Canadian by-elections, 2016 (next event: Quebec provincial byelections [Dec 5])

[DL]

Prediction: the BC NDP will win both byelections on Tuesday and neither will be particularly close

[DL]

Michael Smyth in The Province expects the NDP to win both byelections:

http://www.theprovince.com/news/michael+smyth+will+byelections+very+different+ridings/11687537/story.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

[DL]

As I predicted the BC NDP won both by elections. Vancouver Mount Pleasant was a 61-26% blow out over the highly overrated Greens and the liberal got just 10%. In Coquitlam-Burke Mount it looks like an NDP win by about a 45-39% margin. I wonder where "Lotuslander" is these days? In a padded cell bashing his head against the walls?

[DL]

So back to the by-elections. What I will be looking for:

1. Will the BC Greens increase their popular vote share? And by how much? Will that eat into the BC NDP popular vote share?

2. Will the BC Liberals buck the historical trend and win the C-BM by-election?

The foregoing will have major implications heading toward the May, 2017 BC provincial election methinks.

I guess the answers to these questions are as follows:

1. Yes, the BC Greens increased their popular vote, but not enough to be remotely in contention and it looks like they actually took more votes from the BC Liberals than they did from the NDP (though i suppose its possible that if there had been no BC Green candidates on the ballot at all - the NDP would have won both seats by even bigger margins). Still its notable that when the Greens do really well in a particular riding like Saanich North or Oak Bay - the data suggests that they take votes equally from the BC Liberals and the NDP. Since the BC Liberals are the de facto "conservative party" in BC, the Greens are the de facto "liberal party"

2. No the BC Liberals did NOT buck any historic trend. They threw everything they had into trying to hold Coquitlam-Burke Mountain - an d lost by an 8 point margin in a riding that they have always won by wide margins.

If you think these byelection results have "major implications" for the 2017 BC election, what might those implications be?

In the short term, it will boost NDP morale, fundraising and candidate recruitment and solidify Horgan's image as the one and only person who can knock off Christy "Premier photo-op" Clark

[DL]

Conservative Former CHCH TV reporter and on-air personality Donna Skelly wont ward 7 by-election due to a split in the left-progressive vote.
John-Paul Danko, was a close second with 1,875. And notably, Uzma Qureshi, who former councillor Scott Duvall and other NDPers aggressively endorsed, came third with 1,521 votes.

I'm not sure about there being any "split" - i looked at John Paul Danko's website and it went on about him bringing a business perspective and not being tied to any unions or political parties....whihc is usually code for a small "c" conservative in municipal politics

[DL]

Toronto only has by-elections for school board, don't you know.

That is not true. Toronto has had several byelections to fill vacancies on city council. The rule is that if the vacancy occurs in the first half of the municipal term, there is a byelection. If its in the second half, its up to council whether to have a byelection or appoint a replacement for the rest of the term - we are currently less than a year and a half into this four year term - so there will be a byelection to replace Ford.

[DL]

This could be a very interesting byelection, the NDP was a strong second in Rouge River and their two-time candidate Neethan Shan was just elected to the school board in a municipal byelection...I wonder what recently defeated NDP federal MP Rathika is up to. On the other hand, if Patrick Brown's "outreach" to minorities is bearing any fruit a PC win here would be evidence of that.

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Former NDP MP is filing to run for the OLP in Scarborough-Rouge River. Guess it won't be too long till Wynne calls that by-election.

I've also read that there is another preferred candidate for the OLP nomination and that it is very unlikely Rathika can get nominated. There is some speculation that Neethan Shan will run for the NDP and that he and Rathika do not care for one another. She was maneuvered out of the NDP nomination, will lose the Liberal nomination...I predict shell wind up running for the Green Party

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What difference does it make whether those school board byelections are on the same day or not? They are in two totally different parts of the city, there are no cost savings i can think of...

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Scarborough-Rouge River: NDP nominating a perennial candidate.

You know sometimes these perennial candidates eventually hit the jackpot. Wayne Gates had run and lost for the NDP in Niagara Falls quite a few times before finally winning the byelection in 2014 and then getting re-elected in the general election!

[DL]

The Liberals love their mid-summer by-elections, don't they?

