tcnorris

Cooked Grits

2012-01-17T20:55:00.000-05:00

The Liberals emerged from their weekend convention in a self-satisfied frame of mind. There was a large turnout and enthusiastic participation. Many Liberals are happy with the performance of Bob Rae as leader, and think he will compare well with whatever leader is selected by the NDP on March 24, and likely he ought to become the permanent replacement for Michael Ignatieff.

What was missing was critical self-reflection. The weekend was symbolized by the Globe and Mail op-ed page on Friday, January 13. An insightful column by Jeffrey Simpson (misleadingly headlined "Don't Write Off the Liberals Quite Yet") summed up the Liberals problem well:

Think of the chunks that have fallen away from the once-formidable Liberal coalition: francophones outside Quebec, many multicultural Canadians, blue-collar workers in the industrial cities of Ontario, federalist francophones in Quebec, Jews, Atlantic Canadians in cities such as St. John’s, Halifax, Moncton and Saint John, the “business” Liberals from Toronto. It was an impressive coalition, malleable when necessary, mobilized around the broad ideas for which Liberals stood.

When key parts of the electorate that once supported you depart is it not reasonable to stand up and ask the essential questions: "Why did those voters leave?", "How can we get them back?", and most importantly "What do we need to do to get past the NDP?". Instead there was a focus on issues of organization, reforming the leadership process and fund-raising. Those issues matter but politics is also about the fundamentals of who should vote for you and why, and what do you need to do to do better than both your key competitors. The convention had the flavour of an event where the party had to overcome but one adversary.

In a column placed just to the right of Simpson's in the January 13 Globe was an opinion piece from outgoing Liberal Party President Alf Apps headlined "How the Liberal Party will rise again". He offered the following:

Canadians have sent Liberals to the political woodshed on three previous occasions – 1930, 1958 and 1984. Each time, the party was seen as arrogant, out of touch and out of date. Liberals bounced back from defeat by doing two things: reaching out to new people with new ideas, and modernizing their organization.

He seems not to have noticed that on each of those occasions the party was in second place. It is this narcissistic complacency that is at the heart of the Liberals dilemma. In fact, they did emerge from the last election not that far behind the NDP in Canada outside Quebec, just six points behind - 26.3% for the NDP to 20.5% for the Liberals. But their current circumstance is more catastrophic than in those other three years. Recovery will not come from spouting bromides such as those of Mr. Apps.

The Liberals are strong enough that they should not be written off (just yet), and the NDP has been weakened by the loss of Jack Layton, but one can't help but notice that it is not the Liberals that have eight reasonably decent leadership candidates with a significant measure of French language skill.

The Liberals need to take note of their problems: loss of francophone Quebec a quarter of a century ago, loss of their monopoly on the votes of immigrant Canadians, the losses to the NDP in Atlantic Canada, their death spiral in the west - one could go on - before they can realistically contemplate re-establishing themselves as a major party.

The only way to solve problems is to confront them head-on. The Liberal tasks extend well beyond rewriting their constitution and raising more money. But one does not detect recognition of this on the part of Canada's "natural governing party". It may tell us much about their fate.

Inequality, the movies and Kenneth Arrow

2011-12-04T10:22:00.001-05:00

Kenneth Arrow's Wikipedia page describes him this way:

Kenneth Joseph Arrow (born August 23, 1921) is an American economist and joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with John Hicks in 1972. To date, he is the youngest person to have received this award, at 51.

In economics, he is considered an important figure in post-World War II neo-classical economic theory. Many of his former graduate students have gone on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize themselves. Arrow's impact on the economics profession has been tremendous. For more than fifty years he has been one of the most influential of all practicing economists.

The economics profession of course has contributed mightily to the arrival of the current crisis, particularly the proponents of neo-classical theory whose ideas have been at the root of demands for deregulation and lower taxes on corporations and the well-off. So it is worth noting when Kenneth Arrow focuses in on the problem of inequality. He said the following recently (courtesy of Mark Thoma at Economist's View):

The specific problems of the current U.S. economy—the drastic increase in unemployment and sluggish increase in output—overlay a tendency of much longer duration, a drastic and rapid increase in the inequality of income. Every economy of complexity produces an unequal distribution of the good things in life. But the period immediately following World War II showed a considerably increased equality of income compared with either the Great Depression or the previous period of relative prosperity.

Of course that period was dominated by Keynesian economics. Arrow argues that while the U.S. has had productivity gains in the past few decades, they have not been widely shared.

Clearly, the bulk of the gains from increased productivity went to a small group of upper-income recipients. Indeed, closer study has shown that the bulk of the increase went to the top 1 percent of income recipients and much of that to those in the top .1 percent.... Profits from the finance sector, which historically have been about 10 percent of all profits, have risen to an extraordinary 40 percent....

This casts light on the claim that the problem is one of personal ethics, of greed....

A proper sense of responsibility has to be enforced by legislation, as it was in the 1930s. There has been some erosion in the law, for example under the Clinton administration, and in enforcement. The Dodd-Frank law is a step in the right direction, but the influence of the financial industry watered it down and created unnecessary complications.

It is not superfluous to argue that steepening the income tax progression, removing a number of blatant loopholes, such as the special treatment of capital gains, and reducing the exemption level for estates would add considerably to post-tax equality.

Clearly the zeitgeist has changed and Arrow's commentary reflects that. The Occupy movement has altered the whole political atmosphere in the United States and Canada and elsewhere. In fact, Arrow's commentary appeared as part of a special series in the Boston Review dedicated to the Occupy movement.

Social change such as we are experiencing is often reflected well in the arts, such as film making. If you get a chance, don't miss the new movie Margin Call. It is not playing in many cinemas in Toronto at the moment, but is clearly getting good word of mouth (the packed theatre we were in last night has recently added screenings).

Check out the trailer, which, unlike most such promotional spots, summarizes the film well.

Why Obama can't be compared to FDR

2011-11-08T21:03:00.000-05:00

Another great post from Ezra Klein:

In “Reaching for a New Deal,” Theda Skocpol and Lawrence Jacobs recall with bemusement the sepia-tinged excitement that greeted Obama’s victory in 2008. What the FDR-obsessed pundits missed, the two political scientists say, was that “the timing, nature, and severity” of the economic crises the two presidents faced were very different.

Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidency in 1932, three years into the Great Depression. The unemployment rate that year was 23.6 percent. Obama won the presidency in 2008, mere months into the financial crisis; unemployment was at 6.8 percent. Consequently, the two presidents faced political systems prepared to do very different things.

In his new book, “The New Deal: A Modern History,” Michael Hiltzik makes clear that though FDR was an unusually energetic and ambitious president, he was paired with an unusually energetic and ambitious Congress.

Take the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which ended traditional bank runs by insuring commercial bank deposits. FDR opposed it. He believed that “the weak banks will pull down the strong.” But senators from rural states represented those small, weak banks. Deposit insurance was part of the price they exacted to pass the Glass-Steagall banking law. “You will have to come to a deposit guarantee eventually, Cap’n,” Roosevelt’s vice president, John Nance Garner, told him. He did — but only because Congress forced him into it.

This happened again and again throughout the New Deal. FDR wanted to go far. But Congress often wanted to go further — occasionally over the president’s objections.

Read the whole thing.

The Problem is Political

2011-11-05T09:08:00.001-04:00

Ezra Klein, to whom tcnorris has provided a link for a long time, has written an excellent summary of why a bad economy has plagued Barack Obama in the form of a disparaging book review about Ron Suskind's Confidence Men.

Suskind did not get the story right at all, but this summary by Klein does:

It is easy to tell the story of what the White House did wrong in its response to the financial crisis: it underestimated it. It had good reason to underestimate it, of course. Almost everyone was underestimating it. In the fourth quarter of 2008, when Obama’s economic team was meeting in Chicago to map out their policies, the Bureau of Economic Accounts thought the economy was contracting at a rate of 3.8 percent per year. It wouldn’t be until this year that we learned the economy was really contracting at a rate of 9 percent. And it wasn’t just the BEA. The Federal Reserve has been continuously overoptimistic. So have the leading private forecasting firms, like Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Analytics. And so have Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan.

The observers who got it right were the ones who could tell a story that didn’t rely on the early data. Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, who would publish This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, their epic history of financial crises, in late 2009, saw that the recovery would be slow and tough. Economists like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, who were more knowledgeable about the struggles over recession in Japan and had their own Keynesian understanding of financial panics, were also suitably pessimistic.

But early mistakes can be corrected. If the initial stimulus is too small, you make it bigger. If your housing policies are too modest, you toughen them up. If the private sector sheds jobs and long-term unemployment becomes a problem, you begin hiring workers directly.

Or so goes the theory. The reality is more troubling. The initial stimulus was too small, but there’s no plausible case that Congress would have been willing to make it much bigger just because the Obama administration had a theory that the financial crisis would lead to a worse recession than most forecasters expected. The trouble was that attacking a financial crisis with a too-small stimulus was a bit like attacking pneumonia with too-few antibiotics: you feel better for awhile, and then it comes back. And this time, it’s harder to kill.

The problem is political. Having very publicly passed a very big policy that you promised would revive the economy, the country blames you when the economy does not, in fact, revive. Your policies are discredited and your opponents are emboldened. You lose seats in the next election and your leverage over lawmakers. So you can’t, with any prospect of success, go back to the well and ask for a bigger stimulus or more money to buy up bad mortgages. And then, when the economy gets worse, you’re simultaneously in charge and out of options. You came to Washington promising change and now you’re begging for patience. It’s a crummy situation, and there’s no combination of policy proposals or speeches that can get you out of it. But this is the vise that has tightened around Barack Obama’s presidency.

It seems to me that even those who got it right such as Krugman probably underestimated how much stimulus was actually needed (although he foresaw the political consequences). The Obama stimulus was $700 billion and Krugman and others spoke of 1.3 billion over two years. As Klein notes revisions to the data made only this year tell us the downturn was much worse than suspected at the time.

We still need lots of stimulus, but the blame for not doing anything now squarely and unequivocally belongs with the Republicans and the austerity class, something that the media in particular, has had trouble figuring out.

More needs to be done by government in the form of public spending in the U.S., Europe and Canada. The mania for deficit cutting and balanced budgets is insane. It cannot be said often enough or loudly enough: we must not worry about deficits while the problem is deflation and unemployment.

Persistent Unemployment & the Austerity Class

2011-10-23T09:35:00.000-04:00

Over the longer run I remain an economic optimist, but the North American economy is being dragged down by an "Austerity Class" that dominates political and media discourse preventing the adoption of the Keynsian policies needed to break out of our current economic malaise. Ari Berman has written an excellent summary of its influence in the Nation, that I discovered courtesy of Economist's View:

...a central paradox in American politics over the past two years: how, in the midst of a massive unemployment crisis—when it’s painfully obvious that not enough jobs are being created and the public overwhelmingly wants policy-makers to focus on creating them—did the deficit emerge as the most pressing issue in the country? And why, when the global evidence clearly indicates that austerity measures will raise unemployment and hinder, not accelerate, growth, do advocates of austerity retain such distinction today?

An explanation can be found in the prominence of an influential and aggressive austerity class—an allegedly centrist coalition of politicians, wonks and pundits who are considered indisputably wise custodians of US economic policy. These “very serious people,” as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wryly dubs them, have achieved what University of California, Berkeley, economist Brad DeLong calls “intellectual hegemony over the course of the debate in Washington, from 2009 until today.”

Its members include Wall Street titans like Pete Peterson and Robert Rubin; deficit-hawk groups like the CRFB, the Concord Coalition, the Hamilton Project, the Committee for Economic Development, Third Way and the Bipartisan Policy Center; budget wonks like Peter Orszag, Alice Rivlin, David Walker and Douglas Holtz-Eakin; red state Democrats in Congress like Mark Warner and Kent Conrad, the bipartisan “Gang of Six” and what’s left of the Blue Dog Coalition; influential pundits like Tom Friedman and David Brooks of the New York Times, Niall Ferguson and the Washington Post editorial page; and a parade of blue ribbon commissions, most notably Bowles-Simpson, whose members formed the all-star team of the austerity class.

The austerity class testifies frequently before Congress, is quoted constantly in the media by sympathetic journalists and influences policy-makers and elites at the highest levels of power. They manufacture a center-right consensus by determining the parameters of acceptable debate and policy priorities, deciding who is and is not considered a respectable voice on fiscal matters. The “balanced” solutions they advocate are often wildly out of step with public opinion and reputable economic policy, yet their influence endures, thanks to an abundance of money, the ear of the media, the anti-Keynesian bias of supply-side economics and a political system consistently skewed to favor Wall Street over Main Street.

Taken together, the various strands of the austerity class form a reinforcing web that is difficult to break. Its think tanks and wonks produce a relentless stream of disturbing statistics warning of skyrocketing debt and looming bankruptcy, which in turn is trumpeted by politicians and the press and internalized by the public. Thus forms what Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent calls a Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop, wherein the hypothetical possibility of a US debt crisis somewhere in the future takes precedence over the very real jobs crisis now.

See the rest of the article here.

Part of what permits this oppressive admosphere to flourish is a journalism that refuses to acknowledge the most obvious of facts. This phenomenon was recently tackled by James Fallows, a blogger with the Atlantic and former Jimmy Carter speech writer, who took on the dishonest practices of Washington journalism that have facilitated the Republicans' deliberate obstruction of the Democratic majority Senate, using the example of Obama's jobs bill, an initiative at odds with the views of the austerity class.

The link above was to his original post but he followed it up here, here, here, here, and here.

Ontario election polls postscript

2011-10-09T12:00:00.000-04:00

The Ontario election produced a minority, or bare majority if the legislature selects an opposition member to be speaker, who is then obligated to vote with the government in the event of tied vote.

Overall, the polls were fairly close to the actual result. The day after analysis in the Globe, in TC's view, was somewhat muddled on this point.

The table below illustrates how the pollsters performed. It is ranked by the sum of the errors with respect to the PCs, Liberals and NDP (the Top Three column). The All column adds in the error for Greens and others:

			Liberal	PC	N.D.P.	GP	Other	Total Error
	Election Result	Oct. 6, 2011	37.62	35.40	22.70	2.90	1.30	All	Top 3
Oct. 5, 2011	Forum Research	Oct. 4-5	-0.62	-2.40	0.30	0.10	-0.30	3.72	3.32
Oct. 4, 2011	Abacus Data	Oct. 3-4	-0.62	-1.40	1.30	1.10	-0.30	4.72	3.32
Oct. 5, 2011	EKOS	Oct. 3-5	0.98	-1.40	-1.60	2.40	-0.30	6.68	3.98
Oct. 4, 2011	Nanos Research	Oct 1-3	0.08	-2.20	3.10	0.50	-1.30	7.18	5.38
Oct. 5, 2011	Angus Reid*	Oct. 4-5	-0.62	-2.40	3.30	0.10	-0.30	6.72	6.32
Oct. 4, 2011	Angus Reid*	Oct. 3-4	-4.62	0.60	3.30	2.10	-1.30	11.92	8.52
Oct. 4, 2011	Ipsos Reid	Sept 30-Oct 3	3.38	-4.40	2.30	0.10	-0.30	10.48	10.08

Ipsos, which is at the bottom of this list, had the most accurate poll in the federal election. Given the inherent error in polling one should be very cautious in concluding which polling firm is 'better' than others.

However, there is an asterisk beside Angus Reid as they delivered two 'final' polls in less than a day leading to this account in the Globe after the election:

Ipsos Reid said the Liberals would receive 41 per cent among decided voters, the Tories 31 per cent and the NDP 25 per cent.

That same day, the polling firm Angus Reid announced in a press release, titled “Tories Edging Liberals But Ontario Race Could Turn in Final Hours.” that an online survey it conducted from Monday to Tuesday morning showed the Tories were at 36 per cent and the Liberals at 33 per cent.

“The Progressive Conservative Party has recovered some grounds,” the firm said of its survey conducted for the Toronto Star.

The Star published the results, saying it was the final major poll of the campaign.

But later that day, Angus Reid began to conduct another online poll, which yielded very different results.

“We wanted to track the election right to the last minute so we want back in the field Tuesday afternoon,” Angus Reid managing director Jaideep Mukerji said in an interview.

“There was volatility among Ontarians . . . We knew it was going to a very tight race.”

The later poll ,which wasn’t commissioned by the Star but conducted on Angus Reid’s own account, Mr. Mukerji said, predicted the Liberals would get 37 per cent, the Conservatives 33 per cent and the NDP 26 per cent.

“We’re happy we caught that shift,” Mr. Mukerji said. “There were some Liberals at the last minute who got cold feet about voting conservatives.”

The pollster who worked for The Globe and Mail and CTV, Nanos Research, however released similar numbers two days before Angus Reid’s final poll.

Federal election polls in Ontario
The polls on the provincial election were quite good overall. This was was not the case with the Ontario sub-samples on polls taken during the federal election. The average error in Ontario understated Conservative support by 6.1 percentage points while overstating all the others, the NDP by the 3.2 points the Liberals by 1.7 and the Greens by 1.1. TC is still puzzled by the error in polling during the federal election although one can find some interesting discussion of this on Pundit's Guide. Ekos pollster Frank Greaves is the only one who seriously addressed his own mistakes after the election.

TC observes that the average Conservative support from the beginning of the federal election to the approximate beginning of the NDP surge in Ontario was 41.8% (not too far from 44.4% they actually won) and thereafter it averaged 38.1%. However, I am not sure what that tells us other than perhaps the instability in preferences reflected in the shift had some impact on the measurement difficulties actually experienced.

Ontario likely headed for Liberal majority

2011-10-05T20:13:00.000-04:00

There has been closing tick in this election to the McGuinty Liberals. Eight polls released since Monday by five different firms yield an average of:

Liberal: 37.6 %
PC: 33.2 %
NDP: 24.7 %
Green: 4.0 %

And less than 1% for others.

This gives the Liberals 58 seats, 29 for the PCs and 20 for the NDP - a Liberal majority. A minimum of 54 is required for a majority, so uncertainty remains about the issue of majority/minority. TC thinks the Liberals will certainly win the most seats. It will likely be a majority (the Liberals could win over 60 seats) but there is still some doubt on that score.

In these circumstances the trend is your friend and the trend is to the McGuinty Liberals.

How close is it in Ontario?

2011-10-02T09:00:00.000-04:00

About as close as it could be. Here is the average of the four polls released in the last couple of days:

Liberal	PC	NDP	Green
34.4	34.6	26.4	4.1

The outcome seems likely to depend on asymmetric shifts within the province. In some regions such as the Greater Toronto Area Liberal losses appear to be smaller than in other areas. Overall there will be many close races. A small movement over the next couple of days could shift the election from one party to another. The average above would give us a Liberal minority based on the 2007 results.

NDP headed for win in Manitoba

2011-10-01T09:09:00.000-04:00

The Friday moring headline in the Free Press said "NDP clinging to lead", but it is clearly enough to ensure victory in next Tuesday's provincial election for Mr. Selinger's party. The Probe numbers are at roughly the midpoint of the other two polls, an average of the three essentially replicates Probe's numbers.

TC does not have an estimate model based on the current boundaries, but if the Probe numbers are accurate the one notable change we can see now would be the loss to the Liberals of both their seats. The NDP would win a majority. How large is difficult to determine. TC's estimate is that the absolute lowest number of NDP seats would be 30 (the result that would occur if the PCs win every close race) but it will probably be greater than that.

Methodological Snake Oil

2011-09-28T21:00:00.000-04:00

TC wants to make some points about the polling controversy started by the Ipsos commentary about polling discussed in my previous post.

First, there are legitimate unanswered questions about online polls. There is no accepted methodology. Partly because of that there is effectively zero transparency and accountability on the part of online polling companies. For example, on their website at the bottom of a recent poll the Reid group says this:

Methodology: From September 20 to September 21, 2011, Angus Reid Public Opinion conducted an online survey among 1,668 randomly selected Canadian adults who are Angus Reid Forum panellists. The margin of error—which measures sampling variability—is +/- 2.4%, 19 times out of 20. The results have been statistically weighted according to the most current education, age, gender and region Census data to ensure a sample representative of the entire adult population of Canada. Discrepancies in or between totals are due to rounding.

What it doesn't tell you is how large the panel is from which the sample is selected. When it says 'randomly selected' it goes on to say 'who are Angus Reid Forum panelists'. However, the phrase 'randomly selected' on its own implies 'selected from the whole population of Canada'. The subsequent reference to the panel also infers, without saying so explicitly, that they actually come from the Angus Reid panel.

In Canada if it is within a province, one assumes it is a subset of a national panel and perhaps panel size within the province could be an issue. But we don't know the overall size or demographics of the national panel - gender, income, language - let alone the provincial sub-sample. We don't know what methods were used to recruit it. Surely if we are to accept the panel itself as representative we would need to be assured that it was selected at random. Is this case?

