Canadian by-elections, 2017 (next event: Calgary-Lougheed, AB prov.: Dec 14)

[DL]

The same poll indicates that the NDP has a much bigger lead when you test Ryan Meili (who was nominated last night) against either of the people vying for the Sask Party nomination

[DL]

Looking at a map Meewasin doesn't look all that suburban to me...its close to downtown and mostly right by the river

[DL]

Saskatoon is such a small city that literally anything outside the central business district would look like "suburbia" to someone from any other city in Canada.

[DL]

Needless to say it is virtually impossible to do an online survey in a municipal ward since there is no online sample/panel at that granular a level.

Even doing a phone poll in that ward is very very difficult since that ward is very new and heavily heavily made up of recent immigrants - most of whom only have cell phones and no land line and since it is impossible to get cell sample at the ward level - you can only poll landlines - which may be very unrepresentative of the voters.

FWIW, I expect Neethan Shan to win simply because on a 29 person ballot - he is the one and only candidate who has run in that area several times before and would be a recognizable name

[DL]

As I expected, former Ontario NDP President Neethan Shan won the Ward 42 byelection in toronto. The margin is impressive as he got 46% in a 29 person field and the second place guy got 12%. Interestingly the guy who was public endorsed by Doug Ford AND was backed by the Ontario Liberal machine And was backed by outgoing council Cho came in third with less than 10% of the vote

[DL]

City council lord make about $110,000 per year and as an incumbent Shan probably has a job for life now...look how long a piece of deadwood like Raymond Cho lasted?

[DL]

There were other cases in 2014 where an impressive previous run/runs made a Council-bidder an open-seat shoe-in (Justin Di Ciano in Etobicoke stands out)

Not to mention Joe Cressy running in the Trinity-Spadina federal byelection in July 2014...losing and then getting elected to city council in October 2014 with a margin very similar to Neethan Shan's (i.e. i think Cressy had about 45% and a gaggle of also rans had around 12% each)

[DL]

A take away, for what these Volkshammer-level seats are worth:

The Liberals are clearly holding their 2015 vote and continuing to drain from the (currently) listless Dippers while the Tories have little to worry about in their strongholds. The reduced margin in Markham is mainly due to (rather appalling) branch stacking for Ng, but these types of seats will eventual start to give the Government headaches closer to 2019.

And Canadians don't feel like voting in by-elections.

The only seat where the NDP had any campaign at all, as opposed to just a name on the ballot, was Ottawa Vanier where their vote went up 10 points. To the extent that byelection indicate anything at all, it shows that the NDP can cut into the Liberal vote when it makes an effort. Vanier was the only one of the five seats that would ever conceivably be an NDP target on a good day.

Btw, Emilie Taman is a superb candidate. The next Ontario provincial election is. A year away and while the federal Liberals are still relatively popular, the Ontario Liberals most definitely are not. The Ontario Liberals are so unpopular they could be reduced to half a dozen seats. I wonder if Taman could be convinced to run for the Ontario NDP in Ottawa Centre (where she actually lives)

[DL]

Unlikely. The practice in toronto has been not to have a byelection when we are past the half way mark of the city council term. I expect council to pick a temporary replacement who will promise not to run next year

[DL]

Let's not lose sight of the elephant in the room. In 2014 Sault Ste. Marie was the second safest Ontario Liberal seat in the entire province! They took 59% of the vote there. Their vote crashed by 36 points to just 23% - if that swing were replicated across the province the Liberals would be reduced to just one seat!

Final results Sault Ste Marie

Ross Romano PC 10,391 40.30% (+27.91%)
Joe Krmpotich NDP 8535 33.10% (+7.63%)
Debbie Amarosa Liberal 5919 22.96% (-35.57)
Kara Flannigan Green 512 1.99% (-1.24%)
Above Znoneofthe None of the above party 310 1.20%
Gene Balfour Libertarian  71 0.28% (-0.10%)
John Turmel Pauper 47 0.18%

Turnout 43.93%
https://www3.elections.on.ca/RealTimeResults/ElectoralDistrict/en

[DL]

Of coourse i don't seriously expect the Ontario Liberals to drop 36 points across the province and lose two thirds of their support from the last election...but its still a pretty serious rebuke to come in such a distant third in a seat that was previously won by such a huge margin. This will fuel sentiments inside the OLP that Wynne is toxic and needs to be replaced.

[DL]

Star says seat will remain vacant till the election.

That would imply that if Jagmeet Singh wins the federal NDP leadership and resigns his Ontario seat sometime in the Fall - there would also not be any byelection in Bramalea-Gore-Malton before the June 2018 general election.

The new boundaries for Toronto Centre that lop off Rosedale, coupled with Glen Murray quitting, coupled with the extreme unpopularity of Kathleen Wynne could actually make the riding a top target for the Ontario NDP.

