Canada 2011 Official Thread

[Linus Van Pelt]

Have there been any boundary changes?

No. There should be some by the next election.

Boundary changes will occur after the 2011 census. The legislation to change the formula to end the under-representation of the faster-growing provinces didn't end up getting passed, so it's still uncertain whether it will get passed in the next parliament in time for the post-census redistribution.

A little surprisingly, both the federalist opposition parties were sort of wishy-washy about the legislation, even though it's clearly in the NDP's interest. There were some very weird statements from some of their members that I thought suggested there was a fight between Mulcair and possibly Layton and the rest of the caucus about it, but they wanted to keep it private.

Edit: Sorry, I realize this was unclear. I meant (Mulcair and possibly Layton) and (the rest of the caucus) as the two sides.

[Linus Van Pelt]

While we're briefly on the topic of possible NDP pickups, the big northern SK riding is a possibility - the 2006/2008 results are irrelevant, since they've got the Chief of the Saskatchewan Federation of Indian Nations as their candidate instead of the unknown dude they had the last couple of rounds. (Turnout patterns and internal Liberal/NDP politics up there are very hard to predict from the outside, though).

[Linus Van Pelt]

FYI, the "unknown white guy" you refer to as having been the NDP candidate in northern Sask was actually First Nation - though i agree not very well-known.

oh sorry - I'll fix the earlier post, thanks.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Paul Okalik, the first premier of Nunavut from 1999-2008, is running as a Liberal: http://www.liberal.ca/candidates/paul-okalik/ - he would seem to be a very strong candidate for Nunavut's personal voting situation, but with the usual caveat about this being a hard riding to predict from the outside.

Other than that, I haven't seen too many genuinely interesting candidates (as opposed to the usual handful of vaguely better-known-than-average politicians touted by party hacks as "star candidates")

[Linus Van Pelt]

You have to be careful with people's names here, since with intermarriage there are people who are connected to both linguistic communities. Scott McKay had an Anglo father and a Franco mother, was raised in Montreal-Est, and both his degrees are from UQAM. He's basically a Francophone. Plus there are people of immigrant background who are sort of assimilated to both communities.

Among Anglophones who aren't also in a sense Francophone, there is essentially no vote for nationalist parties. Certainly a lower % than Black Republicans - maybe around the % Jewish vote for Hadash.

(This idea that the BQ vote is just a kind of cynical monetary blackmail is oddly popular among right-wingers in other provinces, but it has little basis in reality. It doesn't even make any sense anyway, since interprovincial equalization payments are just based on provincial GDP and Quebec actually receives less per capita than Manitoba or any of the Maritime provinces, notwithstanding their lack of separatist parties.)

[Linus Van Pelt]

Given that things aren't that different outside Quebec from the pre-election polls, I wouldn't look to English ads or the English debate as the main cause of the issue.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Signs are a much bigger part of local campaigns in Canada than in the US - one of the first things that a campaign will always ask a voter who indicates support for them either over the phone or at a door-to-door canvas is to take a free lawn sign. It surprised me a lot when I first came down here how few houses had signs even during major elections.

I suppose the basic reason is that the small size of the ridings combined with the campaign spending laws mean that there's no TV advertising for individual candidates, so signs are the only way to get name recognition for your local candidate.

Not that this changes the fact that prediction of elections by sign counting is on the dubious side.

[Linus Van Pelt]

It's a shame that that law is no longer enforceable.

One of the reasons cited for the depressed GOP turnout on the west coast in US '08 was media reports of Obama's impending victory.  And of course we all remember what happened in the Florida panhandle in 2000.

Yeah, I support the law, for this reason.

NDG is getting pretty middle class nowadays, by the way, though I agree that it is oddly split between Westmount-Ville Marie and NDG-Lachine.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Quebec is genuinely more favourable to private health care than the rest of the country. It's sort of complicated, but it has to do with the fact that health care, unlike many other economic issues, never really played a role in Francophone Quebec taking control of its economy in the Quiet Revolution, so it doesn't have this symbolic importance that it does in English Canada where the development of the post-war welfare state is strongly associated with Tommy Douglas and Lester Pearson.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Meanwhile, the Liberals have a new ad attacking the NDP from the right on the economy and from the left on gun control, and most strangely, having "26 years as a career politician" appear in the exact same point in the screen as the immediately previous attack "inexperienced", all the while flashing an inexplicable yellow traffic light on the screen.

(The gun thing is a reference to allowing a free vote within the caucus on gun control rather than whipping them as Ignatieff did, allowing a small handful of them to vote with the Conservatives on the issue.)

