Canadian federal election - October 19, 2015 (Official Campaign Thread)

[DL]

(I'm guessing the Tories have largely maxed out their seats.)

The Tories really, really think they can win Mount Royal because...ISRAEL!

To be fair to them, it's more than Irwin Cotler retires. He is hugely respected in the Anglophone and Jewish communities in Montréal and across party lines. I think than if he had retired in 2011, it would be a Conservative seat right now.

For all the hype about Mount Royal being a "Jewish riding"...70% of the riding is NOT Jewish and in Montreal outside of rightwing elements of the Jewish community, Conservative support is literally in low single digits.

[DL]

In my opinion the NDP is competitive in
Vancouver 3/6
1.Vancouver-Kingsway (NDP riding)
2.Vancouver East (NDP riding)
3.Vanouver Centre (Liberal riding)

Lower Mainland 5 or 6/10
1.Burnaby North-Seymour (New riding)
2.Burnaby South (NDP riding)
3.Coquitlam-Port Coquitlam (James Moore retiring riding)
4.New Westminster-Burnaby (NDP riding)
5.Port Moody-Coquitlam (NDP riding)

Could be competitive
1.Delta (NDP/Conservative riding)

Surrey 3/5
1.Fleetwood-Port Kells
2.Surrey Centre
3.Surrey-Newton

Fraser Valley 2/5
1.Pitt Meadows-Maple Ridge
2.Mission-Matsqui-Fraser Canyon

So that's 13 or 14 of 26.

I agree with this list but I would add Vancouver Granville as another seat that I think is NDP winnable

[DL]

According to this poll of BC by Mainstreet on the leaders debate, the NDP has a huge lead on current federal vote intention - NDP 37%, Liberals 26%, CPC 23%, Greens 5% and 8% are undecided

http://www.mainstreetresearch.ca/2015/08/08/trudeau-narrowly-wins-debate/

Those numbers suggest that the federal NDP is getting 100% of the BC NDP vote while the BC Liberal vote is split down the middle between the federal liberals and the federal Conservatives

[DL]

The Star has a riding poll in Eglinton-Lawrence and the results are largely in synch with what an Ontario swing projection would show:

Joe Oliver CPC 41% (down 5% from 2011)
Mendicino Liberal 34% (down 4% from 2011)
NDP (they have no candidate yet) - 20% (UP 8% from 2011)

If this trend of the NDP being up across Toronto at the expense of both the Liberals and Conservatives, look for the NDP to end up with about 11+ seats in the City of Toronto.

Its worth noting that typically Eglinton-Lawrence is the absolute worst seat for the NDP in all of Toronto - they usually get less than 10% there and even getting 12% in 2011 was a strong showing for that riding. 20% is a very strong showing for that riding and if the NDP is at 20% in Eglinton-Lawrence, imagine where they likely are in seats that are actual targets?

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/08/09/joe-oliver-leading-in-eglinton-lawrence-poll.html

[DL]

Blue Liberals coming home? This is concerning, as these voters are likely to switch back to the Tories to stop the NDP.

Yeah, i can just see all those "Blue Liberals" clutching their pearls in terror that the NDP will NOT increase personal income taxes on those making over $150k per year while the Liberals WILL! Imagine the fear that must be gripping the Rosedale tennis club "Hey, did you hear, Mulcair is NOT going to raise our taxes - I'm so scared"

[DL]

Liberal candidate Ken Hardie says the Conservatives will dump M.P Nina Grewal in favor of former Provincial cabinet minister Kevin Falcon.