We don't know how the panel is contacted or how the surveys are conducted to ensure their integrity. If these are to become commonplace, the polling industry should set some standards that provide some reassurance that there is some validity to all this.

TC doesn't agree with the Ipsos critique of IVR. These are ultimately phone surveys, an established proven methodology. The only difference is an electronic voice and answers given on a telephone touchpad. We already know such polls have obtained good results. See what New York Times polling blogger Nate Silver (who formerly blogged at fivethirtyeight.com) said about Survey USA, which uses this methodology:

... SurveyUSA is a very strong polling firm; no company has done more to contradict the notion that a "robopollster" need be inferior. Although it's not my place to make any endorsements, it would certainly make the life of electoral forecasters easier if SurveyUSA were to get more business.

Competing Ontario polls

2011-09-27T21:29:00.000-04:00

Two new polls out in Ontario today ahead of the debate, one with the Liberals ahead, one with the PCs, so which to believe.

An Ekos poll had the Liberals at 34.9%, the PCs at 31.4% with the NDP at 24.7%. However, Abacus Data had the PCs ahead at 37%, the Liberals at 33% and the NDP at 23%. The only big difference is actually in the PC number but it is significant.

One way of verifying the credibility of a poll is to look at its internal subgroups. There is a certain consistent pattern that reappears in poll after poll regardless of overall outcome or source. If there is an anomaly it should be apparent. Look on page four of the Abacus poll. It tells us that the PCs lead among women and voters age 18 to 29. So younger voters and women support the PCs almost to the same degree as the province as a whole. However, there is absolutely no way that is true. PC support is typically older and male to a much greater degree than we see in Abacus. In the Ekos poll (see page 7) one sees the relative weakness of the PCs among youth and women, and one sees it over and over again in many others.

Abacus was attacked by Ipsos Research (the most accurate pollster in the May 2 federal election) for shoddy methodology (methodological snake oil is how they described it) earlier in this campaign. Abacus made a point in their release of emphasizing that they used a traditional ballot question on this poll (in response to the Ipsos critique). TC thinks Abacus has more work to do.

Manitoba polls point in the direction of an NDP win

2011-09-26T18:27:00.001-04:00

Two polls with conflicting results were released in Manitoba today. One was a phone poll by Viewpoints Research for CJOB, which reported 41% for the NDP, 32% for the PCs and 5% for the Liberals with 19% undecided. This gives the NDP about 51% of the decided vote with the Tories at 40%.

By contrast another survey, an online poll by Environics, found the PCs in a narrow lead 45% to 42% over the NDP with the Liberals at 10%. The clashing methodologies should be noted. Online polls have had some real problems, so there is a need to be cautious in interpreting the results. UPDATE: TC goofed - the reference I made previously to real success in the U.S. was to interactive voice recognition polls.

Taken together, however, this polling data as well as earlier polls point in the direction of an NDP victory with a reduced majority. Even in the Environics poll Selinger has a higher approval rating than opponent Huge McFadyen (54% approval compared to 44%). It must also be remembered that the NDP has a more efficiently distributed vote. Large majorities in the rural southwest "waste" more votes for the Conservatives than comparable NDP margins in the city, and the NDP controls the small population northern ridings. TC estimates that the PCs likely need a four to five point lead to be certain of winning.

Liberal support is so weak that the party may well face a shutout (as TC noted on Saturday). One can see on this map of the individual polls from the 2007 election results imposed on the new electoral boundaries that the Liberal polls in northwest Winnipeg are now split between Tyndall Park and the Maples, which should deliver both ridings to the NDP. If Jon Gerrard loses River Heights that would give us a majority government for certain (even if the margin is narrow).

This is the last week of the campaign and we should still see polls from Angus Reid and Probe Research so there will be more information to consider before voting day.

Ontario and Manitoba elections - no obvious winner in sight.

2011-09-24T17:13:00.000-04:00

The first thing that needs to be said about these two elections is that by the usual rules of politics both incumbents should have been heading for defeat from the outset.

In the case of Ontario the Liberals are endeavouring to win a third term with a leader with low approval ratings, a year after introducing an unpopular new tax, the HST, that applies to many more goods and services than the old provincial sales tax. Third terms are highly unusual, while the party that wins the election usually has a well regarded leader, so the Liberals started out with three strikes against them.

In Manitoba the NDP has a new leader in Greg Selinger who, despite his considerable virtues, is less popular than predecessor Gary Doer (however, he has a much higher approval rating than Dalton McGuinty). And the NDP is trying to win a fourth term, something that has not been done in Manitoba since Duff Roblin. Winning multiple terms is difficult in most places simply because all administrations eventually accumulate grievances directed at them from various sectors of the public.

There is less than two weeks to go in both campaigns. The clear narrative for both is that they are close but both incumbents could win re-election (in Ontario's case likely as a minority government).

Ontario
A large sample poll in the Toronto Star today makes it clear that the race is extremely close (similar findings appeared in other polls last week). The Star poll reports that the survey would result in 47 ridings each for the Conservatives and Liberals and 13 for the NDP. The poll is large enough to have results for every riding. However, some of the results reported don't look right to TC. My forecast model suggests that a tie vote would produce an advantage for the Liberals as they have had the more efficiently distributed vote in the past. In addition TC would expect to see more seats for the NDP than just 13. But it is tight enough to go the either way and many individual riding contests must be very close.

Despite the Liberals' handicaps it appears that attacks on PC leader Tim Hudak (see, for example, this web site: hazardoushudak.ca) have taken their toll. This Ipsos poll from earlier this month reported that voters preferred McGuinty to Hudak as premier. The disapproval of McGuinty found in the survey noted above suggests that it may be a case of who is the least preferred.

Both Tim Hudak and NDP leader Andrea Horvath were not well known coming into the campaign. The NDP has been in the range of 23 to 26 per cent support, well above the 16.8 per cent the NDP won in 2007. The NDP's poll numbers this summer look like a spillover from the federal campaign and the outpouring of emotion for Jack Layton, so Horvath still must close the deal with voters to do well. However, this Ipsos poll released a few days ago suggests she is making progress. The poll also makes it clear that Rob Ford has become a huge liability for the PCs in Toronto. His unpopularity could cost them dearly in this election:

A majority (53%) of 1,719 Torontonians polled say Rob Ford being mayor of Toronto makes them less likely to vote for the Progressive Conservatives, while just 9% say they’re more likely to vote for the PC Party

The television debate coming Sept. 27 could make a significant difference. It represents an enormous challenge and opportunity for both Hudak and Horvath. I suspect there is less on the line for McGuinty but he still must perform well given the tight race.

Manitoba
Two significant developments yesterday: a poll reporting that a majority think the NDP deserve re-election and a reasonably successful television debate appearance for Greg Selinger.

The most memorable aspect of the debate was Selinger successfully forcing Liberal leader Jon Gerrard to state that he may have had made "a mistake" in voting against a Selinger budget. Even though PC leader Hugh McFadyen was on the sidelines for this exchange, it was quite important as the role of the Liberal vote in Manitoba elections is critical given that many federal Liberals support the NDP provincially.

There is some evidence that Liberals are in deep trouble in this election, and the beleaguered party could lose both its seats. Former MLA Kevin Lamoureux has moved to the House of Commons, and his seat has been split in two by redistribution (both are likely to go NDP) while the PCs are making a strong effort to unseat Gerrard in River Heights.

TC thinks the PC's biggest problem may be that they start out so far behind in the City of Winnipeg where they only held four seats entering the campaign. In 1995 when the party last won an election they won 14 seats in the city. The PCs recognize this. The Free Press had an article on the PC effort to win the south end riding of Seine River. TC's view is that the PC's must win that riding and several others in the city (such as Kirkfield Park, Southdale and St. Norbert plus others) to have a chance of winning.

Nevetheless, the PCs have all the advantages that accrue to being able to campaign on "time for a change", and a leader who is showing more poise in his second campaign. The election outcome remains uncertain.

Ontario polls point to Conservative minority government

2011-09-02T17:18:00.000-04:00

The two surveys out this week provide more evidence that a close outcome is a distinct possibility and that means minority government.

The Angus Reid poll points to a thin Conservative majority of 56 seats. However, just one more point for the Liberals would turn that into a minority. The Forum Research poll would give the Cs 52 seats while 54 seats are needed for a bare majority.

The NDP was strong in both surveys and is currently running well ahead of their pace in 2007.

Post-Layton Poll

2011-08-31T17:02:00.000-04:00

The new Harris-Decima poll illustrates that the wave of national mourning that accompanied Jack Layton's passing has produced a strong political impact. While the effect is probably going to be temporary, the NDP and Conservatives were tied in this poll at 33% each while the Liberals came in at 21%.

My forecast model suggests it would produce a House of Commons of 131 Conservatives, 118 New Democrats, 58 Liberals 4 Bloc and 1 Green.

Perhaps this is the first sign of real weakness in the Harper majority.

Obama's Economic Dilemma

2011-08-30T18:12:00.001-04:00

I think Jon Chait gets Obama's problem with jobs and Congress exactly right:

...if Obama potentially had the votes in Congress to pass another stimulus, it would be worth taking an unpopular vote in order to rescue the economy. Since Obama does not and will not have those votes, he needs to conceive of his plan as a political message. There is no point in holding a message vote when the message is unpopular.

This seems to be a reality liberals have trouble acknowledging. There are a lot of issues where the public agrees with the left. Economic stimulus does not appear to be one of them. Now, public opinion is fairly hazy and ill-informed about this, and certain elements of economic stimulus can command majorities. But the passage of the first stimulus, at the height of Obama's popularity, shows pretty clearly that people instinctively think that, when the economy is terrible, having the government spend a lot of new money is not going to help. That they're wrong doesn't really matter for the purposes of this question.

The administration floated the idea of using a mortgage refinance plan that would not need Congressional approval and might provide some stimulus, but would still need acceptance by a regulator who is not answerable to the Obama administration. He needs several more ideas like this.

This is the nub of the problem. Obama needs to find some way now to rectify the problem that arises from the inadequacy of stimulus plans two years ago, and he is likely going to have to do it without Congress. One way or the other he needs a great deal of luck in restarting growth, or he will face an enormous obstacle to re-election (he could still get re-elected if the Republicans move too far to the right).

An addendum: a few weeks back Brad Delong summed up the mistakes and missed opportunities of Obama's first year or two in office and what he should do now. It is worth reading.

Overall, it is clear that Obama faces immense obstacles to restarting economic growth. It is not all clear how he gets the U.S. economy moving again, especially given the loony political opposition he faces from Republicans.

Ontario headed for minority government

2011-08-21T15:45:00.000-04:00

Two polls out this month (Ipsos and Nanos) strongly suggest that the next Ontario election will produce a minority government. Spring polls suggested a PC majority so it is the Liberals who have momentum. It looks like negative ads like these are taking their toll on Mr. Hudak.

My seat estimates suggest the current polls would produce an exceptionally close result. It is not clear which party would be in first place.

More on Turmel

2011-08-16T18:30:00.000-04:00

It is unfortunate that Chantal Hébert was on vacation when the Turmel story broke. Her column today is a gem:

The reality is that those who ran for the NDP in the last campaign and the vast majority of those who voted for them did so not to revisit the debates of the past but because they wanted to move on.

Many wanted to resume contributing more directly to Canada’s federal life to help craft a progressive alternative to the Conservatives.

A survey commissioned by the now-defunct Canadian Unity Information Office a few years ago revealed that a majority of Quebecers refused to identify themselves as federalists or sovereigntists.

Large numbers of them want out of that particular box....

To all intents and purposes, those who leaked details of interim leader Nycole Turmel’s past links with the Bloc are playing a longer game than that of embarrassing the NDP at a time of relative fragility.

For the moribund Bloc, the best hope for revival lies with a successful demonstration that there is no room within Canada’s national parties for nationalist Quebecers — or at least not unless they are willing to atone for the way they exercised their voting franchise in the past.

It looks like sovereigntist strategists can count on outside help to achieve their purpose.

Alone of all members of Parliament, Quebec’s New Democrats are being asked to account for their past political leanings.

Some self-appointed high priests of federalism have gone as far as suggesting that a public recanting of anything that smacks of a sovereigntist belief is also in order.

The editors of the Globe and Mail, Liberal leader Bob Rae and Stéphan Dion fit the definition of "high priests" as far as TC is concerned. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Another op-ed on the subject worth reading is this one published earlier in the Toronto Star by University of Ottawa academic Claude Denis. An excerpt:

What political planet do English-speaking Canadians live on?

The majority of francophone Quebecers have voted for the Bloc Québécois for the past 20 years. A strong majority of Quebec francophones voted “yes” to sovereignty in 1995. Most of the Quebec left has been sovereignist for a good four decades. So if you’re a francophone Quebecer and you’re on the left, chances are you are or have been a supporter of at least one sovereignist party.

None of this is news or surprising. Is there something not clear? Nycole Turmel is a left-wing, francophone Quebecer. She has been socially and politically active for 30 years. Of course she has had ties to the sovereignist movement.

Britain's riots - Thatcher's grandchildren

2011-08-12T09:09:00.000-04:00

This column on Bloomberg news by Pankaj Mishra is the best thing I have read on the British riots. An excerpt:

Britain, of course, is the original home of the free market. As the first country to industrialize, and to have an enormous comparative advantage, it inevitably adopted laissez- faire policies in the mid-19th century. The harsh effect this had on the working classes and the poor was gradually softened by such Victorian institutions as compulsory education, trade unions and social-service societies. The political and economic catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century buried the idea of the self-regulating market; and a new national consensus was built around the welfare state after World War II.

This all changed starting in the 1980s as successive British governments, Labour as well as Conservative, struggled with high inflation, falling industrial productivity and conflict. The illusion that the nation could be saved only through immersion in a self-stabilizing market economy hardened into a revolutionary ideology, embraced by both major parties, that has shaped today’s Britain.

In that sense, if Tony Blair and David Cameron are “sons of Thatcher,” as the journalist Simon Jenkins puts it, the rioters of today are the grandchildren.

A little realism on the right

2011-08-07T10:15:00.001-04:00

David Frum has been something of an apostate on the right for some time now, but imagine the teeth gnashing this quote about the post-2008 financial and economic crisis must have engendered:

When people tell me that I’ve changed my mind too much about too many things over the past four years, I can only point to the devastation wrought by this crisis and wonder: How closed must your thinking be if it isn’t affected by a disaster of such magnitude? And in fact, almost all of our thinking has been somehow affected: hence the drift of so many conservatives away from what used to be the mainstream market-oriented Washington Consensus toward Austrian economics and Ron Paul style hard-money libertarianism. The ground they and I used to occupy stands increasingly empty.

If I can’t follow where most of my friends have gone, it is because I keep hearing Susan Sontag’s question in my ears. Or rather, a revised and updated version of that question:

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Wall Street Journal editorial page between 2000 and 2011, and someone in the same period who read only the collected columns of Paul Krugman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of the current economic crisis? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

To see what the Susan Sontag question was and for the rest of the item, read the blogpost, Were Our Enemies Right? here.

U.S. debt downgrade

2011-08-06T11:40:00.000-04:00

Paul Krugman gets it right on the U.S. debt downgrade:

....It’s a strange situation.
On one hand, there is a case to be made that the madness of the right has made America a fundamentally unsound nation. And yes, it is the madness of the right: if not for the extremism of anti-tax Republicans, we would have no trouble reaching an agreement that would ensure long-run solvency.
On the other hand, it’s hard to think of anyone less qualified to pass judgment on America than the rating agencies. The people who rated subprime-backed securities are now declaring that they are the judges of fiscal policy? Really?
Just to make it perfect, it turns out that S&P got the math wrong by $2 trillion, and after much discussion conceded the point — then went ahead with the downgrade.
More than that, everything I’ve heard about S&P’s demands suggests that it’s talking nonsense about the US fiscal situation....
In short, S&P is just making stuff up — and after the mortgage debacle, they really don’t have that right.

It is critically important to remember, as Krugman notes, the scandalous role of the ratings agencies in the subprime mortgage mess, which is all well-documented in Michael Lewis's marvelous book The Big Short.

I passed my copy on and don't have it to quote from but read this excerpt from an interview with Michael Lewis by Terence McNally (the TM in the excerpt below):

ML: The sub-prime mortgage bonds were rated triple A by Moody's and Standard and Poor's. Why? Well, they could give you an argument, but in retrospect, it looks like a very foolish argument.
TM: It looks worse than foolish to me, it looks corrupt.
ML: When you think about corruption, there's the simple kind where I give you $1000 to interview me on the radio so it will promote my book. That's corrupt and we both know it. But there's a different sort of corruption where we're all part of a system that is rewarding us very well to pay attention to certain things and not pay attention to others. We're paid to have blind spots. There's an awful lot of that kind of corruption in the financial system because people's incentives are all screwed up.
Ratings agencies were paid by the people who issued the bonds to put the triple A rating on them. Their incentive is to please the people who are issuing the securities. They can't at the same time independently judge the securities.
TM: Arthur Andersen went out of business for doing basically the same thing with Enron. How could someone not see that they were recreating something which had already failed in a huge way?
ML: Some people did see...The people I find most riveting are the people who saw the magnitude of the coming disaster. They were sane men in an insane world. They would call Standard and Poor's and Moody's and say, "How are you rating these things? Our models show that if house prices even go flat, all these bonds will be worthless." To the question of what happens to these bonds if house prices go down, Standard and Poor's would say, "We actually don't know because there's no place in our model to put a negative number."
TM: Obama, Geithner and the administration are putting out plans for new regulations. This isn't in there?
ML: No. It should be illegal for issuers to pay raters for ratings. It's a bribe. Instead the administration says they're going to give the regulators more authority to evaluate ratings agencies. That doesn't do anything; they already had that authority.

The Turmel Tempest

2011-08-05T18:19:00.000-04:00

It is a classic example of a huge fuss being generated in the media over an issue that adds up to nothing.

The fuss has been fed by political opponents who should know better but apparently don't. For example, Bob Rae was reported to have said today:

What kind of federalism is it that leads someone to join two other parties, both of which are committed to the independence of Quebec, the sovereignty of Quebec and in the case of Quebec Solidaire a socialist Quebec?

Globe blogger and long-time NDP activist Gerald Caplan points out:

...Quebec is different from the rest of Canada in ways we often ignore. Ms. Turmel is one symbol of this difference. For Ms. Turmel -- Québécoise, Canadian, federalist, trade union leader, New Democrat -- to carry a Bloc card for a few years was no big deal.

Some thought that lesson was learned election night. The reason so many Québécois could move en masse from the Bloc to the NDP was not just because Mr. Layton was a great guy to have a beer with. He also shared and represented their values. Mr. Layton was progressive, a social democrat, committed to social justice. So were many Bloc voters who didn’t want Quebec to separate. Those were the social values that the two parties shared and that allowed the massive voting switch once it was clear that the Bloc was an exhausted force.
Maclean's writer Martin Patriquin provides some useful insights. “… it’s amazing how few people have clued into this headsmackingly obvious point, but Turmel willingly ripped up her Bloc Québécois membership card to run for a dyed-in-orange federalist party [emphasis in original]. That alone should be evidence enough that her sovereigntist credentials weren’t quite Parizeau-calibre. If anything, Turmel’s (temporary) ascension to the head of the party, like the NDP’s overwhelming victory in May, is proof positive that detaching the left from the sovereigntist movement isn’t as impossible as it once was. How far we’ve come.”

One should add that not only did Turmel spurn the Bloc, she did so to run for a party that historically had never had much electoral success in Quebec. So she supported a federalist party in a circumstance where she might have reasonably expected that to be a political liability.

The fact that many in Quebec such as Turmel spurned the pro-independence party for a federalist party should be celebrated not mocked. Turmel is a long-time NDP member and supporter, her true allegiance. Her opponents in any case include many with previous sovereignist backgrounds: Liberal Jean Lapierre, who served in Martin's cabinet, was a co-founder of the Bloc, and Maxime Bernier, who is now back in Harper's cabinet, worked for PQ Premier Bernard Landry, a very serious supporter of Quebec independence.

Turmel represents exactly what we want to see Quebecers do about federalism, Mr. Rae, embrace it.

U.S. debt crisis - the real blame belongs with the establishment "centrists"

2011-07-30T09:52:00.001-04:00

There are two critical aspects to the U.S. debt crisis. One is that the confrontation is real and may not be resolved quickly, although the pressure to do so will grow exponentially from here on out. The real blame for all this lies with the deficit-phobic Washington centrists. The best explanation for how we got here is outlined in this blogpost by Jon Chait of The New Republic fittingly titled: The Debt Ceiling Crisis And The Failure Of The Establishment, which, as Chait puts it, underestimated " the loony determination of the Republican right".