[Linus Van Pelt]

It depends a bit on what you mean by "neighbourhood" - certain reserves have much lower income. But if we restrict ourselves to urban areas, yes, the 5 postal codes with the lowest median income are (with description and, given the nature of the site, riding):

1. V6A (Downtown Eastside - NW corner of Vancouver East)
2. H3N (Park Extension - the overwhelmingly Liberal and immigrant west end of Papineau)
3. R3B (north end of Winnipeg Centre bordering the CPR railway tracks)
4. M4H (Thorncliffe Park - south end of Don Valley West, separated from the very wealthy rest of the riding by an industrial area)
5. M5T (Toronto Chinatown - Trinity-Spadina)

Notice here though that the DTES proper where all the horror stories come from (immediately east of downtown, to the north of the big railway yards poll) is actually one of the less NDP areas of the riding - most of the people actually voting are Chinese. Where the NDP really runs up the numbers is in the more stable and more Anglo areas a bit further east.

[Linus Van Pelt]

This is very interesting: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadavotes2011/features/votecompass/map/

For as much BS that Canada Votes thing was, I think these maps are quite accurate. Interesting to see how Libertarian parts of Quebec are.

I find the results for "Canada should seek closer economic relations with the USA" to be extremely interesting, even bizarre from my uninformed standpoint. What am I missing?

There's always been a kind of odd pro-Americanism among the eastern Quebec conservative/ADQ vote that I don't pretend to completely understand, but it has something to do with this group being hostile to Quebec independence yet also being unattached to Canadian national identity. Quebec was always one of the most pro-NAFTA provinces during the 80's free-trade debates.

B.C. lumber areas, meanwhile, are economically anti-American, due to the trade dispute with the US in this area.

[Linus Van Pelt]

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Uh, that'll be a no. Who'd have expected that 75-year-old Azoreans don't fill out surveys on cbc.ca?

[Linus Van Pelt]

And the remarkable thing is, it seems to be working, at least for now. At least, my, admittedly far from thorough, but more than perfunctory search hasn't uncovered any violators. The most that I've seen is people saying "I will be discussing this on Twitter".  Can't believe it - 30 million law-abiding citizens and no freedom fighters among them Smiley

What can I say: Canadians.

Yeah, in 2006 it took an American blogger, Ed Morrissey from Captain's Quarters, to publicly and explicitly do the job most Canadians were unwilling to do.  He's not sitting in any Canadian prison.

This time, there could be a tweet-in.

Look, no-one's saying anyone's going to prison, but what public policy reason is there to possibly violate the law? Is it a good thing for the election in one time zone to be slightly skewed by the election in another?

[Linus Van Pelt]

I've been wondering about an NDP pickup in Pontiac also. The geography is a bit misleading; the population is substantially in the greater Ottawa region, and the splits there have to be just right for Cannon's huge margins in the rural Anglo areas across the river from Renfrew county to carry him over, which he did with only 33% last time.

What are people's opinions of the chances of IND>CON in Simcoe-Grey? (For the internationals: the Conservatives have a nomination fracas.)

[Linus Van Pelt]

Which actually brings me to what I think the NDP leadership should be considering... What if they really do win 15+ seats in Quebec?

For the NDP, that would be a sea-change in their caucus, and one that might not be easy for the party membership to deal with. After all, the party is traditionally small, and most MPs for the NDP get a fair amount of responsibility and power after a short time in office. I can see tensions arising between a new Quebec branch of the NDP (most of whom did not seriously expect to win office before this past week) and the rest of the party over internal matters as current MPs are reluctant to surrender power within the party to give the Quebec caucus a say in matters. Additionally, the NDP is mostly a monolingual party (with a couple of exceptions, but fewer than in the other parties)--the transition to having a large Francophone caucus, some of whom may not speak English well, will be another point of tension.

This isn't such a big deal in the other parties because they have larger caucuses outside of Quebec, but the NDP could be looking at having a third or even half of its MPs from Quebec, which creates the potential for real tensions.

Something to think about, anyway. The NDP leadership ought to be preparing not only for a larger caucus but for how to deal with tensions that will inevitably arise between the NDP old guard and Quebec MPs.

This, except I think you're missing the most important question: how nationalist are this new lot? If history is any guide I think the answer may in some cases be "quite".

