planning to put out updates from the final day polling results around 10 PM (ET) tonight. Frank Graves at EKOS has also said he is going to release a lot more data about likely voter participation and how that will affect final numbers. I’ll try to grab those numbers and post them here before they get taken down.

    —

    Similarly, tomorrow night will be difficult to get election results from eastern Canada while the polls are still open in BC. While the the votes in eastern Canada will be counted as soon as the polls close, they won’t be posted on the web because of the ban on transmission of results while the polls are still open in the west. (There have been prosecutions in the past for breaking the ban, which is somewhat controversial in Canada).

    My understanding is that at 10 pm eastern, folks in the US with cable/dish will be able to watch a simulcast of the CBC coverage on C-SPAN, and CBC should also be able to be streamed live on the web (although they tend to get very funky when large numbers of people attempt to watch something live.)

14. I’m going to go out on a limb and say the seats will fall like this:

    Conservative 139
    
    Liberal 59
    
    New Democrats 100
    
    Bloc Quebecs 9
    
    Green/other 1

15. showing Conservatives with almost 1/2 of the vote in Ontario and with L and NDP splitting the other half almost evenly. That seems like amazingly good news for the Conservatives.  

16. http://www.cbc.ca/news/politic…

    Among the revelations included in the diplomatic documents are accounts of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s “vindictive pettiness,” Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff’s “lack of energy and hands-on leadership,” and New Democrat Leader Jack Layton’s “mouse of a party.”

    A cable from March 2009 that is classified as confidential states the Bloc Québécois is “well-entrenched” and plays a “spoiler role” against future Liberal or Conservative majority governments.

    Calls from Radio-Canada/CBC to the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, where many of the cables originated, were not immediately returned.

    A 10-page brief by officials in the U.S. Embassy in Canada’s capital describes Harper’s governing style in detail.

    It calls him a “master political strategist” whose reputation was left “somewhat tattered” after his 2008 attempt to abolish public financing for all political parties.

    The cable was written a month after Harper prorogued Parliament to avoid the fall of the government on a budget-related confidence vote.

    “Relying on an extremely small circle of advisers and his own instincts, he has played the game of high-stakes, partisan politics well, but his reputation for decisiveness and shrewdness has been tarnished by a sometimes vindictive pettiness,” says the cable dated Jan. 2, 2009.

    The document also notes that despite years in the political sphere, Harper “remains an enigma to most Canadians [including many Conservatives].”

    It also includes references to Harper’s controlling ways within the party. According to the document, a minister of state confessed privately to a U.S. Embassy official that he “did not ‘dare’ to deviate from his preapproved text,” despite events having “overtaken his speech.”

    Citing discussions with Conservative caucus members, the document says the members said they were “often out of the loop on the prime minister’s plans” and many senior Tories said they were stunned to hear about the plan to ban public financing of political parties.

    The lengthy cable also critiques Harper for concentrating heavily on short-term election planning, giving the government a “sometimes improvisational air.”

    Another cable dated March 23, 2009, speaks to strains between the Conservatives and Quebec following the prime minister’s attacks on the Liberal-NDP coalition pact, which alienated many Quebec voters.

    “PM Harper reportedly blames Quebec Premier Jean Charest for the Conservatives’ failure to win a parliamentary majority,” the cable says.

    It also says Conservative Party insiders “repeatedly chafed” at the lack of obvious talent within the pool of Quebec’s Conservative MPs, leaving important portfolios to “less-than-obvious choice MPs.”

    A number of cables also weigh in on the state of the Liberal Party and Ignatieff.

    A document from early 2010 says the Liberal party’s “muted” response to Harper’s prorogation of Parliament suggested a “lack of energy and hands-on leadership,” noting that Ignatieff reportedly remained on vacation in France.

    “The Liberals face a tough road ahead if they hope to beat the Conservatives in the next federal election – whether in 2010 or 2011,” says the unclassified cable dated Jan. 5, 2010.

    Other cables cite conversations with former Liberal Party national director Rocco Rossi, who told U.S. Embassy officials that Ignatieff didn’t really listen to advisers.

    “He knows his own mind, and the only person whose opinion he really cares about is his wife Zsuzsanna,” the cable quotes Rossi as saying.

17. Conservative – 131
    
    New Democrats – 111
    
    Liberal – 54
    
    Bloc Quebecois – 12

    Now, let’s see how wrong I am…

18. Nanos:

    Is out:

    Con 37.1%
    
    NDP 31.6
    
    Lib 20.5

    http://www.nanosresearch.com/e…

    Quebec: NDP 39 Bloc 24 Con 19 Lib 12
    
    Ontario: Con 39 – NDP 29 – Lib 28
    
    BC: Con 41 – NDP 28 – Lib 24

    Ekos:
    
    Con 35
    
    NDP 32
    
    Lib 20

    Quebec NDP 40 Bloc 23 Lib 15 Con 15
    
    Ontario Con 40 NDP 27 Lib 27
    
    BC Con 36 NDP 36 Lib 15

    I am going with:

    Con 142
    
    NDP 97
    
    Lib 51
    
    Bloc 17
    
    Green 1

    Tories pick up 8-9 seats in Ontario but lose that number in Quebec and BC. Ending about where they are. If Nanos is right about Quebec they probably hold their ground there and do 2-4 seats better.

19. Frank Graves just released his final numbers, including results of calls from this afternoon.

    He is saying:

    CPC 33.9%
    
    NDP 31.2%
    
    LPC: 21%
    
    Green: 6%
    
    Bloc: 6.4%

    This is actually a little tighter than the numbers he released this morning, so sounds like today’s numbers were better for the NDP (but very marginally).