The other tragic aspect is that the whole debate is wrong-headed and focused on the wrong problems, the debt and deficit, instead of the right ones, short and long-term unemployment and badly skewed income distribution. A not unreasonable discussion of these can be found in this column by former Obama and Clinton advisor Laura D'Andrea Tyson on the jobs deficit.

How soon we forget

2011-07-12T20:18:00.001-04:00

"Majority backs Harper’s plan for Senate elections and term limits, poll finds" says the headline on the Globe story. Great news for Harper and company, right?

However, this Nanos poll from just a month ago tells us that Senate reform is the public's lowest priority, right at the bottom a list topped by health care, about the same level as strengthening the military, traditionally something that doesn't garner much support.

When it comes to polls, context and wording is everything, something you don't see much in the daily press.

Manitoba NDP has a realistic chance to win

2011-07-10T15:34:00.000-04:00

With the notable exceptions of Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador, few provincial governments keep the same partisan colour beyond two terms in government. The Manitoba NDP has now made it through three terms, so it should be due to lose the next election. Polls over the past couple of years have been pointing in that direction. However, the NDP has continued to lead in the City of Winnipeg in most surveys to date, including polls that give a substantial overall lead to the PCs (this March poll from Probe for example). TC has been convinced for some time that a change in government was coming. Now I am not so sure.

An Angus Reid online poll released on June 7 that measured premier popularity put Greg Selinger's approval rating at 48%, second highest in Canada behind just Saskatchewan's Brad Wall and a gain of 20 points since the previous survey in November 2010. Perhaps this is due to his handling of the flood situation.

A Probe Research poll released on June 29 reported an overall dead heat between the NDP and the PCs at 44% with the Liberals a quite distant third at 9%. This represented a 9 point boost for the NDP. More importantly it would easily give the NDP a fourth majority despite the overall closeness in the vote.

TC estimates it would deliver 34 seats to the NDP, 21 to the PCs and 2 to the Liberals. The key to this is the historically efficient vote pattern the NDP has achieved since it first won office in 1969. Simply put, the NDP's margins in the city are smaller than the huge margins run up by the PCs in rural southwestern and southeastern Manitoba - more seats for exactly the same share of the vote. The final factor is that the NDP has had a virtual lock on the small northern ridings since its initial breakthrough 42 years ago.

Using the Probe poll numbers TC can estimate a vote share for every riding. With exactly the same overall vote, the NDP wins its ridings by an average margin of 25.4%, while the PC wins their seats by an average of 36.9%. Therein lies the difference. In the March 2011 Probe poll the PCs had an overall lead of 47% to 35% but still trailed the NDP by six points in the City of Winnipeg. It would have yielded a bare majority for the PCs. But you can see their problem.

The election could still go the other way, but the NDP's structural advantages and Selinger's growing popularity may well give it an unprecedented fourth term.

Assessing the 2011 Election

2011-06-16T19:55:00.000-04:00

There is more considered analysis of the 2011 election available now. TC continues to be somewhat baffled by the Conservative majority and the gap between final polls and voting.

One excellent overall analysis is by Robin Sears, which appears in the current edition of Policy Options. I thought I had a fairly negative assessment of Michael Ignatieff. He looks worse to me after reading the Sears piece.

There is also an interesting article on the NDP's rise in Quebec by Derek Leebosh. It provides insight on the extensive efforts the party has made in Quebec from time to time since its founding in 1961.

Long-run NDP prospects in Quebec

2011-05-15T18:04:00.002-04:00

There has been considerable debate about the NDP's longer run prospects in Quebec, the party having acquired a large Quebec caucus on election night. Some see it as the beginning of a period of dominance, while others call it a 'flash in the pan' comparable to the success of the ADQ in the 2007 Quebec provincial election, which was then eclipsed in 2008.

I think we can look to history for some clues about what to expect. As a consequence of the conscription crises in the two world wars, the Liberals dominated federal Quebec politics with one exception from 1917 to 1984. The exception was the Diefenbaker landslide in 1958 when Quebec voted in the PCs so as not to be left out of the new government. Quebec moved strongly away from the Diefenbaker Conservatives in 1962, just as the quiet revolution was getting underway in Quebec. Diefenbaker had done nothing to strengthen the party there, but PC fortunes were also dropping sharply elsewhere in Canada. In Quebec, however, the breaking of the old Liberal ties did mean that rural, Catholic, conservative Quebec was open to other forces. Social Credit, led by Réal Caouette, the leader of its Quebec wing, won 26 seats in Quebec in 1962 (compared to the Liberal total of 35). That was to be its high point. The following year after losing 6 seats in the 1963 election, the Quebec wing split from national Social Credit to form the Quebec-based Ralliement Créditiste. As a party rooted in the social and political outlook of the old pre-quiet revolution Quebec, it was doomed in the long run, but managed to hang on to enough rural seats through the sixties and seventies to dent the Liberal monopoly, until Trudeau wiped them out in 1980.

In 1984 the Brian Mulroney Conservatives swept 58 Quebec seats, a number almost identical to the NDP this year. The Conservative victory was built in part on an alliance with Quebec nationalists such as Lucien Bouchard, who drafted a key Mulroney speech in the 1984 campaign. The speech pledged to right the alleged wrong done to Quebec by Pierre Trudeau when he succeeded in completing the 1981 constitutional deal without the support of the Levesque government. The speech was effectively the first step on the road to Meech. However, Mulroney's efforts to produce a constitutional deal would end badly for him. The unraveling of the Meech Lake Accord in the spring of 1990 led to the founding of the Bloc Québecois by Lucien Bouchard, after he quit the Mulroney cabinet and crossed the floor, and to the 1995 Quebec referendum five years later.

The Bloc was primarily a nationalist party to be sure, but it also reflected the secular, social democratic outlook that had become entrenched in Quebec political culture as a consequence of the quiet revolution and the René Levesque PQ government elected in 1976. The NDP has now inherited the social democratic mantle of the Bloc, so in one sense it actually represents a degree of continuity in Quebec politics. It appears to have been made possible by fatigue in Quebec with the nationalist project and the role of the BQ, the same sensibility that has made the PQ hesitant to commit to another referendum.

A key moment for Jack Layton was a highly successful appearance on the widely viewed Radio Canada television program Tout le Monde en Parle (loosely translated it means "everybody's talking about it"), identified by La Presse columnist Yves Boisvert as the point when the Quebec opinion started to move his way. This was followed by an effective performance in the Quebec leaders' debate, where Layton articulated views that would resonate with soft nationalists in Quebec.

Layton made another successful appearance this past Sunday. Pressed on how he would defend Quebec interests in the new Parliament by host Guy Lepage, he responded by saying he would introduce a bill to strengthen the role of French in federally regulated industries, winning immediate audience applause. Moments later, he restated his campaign promise to press for action to limit credit card interest rates - to just as much or greater applause.

On Tout le Monde en Parle program Layton was note perfect. As opposition leader he can sympathize with Quebec but everyone knows he cannot restart the constitutional debate. Moreover, the NDP won support across the linguistic divide, capturing seats on the island of Montreal with large anglophone and allophone populations. It has a new political alliance that calls for a different politics than that offered by the Bloc.

It was Layton's effective demonstration of empathy for a Quebec-centric view that mattered rather than the specifics. There appears to be no appetite for an early revival of the independence project, making much of the NDP's rhetoric moot for the medium term in any case. The obsession of the English media with the Clarity Act and the Constitution misses the point of the political reality in Quebec. If those things mattered a great deal, Quebec would not have moved so decisively away from pro-independence representation in the House of Commons. This is not to say it could not flare up again. In the longer run if the NDP wins office the issue could be trickier to manage. Despite Layton's regard for Quebec's sensibilities and support for asymmetry, it is a measure of changing times in Quebec that the NDP platform made it clear that an NDP government will be more centralist on health care. Consider this excerpt:

We will negotiate a new ten-year health accord with the provinces and territories in 2014. The accord will guarantee a continued strong federal contribution – including the 6 per cent escalator - to Canada’s public health care system – in return for a clear, monitored and enforced commitment to respect the principles of the Canada Health Act and to the integrity and modernization of health care;
We will work with provincial and territorial partners to:
- Promote a clear commitment to the single-payer system;
- Make progress on primary care;
- Take appropriate steps to replace fee-for-service delivery;
- Take first steps to reduce the costs of prescription medicines for Canadians, employers and governments;
- Extend coverage to out-of-hospital services like home care and long-term care.

In addition, Layton committed to going after private health care clinics:

Campaigning in Quebec, Layton criticized the Harper government and called for the growth of private clinics to stop.
"We believe that the Canada Health Act should be enforced," Layton said. "And we don't see Stephen Harper doing that."
Layton said the health care system was being privatized across the country.

Quebecers seem to have become more favourable to the federal government flexing its muscles on issues like this. This Léger poll from May 2010 reported that 62% supported the idea of federal intervention to block a new health fee being contemplated at the time by the Charest government.

On the face of it the NDP's prospects in Quebec look promising. Quebec has become more diverse politically in the 21st century. In addition to the Liberals and PQ provincially there is the ADQ, the left wing Quebec Solidaire, and talk of a new centre-right nationalist formation. Federally, four parties hold Quebec seats. As recently as 2004, federal representation was restricted to the Liberals and BQ in Quebec. So there should be no surprise there might be room for the NDP.

All this diversity could mean that the NDP might not be as dominant as previous parties were, in the sense of sweeping all or most of Quebec seats in most elections. Their success in 2011 was partly an artifact of first-past-the post. Their 42.6% of the vote was almost a 20 percentage point lead over the Bloc's 23.3%, sufficient to give Layton 79% of the seats. The Conservatives have found a home in parts of rural Quebec; the Liberals will likely continue to be strong among west island Anglos; and there is bound to be at least some continuing support for a harder nationalism, so the Bloc could stage a comeback.

The NDP will change Quebec politics but the province will also re-shape the NDP. It might make the NDP less centralist over time, possibly push it to the left on justice issues, prod it on green issues, etc. Clearly the NDP's prospects are rooted in evolving Quebec realities, and therefore could be a key to forming Canada's first national NDP government.

Closing polls significantly underestimated the Conservative Vote

2011-05-07T22:30:00.000-04:00

I have seen a great deal of speculation about what happened at the end but what you can't see are any real signs of movement at the end of the campaign. Here are the closing campaign polls (I added a couple of polls since the previous posting):

Average of Closing Polls
	C.P.C.	Liberal	NDP	Green	Bloc	Other	Total
CANADA	37.1	20.0	30.9	6.2	4.6	1.1	100
Atlantic	32.2	28.4	34.3	3.5		1.6	100
Quebec	15.2	15.2	39.7	2.9	24.3	1.8	100
Ontario	38.1	27.4	28.5	5.0		1.1	100
Man/Sask	50.5	14.2	28.7	5.6		1.0	100
Alberta	63.6	11.1	17.5	6.5		1.3	100
B.C.	40.8	16.6	34.6	7.6		0.6	100

Here are the average vote shares based on the preliminary count of votes by Elections Canada:

2011 Preliminary Results
	C.P.C.	Liberal	NDP	Green	Bloc	Other
Canada	39.6	18.9	30.6	3.9	6.0	0.9
Atlantic	37.9	29.3	29.5	3.0		0.3
Quebec	17.1	14.1	42.6	2.1	23.3	0.9
Ontario	44.4	25.3	25.6	3.8		0.9
Man/Sask	54.8	12.7	28.9	3.2		0.4
Alberta	67.0	9.2	16.7	5.2		1.9
BC	44.7	13.6	33.0	7.8		0.8

And here is the difference:

Difference 2011 results compared to average closing polls
	C.P.C.	Liberal	NDP	Green	Bloc	Other
Canada	2.5	-1.1	-0.3	-2.3	1.4	-0.2
Atlantic	5.7	0.9	-4.7	-0.5		-1.2
Quebec	1.8	-1.1	2.9	-0.7	-1.1	-0.9
Ontario	6.3	-2.0	-2.9	-1.2		-0.2
Man/Sask	4.3	-1.4	0.2	-2.5		-0.6
Alberta	3.4	-1.9	-0.8	-1.2		0.5
BC	4.0	-3.0	-1.6	0.2		0.3

The Conservatives did much better than the polls suggested. The difference is the difference between majority and minority. Note that NDP shares were overestimated in Ontario and Atlantic Canada and underestimated in Quebec. TC doesn't consider differences in the 1-2 point range to be of any significance. For the Conservatives that only held true in Quebec.

Final polls - the NDP tide continues to rise

2011-05-01T19:14:00.005-04:00

The closing polls don't change the story of the election. Conservatives will finish first, close to their 2008 mark with no majority, the NDP second making spectacular gains, Liberals third and falling, a bad night coming for the Bloc Quebecois.

Average of Closing Polls
	C.P.C.	Liberal	NDP	Green	Bloc	Other	Total
CANADA	37.6	19.8	31.1	6.4	4.3	0.7	100
Atlantic	30.9	28.6	34.8	4.0	0.0	1.7	100
Quebec	15.0	15.4	39.5	2.8	24.5	2.3	100
Ontario	38.4	26.7	29.1	5.1	0.0	0.7	100
Man/Sask	50.9	13.3	29.7	5.4	0.0	0.7	100
Alberta	64.7	11.1	17.2	5.7	0.0	1.2	100
B.C.	40.8	16.1	35.4	7.4	0.0	0.6	100

Gains and Losses since 2008:

Closing Polls
Change since 2008
	C.P.C.	Liberal	NDP	Green	Bloc	Other
Canada	-0.0	-6.4	12.9	-0.4	-5.6	-0.5
Atlantic	1.2	-6.5	8.8	-2.0	0.0	-1.6
Quebec	-6.7	-8.3	27.4	-0.7	-13.6	1.5
Ontario	-0.8	-7.1	10.9	-2.9	0.0	-0.1
Man/Sask	-0.3	-3.9	5.0	-0.7	0.0	-0.0
Alberta	0.0	-0.3	4.6	-3.0	0.0	-1.3
BC	-3.7	-3.3	9.3	-1.9	0.0	-0.1

Turnout will be up

2011-05-01T14:55:00.001-04:00

The evidence suggests turnout will be up this year. Audiences for the TV debates were up, advance voting is up and there is a party that is on a roll, the NDP, and that is likely to bring additional voters to the polls (along with opponents who fear they might form a government.)

Increased turnout is likely to be helpful for the NDP and not for the Conservatives. Older voters, who are more likely to vote Conservative, already have a high turnout. Increases are most likely to come from younger cohorts who are much less inclined to support the Conservatives.

Look at the difference, for example, between the Under 25s and Over 65s from Friday's Ekos poll:

	Cons.	Liberal	NDP	Green	Bloc	Other
Under 25	16.4	21.3	33.0	14.3	6.6	8.5
Over 65	48.2	23.0	20.6	3.4	3.5	1.2

I suspect all the youth voting turnout initiatives, the vote mobs and so on, are probably making Mr. Harper nervous.

Liberal Decline

2011-04-30T17:24:00.001-04:00

The post mortems on this election are beginning. Two topics are of particular interest: the NDP wave in Quebec (and, one should add, Atlantic Canada) and Liberal decline.

Too much of the blame for Liberal decline is attributed to Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff but he deserves some of it. The roots of Liberal decline are long-term and complex. TC wrote a series of posts about Liberal decline last year in June and July. Much of the analysis stands up reasonably well. Here are links to that series:
The Liberal Party in Decline: Part One - The Early Years
Part Two: The Chrétien Era
Part Three: The NDP Revives
Part Four: Conclusion

NDP gains in Quebec

2011-04-30T15:13:00.001-04:00

It is clear now the NDP will win a huge number of seats in Quebec on Monday, likely more than 50. In the process the orange wave will wash over some very big names. Here are a few examples of well-known MPs certain to lose:

BQ Leader Gilles Duceppe in Montreal's Laurier St. Marie
Conservative Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon in Pontiac
Liberal and former Canadian astronaut Marc Garneau in Westmount-Ville-Marie

No Tory Majority Come Monday

2011-04-28T20:39:00.001-04:00

The overall shape of the final outcome is now clear. The election next Monday will not produce a Conservative majority. The Conservatives will finish first, followed by the NDP, with the Liberals third and the Bloc a distant fourth.

Here is a chart showing shifts in support from 2008, compared to polls released since Monday, April 25.

Polls - Last week of April
Change since 2008
	C.P.C.	Liberal	NDP	Green	Bloc	Other
Canada	-2.3	-3.3	10.2	-0.6	-4.2	0.1
Atlantic	2.7	-4.4	4.7	-1.4	0.0	-1.7
Quebec	-6.8	-7.3	25.9	0.0	-12.8	1.0
Ontario	0.4	-4.3	5.3	-1.6	0.0	0.3
Man/Sask	-3.3	1.1	2.6	-0.7	0.0	0.3
Alberta	-5.2	2.5	4.9	-0.7	0.0	-1.4
BC	-5.4	2.4	2.4	0.1	0.0	0.6

Apart from a tiny gain in Ontario and a small increase in Atlantic Canada, the Conservatives are losing ground, not making gains. The story of the campaign is the spectacular success of Jack Layton's NDP, with the possibility that their final total will top 100 seats. A perfect symbol is all the commercials the Conservatives are running attacking Michael Ignatieff who no longer poses a threat.

Come Monday night, there will be disappointment for Stephen Harper, celebrations from coast to coast for the NDP, and devastation for the Liberals and Bloc.

The East is Orange

2011-04-23T16:56:00.000-04:00

It is becoming clearer that there is an NDP wave not confined to Quebec. Comparing polls in Atlantic Canada released from April 15 to17 (shortly after the debates held April 12 & 13) to those released on April 21 & 22, we see an average NDP gain of ten points, most of it coming at the expense of the Liberals:

	CPC	Liberal	NDP	Green	Other
April 15-17	36.0	38.6	17.0	4.4	4.1
April 21-22	36.7	30.7	27.6	4.2	0.9

This is the point in the campaign where a clear direction is established. The story of the campaign has been the NDP's growing wave of support in Quebec, with a parallel move happening in Atlantic Canada.

This commentary by former CBC Ottawa bureau chief Elly Alboim captures the significance of the moment:

More often than not, these sorts of break outs cannot be reversed. They represent a collective decision making process that sometimes builds on mounting evidence or sometimes catches media by surprise after events or debates — although this would represent a very slow reaction to a debate. There are notable exceptions like the PC’s beating back the resurgent Liberals in 1988 but they are rare.

Often, the final results overshoot the initial wave. Momentum builds and begins to sweep into ridings that most think are not in play. I’ve been involved in dozens of CBC projection meetings where seasoned political reporters said that it was inconceivable that certain ridings and personalities were lost. And yet they were. Canada is littered with former cabinet ministers who never should have lost.

There have been some small NDP gains in provinces west of the Ottawa River, but so far they lag the progress Mr. Layton's party is making in the east. Conservative support so far is holding but not growing. Here is another table comparing early national polls to the last few days:

	CPC	Liberal	NDP	Bloc	Green	Other
March 24-28	38.8	25.0	18.0	9.7	7.5	0.9
April 21-22	38.0	24.7	23.5	6.7	4.9	2.0

The Conservatives' hoped for majority remains elusive but possible. Vote-splitting by the opposition may help. The open question is: how far can the NDP go?

More on online vs phone polls

2011-04-23T12:52:00.000-04:00

There was an interesting analysis of online vs phone polling on the Carleton School of Journalism election commentary web site by Christopher Waddell who suggests online polls might overstate support for the NDP:

In the 2006 election, Decima Research conducted a series of experiments comparing polling results from an online panel it had assembled with those obtained from traditional telephone polling. The goal was to see how accurately online polls could match telephone results and to try to figure out how online polls should be weighted compared to the traditional demographic weighting done for phone polls to ensure the pool of respondents matched the demographics of the country.

On election day, Decima asked the members of its online panel to report how they voted in an attempt to create a national exit poll. About 10,000 people responded and by 6:30 pm in Ottawa – three hours before the polls had closed everywhere west of New Brunswick – it was obvious Stephen Harper and the Conservatives were going to beat Paul Martin and the Liberals. There there was a clear gap in the share of the vote each attracted and while Liberal vote share was below 2004 results, the Conservatives were significantly higher.

By the end of the night the Liberal and Conservative vote shares in the online poll were pretty close to their actual results. The one discrepancy was the NDP which did several percentage points better in the online results than it did in actual voting results across the country. This difference was most pronounced in Atlantic Canada where the NDP was 7-8 percentage points online better than it was in the ballot box.

Intrigued, TC compared online and phone polls conducted during this election cycle and found that the online polls gave the NDP two extra points:

	CPC	Liberal	NDP	Bloc	Green	Other
Online	37.7	26.2	20.1	8.9	6.3	0.7
Phone	38.9	27.9	18.1	8.4	5.5	1.2

This is not to suggest that there is no NDP surge. There is indeed movement to the NDP in all polls. It is evident in the numbers in the previous post, which compared four phone polls with the 2008 results. As my earlier post on the subject discussed, there are numerous problems with online polls. It seems significant, given the experiment described above, that HarrisDecima currently polls by telephone.

