2011 Canadian Provincial Elections - Wrap-up phase.

[DL]

Possibly BC as well.

[DL]

That remains to be seen. I remember how in 1984 the federal Tories under Mulroney won a crushing majority and took 3/4 of the seats in Ontario - then eight months later the provincial Tories lost power in Ontario for the first time in 42 years!

[DL]

It should be interesting.  BC is a wildcard, although unlike Campbell, Clark is actually more popular than her party.  Campbell dragged down his party support, while Clark helps it.  As for other provinces, here are my predictions.

Christy Clark doesn't seem particularly formidable at the moment.  She barely squeaked it out in the by-election in Vancouver-Point Grey in what was supposed to be a cakewalk, and a few days it was reported she was considering moving over to a super-safe Liberal riding.

Asides from 2001, Campbell never won Vancouver-Point Grey by large margins and she got 49% which is more than what Campbell got in 2005 and 1996 although 1% less than 2009.

I thought that the whole rationale for picking an airhead like Christy Clarke as leader was that she was supposed to MORE popular than Campbell. The fact that she barely managed to hold the vote share that her hated predecessor had in a riding tailor-made for her kind of appeal (ie: full of ostentatious federal Liberal types) speaks volumes about her appeal.

[DL]

I think the big thing which could impact the NDP is how the public perceives Hudak.  When Davis was in power, the NDP frequently got around 25% in Ontario, but under Mike Harris they languished in the low teens.  Most NDP supporters didn't have too strong a preference between Davis and the Liberals, but most hated Mike Harris with a passion and would vote Liberal simply to block him.  If Hudak is seen as a Harris clone which many would argue he is, then expect several unions to endorse the Liberals and much of the NDP support to flock to the Liberals.  Off course that might not prevent a PC win, especially if they get 44% which their federal counterparts got in which case they would still win a majority albeit with fewer seats than the federal Tories.  The NDP can make the strong case for voting for them, but the desire to block the Tories is something they have little control over. 

Except that in the last Ontario election the Tories were led by the very moderate, inoffensive John Tory - and the NDP didn't do all that well with 17% of the vote and 10 seats. The NDP did do well in 1985 when the Ontario Tories were led by an ultra-rightist named Frank Miller (he of the loud tartan sports jackets). The conventional wisdom in the recent federal election was that everyone remotely progressive was soo "freaked out" about "evil Harper" that they would all flock to the federal Liberals in a national epidemic of strategic voting to stop Harper and that the NDP would get squeezed. Remind me what the results of the last federal election were?

Once you get beyond a few professors of social work living in downtown Toronto ridings where the Tories are not a factor - very few people think in terms of voting for "x" even though they prefer "z"  because they want to stop "y" - they just vote for who they like the best.

[DL]

Actually 21% for the NDP in 1995 was pretty bad - especially for a party with 74 MPPs running for re-election. Up until the 1995 election, the ONDP had a pretty consistent mid-20s vote share:

1967 - 26%
1971 - 27%
1975 - 29%
1977 - 28%
1981 - 21% (that was considered a total fiasco under Cassidy)
1985 - 24%
1987 - 26%
1990 - 37%
1995 - 21%
1999 - 13%
2003 - 15%
2007 - 17%

[DL]

Its interesting that up until 2004 - it was almost a given that the NDP always got significantly higher support in Ontario provincial elections than in federal elections (typically the provincial over federal bump was about 6-7%) - now its the reverse. I wonder why?

[DL]

The NDP has a good chance of winning Essex. Taras Natyshak who ran very strongly for them in Essex federally will run provincially - it will probably be a tossup between him and the Tory. With Crozier dead - so is any chance whatsoever for the Liberals to retain that seat.

[DL]

The NDP took 35% in Essex federally. It could be very winnable if the Liberals make some effort to hold the seat and its more of a three way split.

[DL]

The Liberal vote in Ontario tend to be very very inefficient at lower levels. Look at how in the federal election, the NDP and the Liberals had almost exactly the same popular vote but the NDP wound up with 22 seats compared to the Liberals 11. I think that if the NDP come within even 5 points of the Ontario Liberals (let alone surpasses them) - the NDP will be the official opposition to the Tories - and the final nail will have been hammered into the Liberal coffin.

