And the winner is....

This election campaign has left a sour taste in everyone's mouth. It was unnecessary and has let loose a wave of anti-social behaviour, particularly on the part of PPC adherents and anti-vaxxers. It appears the Liberals will win the most seats, likely somewhere in the 140-150 range with the Conservatives somewhere in the 120-130 range. Almost all seat projections would yield a Liberal plus NDP majority in the House of Commons. It is quite possible that vote shares for the two leading parties will wind up lower than their respective vote shares than in the 2019 election. For the Liberals a minority outcome would be a result comparable to the bitter fruit the party tasted at the time of the 1965 election.

It also appears the election has not been kind to the Conservatives; they have been forced on the defensive on issues including ranging from vaccinations to health care to abortion to gun control. Erin O'Toole has quite skilfully tried to come down on both sides of contentious issues without appearing opportunistic. To me he has simply appeared to be dishonest and untrustworthy - not just dishonest in the dissembling way one normally expects from political speech but beyond that.

One party that is clearly doing better this time is the NDP, benefiting in part from dissatisfaction with the two leading alternatives, particularly the Liberals. It is possible, if everything went the NDP's way, they would end up somewhere in the 40-50 seat range. More likely is something in the 30-40 seat range, still a large improvement on the 24 seats they captured in 2019. NDP support is disproportionately young, the demographic with the lowest turnout. In today's Nanos poll the NDP leads in the 18 to 34 age group with 34% of the vote to 22% for the Liberals and 20% for the Conservatives.  Another factor is that some who prefer the NDP nonetheless vote Liberal to prevent the Conservatives from achieving success. 

A key reason the Conservatives are having a tough time ousting the Liberals is that relatively few non-Conservatives cite them as a second choice.

A poll conducted by Leger for the Earnscliffe Strategy Group produced the following finding:

In January 2019, 22% of Liberal supporters named the CPC as their second choice, falling to 16% in October of that year. Now, just 2% would support the CPC, while over half (58%) give their second-choice support to the NDP.

If we go back over the decades it is the Liberal Party and Conservative Party (in its various iterations) that have provided alternative governments to Canadians. Is that era coming to an end? It is too soon to say, but this evolution in public opinion seems significant.

The other big problem for the Conservatives is that they are no longer the big tent party on the right. The gains of the PPC this time are almost certain to be modest, but most of their votes are coming from the Conservatives.  Nick Kouvalis, a pollster and Conservative strategist - he worked for Rob Ford and is currently working for Doug - blames the PPC for the likely Liberal victory in the latest press release issued by his polling firm Campaign Research. It is reminiscent of the nineties and the split between the Reform Party and the former Progressive Conservative Party, albeit on a more limited scale. However, it would take just a few percentage points to deny Erin O'Toole's Conservative Party a good result.

Because there has been a great deal of voting this year by mail and special ballots, results which won't be known until Tuesday, we might not learn the final shape of the House of Commons until the next day. However, polling from Nanos suggests the gains post election day will not go to the Conservatives:

According to Nanos Research’s nightly tracking data conducted for CTV News and the Globe and Mail, which was released on Friday, those Canadians who plan to vote by mail-in ballot are four times more likely to vote for the Liberals than the Conservatives...

Of those who rated their likelihood to vote by mail as a nine or 10 on the scale:

             47 per cent would vote Liberal; 

            26 per cent would vote NDP;

             12 per cent would vote Conservative;

              6 per cent would vote Bloc Quebecois;

             6 per cent would vote Green Party; and

             2 per cent would vote People’s Party of Canada

In 2019 the polls significantly underestimated the Conservatives; every major polling firm understated the Andrew Scheer Conservatives by an average of 2.6 percentage points nationally; in Alberta it was 11.1 percentage points. Will it happen again? Have the polling firms made adjustments to reflect 2019 experience? We don't know. One party that has a lot riding on this is the NDP.  As things stand now, the party is poised to make significant seat gains in Saskatchewan and Alberta, but a repeat of the same polling phenomenon could negate those potential wins. The pandemic has not been kind to Jason Kenney or Scott Moe. That could be an offsetting factor as could the rise of the PPC. 

The 2020 election in the United States produced significant polling error. A key explanation that emerged later was that there was increasing distrust on the part of the political right in institutions including polling. It could be repeated here.

The last week: where things stand

State of the Race

In the last few days the Liberals have begun inching upward in various polls, in particular in the Nanos daily tracking poll for the Globe and Mail and CTV, the Mainstreet poll for iPolitics (you can see all the polls on Wikipedia). Both Nanos and Mainstreet had quite accurate polls in 2019, so they deserve to be taken seriously. The growth for the Liberals may be connected to the debates, but it seems to have started earlier. These results point to a Liberal minority that would be stronger than their pre-election position but short of a majority. There has also been some upward movement for Maxime Bernier's People's Party of Canada (PPC) - scroll down the CBC's poll tracker page to see the graphic showing poll shifts over time to see this. While a little of their support comes from elsewhere, most is coming from the Conservatives. One province showing weakness in Conservative support is Alberta, weak enough that the NDP and Liberals could pick up seats. However, polling there in 2019 underestimated the actual Conservative vote by eleven points. In the United States in 2020 there is evidence that small 'c' conservatives did not respond to polls to the same extent as liberals. We should not be surprised to see something along these lines in Canada, although polling firms are now aware of the problem.

