U.S. Health Care Reform & Canada

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.
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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

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

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.

We report, you decide

Overall the state of political journalism in Canada is dismal. Because so many polls are proprietorial - paid for by newspapers that then trumpet them, we never get the full picture. For example, to follow up on yesterday's post on the state of public opinion in Quebec:

Pollster SurveyDates Sample Error Cons. Liberal NDP Bloc
Strategic Sept. 3-6 244 ± 6.3 16 23 6 49
Leger Aug. 31-Se. 2 1005 ± 3.1 16 30 16 35
CROP Aug. 14-23 1003 ± 3.1 17 30 18 30

Compare especially, Leger and Strategic as they polled at about the same time, although as not much has happened, one might as well look at CROP too. The two large sample polls by Quebec pollsters, who we know for sure have telephone interviewers speaking the same language with the same accent as their respondents, have the Bloc at 30 & 35% but Strategic thinks they are at 49%, a spectacular improvement on the 38.1% they obtained last October 14. Now which polls do you believe?

I have long had doubts about the Globe Strategic Counsel polls. This only reinforces them.

Federal Election 2009 - Quebec

TC has been busy of late so not much posting. I hope to pick up the pace because it appears a federal election is coming.

If some pundits are to be believed, Quebec is crucial to Liberal hopes. Quebec public opinion exists in a world apart from the rest of the country. In national polls, however, it is but one region. So it makes sense to pay close attention to the Quebec polling companies, which conduct large sample surveys just in Quebec. The two most prominent are Léger and CROP, both of whom have had recent polls, Leger in September, CROP in August .

I have developed a new seat model that takes into account language preference in Quebec. However, one tends only to get a linguistic breakdown in large sample Quebec polls. I have combined the two polls (I had to infer the Anglophone vote in the Léger poll which has not put details in the web yet) and used my new linguistic model to get the following outcome:

Cons.	Liberal	NDP	Bloc	Total
7	24	2	42	75

Lysiane Gagnon argues in the column linked to above that the Liberals think they can win as many as 12 more seats than their current 14. This calculation would bring them up 10 seats.
However, the Bloc would remain the dominant party and Liberal gains here would not be decisive in determining the overall outcome.

The Conservatives at the moment have just enough support to hold most but not all their Quebec seats, while the NDP appears to be slipping under the radar and at the moment would do better than expected here.

Two items from the Independent of Note

Courtesy of National Newswatch: on the coming oil crisis,

The head of the International Energy Agency says things are getting worse:

...the first detailed assessment of more than 800 oil fields in the world, covering three quarters of global reserves, has found that most of the biggest fields have already peaked and that the rate of decline in oil production is now running at nearly twice the pace as calculated just two years ago.

And word of a renewed bout of global warming...

...there may be increased drought in Africa, India and Australia, heavier rainfall in South America and increased extremes in Britain, of warm and cold. It may make 2010 one of the hottest years on record.

The Elusive Majority

Jeffery Simpson recently wrote a column discussing the elusiveness of majority government in Canada. However, he focused on the relatively even division of opinion, describing four "blocks" of opinion.

In TC's view only one of these counts: the Bloc Quebecois. As long as it can win between 40 and 50 seats in the House of Commons each election in Quebec, it means that one of the pan-Canadian parties needs from 57.8% (BQ wins 40) to 60.1% (BQ wins 50) of the remaining seats in order to secure the 155 needed for a majority.

The difficulty is illustrated by looking back at previous majority governments pre-BQ. We find, for example, that the 1988 Mulroney PCs won just 57.1% of the seats overall. As a percentage of non BQ seats this mark would fail in current circumstances. The only two wins since 1960 that met the 57.8 to 60.1% benchmark were Mulroney in 1984 (75%) and Trudeau in 1968 (58.3%).

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.

With the Conservatives reunited, looking ahead it is hard to see any majority scenario save for some kind of Liberal/NDP cooperation. While recent elections have not produced those numbers TC has seen a Liberal plus NDP majority in a fair number of polls in the past six months. It bears watching.

Happy Days Are Here Again, Aren't They?

Mark Carney would have us believe the recession is over even if recovery will be somewhat slow. However, look at what Mr. Carney said one year ago, two months before the global economy crashed:

The Canadian economy is judged to have moved into slight excess supply in the second quarter of 2008, and this excess supply is expected to increase through the balance of the year. High terms of trade, accommodative monetary policy, and a gradual recovery in the U.S. economy are expected to generate above-potential economic growth starting early next year. This will bring the economy back to full capacity around mid-2010.

On the other hand, here is a transcript of an interview with Nouriel Roubini, who foresaw the crash coming, on PBS's Nightly Business Report about what we might expect now:

PRATT: So what is your forecast for the recovery right now? I've been hearing sub par growth. What exactly does that mean?