Apparently the rumour is false and Falcon is not running for anyone anywhere

[DL]

Trudeau has NOT said he will not attend the Munk debate unless May is there. All he said was that he would like her to be there. There is no way Trudeau would take the risk of threatening not to attend since it's quite possible his bluff would be called and we would have a two way debate between Harper and Mulcair

[DL]

I thought the English translation of "Forces et democratie" was "dregs, misfits and rejects"

[DL]

Mainstreet Technologies shows a three-way race

Canada: Cons 30% NDP 30% Lib 29% Green 6% BQ 4%

Atlantic: Lib 43% Cons 26% NDP 24% Green 7%
Quebec: NDP 32% Lib 30% Cons 20% BQ 15% Green 3%
Ontario: Cons 33% NDP 31% Lib 31% Green 5%
Manitoba: Cons 44% Lib 34% NDP 17% Green 5%
Saskatchewan: Cons 46% NDP 29% Lib 18% Green 8%
Alberta: Cons 50% Lib 23% NDP 19% Green 7%
BC: NDP 40% Lib 25% Cons 22% Green 13%

I find Mainstreet number to be very whacky. Just two weeks ago they had the CPC at 45% in Ontario and the NDP at 21% - now they have the CPC at 33 and the NDP at 31 - does anyone seriously believe that a swing of that magnitude happened just in the last two weeks? ...and no other poll released this week has the Liberals anywhere near 30% in Quebec - they are hovering around 20%

[DL]

Latest EKOS poll is out but behind a paywall. It says

NDP - 32%
CPC - 30%
Liberals 24%

I'm told it has the NDP way ahead in BC and Quebec and the NDP slightly ahead in Ontario. Tories are way ahead across the Prairies.

[DL]

Leger:

NDP: 33
Lib: 28
Cons: 27

So the surprise is the Tories are in third. But, this is not the first time Leger's numbers are off of the trend.

They are not actually "off the trend" this time. In fact Leger is almost identical to the Forum poll that came out yesterday

[DL]

Those four seats include Lethbridge (Edm Griesbach, Edm Centre, Edm Manning being the others). The NDP could win Edm Mill Woods too on a good day.

There is one more "sleeper" for the NDP could be St. Albert-Edmonton where Brent Rathgeber is running again as an Independent and could split the conservative vote and enable the NDP to win in a three way race.

[DL]

This is a huge problem with any polling at the riding level. People under 40 do not have landlines and it is IMPOSSIBLE to get cell phone numbers at the riding level.

All that being said, we recently had byelections in Toronto Centre and in Trinity-Spadina and those are both ridings that skew very young compared to the Canadian population...despite the fact that the survey respondents tended to be so much older than the demographic profile of those ridings, the polls were very accurate in predicting the results.

Conservative support tends to skew old - in a Liberal vs NDP contest it is less clear that one party or the other has a particularly big advantage with one age group.

[DL]

I wonder how receptive the Sikh community will be of Martin Singh, who is a White convert.

I don't claim to be an expert on the Sikh community but I am told that it is actually a big advantage for him. Apparently Sikhs think its wonderful that a WASP Canadian would convert to their religion and since it happens so rarely it actually gives him some "star quality" in their eyes.

[DL]

Here is the full report from CROP with all the breakdowns

http://static.lpcdn.ca/fichiers/html/2266/Sondage_complet.pdf

[DL]

The NDP at 27% in West Van is a bit of a surprise, considering how wealthy that area is.

The NDP is actually polling bellow their 2011 result in Elmwood-Transcona. The Liberals are eating into Tory and NDP support there. I suspect the Liberal numbers will go back down there, but how will they break?

West Van is not as uniformly wealthy as you may think. Its true that the municipality of West Vancouver is very ritsy, but that riding also includes much of the Sunshine Coast and places like Squamish which is strong NDP territory provincially and Whistler which is a crap shoot.

In Elmwood-Transcona - the VAST majority of Liberal voters say they are voting to defeat harper and elect a new government so i strongly suspect that if the Liberal vote drops it will go NDP and not CPC

[DL]

There was a byelection last year in Scarborough agincourt and it went liberal by a huge margin and the conservatives didn't even run a serious campaign

[DL]

lol Forum:

NDP: 40
Lib: 30
Cons: 23

http://www.thestar.com/news/federal-election/2015/08/27/ndp-in-reach-of-majority-new-poll-suggests.html

I'll be curious to see what ekos has to say since their next poll is coming out tomorrow is also IVR and would have been in field right at the same time and Frank Graves has been hinting on Twitter that he is seeing "big changes" and that the Duffy trial is having an impact. I wouldn't be surprised if Ekos also has a big CPC drop

[DL]

Keep in mind that Megantic-Erable was Christian Paradis's seat and he was very personally popular. Its possible that with him out of the picture - all bets are off

[DL]

You must be logged in to read this quote.