A polling sweet spot for the Conservatives

2011-04-22T13:52:00.000-04:00

The polls from the last few days have captured an NDP surge that is strong in Quebec and evident, although much weaker, elsewhere. Here is the change in support between the 2008 election and an average of four polls released over the past two days:

	C.P.C.	Liberal	NDP	Green	Bloc	Other
Canada	-0.5	-1.5	5.4	-0.3	-4.4	1.3
Atlantic	7.1	-4.9	1.3	-1.3	0.0	-2.2
Quebec	-2.9	-5.7	17.7	0.3	-10.4	0.9
Ontario	1.7	-2.6	1.3	-1.8	2.0	-0.6
Man/Sask	-3.1	1.8	1.8	-0.9	0.0	0.3
Alberta	-3.6	2.7	2.3	-0.3	0.0	-1.1
BC	-2.4	-1.6	3.7	-1.4	0.0	1.6

The current distribution of preferences gets us close to a Conservative majority and a close contest for official opposition. However, I don't feel confident about my seat forecast in Quebec given the unprecedented character of support for the NDP in that province, so there is considerable uncertainty to this estimate:

	C.P.C.	Liberal	NDP	Green	Bloc	Other	Total
CANADA	153	58	61	0	35	1	308

However, note in the table above that the Conservatives are down in most provinces/regions. TC would add that the Ipsos poll, which is included in the averages used to calculate the table above has a decidedly Conservative tilt. Their regional numbers in particular seem inconsistent with the other surveys.

The even split overall between the Liberals and the NDP should be highly beneficial to the Conservatives, but somehow, this sweet spot still leaves them short of an overall majority. TC has been skeptical all along that the Conservatives will win a majority and remains so.

The movement to the NDP is not yet finished, so we are still likely see changes in the days ahead that will alter the seat configuration. In particular, Conservative support in BC in recent days looks too high to me, and I expect the NDP to make further gains there at the expense of the Conservatives.

Still no sign of that Conservative majority

2011-04-20T19:59:00.000-04:00

TC has previously discussed the difficulty faced by the Conservative party in winning a majority. The prospect of a Conservative majority continues to be unlikely.

TC has averaged the polls released in the past five days and projects the following outcome:

	C.P.C.	Liberal	NDP	Green	Bloc	Other	Total
CDA	143	79	37	0	48	1	308

The seat totals make it clear that to date there has been remarkably little change since 2008. Here is the shift represented by the poll average used in the seat projection from the 2008 results:

	C.P.C.	Liberal	NDP	Green	Bloc	Other
Canada	0.2	1.1	1.6	1.7	-4.7	-0.0
Atlantic	4.9	2.2	-3.8	-1.8	1.8	-2.3
Quebec	-2.7	-3.7	9.7	2.7	-6.6	0.5
Ontario	2.2	1.8	-0.8	-2.6	0.4	-0.8
Man/Sask	-2.5	3.8	-3.2	1.0	1.5	-0.7
Alberta	-3.5	5.4	0.9	-1.4	1.0	-1.5
BC	-4.9	5.5	-1.1	-0.0	1.4	0.2

Note that biggest shift is represented by NDP gains in Quebec. The Conservatives have gained about five points in Atlantic Canada while losing a similar share in BC. The Liberals have gained five points in BC and Alberta but lost ground in Quebec. The other polling numbers represent, at best, quite limited shifts. Given the uncertainty and difficulty of measuring regional outcomes accurately, we cannot be certain that there have been significant shifts anywhere. However, the NDP's almost ten point gain in Quebec is clearly too large to ignore.

What an economic model forecasts for the Canadian election

2011-04-09T08:20:00.000-04:00

Economic models have had a strong record in predicting which party will win the White House in U.S. elections. Now a model built by a couple of Canadian political scientists is making a striking forecast for Canada, suggesting Stephen Harper could lose a lot of seats. Courtesy of Brendan Nyan's Twitter feed and the Monkey Cage:

For the upcoming election, the unemployment rate is 7.7% (average of November-December-January), the incumbent party's popularity is 38% (average of eight published polls during the month of February), and the longevity measure is equal to 63 months (logged value = 4.143). Hence, the model's forecast gives 34.4% of the vote and 114 seats out of 308 to the Conservative Party.

All such efforts should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt but it is quite at odds with both current polling and conventional wisdom. Interesting.

Harper

2011-04-05T20:17:00.000-04:00

A couple of items jumped out of the election news this week. First, from Harris-Decima's poll this week:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's 'unfavourable' rating increased by nine points to 52 per cent, up from 43 per cent in February. That's Harper's highest unfavourable ranking since the start of the last federal election in September 2008.

Highest unfavourable rating since 2008? Does it reflect the accumulated weight of all the negatives of the past two months... Carson, contempt, etc? This is not good news for the Conservatives.

And then this from Paul Wells:

.... the 2011 Harper is different from earlier editions. His tone is dark, his body language weary, his appeals to brighter emotions rote or non-existent. He runs the emotional gamut from bored to angry. “Of course,” his detractors will say. But he truly has has not always been this way on the road.

Early in the 2008 election I wrote about a Harper rally in a barn in Saskatchewan, not because it stood out, really, but because it typified the tone of his first campaign week that year. The barn was newly built, the crowd at dusk hushed and attentive. Harper was positively lyrical.

This is not what one would expect of a highly successful campaign. It remains early, the period of the phony war, the electorate not yet engaged, but perhaps it is significant.

Is Coalition An Issue?

2011-03-30T18:16:00.002-04:00

Despite all the election chatter about "coalition" it is not clear why it should be an issue. One would expect it to be, for many voters, a parliamentary process issue. Sure enough, a new Nanos survey that asked respondents to name the most important issue does not appear to have anyone saying "coalition" or "majority government". From CTV:

When asked to name, unprompted, what their most important national issue of concern was, almost 30 per cent said health care. However, it appears that the economy is again coming to the forefront as a key issue (percentage-point change from March 15 survey in brackets):
Health care: 28.5 per cent (-0.7)
Jobs / Economy: 19.5 per cent (+1.4)
Education: 7.9 per cent (-0.9)
Environment: 4.7 per cent (-2.8)
High taxes: 4.8 per cent (-0.1)
Unsure: 12.1 per cent (+3.0)

Economy, health care, education, environment. Makes sense to TC. Where is "coalition/majority government"?

The problem with online polls

2011-03-27T10:38:00.000-04:00

Several polling firms whose results are being widely reported in Canada during this election conduct their surveys via the internet. Now new research, "rigorous work from researchers at the forefront of academic evaluations of survey data", suggests that such surveys are unreliable. Gary Langer, who provides public opinion polling, analysis and consulting services to ABC News after having served as the network's polling director, says:

"Past research has thrown doubt on the ability of so-called “opt-in online panels” to produce results that accurately reflect the views of the broader population. The new study not only reinforces that evidence, it also calls into question whether such data are reliable for two other key purposes, evaluating changes over time and differences among groups."

Among online surveys being reported in Canada concerning the election are party preference results from Angus Reid and Léger Marketing, and issue and leadership preferences from Ipsos. (It should be noted that, to date, the Ipsos party preference numbers come from telephone surveys.) Why are Canadian media uncritically reporting these online results when significant doubts about this type of research are being raised south of the border and have been in the past?

The new research was about the U.S. Census, not about party politics, but it is clear that it applies to party preference polls. Langer notes: "The paper was written by Josh Pasek, now an assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan, and his Ph.D. adviser, Prof. Jon Krosnick, of Stanford University."

He goes on to point out that ABC News does not accept online data as valid:

"We ruled out reporting opt-in online panels at ABC News more than a decade ago. In 2008 David Yeager, then another student of Krosnick’s, along with Krosnick and several of their colleagues, wrote a groundbreaking paper questioning the accuracy of opt-in online data. And a year ago the American Association for Public Opinion Research issued a report saying such panels should not be used to represent population values, should not be described as representative and should not claim a margin of sampling error."

Online surveys are now routinely used for market research "because it’s cheap and fast. But it’s also problematic, because the nature of opt-in panels violates the most basic principles of probability sampling."

All polling needs to be treated cautiously and skeptically but it is clear from this Langer's commentary and the new research that we should view telephone polling as more trustworthy than the online variety.

Contradictory Polls

2011-03-26T16:54:00.001-04:00

I don't recall an election where the early polling sent such contradictory messages. The media mindset is on a possible Tory majority and the coalition "issue", but the polls offer clashing signals about just what is going on.

Here are average seat projections from two different sets of polls.

	C.P.C.	Liberal	NDP	Green	Bloc	Other	Total
Nanos/Ekos/Decima	138	83	34	0	52	1	308
Ipsos/Leger/Reid	158	66	29	0	54	1	308

The difference reflects varying Liberal levels of support. Note also that although a Conservative majority is anticipated by the most recent Ipsos/Leger/Reid surveys, it is just barely over the minimum 154 mark. This continues to lead TC to believe that a Conservative majority remains unlikely.

As a measure of how difficult it will be look at the vote shares from 2008 from outside Quebec.

	C.P.C.	Liberal	NDP	Green	Bloc	Other	Total
Canada excluding Quebec	43.3	27.1	20.3	7.9	0.0	1.3	100.0

We tend to forget the Conservatives did extraordinarily well in 2008. Not only do they have to repeat that success, but they also have to exceed it.

May Election

2011-03-22T20:19:00.000-04:00

There will be a May election, just as so desired by the Harper government. You don't buy time during the Super Bowl for ads unless you have something like this in mind. I have been somewhat distressed although not completely surprised at the inability of the media to discern this obvious fact.

I expect a Harper government once the results are in but not a majority. More on polls and projections at a later date, and I hope, more blogging between now and May 2 or 9.

The recent poll shift

2011-02-21T17:27:00.000-05:00

The recent Conservative ad blitz has shifted the polls in the direction of the Harper Conservatives. However, TC does not perceive this success as foreshadowing a Conservative majority. With all their wealth the Conservatives have had the paid media airwaves to themselves and have reportedly been spending a great deal of money. It moved the polls a few points in their direction. However, the opposition parties, while quiet today, will all be on the air with paid media during the next campaign.

A recent American comparison recommends itself. Meg Whitman, the former CEO and founder of EBay, was defeated in her effort in 2010 to be elected Governor of California despite spending a record $177 million on her campaign, compared to the $36 million spent by her Democratic opponent Jerry Brown. Despite being outspent overall Brown matched Whitman's spending on television advertising at the end of the campaign. Her loss was about much more than just money, but the point stands that Conservative television advertising will be much more evenly matched by their opponents during and especially towards the end of the impending Canadian campaign. And other factors will be important as well.

I have averaged three recent polls and came up with a seat estimate of C - 152, L - 78, NDP - 26, BQ - 51 and Other -1. This suggests to me that the opposition parties are likely too far behind for any of them to pull ahead of the Conservatives, but it also doesn't look like we should be anticipating a Conservative majority. We also shouldn't forget that strange and dramatic shifts have happened in the middle of previous campaigns (it is what makes them fun to watch): a Liberal lead in 1984 turned into a PC landslide; Turner almost caught Mulroney in 1988 before falling back; David Peterson started the 1990 campaign way ahead then proceeded to lose to the NDP led by Bob Rae; Jean Chrétien was labeled "yesterday's man" before proceeding to three consecutive majorities. And there have been many other examples of unexpected upsets.

Polls and Elections in Ontario and Manitoba

2011-02-09T08:15:00.000-05:00

In a first past the post system the party leading in the polls may not be the one that winds up with the most seats.

There are provincial elections due in both provinces in early October this year, on Oct. 6 in Ontario and Oct. 4 in Manitoba. Recent polls suggest both races will be tight but, interpreted at face value, the polls potentially provide misleading guidance about what to expect. In both provinces the Progressive Conservatives currently hold narrow leads in the polls, but in neither province would it be enough to win the most seats.

In Manitoba a December 20, 2010 Probe Research poll gave the opposition PCs are four point lead 42-38 overall but they trail by ten points in the City of Winnipeg. The PCs "waste" thousands of votes in the first past the post system in rural constituencies. A much more efficiently distributed NDP vote leaves the outcome in Manitoba very much in doubt. My seat projection model translates the Probe poll into a narrow NDP victory in terms of seats: NDP - 29, PC - 26, L - 2. However, there would be several close outcomes, enough to leave the final outcome in doubt. The Manitoba PCs have consistently trailed in the City of Winnipeg and that is their greatest obstacle to success. If trends continue they are likely going to be still counting votes in Manitoba when the polls open in Ontario 36 hours later.

A similar scenario applies in in Ontario where there is the distinct possibility that the election will produce a minority government. A recent Ipsos poll puts the McGuinty Liberals just three points behind the opposition PCs who have 38% to the Liberals' 35% with the NDP at 17% and the Greens at 9%. However, TC's model suggests this would produce a virtual dead heat with the Liberals having 45 seats to the PCs' 44 with the NDP at 18, and with razor thin margins in several seats. Clearly, both races are too close to call and it is not obvious from current polls which party will have the most seats when the votes are counted..

The coming federal election

2011-01-30T09:53:00.000-05:00

It now appears certain that we will have a federal election this spring, likely in May. The Liberals have clearly signaled their intention to vote against the budget, and the Bloc has just set terms for its support the Tories won't be able swallow. The NDP, reflecting Jack Layton's predisposition, makes conciliatory gestures, but remains too distant from the Conservatives ideologically for a deal to be possible.

One timing consideration that no one seems to have noticed is the Supreme Court hearings on the federal proposal for a national securities regulator. They are scheduled to be held on April 13 and 14 in Ottawa. Not likely to be a big issue overall, but it is a sensitive matter in Quebec, so I am guessing that the election will not fall close to those dates. Mid-May looks like a good bet. Another option would be an early date.

The polls have been static for a long time. An election with voting statistics that replicated them would return the Conservatives to office with a minority administration with fewer seats than before, the Liberals would gain as many as ten seats while the NDP, at best, would hang on to what they have. The Bloc may pick up a few. However, preferences expressed by the public in surveys are weak and subject to change. The obstacles to a Conservative majority are formidable and haven't changed.

The Liberals right now look to be in better shape entering the electoral fray than they were under Stéphane Dion in 2008. Michael Ignatieff does not have much in the way of political skills but they are arguably superior to Dion's. The party's infrastructure, supporting personnel and policy positioning do look stronger than 2008.

If the campaign were to be framed around corporate tax cuts, it could help offset the negative public assessment of Ignatieff. A poll out this week suggests just 21% of Canadians accept the government's position that such tax cuts are effective at creating jobs, while a 52% majority quite rightly reject this notion. And other pollsters agree that corporate tax cuts are unpopular. In the past this has been an NDP issue, but the Liberals could easily steal it. Voters are most likely to be pragmatic, and uninterested in historical positioning, if the issue takes off as the most important of the campaign.

It is the Liberals who have put out ads attacking the cuts:

Another issue that could hurt the government is the F-35 fighter purchase. Context matters here. The government wants to engage in deficit fighting. It isn't remembered well now, but the military took a big hit in Paul Martin's mid-nineties deficit fighting precisely because military spending has a very low priority with voters. A campaign that emphasized these two issues could work well for the Liberals.

Both issues ought to be strengths for the NDP but the Liberals have demonstrated great effectiveness over the years in stealing the social democrats' themes. The NDP has generally been trending at or slightly below their 2008 showing despite having a leader who is far more popular and respected than Mr. Ignatieff. Although currently stuck at long-term support levels, the party does have growth potential. How many realize the NDP is Canada's most popular second choice including in Quebec?(page 12). That potential, however, will remain unrealized unless the NDP finds some way to break through its traditional barriers.

The Liberals do remain in a perilous, fragile position. TC wrote a series on the long-term Liberal decline last year and recently attended a political science seminar where one knowledgeable participant offered a similar analysis. One threat to the Liberal Party comes from Conservative efforts to win over traditionally Liberal immigrant voters. Although the media overstates the Conservatives' actual success to date, holding power means the Conservatives can bestow local favours, a critical factor in the parish pump politics of ethnic voting. This is reinforced by the perception they will continue to govern. The catch for the Conservatives, as it was in the eighties with respect to wooing Quebec, is that they continue to be the repository for anti-immigrant sentiment in Canada. You can't represent both ends of a spectrum for long.

One factor that ought to give the Conservatives pause is what the atmospherics in Ottawa would be like if they come back with fewer seats, even if the losses are modest. In that circumstance they would look like a government beginning to decay, and deep rot would soon set in.

Tory Majority: the Ottawa Spin Machine

2010-12-20T16:37:00.000-05:00

The Ottawa scribes are at it again. Jane Taber is getting spun round the block by a "senior Tory MP" in her latest missive, titled Tories target 190 ridngs. Let us examine just this one quote:

Some of their target ridings are obvious – the three seats in Newfoundland and Labrador, for example, that were held prior to the last election and not just the Avalon seat they lost as a direct result of Danny Williams’s Anybody-But-Conservatives campaign. Now that the popular premier has stepped down, the Conservatives think they can win them back.

They think they can win "them" back. One of the three is St. John's East. Here is the result from the last election.

Parl	Date	Candidate	Occupation	Votes	Votes (%)	Party	Elected
40	2008/10/14	HARRIS, Jack	lawyer	30,881	74.55%	N.D.P.
		NOEL, Walter	economist	5,211	12.58%	Lib
		WESTCOTT, Craig	journalist - self-employed	3,836	9.26%	C
		TOBIN, Shannon John	student - entrepreneur	578	1.40%	PC Party
		STORY, Howard	businessman	570	1.38%	G.P.
		COULTAS, Les	retail manager	347	0.84%	NLFP

Jack Harris, the successful NDP candidate, was a longtime provincial member and former party leader who, it is clear from these numbers, is overwhelmingly popular in his riding. Danny Williams or not, this one won't change. This is but one example of the Tory spin that went unexamined critically by the Globe.

More broadly, the problem for the Conservatives is the same as before. In 2008 with nearly a 12 point lead and a very weak Liberal leader, they could not win a majority. They need about 62% of the seats outside Quebec, a little more than the Mulroney 1988 overall majority or Trudeau's in 1968. Possible perhaps, but highly unlikely. TC has discussed this issue before in greater detail here. The underlying math hasn't changed. Blogger Éric Grenier of threehundredeight.blogspot.com writing recently in the Globe, makes essentially the same argument.

Why growing inequality matters

2010-12-15T20:48:00.000-05:00

I have long believed that the growing inequality in global, North American and Canadian society is immensely destructive both socially and economically. The Globe published an article on the growing economic/geographical divide in Toronto. It captures a part of the problem:

Toronto is becoming a city of stark economic extremes as its middle class is hollowed out and replaced by a bipolar city of the rich and poor – one whose lines are drawn neighbourhood by neighbourhood.

The issue in Toronto is not one of urban form or policy. It is more fundamental, a fact that David Hulchanski, the author of the study highlighted in the Globe, summarized during an online chat on the Globe website:

Comment From Robert: what is the reason for increase in disparity?
David Hulchanski: The reason: From 1945 to 1985 all types of evidence indicate we were becoming a slightly more equal society. After 1985 the top ten percent have taken an ever greater share of income. Public policies and changing labour markets left people with either very high paid jobs or very low paid jobs.

Addressing this issue is urgent. Income disparities are not just a cause of urban malaise. As this post from Kevin Drum makes clear, inequality is at the root of the current economic crisis and stagnation.

"Inequality, Leverage and Crises," an IMF paper written by Michael Kumhof and Romain Rancière, is full of long equations populated by many Greek letters. I won't even pretend that I can evaluate it. However, their introduction is pretty easy to understand: they've constructed a simple model for financial crises that essentially proposes the following narrative: (a) growing inequality produces less money for the middle class and more money for the rich, (b) the rich loan much of this money back to the middle class so they can continue to improve their living standards even with stagnant incomes, (c) the financial sector balloons to mediate all this, and (d) the system eventually collapses since, after all, this kind of thing can't last forever.

It certainly cannot. It is an issue that ought to be addressed by all those on the centre and left. Achieving greater equality would be complex, and is not so much about taxes as it is about paying those who earn less, more, and paying less to those who earn more. It is in the interest of all of us including the well-off.

Some inconvenient truth (for Mr. Ford) about Toronto governance

2010-12-13T20:30:00.000-05:00

Sometimes the truth about something clashes with ironically with conventional wisdom. Kudos to John Lorinc for this about Toronto city hall:

When council convenes this week to debate the new regime’s signature moves, I’m guessing Mayor Rob Ford won’t be rising to offer praise to former budget chief Shelley Carroll, former TTC chair Adam Giambrone and the senior bureaucrats who were allegedly complicit in the fiscal boondoggle that was the Miller era. He should, of course, because this crowd -- contrary to much of what we heard during the election -- has made it possible for Toronto’s Waste Collector in Chief to deliver a property tax freeze for which he has no electoral mandate.