[DL]

The Liberals had 27% of the vote in 1971 and the NDP also had about 27% and the Tories under David had 44% - that gave the PCs 71 seats and the Liberals and NDP 20 and 19 seats respectively. Of course those were the days when the Ontario Liberals were a very rightwing rural party that tended to have a stranglehold on rural seats in southwestern Ontario and almost no support in Toronto (in other words the Ontario Liberals of the 60s and 70s were the same as the Hudak PCs of today).

[DL]

If the Ontario PCs won the most seats but fell just short of a majority - it would be interesting to see what would happen. McGuinty as the incumbent Premier would be well within his rights to put forth a throne speech and try to get it passed with NDP support - then again he might also do what Paul Martin did on election night '06 and resign on the spot - in which case we would have a delicious repeat of what happened federally after 2006 where the Liberal official opposition propped up a Tory minority government in exchange for nothing while an emboldened and strengthened NDP got to be the "opposition in all but name".

[DL]

Except, minority governments will be harder to come by in Ontario due to the lack of the Bloc. The NDP has to do really well, and the Liberals have to hold their own a bit too, which is an unlikely scenario. Either the NDP does well and the Liberals tank or the Liberals hold their own and the NDP only makes marginal gains. In other words, a perfect balance would have to occur for there to be a Tory minority.

I don't think it would take that much of a "freak result". What if the gap narrowed to just a 5 or 6 point Tory lead (very possible) and we ended up with something like PC - 39%, Libs - 34%, NDP - 22% (or for that matter let's say the NDP gets a more 'low end" 20% and the Tories get 40 and the Liberals 35) - if that happened, we would probably be looking at something like the seat split in Ontario federally in 2008 (C - 52, Libs 38, NDP 17). In 1985 we had a 51-49-25 seat split. I think its extremely likely that the ONDP gets in the high-teens seat-wise - and then all it takes for a minority government is for the Tories to be kept to a low to mid single digit lead over the Liberals.

[DL]

If the Tories have a minority, the NDP propping up the Liberals, or forming a coalition with them, with McGuinty still as the leader of the Liberals would be suicide.

Would it not be even more suicidal for the NDP to support a Tory throne speech and allow Hudak to form a government and then go on a rightwing rampage of slashing and burning?

I suspect that in that scenario - Horwath would do one of two things - either enter into negotiations with both the Liberals and the PCs and see which party would make the most concessions to the NDP OR announce on election night that the NDP will not support a Tory government under any circumstances and try to maneouvre the Liberals into having to be Hudak's "silent partner"

[DL]

Minority government is actually not such a rare an event in Ontario - in addition to 1985, we also had minority governments in 1975 and 1977 and in 1999 the Tories came within just a handful of seats of losing their majority - that was with the NDP only having 9 seats. What if the NDP has 18 seats? Then the Tories need to beat the Liberals by more than an 18 seat margin - of course if the Tories maintain a double digit lead - they will easily get a majority - but what if the gap narrows to 5%? It doesn't have to be razor thin - just get the Tory vote down from the low 40s to the high 30s and it becomes very likely.

[DL]

NDP is not taking Tory votes.

I would agree that the NDP is not taking the votes of the core 33% of people who voted Tory in the 2007 election, BUT with the Tories at 42% - you can be sure that a chunk of that is from people who are simply pissed of with McGuinty and whose kneejerk reaction is to park their votes with the official opposition. If Hudak's weaknesses are exposed in the campaign and if Horwath performs well, the ONDP could attract some of that generic anti-government vote away from the Tories.

Look at what happened in 1995. The Rae government was very unpopular and for a year leading up to the election and even for the first half of the campaign the Ontario Liberals under the dreadful Lyn McLeod had double digit leads. The Tories under Mike Harris actually started the campaign in third place! Then Harris ran a good campaign and McLeod flopped and the anti-government vote suddenly shifted dramatically away from the Liberals to the PCs. So anything is possible.

[DL]

the latest Ipsos-Reid poll gives us a 10-11% swing from the Liberals to the Tories which, assuming a uniform swing (lol), would give the Tories up to 43 more seats, including Ottawa South (McGuinty's seat).

This is true on a uniform swing - but did you notice that in the federal election, Ottawa was one place in Ontario that bucked the province-wide trend and there was virtually no Liberal to Tory swing at all?

[DL]

Even in the UK, the swings are not all that uniform. Last year some ridings had 11 point Labour to Tory swings while ridings right next door had just a 2 point swing and of course all the models go out the window in Scotland where the SNP is a factor and where the Tories made no gains at all. At the national level in the UK there was a mammoth Labour to LibDem swing and yet Labour actually GAINED several seats from the LibDems that they had lost in 2005 - so go figure.

