Canadian federal election - 2015

[Linus Van Pelt]

Lawyer Nate Erskine-Smith wins the Liberal nod in Beaches-East York

LOL, when I saw this (Nate + double-barreled last name) I immediately thought "classic 80's name, I bet this guy's about my age", and sure enough, he appears to be born roughly 1984 from his degree dates (assuming he didn't skip a year), same year as me.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Nice work on the maps, Smid.

[Linus Van Pelt]

When the Conservative government reformed the representation formula to correct the under-representation of Alberta, B.C. and Ontario, their initial version had the result that Quebec was slightly underrepresented with 75, so after some criticism, they modified the formula to get it proportional with the new system at 78.

[Linus Van Pelt]

This is a really weird episode.

[Linus Van Pelt]

You know things are bad when Joe Volpe is on the clean-government side of a Liberal Party internal dispute.

[Linus Van Pelt]

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This is a totally useless piece of information, and, frankly, journalistically embarrassing. Who performed the survey? Who paid for it? Which ridings are we talking about?

In the US papers like the New York Times actually have rules about restricting the use of anonymous sources to cases where it is in the public interest; you can't just randomly push someone's internal poll without attribution. I wish Canadian papers were responsible enough to follow.

[Linus Van Pelt]

One thing to keep in mind in polling in BC is that its often very challenging to get Chinese-Canadians (who often skew Conservative) to respond to surveys - this is a non-issue on the three island ridings but could be more of an issue in the Burnaby seat.

I recall a couple articles saying roughly 60-65% of Cantonese speakers voted Tory last time? Does anyone no what the numbers for Mandarin speakers are?

I think this thing about Cantonese speakers came from a claim Jason Kenney made about internal Conservative polling. Which doesn't make it necessarily false, but it's not really independently verified.

Anyway, these new BC ones look like junk polls.

[Linus Van Pelt]

This is the actual quote from Mulcair:

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"We were ready to put a lot of water in our wine, because our priority is to get rid of Stephen Harper. Mr. Trudeau has said that he'd maybe be ready to work with the NDP, so long as I was no longer the leader. I raised the project four times. At a certain moment, one gets tired. These stories, they're finished. We're looking to the electorate and we're telling them that if they want real change, it will pass through the NDP. From now on, that's the only proposal we'll put forward on the subject." (my translation)

If you ask me, it's not clear that he's refusing to form a coalition, or has changed his position. He's just saying he's not going to bother with any pre-election negotiations because he's fed up with Trudeau not engaging him.

[Linus Van Pelt]

If I understand that graphic correctly - given the phrase "federal political parties" and the percentages adding to 100 - Bloc-NDP swingers would be included in "NDP only", since the NDP is the only one of the federal parties asked that they would consider voting for.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Has everyone just decided not to poll Forces et Démocratie?

[Linus Van Pelt]

In a 3-way split of Ontario, the Liberals would likely win most of the generic 905 seats. Even when they lost them in 2011, the margin between them and the Conservatives was mostly a fair bit less than the province-wide number.