Read the rest here.

By-election post-mortem

2010-11-30T20:15:00.001-05:00

The result in Winnipeg North was a surprise. TC has no explanation to offer. 308.com did forecasts of the by-elections but found this constituency inexplicable:

Obviously, the projection here was a complete and utter failure. The NDP's Kevin Chief and the Conservatives' Julie Javier under-performed, while Lamoureux surpassed all expectations. Even had I taken into account the provincial numbers here, I still wouldn't have had Lamoureux over 25%. His drawing power was completely unpredictable, and all I can really say about it is that any projection which would have given this result would not have been based on anything but a gut feeling.

I did a little number crunching on the results but could see no discernible pattern so my previous admonition stands: one should not read too much into the results. In this respect one voice stood out from the usual media claptrap. Dan Lett in the Winnipeg Free Press wrote:

What do all these results, and the results of Monday night's byelections, tell us? We in the media are trained to detect and report the slightest change in fortune or momentum. But the results in these most recent byelections do not change the fact that this is a country in political gridlock.

The results did not tell us, for example, if Ignatieff and Harper have job security as leaders of their parties. Both head parties that are growing impatient about their lack of progress. Or if either the Liberals or Conservatives are willing to force an election next spring. Did voters punish the NDP in Winnipeg North and the Liberals in Vaughn? Does Lamoureux's victory in Winnipeg North redeem Ignatieff?

Not really. The Tories captured the last in a series of right-leaning suburban seats in Ontario. And it was the indefatigable Lamoureux, not the Liberal Machine, that triumphed in Winnipeg North. You can search for greater meaning in these results -- and Lord knows, we in the media will keep looking -- but it's not really there.

Well said.

The By-elections

2010-11-29T11:18:00.001-05:00

There are three by-elections today, in Vaughn, Winnipeg North and Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette.

The media is reading way too much into them. Let me give a couple of examples. From the CBC web site:

Liberal insiders concede if Vaughan falls, it bodes ill for other Toronto MPs who hung on by fewer than 3,000 votes last time, including Ken Dryden...

The Winnipeg Free Press on Winnipeg North:

It's a sought-after seat that could foreshadow who will come out on top in the next federal election. Winnipeg North voters will cast their ballots today in a hotly contested byelection between NDP candidate Kevin Chief, former Liberal MLA Kevin Lamoureux and Tory candidate Julie Javier.

The only one that is close is the Vaughn riding, an affluent, Italian, heavily Catholic northern suburb of Toronto that has been Liberal federally since 1993 but voted twice for the Mike Harris Conservatives provincially. Meaning it is no big deal if the federal Tories win it now.

Judging from this story in the Toronto Star the other day, if I were a Stephen Harper Conservative, I would be rooting for the Liberal candidate. Julian Fantino looks like he is going to make quite an inept politician.

Meeting Conservative Julian Fantino last month on the hustings for the upcoming Vaughan by-election didn't go as Liberal Tony Genco expected. He'd imagined pleasantries between competing candidates.

Not quite.

“I gave him my best wishes,” Genco told the Star, “and he told me some of my signs were too close to his campaign headquarters so he'd had his people take them down.”

“I was totally surprised,” said Genco. “I asked him if he would please give them back — they're expensive, you know — but he didn't respond.”

Genco apparently never did get his signs back — an example, according to his critics, of the arrogance of a former top cop who's used to doing what he pleases.

“My volunteers followed all the rules in putting our signs up on public property and they weren't placed improperly,” says Genco, 43, of the three or four signs apparently in Fantino's sightline on Major Mackenzie Dr.

Asked about Genco's allegations, a Fantino spokesperson emailed a response: “(Liberal Leader Michael) Ignatieff's candidate may want to talk about signs; I'm talking about what actually matters to families in our community.”

Note that the email did not deny the allegation, in effect conceding that it was true. If Fantino is stupid enough to say things like this now, he is likely to make many similar mistakes if elected. This kind of behaviour would be particularly disastrous if he was appointed to cabinet.

As for Winnipeg North, while the Liberals have a strong candidate who has had a successful run provincially in a riding that is about 25% of the federal riding, it is going to remain comfortably in the NDP column. The Liberals will, however, easily surpass their 2008 showing here when they finished third, so they will have something positive to spin from the results. If the Liberals lose Vaughn expect to hear a lot from them about the strong showing here.

A small lesson from history. In the autumn of 1978 Prime Minister Trudeau deferred a federal election call and instead fifteen by-elections were held on October 16. Some called it a mini-general election at the time. It was a low point in Liberal popularity and the outcome was a Liberal disaster. While the results did tell us the Trudeau government would lose the next election, at the time it appeared as if the outcome would be an unprecedented Liberal disaster on the order of a 1958. Instead, Joe Clark's PC's won a minority that lasted less than a year before giving way again to the Trudeau Liberals. Less well-remembered is that two of the constituencies that switched from Liberal to PC that night in October 1978, one in Winnipeg (St. Boniface) and one in Toronto (Parkdale), went back to the Liberals just six months later in the 1979 general election.
UPDATE: a friend pointed out that in addition to St. Boniface and Parkdale, Eglinton and Ottawa Centre also elected PCs in 1978 and Liberals in 1979.

By-elections in particular can be influenced by local circumstances and events as well as broader trends. One should be cautious in drawing overly broad conclusions from them.

Next Manitoba Election - the NDP's Opening Salvo

2010-11-15T18:26:00.000-05:00

It is about nine and a half months until the next Manitoba election campaign. This negative ad from the NDP directed at Tory Leader Hugh McFadyen suggests they are looking over their shoulder:

I blogged about recent Manitoba polls here noting:

... three polls have been released in recent weeks .... The opposition PCs were reported on September 21 by Angus Reid to have a 15 point province wide lead over the governing NDP 49% to 34% with the Liberals in third at 12%. It was preceded by a Viewpoints Research poll conducted Sept. 7-15th that had the NDP one point up on the PCs at 39% to 38% with the Liberals at 14%. This survey was followed by a Probe Research poll on October 7th that had the PCs at 42% and the NDP at 40% with the Liberals at 12%. Again we would have different election outcomes.

Despite the PC lead in the Probe Research poll, the concentration of PC support outside the City of Winnipeg and its weak performance inside would produce an NDP government in a new election - the PCs lead the NDP 53-32 in rural areas but trail the New Democrats 46-35 in the city. TC estimates that the Probe poll would produce a legislature with 32 New Democrats, 23 PCs and 2 Liberals; the Angus Reid poll would produce a PC government with just 30 seats (despite their large overall lead) to the New Democrats 25 and the Liberals 2.

It looks like the Manitoba NDP are more inclined to believe the Reid poll, or at least fear the worst.

Ford did not win the Toronto mayoraly election/ his opponents lost it

2010-11-11T09:05:00.001-05:00

Most accounts of Ford's victory in the Toronto mayor's race, like accounts of election victories generally, have focused on how he won it. Ford struck certain themes that helped him greatly. However, all the negatives thrown his way, the arrests for drunk driving and so on, also stuck firmly, and could have defeated him if he had faced a decent competitor. The story of the 2010 Toronto mayoralty race was as really about how weak Ford's opponents were. Joe Pantalone never rose to the level of being regarded as a serious candidate. Smitherman was the major opponent but his campaign was pathetic. Ford's victory in the end was at least as much about Smitherman's weaknesses as Ford's presumed strengths. It seems clear that if Miller had run again, he would have won.

Read the comments section of this post on Blog TO comparing Ford to Mel Lastman. Even Ford's supporters didn't like him much. An example:

I couldn't stand Lastman and I think Glenn Beck's existence runs contrary to natural selection, yet I'd still take Ford over almost any candidate out there (and I don't like Ford either).

The best account of the campaign overall was by John Lorinc in the Globe and Mail. Smitherman's campaign reminded me of the Liberal campaign of Lyn Macleod in the 1995 provincial election, completely unfocused and directionless, and premised upon winning easily.

I am not optimistic about the next four years of civic governance in Toronto. The one certain prediction we can make about Rob Ford is that being elected mayor will not change his essential character.

The U.S. Midterm Elections - Its the Economy Stupid

2010-11-02T19:46:00.000-04:00

What to expect tonight in the U.S. midterms, Republican gains for sure but just how much is quite uncertain. Polling in the era of the cell phone and internet has become uncertain. In any case 538 (now part of the New York Times) believes it will be about a 55 seat gain for the Republicans in the House of Representatives, enough to give them control, but believes the Republicans have just a 7 per cent chance of winning the Senate.

The determinant of all this is the economy, as Brendan Nyhan has argued all year. This post summarizes hie perspective well:

I'm bracing for an avalanche of nonsense tomorrow night about why Barack Obama is responsible for the expected Republican landslide. Here's a guide to what you should expect.

It's long been obvious that Obama's political standing would decline as a result of the poor economy and the passage of time. Similarly, substantial Democratic losses in the House were always likely given the large number of seats the party had to defend in a midterm election in which it controls the presidency. The continued weakness of the economy subsequently appears to have enhanced the Republican advantage, helping to produce tomorrow's pro-GOP wave.
Instead of focusing on these structural factors, journalists and other political figures have constructed a staggering number of ad hoc claims about messaging, tactics, etc. to "explain" what has happened to Obama and the Democrats:

-Obama's message is not populist, thematic, simple, and/or comprehensive enough;
-Obama failed to "connect" with voters (in part because he often uses a Teleprompter);
-Obama has an "empathy deficit";

Etc., etc.

He goes on to list many more examples of what we can we can expect to hear.

What matters going forward will be, as always, what happens to economic growth over the next two years.

Toronto's Mayoralty Race

2010-10-24T17:13:00.001-04:00

It is a close race. The momentum and zeitgeist would appear to favour Rob Ford. However, the race has effectively polarized into pro-Ford and anti-Ford camps to the extent that the many will abandon the left leaning candidate Joe Pantalone, and vote for big "L" Liberal George Smitherman.

The 2009 garbage strike is key to Ford's success in this campaign. It lasted a long time and caused considerable unhappiness at a time when the economic downturn was causing general stress. Add to that the resentments Ford has exploited with his complaints that there is some sort of "gravy train" at city hall. These sentiments, however much they are divorced from reality, are more easily exploited in difficult economic times.

If one looks at demographics in the polls, one key factor helps Ford - he is most strongly supported by those over 60. One the other hand the better educated and more affluent favour Smitherman. Polls do a terrible job of measuring and anticipating turnout. However, we know that the better educated and more affluent are more likely to vote, but so also do senior citizens.

If Ford does win, TC's view is that he would be a disastrously bad and unpopular mayor. Unfortunately, the city would be in for four years of real suffering as a consequence. More so than is generally anticipated even by anti-Ford voters. Ford looks much worse to TC, for example, than Mike Harris.

Obama's leadership skills

2010-10-24T16:43:00.000-04:00

Obama is taking a great deal of heat right now. It is unlikely that the Democrats will do well in the midterm elections because the economy in the U.S. remains in bad shape. Brendan Nyhan has argued persuasively that it is this structural factor that is the key determinant of the off year election. One should remember that Obama continues to have good leadership skills as he faces mounting criticism the result of current political circumstances. I certainly remember thinking Reagan was politically finished after the 1982 off-year elections.

A couple of weeks ago Fareed Zakaria interviewed Steven Rattner, the Wall Street executive who headed up the Auto Bailout and has just written a book about it. Zakaria started off by asking him what he thought of Obama as a CEO. From the show transcript:

ZAKARIA: What do you think of President Obama as a CEO? You -- you spent a lot of time in the private sector. Was he a good CEO?

RATTNER: I thought he was a terrific CEO. It was interesting, because people said, well, what does he know about being a CEO? He's never managed anything besides a Senate staff. Of course, he did run a campaign pretty well.

But the fact was he was a natural. I thought he was a natural.

I have been around, as you say, a lot of CEOs over the years. But he was -- he didn't dwell on things. He was willing to make decisions, but he didn't sort of rush through and say, well, I've got 10 minutes to make this decision. I'm going to make it.

There was one famous day when he adjourned a meeting until later in the day so he could have more time to reflect on the question whether to save Chrysler, which is one of our toughest -- probably our toughest decision -- his toughest decision.

And I thought he was thoughtful. He did his homework. He came to the meetings having read his briefing papers. I can't imagine when he started running for president he thought dealing with Chrysler was going to be something he was going to have to do, but he -- he was a good soldier and he -- he dug into it.

And so, no. I came away with a lot of respect for his CEO qualities.

The rest of the transcript is here (you have to scroll down).

When polls don't agree - Ontario and Manitoba

2010-10-16T09:20:00.002-04:00

One can usually gauge political trends relatively easily. Polls vary, but they don't tend to contradict one another dramatically, so one sits up and takes notice when this happens. There have been a couple of interesting recent examples involving Ontario politics and Manitoba politics, two provinces that will be holding elections a year from now within a week of each other.

An Ipsos-Reid poll released on August 21 received considerable attention because it had the Ontario PCs ahead - 36% to 35% for the McGuinty Liberals and 18% for the NDP. However, a one percent difference is really a tie given the inherent uncertainties of polling, the margin of error, etc. A poll released by Angus Reid on September 28, just five weeks later (too soon for any actual opinion shift to take place), suggested a very different outcome: an eleven point lead for the PCs, 41% to the Liberals 29% and 22% for the NDP. The difference matters even more in terms of seats. TC's forecast model says the Ipsos poll would produce a Liberal minority government of 51 seats, the Angus Reid poll a large PC majority. They are so different that one can say with confidence that one of these polls is wrong. With no immediate election, however, we will never know which one it is.

Perhaps we might get some clue as to what to believe from Manitoba. There, three polls have been released in recent weeks and a similar pattern emerges. The opposition PCs were reported on September 21 by Angus Reid to have a 15 point province wide lead over the governing NDP 49% to 34% with the Liberals in third at 12%. It was preceded by a Viewpoints Research poll conducted Sept. 7-15th that had the NDP one point up on the PCs at 39% to 38% with the Liberals at 14%. This survey was followed by a Probe Research poll on October 7th that had the PCs at 42% and the NDP at 40% with the Liberals at 12%. Again we would have different election outcomes.

Despite the PC lead in the Probe Research poll, the concentration of PC support outside the City of Winnipeg and its weak performance inside would produce an NDP government in a new election - the PCs lead the NDP 53-32 in rural areas but trail the New Democrats 46-35 in the city. TC estimates that the Probe poll would produce a legislature with 32 New Democrats, 23 PCs and 2 Liberals; the Angus Reid poll would produce a PC government with just 30 seats (despite their large overall lead) to the New Democrats 25 and the Liberals 2.

A key difference between the surveys is that Angus Reid does online polling while the others use traditional telephone methods. Online surveys are relatively new methodology. TC thinks they need to be seen as experimental. Reid uses large panels (they describe some of their methods here) recruited at least in part through internet ads (such as this). I have heard that their panel is about 100,000 in Canada. However, it is not clear that this gives them the truly representative sample they need to properly capture public opinion. And one wonders how large their Manitoba panel can be.

Angus Reid (or Vision Critical as it is named on its web site) has been close on some election outcomes, including in 2008 in Canada, but they have also had some bad results. Earlier this year they managed to get the order of finish wrong in the UK general election. Reid's final UK poll results are here and the final election results here. But what explains the apparent Tory tilt in the Manitoba and Ontario polls and the disagreement with traditional pollsters? While the Manitoba and Ontario numbers are suggestive, the limited poll set here can't really tell us anything conclusive.

We know well the methods of the telephone polls but what of the online polls? Their methods remain relatively opaque, and they still haven't established a reputation for accuracy and reliability. While Vision Critical is not included in his assessment, Nate Silver rated online pollster Zogby the least accurate polling company in a review of the accuracy of dozens of US firms. Éric Grenier of the blog threehundredeight.com estimates the "house effects" (or partisan tilt to put it another way) of polls. His estimate (top poll in table) suggests Angus Reid's polls are favourable to both the Conservatives and the NDP.

TC puts more stock in polls conducted using the telephone and remains skeptical of online polling. I would therefore see the overall races in Ontario and Manitoba as close and still competitive. Nevertheless, the NDP in Manitoba will be looking for a fourth mandate (with a new leader), and the Ontario government a third. Both situations imply a change in government even if it is not yet clearly evident in the polling.

Why it is so difficult for Harper to win a majority

2010-10-10T12:25:00.003-04:00

A column in yesterday's Star by Jim Travers renews the endless Ottawa speculation about a Harper majority and concludes that Harper "is closer than it appears to the majority he covets." He quotes pollster Nick Nanos as saying:

Conservatives... are both efficient in converting votes into seats and unusually skilled at "repelling people from voting for others".

TC has discussed this issue before but it is worth reviewing again. The largest obstacle to any party winning a majority under our current party system is that the Bloc Québecois controls between 40 and 50 seats in Quebec. A majority must come from the seats that remain. If we assume the Conservatives can win at least 10 seats in Quebec (although most recent polls suggest it will be a few less) then the party must win 145 of the 233 seats outside Quebec to get a bare majority of 155 seats. That 145 number is 62.2% of all non-Quebec seats. (It would be a little less if the Conservatives could win additional seats in Quebec.)

One can assess the likelihood of this by comparing it to the era prior to the advent of the Bloc when parties did not face the same obstacle to a majority. I am ignoring the post 1993 period because as TC wrote before:

Chrétien's majorities were flukes in the sense that they depended on an even split between Reform/Alliance and PCs in Ontario and very low NDP numbers, which themselves were a product of a temporary decade-long depressed support level caused both by unpopular provincial governments (Harcourt/Clark in BC and Bob Rae in Ontario) and unusually weak federal leadership, principally Audrey McLaughlin. The NDP did begin to revive a bit under Alexa McDonough and gained new ground in Atlantic Canada but remained very weak in Ontario.

If we ask which majority governments won 62% or more of the seats in the pre-1993 period of Canadian history but after 1921 when third and fourth parties began to emerge, we find the PC majorities of Mulroney in 1984 and Diefenbaker in 1958 as well as the Liberal victories of St. Laurent in 1949 and 1953, and Mackenzie King in 1935 and 1940 (King's wins, however, were strongly affected by the depression and the war). There weren't that many, they tended to be early wins (Mulroney in '84 and Dief in '58) and there have been just two since 1958. Trudeau was close in 1968 but he won just 58.3% of the seats.

As for Nanos two points: first, the Conservatives are not particularly efficient at converting votes into seats. For example, look at all the wasted votes they accumulate in their huge majorities in Alberta. Second, with respect to vote suppression, one should note that in the last election turnout was 58.8%, down from the previous three elections. It appeared to TC that it was particularly concentrated among Liberal voters who lacked confidence in Stéphane Dion. How much greater vote suppression can one realistically expect when over 40% of Canadians already don't show up at the polls?

What Travers and Nanos are asking us to believe (without reviewing the math outlined above) is that a government that has been around for six years can win more than 62% of the seats realistically available to it. It is possible in the sense that anything is, but it is also not very likely.

Trends still favour New Brunswick PCs

2010-09-26T18:14:00.000-04:00

The race in NB tightened up and the final polls are based on surveys more than a week old. There is a good summary of all the details over at 308.com. It nevertheless looks like the PCs will wind up on top. The excellent blog Politics from a New Brunswick Perspective foresees a tight race and a narrow PC victory.

The politics of gun control

2010-09-22T20:13:00.004-04:00

The gun registry lives on.

While one can understand the intense media interest in this, the commentary of the pundit class does drive one to distraction. There are two particularly idiotic examples here and her e (both of which ask us to accept that despite the Conservatives being poised to win the vote for many months, losing actually helps them). The clip of Harper on tonight's news says otherwise.

The whole issue matters much less electorally than meets the eye. To accept that it matters, one must believe there are a large number of voters in the constituencies of the NDP and Liberal members who switched their vote tonight to support the registry who, a), did not vote Conservative last time, but b), feel so passionately about this issue that they will hold that concern all the way to the next election, ignore all the other issues that come along, and support the Conservatives due to this consideration either primarily or alone. Was this a big vote determining issue in 2006 in these places or 2008? TC does not think so. In any case most of the rural seats inclined to go Conservative are already safely in that party's camp.

The Liberals recognized the second time around the issue would not hurt them and could give them an advantage by being unified while the NDP was divided, all the while driving soft urban small 'l' liberal votes their way. The wonderful Pundit's Guide has a detailed listing of the Liberal and NDP members who voted last time with the Conservatives to kill the gun registry. If you look closely at the results in just these constituencies, there are no more than three or four that could be classified as both rural and holding real potential as Conservative gains in a new election. The most obvious candidates are the NDP held ridings of Western Arctic (3.8% lead over the Cs) and Skeena (13.8%) and, among the Liberals, Malpeque (4.9%) and Yukon (13%).