Example: Alexandre Boulerice, the candidate in Rosemont-La Petite Patrie, claims the following on his blog (my translation):

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"le droit pour le Québec de se rétirer de tout programme fédéral avec compensation financière"! In other words any time Ottawa starts a new program and funds it, Quebec City can just declare it's not in force in Quebec but take the federal tax money anyway. It's a fiasco waiting to happen if a chunk of the caucus is actually seriously advocating this.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Maybe the gains in Ontario are enough to hold on to Sault-Ste-Marie, and pick up a seat or two in Toronto, but I don't see much room for growth elsewhere. Southern Ontario sans Toronto is pretty solidly Conservative and I imagine people still have a bad taste in their mouth from Bob Rae. Maybe if they surpass the Liberals, they might have a shot at Kenora?

There's a bunch of seats in the blue-collar southwest outside the core union cities where the Liberal tradition was surprisingly strong in 2008 - the NDP shouldn't really be third in Brant, Cambridge, Essex, Elgin-Middlesex-London, Haldimand-Norfolk, etc. I doubt any of them will fall with the Conservatives in the 40's in the province, but I could see the NDP moving into a clear second.

[Linus Van Pelt]

This guy who seems to style himself as the Canadian Nate Silver

That's the first problem right there - remember how Silver, being actually quite statistically literate, always allows that different outcomes have different probabilities instead of producing a single exact projection.

These projections, especially ones from Grénier, basically get destroyed in the current post (linked earlier in this thread I believe) from Alice Funke at the Pundits Guide, who is a way better and more numerate commentator. The key quote:

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This particular thing apparently was changed after it was exposed, but it should give a general idea of the mathematical rigour of this guy's site.

None of this is to deny, mind, that the NDP could very well underperform the polls due to its lack of ground organization in Quebec. But we shouldn't weight the advice of someone who produces these projections any more than anyone else on a question like this.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Also, this is the same nation that gave the world the 1993 election.

Yeah, I don't know too much about Canadian politics, but I notice their elections can generate massive swings which wouldn't happen in other Westminster systems.

Ultimately, this comes down to the bilingual/binational nature of the country. Canada is basically the only country where you have not just regions with different preferences within the same space of political options, but regions with two fundamentally different axes along which politics is organized - roughly, left-right in the English provinces and federalist-sovereigntist in Quebec - which don't match up with one another. This makes the party system very unstable, because it's so difficult to stake a coherent and popular position on both the left-right spectrum and the federalist-sovereigntist one - the PC's huge victory in 1984, their subsequent disintegration and the Liberals' return were ultimately about this, and this election appears to be no exception.

[Linus Van Pelt]

The NDP guy in Pontiac was a Communist candidate in 1997. Ironically, if he won, that could technically make him the second communist elected (the other being Fred Rose for the LPP in Cartier in the 40s). Haha. 

Surely Dorise Nielsen would qualify before this dude.

I think Etobicoke-Lakeshore would probably be about the fourth or fifth pickup in the city, after (in no particular order) Don Valley West, Eglinton-Lawrence and York Centre. It's more Eastern European than it was in the old NDP days, which is usually pretty good for the Liberals, but the old white immigrant communities in Toronto are decreasingly voting en bloc as they get more suburban and prosperous (see: Vaughan). Plus it has the Kingsway which is probably the wealthiest and most WASP neighbourhood of the city outside the region from Rosedale up to Lawrence Park.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Applying the "if it weren't in Quebec" test, Saint-Maurice-Champlain should also be a target.

[Linus Van Pelt]

From Ipsos's press release announcing said poll:

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Fail.

[Linus Van Pelt]

From Ipsos's press release announcing said poll:

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Fail.

Not necessarily, if Ipsos is polling likely voters.  Higher relative Quebec LV expected turnout times lower Quebec LV support could equal higher overall national support, especially if 6.4% is rounded down and 6.5% rounded up.

Fair enough, that's mathematically possible. I don't think they are doing that, though, from the description of the actual poll on their web site, but it's not very transparent how their weighting works.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Actually, would the May Day have the potential to help the NDP? As in, boosting morale and turnout among their core voters? Then again, they won't need much encouragement.

No, May Day isn't much associated with the labour movement in North America. Labour Day is in early September here, but even that has a kind of different role.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Any word on what turnout is like? Are such things reported on in Canada?

There may be a few rumours later in the day, but compared to the US it will all be pretty impressionistic, since the election's run more centrally by Elections Canada staff, who are not exactly into releasing information while things are still running (see: broadcasting), rather than by all these random county clerks doing their own thing. Also it's well run enough that you wouldn't see those ridiculous long lines outside the building even at 100% turnout.