    He also looked at those with firm voting intentions:

    CPC 34%
    
    NDP: 31.6%
    
    LPC: 20.8%
    
    Green: 5.9%
    
    Bloc: 6.4%

    For all the talk that Conservatives are more likely to vote, the NDP actually makes up 3/10ths of a percent with this group, so the NDP vote seems pretty damn motivated.

    —

    He offers the seat projections as follows:

    CPC: 130 to 146
    
    NDP: 103 to 123
    
    LPC: 36 to 46
    
    Bloc: 10 to 20
    
    Green: 1

    ————————-      

    Regional breakdowns

    British Columbia (36 seats)

    CPC: 35.3%
    
    NDP  37.4%
    
    LIB: 14.7%
    
    Green: 9.7%

    (This is huge if it is true, there are a lot of potentially close NDP/CPC races in BC, and the NDP has run behind the CPC up until now…)

    Alberta (28 seats)

    CPC: 58.5%
    
    NDP: 17.5%
    
    LPC:  13.4%
    
    Green: 8.0%

    Saskatchewan/Manitoba (28 seats)

    CPC: 41.5%
    
    NDP: 32.3%
    
    LPC: 18.0%
    
    Green: 7.6%

    Ontario  (106 seats)

    CPC: 39.6%
    
    NDP: 26.5%
    
    LPC: 28.2%
    
    Green: 5.5%

    Quebec (75 seats)

    CPC:  14.3%
    
    NDP:  38.3%
    
    LPC:  14.6%
    
    Green: 4.2%
    
    Bloc: 26.6%

    Atlantic Canada (32 seats)

    CPC: 25.7%
    
    NDP: 40.1%
    
    LPC: 28.1%
    
    Green: 4.1%
    

20. chatter that Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Bloc could lose his seat tomorrow. Now that would be the icing on the cake for the NDP if that happens.

    http://www.thestar.com/news/ca…

21. http://www.theglobeandmail.com…
    

    In Quebec, the Bloc Québécois’s lists of supporters now may be junk: The party canvassed to identify its voters before Jack Layton’s sudden, surprising rise after the April 13 French leaders debate. Now, the party fears that if it urges those on its supporters’ list to go to the polls, it will be getting out the vote for Jack Layton.

    What happens when canvassing for likely supporters becomes obsolete in just a few days — fear enters the minds of people doing GOTV.

22. must be a real dickhead personality wise(if his party falters tonight, i can’t wait for the commentors on cbc trashing him)

23. Results should start being reported 10p eastern

    Elections Canada results should be here http://www.elections.ca/conten…

    308 has a projected results page, based on their 143/60/78/27 seat projection (C/L/N/B), http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MZAv…

    If it’s going to be a good night for the NDP, you may see it first in a flip of Nova Scotia’s Central Nova riding. And if the NDP is to break 100 seats, they need 45%+ there.

24. http://www.cbc.ca/news/politic…

    While not specific, the CBC report suggests that the objects of the pranks are liberal voters — and the automated calls are sending voters to wrong polling places

25. Here’s my prediction, based on some combo of number crunching, riding by riding examination, polls, gut instinct and a little bit of hope

    I’ve got to admit that there is incredible amount of uncertainty going into this election, all of the permutations of vote splits, 3 way races, 4 way races, strategic voting, efficiency of votes, and wildly divergent polls for some regions make it all like some very elaborate version of 3D chess….

    Talk about moving targets. The Conservatives could easily have 20 more seats or 15 less, the NDP could have 20 more or 20 less, while the Liberals could go as low as 35 or as high as 70. The Bloc could pick up another 10 or so, or just as likely, fall down to as few as 12 seats.

    For what it is worth, the 2 independents I am predicting are both conservatives — Helena Geurgis in Simcoe Grey (who was kicked out of caucus by Harper, so would be rough if he needed her to form a government), and Tim Ford in Alberta, who is pissed at the incumbent conservative and has been campaigning for 2 1/2 years since narrowly losing to him last time out.

    Overall:

    CPC:  128
    
    NDP: 103
    
    LPC: 54
    
    Bloc: 20
    
    Green: 1
    
    Independent: 2

    —-

    Newfoundland & Labrador:

    CPC:    1
    
    NDP:    2
    
    LPC:    4

    ———————————————–

    Nova Scotia

    CPC:   1
    
    NDP:   6
    
    LPC:    3

    ———————————————-

    New Brunswick

    CPC:   7
    
    NDP:  1
    
    LPC:   2

    __________________________________________________________

    PEI

    CPC: 2
    
    LPC: 2

    __________________________________________________________

    Quebec

    CPC:      6
    
    NDP:    39
    
    LPC:    10
    
    Bloc:   20

    __________________________________________________________

    Ontario

    CPC:   49
    
    NDP:  29
    
    LPC:  27
    
    Ind:     1

    __________________________________________________________

    Manitoba

    CPC:   9
    
    NDP:   4
    
    LPC:    1

    __________________________________________________________

    Saskatchewan

    CPC:   10
    
    NDP:    3
    
    LPC:     1

    __________________________________________________________

    Alberta

    CPC:  25
    
    NDP:   2
    
    Ind:     1
    
    __________________________________________________________

    British Columbia

    CPC:  16
    
    NDP:  16
    
    LPC:    3
    
    Ind:     1

    _________________________________________________________

    North (Yukon, Western Arctic, Nunavit)

    CPC: 1
    
    NDP: 1
    
    LPC:  1

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