[DL]

Well, the 308 guy has become something of a snob who thinks that elections are predicted only by universal swings and those myths and ignores basically things which actually count.

308 is trying to apply a BBC-style "swingometer" to Canadian elections and its like trying to jam a square peg into a round hole. Canada has too many varying regional and sub-regional trends and individual riding anomalies for that to work the way it does in the UK (or for that matter in projecting states in a a US presidential election)

[DL]

New poll of 2,000 Ontario voters by Forum in today's Star:

PC - 38% (down 3)
Liberals 28% (up 2)
NDP 24% (up 2)
greens 7% (down 1)

Change is from the previous survey in June. If we compare to the 2007 election the Liberals are down 16 points, Tories are up 6 points and NDP is up 7 points, greens are steady and since the numbers only add up to 97% I have to assume that "other" is up a bit as well.

[DL]

If the NDP is within 5% of the Liberals they will likely get as many or more seats. The Liberal vote in Ontario is very inefficient at low levels because it's so evenly spread across the province. Look at the recent federal election, the Liberals and NDP were virtually tied at 25% each but that translated into 22 NDP seats and just 11 for the Liberals!

[DL]

Three thoughts on that poll:

1. Pollara is the Liberal Party pollster. That doesn't mean their numbers have to be wrong - but it should be taken into consideration.

2. The results may also be a negative reaction to the Tories running Rocco Rossi. Rossi is an ex-Liberal who ran for mayor last year and was a total FLOP and turned into an object of ridicule by the end of the campaign. It may be that while the Tories acted like it was some "coup" to land Rossi - in reality he is actually a candidate with very high negatives.

3. FWIW the poll also had the NDP at 15% which is not a bad increase from 10% in the 2007 election and that riding is just about their worst riding in the province - so it at least shows that NDP support can go up 5% - and yet NOT have that cost the Liberals the seat.

[DL]

Considering that Wall is quite popular and Lingenfelter has totally bombed as NDP leader in Sask., I'm actually pleasantly surprised things aren't even worse for the NDP there.

[DL]

I would second that - Newfoundland is a bit of a flip from the usual Canadian pattern St. John's is mostly Catholic and catholics in NL traditionally voted Progressive Conservative, while the rural outports tended to be Protestant and Liberal. but the brand of Tory in Newfoundland was always very, very red and had no connection at all to the western reactionaries who dominate the federal Tory party. They were like the last vestiges of liberal Republicans who were still winning in places like Vermont right up until ten years ago.

There is so much tribal enmity between Tories and Liberals and between Catholics and Protestants in NL that a lot of people from Tory families will say "if i ever voted Liberal old Grandpa McLeod would roll over in his grave" etc... but the NDP has no history in Newfoundland so there is no tribal taboo against voting for them. Danny Williams the ridiculously popular PC Premier of NL who just retired is a close personal friend and former law partner of NDP MP Jack Harris and when he had a falling out with Harper and the federal Tories in 2008 and he all but publicly endorsed the NDP in St. John's.

In some ways NL is like Quebec. In Quebec there is so much tribal hatred between federalists and sovereigntists that its hard for voters to switch between the Liberals and the BQ - but then the NDP comes along with no baggage and ex-Liberal and ex-BQ voters alike are able to find a new home.     

[DL]

I guess it depends on how you define "leftwing". In many ways NL actually is quite leftwing. They have quite a high level of union membership. They got rid of their religiously based school system. They tend to be very much in favour of government spending, programs and subsidies (ie: employment insurance, massive subsidies for cod fishermen etc...), they tend to like a lot of gov't support for the arts and culture and NL was one of the first couple of provinces to legalize same sex marriage etc...can you name a province in English Canada that is more leftwing than Newfoundland??

As for Fort McMurray - i think I read that that riding had the lowest turnout in all of Canada with barely 40% of eligible voters casting a ballot. Given that its such a supersafe Tory seat etc...I suspect that the vast majority of expatriate Newfies working in the tar sands don't bother voting at all.

[DL]

St. John's is developing voting patterns just like Halifax (remember Halifax was Robert Stanfield's old seat and was Tory for many years - now its a total NDP stronghold). I think by the next election you will see Saint John and Moncton, NB trending NDP as well.