Quebec election poll: Which would you rather see

[EPG]

Maybe support for left-wing politics is just really weak.

[EPG]

Well, struggle otherwise to explain how the recent three most popular parties are a big-tent federalist and minority party, a reasonably orthodox conservative party, and a pro-majority nationalist party with a socialist/developmental heritage to which very little attention is paid any more.

[EPG]

Oh, that's not too hard. Since 2011 NDP has been the soft sovereigntist option. Before 2011 those people voted for the BQ, while the NDP polled 2-11%, persistently less than the centre-right parties. Now one can argue that BQ was centre-left, but one can also argue that both NDP and BQ were mainly about powers for Québec. So we can't resolve the question with just electoral results. Comparative psephology is really limited if we just label parties as left-wing or right-wing, because we end up saying Danish Venstre is more right-wing than Tony Blair's New Labour.

I must say I don't find the Québec=left evidence as conclusive as many other people do, but I seem to have many contrarian opinions about Canadian politics, e.g. I was mocked for speculating that the Liberal Party would outlast the Conservative Party in 2014 - who's laughing now? It is indeed more productive to look at policies. All I can say on domestic policies is that a European government adopting Québec's domestic policies toward minorities would be ostracised by most of the European left, like Slovakia's government.

Assuming that's a special case, one can certainly say Québec is relatively economically directed by its government compared to some other provinces. But two caveats exist due to Québec's rather low incomes compared to the rest of Canada: Québec receives far more equalisation payments than any other province, of course; less obviously, the federal income tax is progressive and therefore its burden on Québec is lower, leaving more room for provincial tax (Edit: Top headline tax rates are also paid by fewer people). So even on fiscals, I don't think it's conclusive that underlying preferences are so different, though it would not be surprising for some differences to exist across two language groups.

[EPG]

Perhaps one can most usefully say that in 2011 and 2015, many people in Québec voted for the more left-wing federal government option, but that wasn't the case before 2011. Seems most reasonable interpretation.

[EPG]

Yeah, I would broadly agree with that - though I would think of party preference as being completely contingent rather than latent