I don't think they have much choice in this case...the vacancy occurred in February so they have to call it by sometime in July

[DL]

The latest province wide poll in Ontario has the Liberals crashing to 28% with the Pcs up at 42% and the NDP at 23% - the way the votes are distributed that could mean a PC majority and NDP as official opposition. Also if you extrapolate that trend the Liberals should be in deep danger of losing Scarborough-Rouge River!

[DL]

The latest province wide poll in Ontario has the Liberals crashing to 28% with the Pcs up at 42% and the NDP at 23% - the way the votes are distributed that could mean a PC majority and NDP as official opposition. Also if you extrapolate that trend the Liberals should be in deep danger of losing Scarborough-Rouge River!

Yes, but unfortunately it means a PC win there

Its hard to know how things extrapolate to that riding...In 2014 the Liberals came in first with the NDP a very strong second and the PCs not far behind...but a riding that is something like 65% made up of people born outside Canada and with a huge Tamil population is very difficult to poll and may or may not follow province-wide trends. Personally, if the NDP doesnt win that one, the next best thing is for the PCs to win...nothing will change the Liberal majority, but if they lose a suburban Toronto seat to anyone, it will create major panic and unrest within Ontario Liberal ranks...whihc means i can get out the popcorn!

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Brown flip-flops again on sex ed. Wonder how much this will hurt him in Scarborough.

I have a suspicion that the local PC campaign in Rouge River got over-zealous and put out a piece of literature claiming that Brown wanted to "scrap" the sex ed curriculum...and its been damage control ever since. there has to be an inside story on this.

[DL]

Wow.  That is a huge win.  If this trend continues up to the next provincial election, it's going to look more and more like a majority for the PCs next time around

Except remember how the Ontario NDP had some smashing byelections wins in the lead up to the 2014 election and they turned out to be totally non predictive of what would happen in a general election

[DL]

By elections are often very poor predictors of the results of next general election, but they are still important in the short term. This result will cause a lot of anxiety in Liberal ranks as it will prove that the dismal polling numbers are for real and that the Wynne government really is extremely unpopular. There could start to be dissension in caucus and pressure to reverse course in some unpopular policies.

For the PCs this will be a huge morale boost that will solidly Brown's leadership and allow him to quickly turn the page on the whole sex education fiasco. This will also make it easier for the PCs to attract good candidates etc...

For the NDP it probably means almost nothing. While their vote share dropped a bit compared to 2014, they did better than predicted and came remarkably close to driving the Liberals into third place. An NDP win would have been a huge morale boost. A drop into the teens like the Mainstreet poll predicted would have been demoralizing and caused more questioning of Horwath's leadership. This 27.4% result is so-so enough that it's neither here nor there.

[DL]

This is pretty big. Remember that the Tories couldn't even win this seat with Mike Harris or Stephen Harper. It hasn't voted Tory since the 1980s, when the riding was presumably mostly White.

True, although we should note that the Tories are doing much, much better among Chinese-Canadians and worse among well off whites than they were in the Harris era.

Also, the "Harris era" was 20 years ago and ridings like this have undergone MASSIVE demographic change. It is simply not the same riding that it was back then.

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Big caveat: Ottawa is not like the rest of Ontario. We do not pay attention to provincial politics here.

Apparently Ontarians pay enough attention to Ontario politics to give the provincial Liberals about 25% lower support than they would give the federal Liberals if an election were held today

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Seeing as Wynne is at McGinty levels, could she resign if she loses these by-elections?

Niagara is a safe Tory seat, Ottawa-Vanier safe Liberal. There have been faint whispers that she should if Ottawa-Vanier somehow goes blue, but extremely unlikely regardless. She's fiercely competitive and firmly believes she can repeat 2014.

There is no such a thing as a "safe seat" anymore...especially in byelections. Remember when outremont was the "safest Liberal seat in Canada"...a seat is safe until it isn't. I suspect that the Liberals will win narrowly...if they did lose, it would probably cause some major freak outs in Liberal circles but I think Wynne would pretend she was Greg Selinger and doggedly try to hold on and truth be told with just 1.5 years to the next ontario election, there is really no mechanism for the Ontario liberals to get rid of her.