ROUBINI: First of all, in my view the recession is going to continue through the end of the year. It's not over yet, and while potential growth rate for the U.S. economy is 3 percent, I expect that the growth rate of the economy is going to be very anemic, below trend, then on 1 percent for the next two years. Why? You have U.S. consumers are shopped out, saving less debt burden. They're not going to consume very much. Your financial system is severely damaged, and credit growth is going to be limited, and now we have also this massive re-leveraging of the public sector with a large budget deficit and increases in public debt are going to eventually crowd out the economic recovery of the private sector. So I don't see a lot of economic growth ahead of us.

PRATT: Are you worried at all about a double-dip recession?

ROUBINI: Yeah, the risk is that by the end of the next year, if budget deficit remains very large, around $1.5 trillion, and if the Fed keep on monetizing them, essentially printing money to try to prevent increases in interest rates, expect that the inflation is going to go up, and if expecting inflation were to go up, long-term government bond yields would go up, and mortgage rates will go up. Borrowing costs for consumers (INAUDIBLE) will go up, and that's going to crowd out the recovery, so there's even a risk of a double-dip recession.

This looks very much like the early nineties but perhaps worse. The political toll then included the defeat of the Bush I administration in the U.S. despite the political highs it achieved following victory in the 1991 Gulf War and the reduction of the Mulroney-Campbell PCs to 2 seats in 1993. The political toll substantially lagged the economic one but it was just as devastating when it appeared.

Did Joe Biden offer a prediction on the Canadian election?

Joe Biden acknowledged this past weekend that the Obama administration underestimated the depth of the recession. "We misread the economy", he told George Stephanopolous of ABC.

Polls in the past month or so in Canada have shown some strengthening on the part of the Conservatives. Frank Greaves of Ekos Research, which is doing weekly large sample IVR polls on party standings, sees this improvement as linked to the economy:

An increasing number of Canadians say they are already feeling more optimistic about the economy than they were three months ago, and they are naturally concentrated among the most prosperous. This could generate a drift of voters back to the Conservatives from the Liberals in this demographic even as working-class voters become more distressed and perhaps antagonistic to the Conservatives.

There was a rapid run-up in the markets from March until mid-June unsupported by the fundamentals (the economy has continued to decline) and this certainly led to a great deal of speculation about the economy turning the corner and headed upwards. Indeed so optimistic was Jim Flaherty that he thought it was time to think about ending the stimulus.

The positive impressions from media coverage of day after day of positive market news helped the Conservatives as Greaves points out. What then to make of an economy that may stagger for the rest of the year. Following the negative U.S. jobs report last week, Nouriel Roubini commented:

The June employment report suggests that the alleged ‘green shoots’ are mostly yellow weeds that may eventually turn into brown manure. The employment report shows that conditions in the labor market continue to be extremely weak, with job losses in June of over 460,000. With the current rate of job losses, it is very clear that the unemployment rate could reach 10 percent by later this summer, around August or September, and will be closer to 10.5 percent if not 11 percent by year-end. I expect the unemployment rate is going to peak at around 11 percent at some point in 2010, well above historical standards for even severe recessions.

If Roubini's prediction holds true the impact on Canada would produce a similar story. The political implications are clear. Assuming the government falls on a confidence vote in early autumn, the subsequent election would be certain to produce a change in government, most likely a Liberal minority and quite possibly one where the NDP would hold the balance of power.

Will Hudak Become Ontario's Premier?

Margaret Wente is a generally small 'c' conservative Globe columnist (remember her persistent denials about climate change earlier in this decade) so her perception of the neo-Harrisite party that just selected Tim Hudak as their leader as "a bunch of old white guys so lost in the woods they make Stephen Harper's crowd look enlightened", should be making the Tories nervous. Wente is also a Torontonian.

Memories are short. The big victory of the Harris Conservatives in 1995 included victory in a majority of the constituencies in what is now Toronto (they won most of Etobicoke and Scarborough plus ridings like Willowdale and Don Mills, even the downtown riding of St. George-St. David). Merely to recount this is to say how much the world has changed since then. The context that permitted Harris to be successful in 1995 is no longer around with one exception.

Mike Harris was elected at the end of a long economic downturn. The Ontario Liberals will be coming to the end of their second term in 2011 and the economy could still be quite weak. This would be a potential electoral asset for Hudak depending on many circumstances currently unknown.

A key difference is going to be strategic voting - not a factor in 1995. The election of Hudak is potentially a disaster for Andrea Horwath's Ontario NDP: many New Democrats will vote strategically to avoid a return to the Harris years. Numerous others will be receptive to Liberal messaging we will soon hear over and over again that attempts cement the impression of Margaret Wente in the minds of the Ontario electorate.

Many neocons here yearn for the Harris years the way Republicans yearn for Ronald Reagan - a return to a mythical glamourized past. A Hudak premiership will more than likely be comparable to the regime of George W. Bush, ideological to be sure, but ultimately a political disaster. However, Hudak may never make it that far.