There are a few other contests where the Conservatives might think about a challenge but in most constituencies, the principal challenger to the NDP is the Liberal candidate and vice-versa, or, as in the case of Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca and Welland the ridings are not rural (and presumably therefore not obsessed with gun control) - Esquimalt has a rural component but is mostly suburban Victoria while Welland is mainly industrial and urban.

In the end the vote was a victory for Jack Layton (who I suspect had at least one more vote in reserve). The potential for a significant setback for the NDP was there, so he should be wiping his brow. The Liberals might well have been able to use the gun registry vote as a tactical voting metaphor in urban areas in the next election. In this case the difference between winning and losing was crucial. In addition, losing is not good for the government (except possibly in fund raising if one accepts their claims) - there is always at least a brief negative honeymoon associated with a strategic defeat in a contest that they had expected to win.

Notwithstanding all the ballyhoo, TC does not expect this to be an issue or key voting consideration in the next federal election.

U.S. Midterms - What are the Democrats Prospects?

2010-09-19T11:15:00.005-04:00

Most accounts of the Democrats prospects suggest a bleak midterm election result. Until far right Christine O'Donnell (who once claimed to have dabbled in witchcraft) won the Republican nomination in Delaware over a moderate, the conventional wisdom was increasingly suggesting the Republicans could win both the House and the Senate.

I have followed all this but noted months ago that surveys reported again and again that the Republicans were more disliked than the Democrats. The assumption has been that the declining economy and slumping income meant that this would be a very bad year for Democrats. However, never before in a situation like this has the opposition party been so disliked.

Now there is an intriguing new analysis from Barry Pump, a grad student in political science at the University of Washington, that suggests we should indeed pay close attention to the survey evidence on the unpopularity of the Republican brand.

The argument is simple:

I’ve been looking at the low Republican favorability rating for a long time and always suggesting to friends who ask me about it that it’s more important than we think. People don’t vote for people they hate. But they may hold their nose and vote for people they dislike less.

And from a second post:

....my theoretical argument is that people don’t vote for parties they hate. They vote for the party they dislike the least relative to the other party. The leading counter argument, and the one that has pretty much dominated the narrative is different. That argument goes: because the economy is terrible, people will vote for the opposition party regardless of how much they dislike them. In other words, it’ll be a referendum election on the economy, and the economy stinks so Democrats will lose a bunch of seats, probably even the majority in the House.

In order to predict how well parties should perform in the upcoming election analysts typically use polls on the generic Democrat or Republican ballot question. But Pump believes that more attention should be paid to the net favourability polls which report that the Republican Party is far more disliked than the Democratic Party. Look at the bars on the far right of this graphic (Republicans are red) for the most recent party standings on this:

Mr. Pump compared the predictive value in past elections of the favourability surveys with the generic ballot. He acknowledges that there are data limitations on the analysis but concludes:

So what can we take away from this little discussion?

First, we’ve never been in a situation until now — as far as we have data to show it — where both parties were disliked but one party was disliked far more than another. We’ve also never been in a situation where the difference between the favorability rankings of the two parties was as great as it is now. (That’s from the first graph.)

Second, we’ve yet to be in a situation until now — as far as we have data to show it — where the favorability rankings of the two parties were so discordant with the generic ballot.

Third, given this new territory and the uncertainty of estimates made so far away from election day, analysts don’t know as much as we’d like about where things stand in US politics.

Fourth, there appears to be a puzzle about voter decision making embedded in all of this: under what conditions will voters choose a party they profoundly dislike over the party they merely dislike? And is a dismal economy one of those conditions?

And fifth, I’m inclined to think that while Democrats will lose many seats on Election Day, those losses will be tempered by the fact that the Republican Party “brand” has been deeply tarnished over the last six years and many voters don’t think the party is ready to govern again.

New Brunswick Election - Conservatives likely to win

2010-09-15T20:57:00.000-04:00

Both the blog ThreeHundredEight and Politics from a New Brunswick Perspective have reacted to the latest polling from New Brunswick that shows the Conservatives surging to a 12 point lead to suggest that the province is heading for a Conservative government. TC agrees that this is the point at which the campaign is taking on a clear direction and the outcome really isn't now in doubt. Premier Shawn Graham is headed for defeat.

New Brunswick Election - September 27, 2010

2010-08-28T18:18:00.000-04:00

The New Brunswick election got underway this week. The Liberals under Premier Shawn Graham have a narrow lead of five points over the PCs. However, the same Corporate Research Associates poll that gives the Liberals a 41-36 edge over the PCs makes it clear that there is a substantial amount of dissatisfaction in the province.

One factor in this race that may be getting discounted too greatly by the media is the NDP. The party appears likely to perform much more strongly than in the past. The NDP has 16% in the poll cited above with the Greens at 6%. TC estimates that the current spread in seats would be L - 34, PC - 20 and NDP - 1. However, TC has seen some private polling that suggests that NDP could do much better. As it is 16% represents an increase of 10 points since 2006. This is going to be an interesting, competitive race that could result in a change of government, a minority administration or both.

This blog site is a good way to follow the election.

Ontario Liberals trail Conservatives in new poll

2010-08-21T13:29:00.000-04:00

The National Post has a new Ipsos-Reid poll today, advertised as the first to show the McGuinty government behind the Conservatives. However, this latter point is a bit of pollster ego. The first Ipsos poll to show the Liberals behind it may be. However, an Environics poll released last October actually put the PCs 5 points ahead at that time, so the evidence of political trouble for the Liberals has been around for some time now.

The Ipsos-Reid poll has the PCs at 36, the Liberals at 35 with the NDP at 18 and the Greens at 11. TC calculates that this would produce a Liberal minority government. The seat distribution would be:

Liberals - 51
PCs - 38
NDP - 18.

She isn't all that well known now but it might be worthwhile for people in Ontario to find out more about Andrea Horvath. In a little more than a year she may be playing an important role in their lives.

Harper's Decline

2010-08-15T10:23:00.000-04:00

As recently as the end of May some, but not all, polling numbers suggested an election could produce a result leaving the governing Conservatives with about as many seats as they won last time. That was before the G20 fake lake, the census fiasco, and Stockwell Day's imaginary crime wave, all compounded now by the Tamil ship, which one might easily guess has the party's base, the Reform type Conservative supporters, fuming. The decline has taken a substantial toll on Tory popularity.

Three polls are aggregated below and turned into seats. Here is the House of Commons an average of the Ekos, Harris-Decima and Vision Critical (Reid) polls produce:

	C.P.C.	Liberal	NDP	Green	Bloc	Other	Total
Poll	33.0	28.4	16.6	10.8	9.5	1.7	100
Seats	123	96	37	0	51	1	308

The Harper government has been considerably weakened by events this summer.

The Miserable Summer of Stephen Harper

2010-08-13T18:56:00.006-04:00

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. This column by Don Martin sums it up well as

"the summer where Harper lost his census, at least in terms of the once-mandatory long-form version, and put worried frowns on senior staff and even some ministers.

Harper's decision and its fib-laced justification has tarnished a once-capable minister so badly that Tony Clement would, if he had an ounce of self-respect, resign from cabinet.

Clement should've done what former industry minister Jim Prentice did when he was asked to consider ending the mandatory filing of the detailed census form several years ago.

He told the idea's proponents to shove it.

This is not a singular vote-changing issue, of course, but, when added to other odd moves, has redefined this pragmatic prime minister as prickly, ruthless and needlessly ideological.

The dramatic ouster of MP Helena Guergis from cabinet, caucus and any future Conservative candidate lineup appears excessively thuggish given there's been no supporting evidence of inappropriate behaviour.

The flaccid results from billions spent on G8-G20 summits featuring bogus infrastructure spending has hurt the Conservatives' competent management reputation.

The end to prison farms without a rehabilitative replacement seems ideologically petty.

And then Stockwell Day -- arguably one of the best performers in cabinet -- became a laughing-Stock after he linked federal prison expansion to unreported crimes which, by definition, leaves criminals unconvicted and free from locked-cell accommodation.

No wonder Conservatives can't wait for this summer to end. It's been a non-stop series of bad decisions complicated by worse communications to appease a hard-right support base with nowhere else to go.

While Michael Ignatieff's road-tested image enhancement and Jack Layton's return to active duty were bad news, Stephen Harper's biggest headaches were all self-induced."

The polls reflect a new reality. The Census in particular (read this about how badly they have handled the issue) and the other Conservative shenanigans have taken their toll. More on that later in the weekend.

The Benefits of Government Intervention in the Economy

2010-08-01T08:56:00.000-04:00

This NYT summary of a study by the economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi is clear:

In a new paper, the economists argue that without the Wall Street bailout, the bank stress tests, the emergency lending and asset purchases by the Federal Reserve, and the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus program, the nation’s gross domestic product would be about 6.5 percent lower this year.

As the Times asserts "the government’s sweeping interventions to prop up the economy since 2008 helped avert a second Depression."

Curiouser and Curiouser

2010-07-26T19:23:00.001-04:00

Methinks the Harperites may have jumped the shark on this census thing. Turns out Stephen Harper made extensive use of the long-form census for his 1991 Master's thesis. Hypocrisy, it turns out, has no time limits.

Tory TV

2010-07-25T09:10:00.028-04:00

Recent developments make it clear that the Sun media chain is becoming an entirely partisan affair, devoted to boosting the Conservative Party. TC regards this as largely a kind of vanity project, which will not change anything in the framework of Canadian politics. Sun media is already almost entirely small 'c' conservative so dropping Greg Weston and Eric Margolis as columnists is not going to make any real difference to that.

What might presumably matter would be the proposal for a Tory TV news channel. However, they have already been spurned by the CRTC for a top tier spot on the dial. And even getting one like CBC News NN and CTV News Network have won't matter much. As the blog Medium Close-up pointed out:

It is important to note that the existing news, talk and current affairs channels in Canada are not exactly catching on with the viewing public. CBC NN and CTV News Network have so few viewers that I suspect it would be cheaper to put their content on DVD and deliver it to the 25,000 or so folks who tune in. CP24 is one of a handful of stations that people watch but don’t listen to. Whenever I see the channel in offices, gyms, bars, the sound is turned off. It is a weather and time channel.

TC's view is that too much fuss has made about all this especially by many on the left. The best analysis of the whole business by far was this column by Jeffrey Simpson who said:

People in high dudgeon about its arrival should calm down. Sun TV won’t be watched by many people, if the audiences for the other all-news channels are any guide. Most of those who watch will be committed right-wingers looking, like most consumers of news and information, to have previously held opinions reaffirmed.

Sun TV isn’t going to make, break or even influence the shape of Canadian politics, whatever the ideological fervour of Kory Teneycke, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s former spokesman now in charge of assembling the Sun TV challenge.

I leave you, however, with this video satire from YouTuber fairandbalanced.ca (thx to Accidental Deliberations for this tip:

The Long Form Census Fiasco

2010-07-24T11:07:00.000-04:00

It is a truism of politics that governments defeat themselves. Typically death comes from the cumulative impact of a thousand cuts. The long form census issue is more like a gash. All the more remarkable is that the government's only defence, that the long form census is an invasion of privacy, is completely hypocritical, as Tom Walkom demonstrates well in this column:

Two things stand out about the great Canadian census controversy.

The first is that there is a controversy. Who could have predicted that the federal government’s decision to eliminate something as profoundly prosaic as the mandatory long-form census questionnaire would generate such fierce opposition?

The second is the shameless hypocrisy shown by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government.
Industry Minister Tony Clement says he’s axing the mandatory questionnaire because the state has no right to demand intrusive information, such as the number of bedrooms in a home.

Yet his is the same government that requires airlines to collect and hand over detailed personal information on everyone who flies – and then give much of it to a foreign state.

And who could have imagined an issue that would produce a backyard protest song based on an old Gary Lewis and Playboys hit:

Green Party Troubles

2010-07-24T10:45:00.000-04:00

For all her considerable communications skills, honed over the years as an environmental lobbyist, Elizabeth May is nonetheless an absolutely incompetent party leader. To be successful a leader must be much more than a charismatic presences on the tube. She must also serve as the party's CEO - inspiring the troops, ensuring the party is administered efficiently and keeping the inevitable factions at peace. May is as complete a failure at this aspect of the job as one can imagine. I think everyone should read this post on the party's troubles by Democratic Space blogger and former Green Party activist Greg Morrow. Its title says it all: The Green Party's Mess.

The Liberal Party in Decline/ Conclusion: Crisis and Opportunity

2010-07-06T18:51:00.002-04:00

See Part One of the Liberal Party in Decline here.

See Part Two of the Liberal Party in Decline here.

See Part Three of the Liberal Party in Decline here.

There is a random element of luck when it comes to party leadership. The NDP were fortunate to find Layton, but his rivals in that contest were much weaker. In 2006 all the Liberal contenders had significant drawbacks. Many Liberals now think Bob Rae would be their best option; he does have the strongest skills as a performer among the potential alternatives in the Liberal caucus. However, the same Bob Rae demonstrated bad political judgment as Ontario Premier in the early nineties, not a good predictor of success in the 21st century.

The Liberals may find a way out of their current doldrums and a leadership change might serve as catalyst. However, the Liberal party is in crisis and it is possible that this will present an opportunity for the NDP to break out of the confines of third place. The Liberals need to identify their areas of strategic and demographic weakness and do something about them, but there is no evidence of that happening. So it is fair to describe the Liberal Party as being in a multi-dimensional crisis.

The current political context gives the appearance of being the opposite of the nineties, disunity on the centre left in contrast to Conservative rule. But the mere fact that this reversal has happened should make us cognizant of the possibility that things could reverse themselves again. Can the Conservatives make a transition to a new leader and maintain their unity when the time comes? What does the future hold for the Greens, who do not yet have a real foothold in Canadian politics despite rising environmental consciousness? My impression is that the unpopularity of some provincial regimes, for example in B.C., is causing damage to federal counterparts. In the particular case of B.C. it is to both Liberals and Conservatives because of the peculiar character of Gordon Campbell’s regime.

A merger between the NDP and the Liberals would probably be impossible to bring off in current circumstances. The two parties have long and independent histories that would almost certainly preclude it. It is also likely that a new left wing party would be created at the time of the merger. Perhaps many New Democrats would move to the Greens and make an effort to move it to the left.

When the British Labour Party split in the early eighties and four prominent Labourites left to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP), the new party recognized before the next election that to survive they had to develop an alliance with the Liberals who, as a struggling third party, were receptive. The new SDP-Liberal Alliance fought a couple of elections as a tactical alliance and then decided in 1987 to merge. However, as this brief history of the UK Liberal Democrats notes:

The winter of 1987-88 saw a lengthy period of tortuous negotiations between the two parties. The new party's constitution and even its name were the subjects of intense discussion, as was the question of whether an initial policy statement was needed and, if so, what it should say.

Those who see merger as an easy, almost mechanical path to ousting Harper I think are mistaken. In most cases governments defeat themselves, and the disaffected public turns to the most obvious alternative. It is currently the Liberal Party, but the NDP is not so far behind and has a broad enough support base that they might be able to make that leap from third to first.

While one can detect many signs of Liberal decline, it is not clear that the party’s fate is certain to become decline and fall. Politics is about possibilities; the Liberal crisis has created possibilities that could break open the status quo in Canadian politics. However, the complexities of politics, and the growing uncertainties facing the Canadian and world economies, make the future path of Canadian politics opaque.

The Liberal Party in Decline Part Three / the NDP Revives

2010-06-28T20:39:00.005-04:00

See Part One of the Liberal Party in Decline here.

See Part Two of the Liberal Party in Decline here.

Parallel to Liberal decline the NDP by the late nineties was beginning to achieve new growth. Alexa McDonough gave the NDP a major breakthrough in Atlantic Canada in 1997 when the party won eight seats in the region, strength retained federally to the present day. The NDP now holds four of thirty-two federal seats including representation in three of the four Atlantic Provinces, and was elected to government in Nova Scotia last year. By 2008 the NDP had increased its Commons representation from a low of 9 in 1993 to 37 with MPs from all provinces except PEI and Saskatchewan plus one from the Northwest Territories.

Jack Layton currently has the strongest approval rating of the three national party leaders and the NDP is potentially poised to win the next election if the Harper government falters between now and then. It appears at the moment that the NDP is one transformational moment or issue away from winning. It may not happen – Michael Ignatieff could still wind up as the next Prime Minister - but the potential is there for the first time. The NDP has occasionally had the illusion of winning prospects before (during World War II and the late eighties) but they had no strength east of Ontario at that time so they were forced to concentrate their hopes on Canada west of the Ottawa valley. Today the party is far more regionally balanced and actually has one seat each in Alberta and Quebec. Layton has been working at winning over Quebec with some success. You can see that in this poll (tables on page 12) more BQ voters (and therefore more Quebec voters) cite the NDP as a second choice than any other party including the Liberals.

Liberal weakness today stems from important internal failings as well as bad luck. Post-Trudeau the party was divided between factions led respectively by Chrétien and John Turner, whose 1980s faction would be taken over by Paul Martin in the nineties. The Martin government was then done in by a Chrétien-era scandal.

During the Chrétien period the Liberals did a poor job of recruiting future leaders, for example, in Ontario, where they won all but a few seats over the course of three elections. The Ontario-based leadership hopefuls from Ontario elected first in the eighties and nineties and early 21st century were Ken Dryden, Sheila Copps, John Manley, and Alan Rock, an unimpressive group. Despite the enormous size of the cohort of MPs that came into Parliament in 1988 and 1993, these hopefuls were all that the party could muster from Canada’s largest province. There is a substantial measure of chance in this. The NDP’s weakest leader, Audrey McLaughlin, came from its largest ever caucus. The entire field of 1989 NDP candidates (who were all weak) came from the same federal caucus. In the 21st century this phenomenon has been visited upon the Liberals.

The Liberal Party in Decline/ Part Two: the Chrétien Era

2010-06-25T17:43:00.008-04:00

There can be little doubt that Jean Chrétien is and was one of the most naturally gifted politicians in Canadian history. However, he alienated French Quebec in the early nineties during the constitutional wars and the party remains weak there to this day. In addition his string of victories in the nineties rested to a degree that remains unrecognized on a run of unbelievably good luck. Let’s go through it all in order:

First came the fracturing of Mulroney’s coalition. It was always a tenuous alliance at best. Free trade united PC MPs from Quebec and the rural west. When the question shifted to Quebec’s place in the federation during the debate on Meech Lake, the Progressive Conservative Party split into three: the original party, the new western-based Reform Party and Lucien Bouchard’s Bloc Québecois. It is easier to win an election when your opponents are so thoroughly divided.

Our national media from time to time gets the national political scene spectacularly wrong. Perhaps its low point came in the early nineties when, despite the obvious collapse and fracturing of the Mulroney coalition then underway, all they could see was that somehow Kim Campbell would rescue the sinking PC ship. At the time it meant completely disregarding and underestimating both Reform and the Bloc. So they wrote stories about how Jean Chrétien was yesterday’s man.

But there was a second key element of Liberal good luck: the party also benefited from developments on the left. The NDP took control of Ontario in 1990 and B.C. in 1991 at the provincial level, and promptly started to drive down the popularity of the NDP brand provincially and federally. That came on top of the NDP selecting the inexperienced and unqualified Audrey McLaughlin as its federal leader in 1989. Given that second choice for the majority of NDP voters is the Liberals, that meant the NDP electorate defected en masse to the Liberals in 1993. The NDP brand in Ontario in particular was deeply hurt by the early nineties recession. At the same time this meant the Ontario Liberal Party, being out of power provincially, could not do any damage to the federal Liberal brand during the early nineties downturn. Had David Peterson won in 1990 the story would have been quite different.

Third, the split on the right had a clear regional character that helped the Liberals in Ontario. West of the Ontario-Quebec border only one PC was elected between 1993 and 2000 whereas east of the Ontario-Quebec border there were no Reform or Alliance MPs during the same period. In Ontario the two parties split the right almost perfectly down the middle. Combined with NDP weakness, this gave the Liberal party a near sweep of seats in Ontario for three elections in a row. But Ontario politics had never before displayed such uniformity. It couldn’t last and didn’t. The Liberals’ apparent invincibility in Ontario ended in 2004 when the unified Conservatives won twenty-four seats, and the NDP, newly reinvigourated by Toronto-based leader Jack Layton, took 7 seats (the NDP now has 17). Those 31 seats were the difference between Paul Martin winning a minority and a majority that would have somewhat resembled the Chrétien victory in 1997.

Overall, Chrétien faced weak leaders such as McLauglin and Stockwell Day on the opposition benches. The political stage was set for the three consecutive majorities. Economic developments would prove to be equally favourable.

The Political Economy of Liberal Majority

The new government, elected in November 1993, inherited a large deficit. However, the slump of the early nineties ended in 1994 setting the stage for a decade of strong growth, an essential ingredient for political strength and critical to any deficit reduction strategy.