I'll also be curious to see if the Liberals can be driven into third place in Niagara West-Glanbrook

[DL]

Why doesnt the Quebec government offer to give the Hassidim a plot of land in northern Quebec and have them build a Hutterite style closed community where everyone is walking distance to the synagogue and where they don't have to be in contact with the rest of society. None of them have jobs - they just pray and study all day anyways - so what does it matter to them if they are on the shores of James Bay or in the middle of Outremont...?

Seems to me that the problem with these religious freaks is that they want to live like an isolated religious sect/cult in the middle of a densely populated diverse urban area - its never going to work. Why can't they be like the Amish or the Hutterites and isolate themselves  to a remote place where they can live as they please with no contact with the rest of the world?

[DL]

I suspect that in the current political environment in Saskatchewan, the NDP would be heavily favoured to win Meewasin in a byelection. I wonder if Cam Broten would try to make a comeback by running there? Or what about Ryan Meili? Or the woman who ran for the NDP last April who was seen as having done well. It would be a natural place to run for anyone not currently an MLA who might have ambitions to run for the Sask NDP leadership

[DL]

I think you guys are all wrong about this riding. First of all, while it went Liberal by a wide margin in the last election the Soo does have a lot of NDP history and was NDP federally up to 2011 and it has been NDP provincially off and on since the 1970s. You cannot compare it in any way to Ottawa-Vanier which is a riding with no NDP history of any kind. In the last Ontario election the NDP ran Celia Ross the president of Algoma College who apparently was regarded as having been a top notch candidate her results notwithstanding and there are NDP leaning city councillors in the Soo as well.

The Ontario Liberals are astonishingly unpopular these days with Wynne at an abysmal 16% favourability and while she may have some vestigial support in downtown Toronto and downtown Ottawa - northern Ontario is the epicentre of where she is now dead meat - especially since skyrocketing hydro bills his northern Ontario very hard.

I also don't think the NDP needs or even wants a strong PC campaign to win here. These northern Ontario blue collar ridings are the kind of place where there actually is a big blue-orange swing vote and there will likely be a large "strategic vote" in this byelection as people try to figure out which opposition party is most likely to beat the Liberals. I expect this byelection to be referendum on Kathleen Wynne and if the PCs run a strong campaign it will split the anti-government protest vote. The best thing for the NDP is for the PCs to be seen as a non-factor and for people to see the NDP as the best protest vote to cast

Provincial Sault Ste. Marie: David Oriazetti is quitting politics. First Red-Orange battle in a while.

If it is a straight "red-orange" battle, than the Liberals will win. The NDP only can win the Sault if the Tories do well.  The Tories may very well do well in the Sault though (don't forget it went Tory federally from 2011-2015).

Much of the "red" here was only "red" for Oriazetti and not for Wynne or the party.  That along with the unpopular hydro fiasco and a higher Ontario PC will certainly help the ONDP pick this up. 

Could we even see an orange-blue race?

Problem is the provincial NDP has been rather incompetent lately. I can't imagine they will be able to find a very good candidate. I mean, all they could find for Ottawa-Vanier was the brother of an MPP no one in the city has heard of from far away riding.

[DL]

I think the days of Ontario Liberal and PC voter feeling they had to "vote strategically" to stop the "socialist hordes at the gate" in the NDP are long gone. I'm sure the PCs will make a serious effort here since Brown has made a lot of noise about want to make a breakthrough in northern Ontario and the federal Tories did win the Soo in 2011. I'd be surprised if ther PCs got less than 20% here. But, I predict that in the context of a byelection with an Ontario Liberal government that is about as popular as Ebola virus - especially in northern Ontario - the "ballot question" in the byelection for about 80% of voters is going to be "who can beat the Liberals?" and a lot of the "swing vote" will be people who are no fixed affiliation and just want to send a message to Kathleen Wynne. If a poll is published days before the byelection showing the NDP leading and the PCs out of contention - the PC vote will collapse and go NDP - and vice versa if the polls say the PCs are best positioned to beat the Liberals.

[DL]

The level of antipathy towards the Ontario has gotten so extreme lately that polls show that PC voters have the NDP as their second choice by a 2-1 margin over the Liberals and even Ontario NDP voters are starting to increasingly have the PCs as their second choice. We are going into uncharted territory now that Wynne is getting to be as unpopular as Brian mulroney circa 1992