[DL]

I could easily see the Sask NDP win the provincial riding of The Battlefords - which they held up to 2011...and maybe a couple of rural ridings in the north that have large FN reserves such as Meadow Lake or Batoche or Saskatchewan Rivers....but not the rural parts of this federal riding

[DL]

Weird how we haven't gotten a single Saskatoon Fairview poll, when we got 2 Saskatoon Meewasin by-election polls.

Probably because Meewasin was considered very competitive and Meili was considered a likely NDP leadership candidate. in contrast the conventional wisdom about Fairview is that it will be a slam dunk pickup for the NDP.

[DL]

Actually, this goes to show how narrow the NDP's options are for giving a leader a seat. If we filter down to seats where the NDP MP is in their 3rd term or later and won by at least 10% ( a decent proxy for leader byelection material) we get:

Outremont
Windsor West
Edmonton-Strathcona
Skeena—Bulkley Valley

You forgot Hamilton Centre whgere Dave Christopherson is quite old and has been there since 2004...and he won pretty easily in 2015

[DL]

FWIW Louis Hebert was once the PQ's strongest seat in the Quebec City area. The almost won it in 1973 and the won it by massive majorities in 1976 and 1981 when it was represented by Claude Morin - one of Levesque's closest confidantes.

[DL]

FWIW Louis Hebert was once the PQ's strongest seat in the Quebec City area. The almost won it in 1973 and the won it by massive majorities in 1976 and 1981 when it was represented by Claude Morin - one of Levesque's closest confidantes.

Then Louis-Hébert was much more to the east, too.

Yeah, not the same riding at all. Jean-Talon covers what was then Louis-Hebert. Though, Jean-Talon is a fairly safe Liberal seat right now. Weird.

I'm not so sure about that. Jean Talon provincial riding has existed since 1970 and Louis-Hebert has always been largely the suburb of Ste. Foy

[DL]

So the current Jean Talon is more of a successor riding to the Louis Hebert 1976... but my point remains that back in the 70s and 80s that area was a PQ stronghold and these days the PQ is not at all competitive in either Louis Hebert or Jean Talon

[DL]

I’m actually pleasantly surprised the NDP is making crédible showing with about 16% of the vote. I was afraid they would lose their deposit considering this is not a good area for them. It’s a bigger disaster for the Tories to come in a distant third in a riding they have held for 10 years and it’s also a major fiasco for the Liberals. They were expected to win and they spent MILLIONS. In the riding and had a strong candidate. Rural Quebec ridings have a bit of a history of swinging to the government party since they Expect to get lots of goodies. That is how the Tories won in the first place in 2007

[DL]

If the NDP lost 13% of their vote share in all their currently held Quebec seats, only Ruth Ellen Brosseau, Alexandre Boulerice, and Guy Caron would remain in the House (of course, this is before the 13% gets redistributed).

the CPC vote is down about 15 points. How many of their 12 Quebec seats would they be left with on a uniform swing like that?

[DL]

Liberal is up slightly

[DL]

It’s worth noting that this was once a big BQ stronghold that voted overwhelmingly Yes to independence and was Lucien Bouchard’s riding. If the BQ can’t win here where can they win?

[DL]

If you did a "uniform swing" based on the Outremont byelection of 2007 the NDP would have won a majority government in 2008 so what's the point of this exercise?

[DL]

Denis Lemieux from Chicoutimi-Le Fjord is resigning so sometime in the new year a by-election here.  As long as the Liberals maintain their polling numbers in Quebec, suspect they will hold this, but Quebec is known to switch on the dime so if poll numbers change dramatically then you could get an upset.

For "family" reasons. More likely to provide a seat to Jean Tremblay, outgoing mayor of Saguenay.

Tremblay is a right wing social conservative who is outspoken about reciting Christian prayers at council meetings and about wanting draconian restrictions onMuslims. I can’t see the federal Liberals touching him with a ten foot pole.

[DL]

Talk on the ground in Saskatchewan is that the new Premier (likely Alanna Koch) will call a spring snap election to secure a new mandate. If not, then the next set of by-elections will surely happen the same week as the NDP leadership race (first week of March).

Koch would be the leader of a caucus that doesn’t like her very much, so it’ll be a chance to catch the NDP off guard, likely before they choose a permanent leader, and fill caucus with her loyalists and allowing the dissidents in her caucus a chance to to retire gracefully.

The history of premiers with large majorities calling early "snap elections' is not good. Ask David Peterson or more recently Jim Prentice. On top of that, I wonder if people in Saskatchewan also have a strong sense of "fair play" and to call an election two years ahead of schedule just weeks before the official opposition is to pick and new leader seems incredibly cynical and opportunistic...