Whether the deficit was ever the economic burden that it was made out to be is debatable. Regardless, falling interest rates, the end of a credit crunch, lower oil prices, and increasing productivity from the tech boom, helped fuel a decade of rapid growth in the U.S. economy during the decade Joseph Stiglitz called the “roaring nineties”. Growth in the U.S. fueled demand for Canadian goods and services. A bonus was that Canada gained a competitive advantage via a weak the Canadian dollar, (which did not reach bottom until January 2002 when it traded at about 62 cents U.S.) Thus the 1995 deficit fighting budget was certain to be successful despite all the gloomy editorials and op-eds in the media that suggested otherwise. Within three years the Liberal government could take credit for cleaning up what had appeared to be an intractable financial mess.

By 1998 the Chrétien government could start both spending money and cutting taxes. Indeed they could have launched Paul Martin’s child care program much sooner, making it far less vulnerable to cancellation by the Harperites. Despite the good economic news, Liberal weakness continued in Quebec. During the nineties the Liberals did regain strength in western cities such as Winnipeg and Vancouver compared to the Trudeau era, but currently the party holds just 7 of 92 seats west of the Manitoba-Ontario border.

Next... The NDP Revives

Part One of the Liberal Party in Decline is here.

The Liberal Party in Decline/ Part One: The Early Years

2010-06-24T15:15:00.014-04:00

The last few years have not been kind to the federal Liberal Party. It experienced its second worst electoral result in percentage of seats won in 2008 (1958 was worse). The Liberals have managed to make two poor leadership choices in a row, and have been unable to pose an effective or coherent alternative to a very conservative albeit opportunistic Harper government. Now its partisans debate the merits of coalescing with the NDP, while some even suggest a merger.

The Liberals as recently as last autumn were all ready to bring down the government and force an election, an egregious error given that the public was at the time extremely hostile to the idea of having an election (my impression is that this remains largely true although there has been no recent polling on the issue). There has been periodic commentary by the pundit class that the Harper government is getting everything its own way without an election anyway and may be heading for a majority next time. This column from Paul Wells, which was clearly and explicitly influenced by Harper’s staff, is a typical example.

There is a tendency to assign most of the responsibility for Liberal weakness to its current leader. It is clear that Michael Ignatieff is inexperienced, has weak political skills and appears not to have good instincts. However, whatever its leadership issues, the Liberal Party’s decline is longstanding.

A quick question: if this is a low point for the party, what was its high point? The answer: the 1949 election, when the party won 50.1% of the vote and 73% of the seats. Its leader then was Louis St. Laurent and the party was strong in every region of the country including the prairies where it won 30 of 54 seats.

The Liberals performed almost as well in 1953, but the decline started in 1957 when John Diefenbaker expanded the Conservative universe. The new Progressive Conservative strength was on the prairies where PCs had won just 4 of 54 seats in 1949. In 1958, 1962 and 1963 the party won an average of 43 of 48 seats in the three prairie provinces. The Liberal party lost much of its base in there as a consequence of Diefenbaker, and has never figured out a way to recover the lost ground.

Out of office between 1957 and 1963 the new Liberal leader Lester Pearson made a critical strategic choice between two competing visions. His decision helped renew the Liberal party for next forty years. He rejected advice by Jack Pickersgill to position the party in the same way that had worked for St. Laurent. Let’s call it a centrist business Liberalism. Instead he took the advice of his young adviser Tom Kent (who had arrived in Canada from the U.K. in 1954), that the party should move to left by emphasizing equality and push for completion of the then partly built Canadian welfare state. Among Pearson's notable accomplishments were a comprehensive national pension plan (the CPP) and public health care.

This coincided with a renewal effort on the left as the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation gave way to the New Democratic Party. The NDP, with new ties to the labour movement, was stronger than the CCF, which had been rooted in agrarian socialism. However, the newly left-leaning Liberal Party would be largely successful in blocking its advance.

Trudeau Moves into 24 Sussex

The party made a similar choice in 1968 when it chose Pierre Trudeau over the St. Laurent era cabinet minister Robert Winters (who had returned to politics in 1965 after his 1957 defeat). After initial stumbles in his first term led to near defeat in 1972, Trudeau learned to combine governing and politics and went on overall to be a successful Liberal leader and prime minister. Unlike Ignatieff, Trudeau had been actively engaged in Quebec politics via the magazine Cité Libre and other activities, and actually entered politics with a background of political involvement. However, Trudeau’s constitutional ambitions would sow the seeds of Liberal weakness in the nineteen eighties.

The Liberals lost French Quebec in 1984. Brian Mulroney won a landslide majority that included most of French Quebec and held it through two elections before it came to be dominated by the BQ. The Liberal party did hold on to Anglo-Quebec and has maintained its strength in that community since. However, with the exception of the 2000 election when the unpopularity of the Lucien Bouchard’s PQ government in Quebec City (in particular, its program of municipal consolidation) weighed heavily on the fortunes of the BQ, the federal Liberal party has been more or less shut out of French Quebec. Like their loss on the prairies in 1957, the Liberals lost the support of one part of their coalition. This time the loss was much more important. Without French Quebec there would have been no Trudeau majorities.

Trudeau was genuinely popular in Quebec while in office. However, he excluded the Quebec government of René Levesque from the deal with the other nine provinces that resulted in the Constitution Act, 1982. He successfully defeated the PQ government of René Levesque in the negotiations. However, he laid the basis for a renewal of Quebec nationalism, which had suffered a devastating blow when the PQ lost their referendum on sovereignty-association in May 1980. Trudeau retired in 1984 without going to the electorate to defend his new constitution. In English Canada the early eighties economic downturn guaranteed Liberal defeat. It is an intriguing historical question, however, as to what might have been the outcome in Quebec where Liberal support carried over in the polls in that province into the middle of the 1984 campaign before collapsing, had Trudeau fought one more election. The Liberals recovered partial ground in French Quebec in the 2000 election but that proved to be fleeting.

It has actually been Jack Layton’s NDP that in recent years has done a much more effective job of courting support in French Quebec, and stands now to benefit the most if the BQ ever suffers a truly serious reverse. Despite the NDP’s historic weakness in that province, in the most recent Léger poll (see table on page 8) the party is tied with the Liberals among francophones. The Liberals failed in the eighties to recognize their profound weakness in French Quebec and its importance. Despite the fact that the onset of this decline dates from 1984, the Liberals have done little to address it.

Liberal weakness continued in western Canada during the Trudeau era despite a few early gains. The 1980 election reinforced this aspect of Liberal weakness when the party achieved its majority east of the Manitoba border, creating the illusion that weakness in that one region did not matter.

After 1984 one region became two. The nationalism long dominant in provincial politics in Quebec demonstrated its strength on the federal scene first for the Mulroney PCs and then for the Bloc Québecois. The federal Liberal Party somehow never recognized what was happening. A key reason for that failure stems from the assumption on the part of many Liberals that the selection of Jean Chrétien as leader in 1990 would lead to a rebound for the party in Quebec.

Next: The Chretien Era & Beyond

British election polls - telephone surveys outperform internet

2010-05-09T11:17:00.003-04:00

The British election appears to have provided a relatively comprehensive comparison of internet vs telephone polling. It is clear from the data provided in this post from Nate Silver's blog fivethirtyeight.com that traditional telephone surveys still provide a more reliable method of polling than the internet. I think the internet is going to be the way all polls are done some day but it is clear from what happened in the UK that there are unresolved issues with internet polling. The average total error for the telephone surveys was 5.2 and for the internet 11.4. Interestingly, the weakest performance among the major pollsters was the Canadian firm Angus Reid.

Silver's comment: "at this point, the challenges facing Internet pollsters are relatively formidable. Moreover, the bias of the Internet polls -- too many votes assigned to LibDems, who have younger and more-wired voters, and too few assigned to Labour, for whom the opposite is true -- ran in exactly the direction that you might expect."

Canadian firms are moving in this direction. We have had recent internet polls from Decima and Leger in addition to Angus Reid.

Another new methodology starting to gain credibility is IVR, which stands for Interactive Voice Recognition. Ekos in Canada started using this method in 2008 and had the second closest outcome on the 2008 federal election (the online Angus Reid survey was closest but stopped polling several days before the end of the campaign).

UK Election - What should we expect?

2010-05-05T21:28:00.003-04:00

It is going to be close, which is remarkable. Given how much the UK's economy was damaged by the financial crisis it is amazing to me that Brown and company are even this close. I built a model to forecast the British election.

With the final poll of polls entered from the Guardian this is the result we get:

	Cons.	Labour	Lib-Dem	Others
Poll	36.0	28.6	26.2	9.2
Seats	282	249	81	36

The seat total is 648 and others include the Northern Irish parties, Welsh and Scottish nationalists and a few others including one Green.

The conclusion: no majority and while the Conservatives do seem headed for first place Labour is still not completely out of it.

British vote counting is notoriously slow. It will be a long night.

New Manitoba Poll puts PCs in First Place

2010-03-22T18:52:00.005-04:00

A new poll in Manitoba suggests the Conservatives are now in first place: the numbers are PC - 44, NDP - 37, Liberal - 13 and Green - 3. While doubts about the poll have already been expressed elsewhere, what TC finds interesting is that the regional breakout of the poll has the PCs ahead in rural areas 55-28 over the NDP, while in the City of Winnipeg it is the New Democrats who remain well ahead of the PCs by eight points, 44-36.

Once I crunch the numbers using the regional data, I find that, despite a lead of 7 points overall, the Tories would actually lose the election by one seat. My projected seat numbers are:

NDP - 28
PC - 27
Liberal - 2

The Tories still have a big City of Winnipeg problem that TC thinks they must overcome to be assured of winning the next provincial election due in October, 2011.

Does the Canadian news media have a pro-Harper, pro-Tory tilt?

2010-03-07T11:22:00.000-05:00

Tom Flanagan thinks so.

This is from a live chat on the Globe web site on budget day, March 4. (Scroll down to the live blog area)

[Comment From GuestGuest: ]
Dear Mr. Flanagan Do you feel the Conservatives have to work extra hard to sell their proposals because of a more-than-usual hostile press?
Thursday March 4, 2010 1:23 Guest
1:28

Tom Flanagan:
Our situation in Canada is very different from the USA, where the national media are definitely liberal (except for Fox News). In Canada both the Sun chain and the CanWest papers tend to be sympathetic or at least open-minded toward the Conservatives. The Globe and Mail sometimes indulges in quixotic crusades against the government (e.g., prorogation) but is pretty fair overall. The Toronto Star is relentlessly hostile, but nobody ever said you could make friends with everyone. I would say that, compared to most countries with which I have any famiiarity, the Conservatives in Canada actually have friendly media to work with. It was different in the past, but that's the way it is now.

Cutting through the clutter...

2010-02-14T09:46:00.001-05:00

I have been struck recently by just how much silly clutter there is in media commentary and within the blogosphere. While I don't always agree with his "nothing to see here folks" approach I do think the analysis of political scientist Brendan Nyan whose blog I link to on the the right side of this site is well worth reading.
There has been much fuss about the popularity/unpopularity of Barack Obama and whether this is leading to an off-year election debacle.

As Nyan notes:

Back in January, I predicted a rash of process-based explanations of President Obama's declining political fortunes in 2010:
During the next eleven months, it will become increasingly obvious that Democrats face an unfavorable political environment and that President Obama's approval ratings are trending downward. Inside the Beltway, these outcomes will be interpreted as evidence that the Obama administration has made poor strategic choices or that the President isn't "connecting" with the American public. Hundreds of hours will be spent constructing elaborate narratives about how the character, personality, and tactics of the principals in the White House inevitably led them to their current predicament.
...Obama's staff certainly has made mistakes, but I doubt they are the principal cause of the administration's problems. As I've pointed out before, good fundamentals make political strategists look like geniuses and bad fundamentals make the same strategists look like idiots. In other words, staff performance is largely a reflection of the political fundamentals (in particular, the economy), not the cause of a president's success or failure.

I think Nyan's right about the central importance of the fundamentals in American politics (I think this works a little differently in Canada). The key issue is what might happen to the economy this year (he seems to assume continuing bad news). The current downturn is ending but the recovery may be weak. A normal or stronger than anticipated recovery could produce more positive ratings than currently anticipated for Obama and the Democrats later this year. But his basic message needs to be listened to: Ignore the clutter, concentrate on the important things.

The Politics of Prorogation

2010-01-23T15:06:00.001-05:00

TC finds it curious that prorogation has become a cause célebre, the subject of demonstrations currently underway. Our Westminster style system grants the prime minister considerable discretion and others have previously used it for political purposes. If people don't like prime ministerial discretion that suggests that they aren't fond of the current occupant of 24 Sussex. Regardless, it appears to have acted as a catalyst for an accumulation of grievances against the Harper government and that is significant. As Rick Salutin put it the Globe:

"...impressions are cumulative and, as a series moves along, each new one weighs heavier. Firing nuclear watchdog + global black eye re tar sands + ending KAIROS funding + torture scandal = bad election news."

It appeared early on from strategic leaks to Norman Spector and Don Newman that the plan was to keep the House from sitting until March but then trigger an immediate election thus avoiding any additional scrutiny of the detainee issue but that blew up in Harper's face and he retreated from the idea within days. It is clear that the idea of an early election is still politically toxic to the party seen as responsible for it. This makes an early trip to the polls unlikely. One must qualify this assertion by noting the Harper would like to go early to take advantage of the ongoing ineptitude of Michael Ignatieff, and to avoid the downside of deficit politics - the negative fallout from the cuts. There is a tendency to see the Liberal record in the nineties as an unqualified triumph. It was not. They very nearly ended up in a minority in 1997 as a direct consequence of the 1995 budget.

TC thinks the politics of the deficit are not good for the Cons. Yes, they have a reputation as good fiscal managers but they don't have one as a party committed to protecting public services. That is why an election gamble to get a majority (as difficult to achieve as that is) might be seen by them as worth it. However, their slump in recent polls makes the majority more elusive than ever.

They just might have a little difficulty governing...

2010-01-05T20:12:00.002-05:00

Couldn't help but notice the following passage in the Globe story about two Alberta PCs who defected to the Wildrose Alliance:

Ms. Forsyth and Mr. Anderson rhymed off a long list of reasons for crossing the floor to sit with Wildrose MLA Paul Hinman, who won a surprising by-election in Calgary last fall.

They pointed to the government's unpopular revamp of the royalty regime, making it unfavourable to oil and gas companies. They also cited deficit spending and cuts to health and social programs....

Um, the revamp to royalties is a tax hike. Health and social programs are, by my count, 44.1% of all Alberta spending this fiscal year, so one might say that with their apparent inability to grasp basic arithmetic, it is not clear how well this party might do in government.

The reality is that Alberta is running out of low cost conventional oil, has a very low tax structure, and absolutely no recognition that it might be facing some future difficulties. Sure, very high oil prices will keep then out of trouble for awhile but such prices will also spur a search for alternatives. There has always been a certain cluelessness in the Albertan outlook (with some exceptions) and Wildrose is keeping it alive.

U.S. Health Care Reform & Canada

2009-12-24T14:33:00.003-05:00

The fact that the health care bill marshaled 60 votes and finally passed the U.S. Senate is nothing short of remarkable. The U.S. health care system is dysfunctional and these reforms fall well short of what that nation needs, in part because of its corrupt and dysfunctional political system. Nevertheless, perhaps if the reforms had been in place a few years ago, this Canadian would not have had to return to Canada, having emigrated and become an American citizen. Be sure to read his full story but here is a quote:

I’m not demonizing the US system. My wife and I met some wonderful and caring practitioners. Nor am I idealizing Canada’s health care plans. ... both systems have advantages and disappointments. In the end, it was the American approach – with its utter lack of any consideration other than a commercial one, and its ruthless corporate attitude that can only be describe as harassment – finally did it for me and my wife. In 2008, we had had enough and decided to leave.

Is Obama a Progressive President?

2009-11-28T09:17:00.009-05:00

While many seem dubious at the moment, I have no doubt about Obama, despite my view that he ought simply to get out of Afghanistan.

Sometimes it is the small unnoticed things that tell the tale:

From the Washington Post by way of the Huffington Post:

Hundreds, if not thousands, of lobbyists are likely to be ejected from federal advisory panels as part of a little-noticed initiative by the Obama administration to curb K Street's influence in Washington, according to White House officials and lobbying experts.

The new policy -- issued with little fanfare this fall by the White House ethics counsel -- may turn out to be the most far-reaching lobbying rule change so far from President Obama, who also has sought to restrict the ability of lobbyists to get jobs in his administration and to negotiate over stimulus contracts.

Of course they are fighting back. The Huffington Post story:

"Not surprisingly, lobby groups, corporations, and other K Street influencers are up in arms.
The reaction from the lobbying community has been swift and overwhelmingly negative. Some of the loudest criticism has come from the Industry Trade Advisory Committees (ITACs), a collection of more than a dozen panels that provide policy advice and technical assistance to the Commerce Department and the U.S. Trade Representative. The ITACs, whose roughly 400 members include at least 130 lobbyists, officials say, have taken the lead in attacking the White House policy as misguided and harmful to U.S. business interests; a letter to Obama from committee chairs last month included executives from Boeing, IBM, Harley-Davidson and International Paper.

"This action will severely undermine the utility of the advisory committee process," the letter read. ". . . The characteristics that make many Advisors valuable to the Administration [are] the same characteristics that are being used to artificially disqualify them from participation in the Committee system."

You can read White House Counsel's full letter responding to lobbyists' critiques of the decision here. A brief excerpt:

I assure you our action was not provoked, as you suggest, by "criminal and unethical behavior of a few individuals." Indeed there have been some egregious abuses, but this decision was not meant to besmirch anyone who is a registered federal lobbyist.
It is about the system as a whole.

Indeed.

Harper vs Obama

2009-11-25T21:04:00.004-05:00

Recently columnist Norman Spector asserted that a year after the 2008 elections Harper is more popular than Obama. One finds echoes of this in other columns as well.

Here is Spector on November 16:

Yet today, Mr. Harper is flirting with a majority. Canadians have grown increasingly comfortable with him, as judged by his approval ratings. And the Conservatives just won two of four by-elections, including a surprise victory in Quebec – where conventional wisdom had them dead, if not completely buried.
Mr. Obama, meanwhile, has suffered the steepest decline of the 12 elected presidents since Gallup began polling.

Minor details: the last poll on the subject (in October by Angus Reid) found that Canadians disapproved of Mr. Harper by a margin of 45-34, while the aggregate of all U.S. polls currently find that, by a margin of 48.4% to 46.5%, more Americans approve of Mr. Obama as President than disapprove. Overall, as of today, a majority of 54.4% to 39.1% have a favourable view of Mr. Obama.

Of course Mr. Obama inherited an economy going over a cliff that has just barely begun to reverse course, while Canada has benefited from higher global commodity prices, the product of economic strength reasserting itself in Asia and elsewhere.

As Brendan Nyhan noted in August:

The approval ratings of presidents tend to decline over time... And in Obama's case, he faces a poor economy that will push his approval numbers into the 40s very soon.

Despite a more favourable economic environment due to better luck, Harper is not doing as well as Obama. Of course Mr. Spector cherry picked just the Gallup Poll. Nonetheless, Obama has fallen and will likely fall further, but Mr. Spector's comparison is, to say the least, deeply misleading.

November 9 by-election in Montmagny

2009-11-11T11:40:00.009-05:00

There is a certain amount of nonsense being spouted about Monday's by-elections. For example, Mulroney biographer L. Ian Macdonald, discussing the outcome in Montmagny-l'Islet-Kamouraska-Rivière-du-Loup, describes "the Conservatives taking a seat from the Bloc... (as) a game-changer". This was the only by-election result of any significance on Monday, but Macdonald vastly overstates its importance.

He seems to have forgotten the Conservative victory on September 17, 2007 in the Roberval-Lac St. Jean by-election where the Conservatives came from 8 points back in 2006 to win by 40 points. By the time of the 2008 election, however, that lead had shrunk back to 4 points and the Conservatives wound up with fewer seats in Quebec not more. Was that 2007 result a game-changer? Obviously, it was not. What we saw instead was a replay in Montmagny-l'Islet-Kamouraska-Rivière-du-Loup on Monday night where a previously second place Conservative party won a seat from the Bloc, albeit with much smaller gains than in Roberval in 2007.

Jeffery Simpson was closer to the mark in the Globe today:

Slowly, the polls – for what they're worth – showed a drift away from the Liberals toward the Conservatives, a drift occurring in other parts of Canada, too.

On Monday, therefore, the Conservatives took a seat (Montmagny-L'Islet-Kamouraska-Rivière-du-Loup) previously held by the Bloc in the Lower St. Lawrence, a part of Quebec that historically prefers any party but les rouges . It's part of a band of seats in Quebec on both sides of the St. Lawrence that is nationalist, rather anti-elitist, rural and small town, and that has voted for the Union Nationale, the Créditistes, the Parti Québécois, the Bloc and now the Conservatives.