In 1997 Liberal Claude Drouin was elected with nearly 50% of the vote and a nearly 2-1 win over the B.Q. In 2000, Drouin was reelected with 56% of the vote. In the 2004 election that was referenced above, the Conservative Party ran, not the P.C/Alliance Parties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauce_(electoral_district)

If the NDP end up at around 50% in Quebec and the Conservatives fall to around 13%, I could see Maxime Bernier losing.  It would be very close, but he could lose.

Interestingly Beauce is also the home county of the first big name in the NDP Robert Cliche. Cliche was a lawyer in Beauce who led the NDP in Quebec in the 60s and was very respected. He ran in Beauce in 1965 and had the second best NDP result in the province and was a strong second to a Social Credit incumbent. He ran in Laval in 1968 and lost very narrowly. Some think if cliche had won in '68 he would have been the next federal leader of the NDP. He was named a judge and headed up the high profile Cliche Commission into corruption in unions in Quebec and his co- commissioner was a young lawyer named Brian Mulroney. Today there are monuments and public buildings named after Robert Cliche all over Beauce

[DL]

Charles Taylor ended up running against Pierre Trudeau in Westmount as Trudeau was recruited by the Liberals in part to stop Taylor from winning.  My dad lived in Westmount at that time and voted for Taylor, but Trudeau won handily. Renowned economist Eric Kierans was also recruited to run against Robert Cliche in 1968 though Kierans did run for the Liberal Party leadership in 1968 before that. Ironically, after Kierans was no longer in Parliament he left the Liberals and joined the NDP.

As far as I can tell, the Liberals did not taking LaPierre's candidacy seriously and he also lost handily.

Not quite right. Trudeau and Taylor never ran in Westmount. They ran against each other in Mount Royal - which in the 60s included all of the present day riding of Mount Royal plus the western half of what is now Papineau. The guy who really came close to creating an NDP breakthrough in Quebec was CG "Giff" Gifford and RCAF fighter pilot and professor who came close to winning NDG in 1965.

In 1968, the NDP ran a bit of an all-star team in Quebec: Cliche in Duvernay (in Laval), Taylor in Dollard, Lapierre in Lachine-Lakeshore, Gifford in NDG - but they were all swept away by Trudeaumania. If the Liberals had picked anyone but Trudeau as their leader in 1968 - the NDP likely would have had a major breakthrough in Quebec that year and might have even had an "orange crush" 43 years earlier!

[DL]

This is the only thing on the internet I can find about Duncan Graham:
http://www.parl.gc.ca/About/Parliament/FederalRidingsHistory/hfer.asp?Include=Y&Language=E&rid=158&Search=Det

When he ran again in 1974 he fell to just 3% of the vote!

I'm pretty sure that is a typo in the database and he got no where near that many votes. Notice that if you add up the number of votes cast in Compton in 1968, 1972 and 1974 - in 1972 there are about 10,000 extra votes!

[DL]

A riding poll is out in Laurier-Ste. Marie that has horrifically bad news for Gilled Duceppe the leader of the BQ.

Helene Laverdiere NDP - 57%
Gilles Duceppe BQ - 20%
Poirier Liberal - 15%

http://tvanouvelles.ca/lcn/infos/national/archives/2015/09/20150902-155418.html

[DL]

There have been some close three way contests in Ontario as well. Ontario 1975

Popular vote was: PCs 36%, Liberals 34% and NDP 29% but in seats it was PCs 51, NDP 38 and Libs 36

Then in 1977

 Popular vote was: PCs 38%, Liberals 32% and NDP 28% but in seats it was PCs 58, Liberals 34 and and NDP 33

[DL]

Notice that when its a three way split in Ontario - its the Liberals who get burned by FPTP because their supportr is so spread out