The Conservatives chose a popular local mayor, Bernard Généreux, who captured nearly 43 per cent of the vote and allowed the Conservatives to win their 11th Quebec seat. No one should read much into by-elections. Still, it's an encouraging Conservative result.

Simpson overstates the les rouges reference - Pearson and Trudeau were successful here. He could also have noted the significance of being on the government side during a period when pork has a blue tinge.

TC calculates that the Conservative gains in Montmagny by itself are consistent with the Conservatives winning about 17 seats overall in Quebec. Notably the Conservative gains in Montmagny were not echoed in the Hochelaga numbers so even that number is doubtful. One aspect of this we should not overlook: the Bloc vote is generally younger and therefore less likely to turn out for a by-election. This would likely account for some of the difference in Roberval between 2007 and 2008.

Overall the Conservatives remain in a strong position, similar to the 2008 election outcome (as noted in my previous post) courtesy of the incompetence of the Ignatieff Liberals to date and the inability of the NDP, which had a good night on Monday, to break out decisively in a way that might allow them to be seen as the main alternative to the government.

TC continues to find the Conservatives' strength surprising given the recession, although strong commodity prices have partially shielded Canada from its worst consequences. And the political fallout from the downturn is not finished given its impact on budgets, so we may yet see some negatives for the government. However, one of the opposition parties must be seen as a plausible alternative to Harper, and we don't have that yet.

The majority is a minority

2009-11-03T20:31:00.004-05:00

There seems to be an assumption floating around (for example, the opening line here) that the Conservatives would win a majority if an election were held today. TC averaged three polls out last week, from Nanos, Environics and Ekos, and came to the following seat numbers:

C - 145
L - 82
NDP - 34
BQ - 47
Oth. - 1

This is roughly identical to the last estimate of Democratic Space.

With the arrival of Peter Donolo to add some accomplished political experience to Ignatieff's office, which had none before, we may wonder whether these numbers (that are so close to 2008) represent a Liberal bottoming out and a Conservative peak. The NDP and Bloc continue to hold their own.

An election seems a long way off.

No Drama Obama

2009-10-21T18:37:00.006-04:00

TC continues to find Barack Obama an extraordinary political leader - a talent without parallel in my lifetime.

Here is a testimonial from the Wall Street whiz who presided over the auto bailout:

New to business meetings with Presidents, I found Obama's style consistent with his 'No drama Obama' image and on a par with the best CEOs I had spent time with. He was cordial without being effusive and decisive when his advisers were divided....

Read the rest of it here.

I also read the full account of the bailouts here in Fortune. Here are some highlights:

Among the surprises along the way: We were shocked, even beyond our low expectations, by the poor state of both GM and Chrysler. Looking just at the condition of GM's finances and Chrysler's new-car pipeline, the case for a bailout was weak.
But on the other hand, as we surveyed the interconnected web of finance companies, suppliers, and related businesses, the potential impact of the likely alternative -- liquidation -- stunned us. We imagined that the collapse of the automakers could devastate the Midwest beyond imagination. We were determined not to fail. But as we started down the road, we saw mainly obstacles....

And this description of GM management:

Everyone knew Detroit's reputation for insular, slow-moving cultures. Even by that low standard, I was shocked by the stunningly poor management that we found, particularly at GM, where we encountered, among other things, perhaps the weakest finance operation any of us had ever seen in a major company.
For example, under the previous administration's loan agreements, Treasury was to approve every GM transaction of more than $100 million that was outside of the normal course. From my first day at Treasury, PowerPoint decks would arrive from GM (we quickly concluded that no decision seemed to be made at GM without one) requesting approvals. We were appalled by the absence of sound analysis provided to justify these expenditures.
The cultural deficiencies were equally stunning. At GM's Renaissance Center headquarters, the top brass were sequestered on the uppermost floor, behind locked and guarded glass doors. Executives housed on that floor had elevator cards that allowed them to descend to their private garage without stopping at any of the intervening floors (no mixing with the drones).

The majority conundrum

2009-10-18T17:29:00.010-04:00

While the focus of current discussion is about a possible Conservative majority, the reality is that our regionally and ideologically fragmented system makes a majority problematic even when a party seems well positioned to do so. Many believe Harper’s Conservatives presently are in that position now. However, one needs majority type polls at the end of an election campaign not in hypothetical horse races in the media. Some recent polls point to just such a hypothetical majority (Ekos, Strategic Counsel and Angus Reid) but others (Decima, Ipsos) don’t. This is largely because of differences in the Ontario sub-samples, which suggests some instability in Ontario opinion, and that its ultimate direction remains unclear.

As TC has touched on before, winning a majority is extremely difficult in the current Canadian party system. One could make the case, for example, that the Conservatives were headed for a majority in 2008, but fumbled the opportunity by getting the politics of culture wrong in Quebec. A misstep like that could occur in any region. We forget that the Conservatives also lost seats in Newfoundland as a consequence of their feud with Danny Williams. The point is that it is enormously difficult to have everything work right at once in enough regions to secure 155 ridings.

Fundamentally, the problem is that the Bloc Québecois control a group of francophone ridings in Quebec usually numbering around 50. They dipped as low as 38 in 2000 when they were hurt by the unpopularity at the time of the PQ Bouchard regime in Quebec City. They won 49 seats in 2008.

That means that to win the 155 seats needed for a majority, another party must win 59.8% of the remaining seats. If we look at history in the pre-Bloc era (but after 1957 when the number of seats won by third parties began to grow significantly), we see only the Diefenbaker landslide majority of 1958 (78.5% of the seats) and a similar win by Mulroney in 1984 (74.8% of the seats) exceed that benchmark. By this standard, the Trudeau majority of 1968 (58.3% of the seats) almost but not quite qualifies, while his majorities in 1974 (53.4% of the seats) and 1980 (53.4% of the seats) do not.

It is highly unlikely there will be an election before the spring of 2010 – an eternity in politics. The outcome is more likely than not to be another minority. When we see the Bloc vote collapse the conditions for majority governments in Canada can emerge once again. The recent Ignatieff meltdown does suggest another scenario for a majority, but there are many ways for the Conservatives to go astray between now and voting day when it eventually comes.

Strategic Counsel Poll in Globe - A Majority?

2009-10-07T20:47:00.002-04:00

While I can't estimate an exact number, there is no doubt the Strategic Counsel Poll we saw in the Globe would produce a small Conservative majority.

However, on the weekend the PM did two things that appear to rule out an early trip to the polls. He announced a royal visit and called early by-elections on consecutive days. What this says I think is that Conservative support (and likewise Liberal weakness) is premised on deep antipathy by Canadians to the idea of an early election. If Harper tried to force one, it would be obvious, and a fair portion of their support would evaporate. Just a slight loss would mean no majority, and leave the Conservatives where they are now.

This paradox is very much to the current benefit of the Liberals who are not ready for a campaign. Ignatieff nonetheless seems oblivious to his party's predicament. If Michael Ignatieff ever manages to find a way to 24 Sussex Drive he will owe a debt of gratitude to Jack Layton that he did not have to enter an election campaign in the fall of 2009.

Michael Ignatieff's Charmed Life

2009-10-03T11:00:00.006-04:00

One might think from perusing our national press that it had been a bad week for Michael Ignatieff. Not so at all. It is true that the full extent of Mr. Ignatieff's lack of skills for Canadian federal politics was on full display (something previously noted by TC). However, the worst fate that could have befallen the Liberal leader would have been actual success in his failed effort to bring down the government.

TC has averaged the three polls out this week from Léger, Ekos and Angus Reid (the latter reported exceptionally weak results for the Liberals) and applied them to my seat model. Here are the results:

Polls	Cons.	Libs.	NDP	Green	Bloc	Other	Total
CANADA	36	29	16	8	10	1	100
Atlantic	28	38	25	9	0	1	100
Quebec	16	28	12	5	38	1	100
Ontario	41	33	15	9	0	1	100
Man/Sask	50	21	22	6	0	1	100
Alta.	64	16	10	9	0	1	100
B.C.	39	25	24	11	0	0	100

Constituencies	Cons.	Libs.	NDP	Green	Bloc	Other	Total
Atlantic	7	21	4	0	0	0	32
Quebec	7	21	0	0	46	1	75
Ontario	55	36	15	0	0	0	106
Man.	9	1	4	0	0	0	14
Sask	13	1	0	0	0	0	14
Alta.	28	0	0	0	0	0	28
B.C.	20	8	8	0	0	0	36
North	0	2	1	0	0	0	3
Total	139	90	32	0	46	1	308

Note in particular that Liberal weakness translates not just into Conservative strength but also NDP victories in most of the party's 2008 seats, even with a smaller overall NDP popular support. So Mr. Layton's that was then, this is now act in supporting the government after many votes of non-confidence (which was overshadowed this week by the Liberals' troubles) is not costing the NDP. Note also that, for all that has been going well recently for Mr. Harper, he is nowhere near a majority.

All of the above is hypothetical and Mr. Ignatieff does not actually have to face the electorate despite all his mistakes and difficulties. He actually escaped this week with no election. As I said at the outset: a charmed life. Circumstances could yet make him prime minister, despite his own best efforts to derail his campaign to get to 24 Sussex Drive.

NDP Leadership Race in Manitoba

2009-10-01T18:43:00.002-04:00

Greg Selinger will be the next premier of Manitoba. This contest cinches it:

WINNIPEG — Steve Ashton got the morning headline, but Greg Selinger seems to have won most of the NDP leadership convention delegates that were up for grabs in Inkster constituency last night.

More on polls and snake oil - the deficit

2009-09-27T17:21:00.004-04:00

One of the successes of late twentieth century conservatism has been the propagation of the notion that cutting taxes would somehow boost the real income of most people and, conversely, raising taxes represents a real loss of income, instead of a shift from private consumption to (often vital) public consumption such as health care.

When debates commence about how to reduce the deficit, we find "raising taxes", which is at least well understood by most, contrasted to "cutting programs". The problem is that "programs" is an abstract, undefined term. In a survey from Nanos we find the following question:

What do you think the Government of Canada's primary focus should be to reduce the deficit? Among the options were "raising taxes" and "cutting programs"

Not surprisingly only 29% wanted to raise taxes compared to 48% who said cut programs.

In many if not most cases, the response to a polling question is determined by its wording. Suppose instead of "cutting programs", the question wording was "cutting spending on things like health care, education, and pensions" (about 31% of all federal spending, for example), the answer would be quite different.

In addition, a rapid reduction in the deficit could trigger a renewed downturn and even more unemployment. No information from the pollster of this nature. The survey reports that, unprompted, 5% did say "don't need to fight the deficit". A few do understand the stakes involved in this debate but it would be helpful if polls were not so obviously biased in one direction.

David Miller

2009-09-26T17:27:00.005-04:00

I was saddened to see David Miller will not be running again. He has been an excellent mayor.

Were it not for the outrageously dreadful media coverage of this summer's garbage strike, he might still be in the race. Compare this column by John Lorinc on Spacing Wire with the nonsense published in the Toronto dailies (linked to by Lorinc) and the bilge we saw on the airwaves. That said, garbage strikes are intrinsically unpopular, especially for a mayor with ties to labour, so the re-election would have been difficult.

Perhaps his greatest legacy was his work on public transit. Longtime transit advocate and citizen expert Steve Munro wrote this tribute on Spacing Wire. It is all worth reading but here is his conclusion:

What is David Miller’s legacy?

Transit is a vital, central part of City planning and building. No longer is the TTC trying to fit one more rider on the roof of every bus and streetcar, and despite many problems with fleet availability, plans are still in place to continue improving service. Transit is no longer something only downtown Councillors with their “pampered” constituents fight for, it’s a concern in wards right across the City. Showing people what can be done and encouraging them to ask for more is a vital part of advocacy and leadership.

I am deeply saddened that we won’t see a third term, that the changes now underway must be completed by others, indeed could even be threatened by the short-sighted who would trash “Miller projects” without regard for their intrinsic value.

I remember a meeting in the Mayor’s office early in his first term. A confident, happy Mayor, proud of his city, sat with his legs up on the couch while a group of us discussed what was needed for transit. We’ve come a long way since then.

When the first LRV rolls along Sheppard Avenue or into a redeveloped eastern waterfront, when Councillors demand even more routes as part of the 10-minute network, when cutting transit service becomes utterly unthinkable at budget time, David Miller should be there if only in spirit.

UPDATE: This item by Michael Hollett in NOW Magazine is also worth reading:

We have what may arguably be the greenest city on the continent, shrinking crime rates, reduced business taxes, safer streets, less homelessness, a more inclusive city, a building boom downtown, a police chief who doesn’t wage war on his citizens, expanding public transit, an arts-positive atmosphere and an enthusiasm and vigour on our streets and boulevards that were unimaginable just 10 years ago.
In the same way I’m amazed at the ability of the right-wing press in the U.S. to put a negative spin on Barack Obama’s attempts to bring health care to the needy, I have to give grudging respect to this city’s conservative dailies (yes, you, too, Toronto Star – Joe Atkinson is spinning in his grave) for successfully painting Miller’s accomplishments in such a negative light.

Does nobody remember the previous buffoon of a mayor enthusiastically endorsed by Toronto’s mainstream media just before Miller? Mel Lastman presided over a collapse so complete that his most enduring idea was a bunch of plastic moose that sat as empty-headed as Hizzoner on crime- and litter-filled streets.
The same media experts who now try to paint Miller as a failed mayor happily endorsed this joke of a leader who made Toronto a punchline in the world and oversaw a City Hall so crammed with corruption that secret envelopes of cash, privileged plane rides to hockey games and grotesque patronage scandals like the MFP computer debacle just seemed like the way things were done.

Polls and Snake Oil

2009-09-26T15:21:00.006-04:00

It has always managed to get under TC's skin that our media swallow polling results literally - without a hint of skepticism. Recently there have been several polls on federal party leadership (such as this Nanos poll and some numbers in this Angus Reid poll). Why? Presumably in part to give us some idea about how the next election might go. However, leadership polls can be extremely misleading.

As readers of my previous two posts know, TC holds no brief for Michael Ignatieff. However, the fact that he trails Stephen Harper on this particular scorecard doesn't tell us much. For example, consider this poll from Nanos Research taken on September 7, 2003. The results inform us that the leader Ontario voters favoured in the provincial election then less than a month away was Ernie Eves: he had 41% support, followed by 25% for Unsure and 24% for Dalton McGuinty.

However, the very same poll asked the ballot question: Which party would you support? The poll reported the Liberals with 45% compared to 43% for the PCs. This answer was much closer to the voting results of the general election on October 2, 2003 when the Ontario Liberals won a large majority with 46.5% of the popular vote.

We will return to his topic again.

More evidence of Ignatieff's strategic ineptitude

2009-09-21T20:12:00.003-04:00

The Liberals are making a big mistake in denying Martin Cauchon's bid to become the Liberal candidate in Outremont.

It is an arrogant and stupid decision. The riding was never going to be easy for the Liberals to take away from the NDP's Thomas Mulcair; it may now be impossible. It is an extremely foolish thing to do. As my previous post noted: not ready for prime time.

Not ready for prime time

2009-09-16T20:47:00.004-04:00

My doubts about Ignatieff began to arise when it seemed to me that his dramatic pronouncement that he would endeavour to bring down the government came seemingly out of the blue. Suppose that public reaction to such an announcement was going to be negative. Wouldn't the Liberals have wanted some inkling of that before committing themselves?

Indeed they should have spent the summer floating the idea in case they needed to back away from it. But they did not do that. It appears that political amateurs are running the Ignatieff operation. The apparent signals from the Bloc and the NDP that they will keep the Harper government running a little longer should be welcomed by the Liberals. They are not ready for prime time.

As I contemplated this, I was reminded of Ignatieff over-committing himself in a June press conference to a "my way or the highway" position on Employment Insurance. He backed down and looked bad but it was all forgotten over the summer. So why the premature boldness in June and the failure to "leak" their intentions over the summer? The Liberals are in trouble and don't know it. In a way, it is not surprising. Ignatieff is a neophyte apparently surrounded by advisors who are equally inexperienced.

If there is an early election the bad economy will push us toward a Liberal win, but it is not guaranteed and inept campaigning and tactics might give Harper a new (albeit probably weakened) mandate.

On the other hand, the delay could help the Liberals. The downturn might come to a technical end but its consequences, both in unemployment and weak government finances, will be with us for a long time to come. The worst days for the Rae government in Ontario in the early nineties came in 1993-94 when they felt obligated to tackle the deficit and enacted the Social Contract to achieve some budgetary savings. Rae's popularity, already low, fell further and his regime was subsequently decimated in the 1995 election. The recession was also over when the Mulroney-Campbell regime was reduced to two seats in the 1993 election.

Harper might not adopt anti-deficit strategies as unpopular as those of Rae but he will come under increasing pressure to say something about his intentions, and nothing he announces is likely to be well received. I wonder if the Ignatieff strategists are familiar with history.

In Stephen Harper's Back Yard

2009-09-15T21:18:00.002-04:00

The politics of recession hit home in Alberta last night when the right wing Wildrose Alliance won a by-election from Ed Stelmach's provincial PCs in Calgary Glenmore, which just happens to fall within the boundaries of Stephen Harper's federal riding of Calgary Southwest.

Alberta has been hit hard by the downturn as the oil boom of the tar sands has gone bust, with direct consequences for Alberta's bottom line.
--------------
The downturn should have an impact on the federal election but TC, who until now has thought that the Liberals were the most likely winners, is beginning to have second thoughts about that. More in a future post.

Where Jack's At

2009-09-13T11:34:00.004-04:00

I think this Liberal blogger's assessment of Jack Layton's current strategy is right:

Mr. Layton, knowing he and his party are probably the key votes of either keeping the government alive or causing it’s downfall, comes out sounding very conciliatory, trying to get out the message to the voters that the NDP is trying to “make Parliament work”, if Harper and the Conservatives are willing to make concessions for the greater good. If Harper rejects that (and indications are he will be), then Layton can claim that he tried his best to keep the Canadian public from that “unnecessary election”, but Harper just wasn’t being reasonable. That line of argument might help both the NDP, and indirectly the Liberals, against the charges of the Conservatives that this is an “unnecessary election”.

Is that what the NDP strategy is? We’ll see. Some of my Liberal blogging brethren may not buy it, but when I saw how Layton was wording his statements to the media, I began to think that is what he and the NDP might be up to, strategy wise. After all, it’s the Prime Minister’s duty (and the governing party’s duty) to maintain the confidence of the House of Commons. With the Conservatives playing partisan games with the EI Commission, and then potentially spurning the NDP’s offer of conciliatory gestures, the counter charge that this government is unwilling to work with the other parties certainly can be made, and made by multiple opposition parties.

I would add that Layton's approach to pre-election positioning is optimal: he defends key NDP principles while showing Canadians en masse that he is willing to be reasonable and accommodating to get things done - as popular a place to be in current circumstances as one could hope for. There would be a problem with actually making a deal with the Conservatives, since it would expose the NDP to potentially effective attacks from the Liberals. It is a very different situation from the NDP support given to Paul Martin in 2005.

The NDP doesn't really have much in the way of prospects for additional seats in this election, and is likely be focused more on protecting seat pickups from 2006 and 2008. But the party's ability to protect those gains should not be underestimated. If the Liberals do well, some seats will be lost, but the NDP's resources and very considerable strategic talent will likely produce relative success in this context.

Glory Days

2009-09-12T10:11:00.007-04:00

Parliament resumes this week as we appear headed for a fall election. The fact that majorities say they don't want an election doesn't mean much because it is not going to matter a great deal in the considerations that determine voting when election day comes.

The Liberals declare they will no longer support the government but have yet to offer a compelling rationale for why voters should support them. We will learn if they are going to have some capacity to do this in a speech Ignatieff gives on Monday. He doesn't have to give his platform away, but he needs something more than the cliché "we can do better". Winning an election even in these economic circumstances is not a slam dunk.

Meanwhile Harper wants to resurrect the days last year when the Conservatives spiked in the polls when threatened with a coalition by trying to stoke Canadians' fears of Quebec separatists. It kind of reminds one of the Bruce Springsteen 80s hit Glory Days which ends with a line Stephen Harper would do well to remember:

"well time slips away
and leaves you with nothing mister but
boring stories of glory days"

What Harper missed then was that the public reaction was less rooted in opposition to the idea of coalition per se than it was in the idea that the outcome of the 2008 election would be overturned, and that the unpopular Stéphane Dion would wind up as prime minister. And there can be no doubt his overheated rhetoric about Quebec separatists has damaged him permanently in Quebec. That is his enduring legacy from that time. The strategy won't work again; this election will be focused on economic issues.