The Debate

The debate was atrocious. I did not think they could get any worse but this one did.  The Globe's John Doyle nailed it in his TV column:

What happened across multiple Canadian TV channels was the worst of the worst, an example of utter failure in Canadian television, and a disgraceful insult to the intelligence of viewers and voters.

That was not a debate, it was a farce. The fact that the political leaders even agreed to participate in the format is an indictment of their collective intelligence....

Moderator Shachi Kurl took the view that her job was to stop the leaders from talking. This was a peculiar tack to take. You see, at its best, television coverage isolates and highlights the strengths and flaws of individuals. It goes to the core. It can push aside propaganda and posturing. Politicians and the public know this. It’s why the U.S. debates proceed with deep seriousness. Here, in election debate after election debate, the event has tended to descend into bickering and masquerade.

I agree with all of this. One reform I would like to see (among many) is that there be only one live mike at a time for the politicians. The cross talk and interruptions make the debate extremely confusing for viewers. If only one mike is on at a time, the speaker who has the floor will be heard easily above one who tries to interrupt. As it was in this debate the moderator frequently took the side of the interrupter and told the speaker to stop. It was the worst performance by a debate moderator ever.

The significance of Suburban Toronto

The region where the Conservatives are hoping to make significant gains in Ontario is known as the 905 after its area code and consists of suburbs west, east and north of Toronto.  Half of these constituencies are in the west, a third in the north and a smaller number in the east.

The Conservatives swept this area in 2011, the Liberals in 2019. The top two tables below report the results for 2019 and 2015. The third table gives the comparison. Note that while the Liberals maintained their strength overall in 2019 they slipped a bit in the north and east but actually gained in the west. The suburbs to the west of Toronto include primarily Mississauga, Brampton, and Oakville. The population  there is becoming more diverse, that is, more like Toronto, where Conservative support is weak.

I would look for Conservative gains (if they re-establish their earlier campaign strength) first in York Region, the suburbs north of Toronto. The Conservatives are targeting seats here and were successful in luring a Liberal elected in this region in 2019 to cross the floor, no doubt in part because she sensed Conservative strength here. 

The NDP and Jagmeet Singh

To date the NDP is running ahead of its pace in 2019, and looks set to pick up seats. Leader Jagmeet Singh is polling particularly well in surveys that ask specifically about leadership. A recent Abacus poll found he had the strongest net positives among the leaders. The problem is that leaders are not on the ballot but parties are. Nonetheless, Singh is proving to be an adept campaigner and communicator. 

However, the NDP vote is strongly correlated by age (in the most recent Mainstreet and Nanos they were either tied or ahead in the youngest age cohort) so turnout is exceptionally important. The NDP is quite a bit weaker among older voters who tend to turn out more strongly while younger voters have lower turnout (see this Statistics Canada survey).  It bodes well for the NDP in the longer run. Because the Conservatives did well early on in the campaign they could also lose votes to tactical voters who may prefer the NDP but will nonetheless vote Liberal if they fear the Conservatives.

Normally, one should not expect much movement in the final week of a campaign but this one is close; there are recent shifts that may not be finished. There is higher than normal uncertainty.

Election Campaign 2021 and the polls

Election 2021 features quite a few polls including daily tracking polls from Nanos and Mainstreet, who were among the most accurate polling firms in 2019. The table below presents calculations of the difference between actual election results and the late campaign provincial & regional subsections of national polls in 2019. I converted the errors into absolute values, added them up and ranked the pollsters. The top three performers in 2019 (seen below with a white background) were Leger, Mainstreet and Nanos.

In my view the polling firms in the middle with the light gray background also did well - Abacus, Research Co and Campaign Research. The others in darker gray below were less accurate.

These pollster performances could look different in 2021.  The pollster with the best record over time is Nanos, the firm doing daily tracking polls for the Globe and Mail/ CTV News.  So far the polls suggest that the Liberals' hoped for majority is a chimera. I hate the term "polls show"; polls are not so unswervingly accurate, so they deserve less declarative language.

The results so far should be regarded as tentative and preliminary.  The arrival of the autumn will bring TV debates in the week following Labour Day. They are likely to be highly influential on the final result. 

Although parties devote much space to detailed policy proposals the public looks at the big picture: it is symbolic politics that are decisive. 

The Liberals popularity declined almost as soon as the writ was dropped. It is likely the Trudeau government was unpopular before writ. Six years of accumulated grievances will do that. However, the Liberals' polling and other public opinion research such as focus groups should have been looking for that and they ought to have found it. Clearly they weren't looking.

The Dishonesty of Erin O'Toole

The Conservatives are running an extremely dishonest, but highly effective campaign, a much more effective campaign than Andrew Scheer mounted in 2019. 

An Andrew Coyne column in the Globe and Mail helps illustrate the nature of the Conservative campaign.

"...So Conservatives must be thrilled to find Erin O’Toole showing promise of the requisite shamelessness. The Conservative leader has not just survived the inevitable Liberal attacks in the campaign’s first week, he has seemed almost to invite them, luring the Grits into wasting valuable rhetorical ammunition on a series of dummy controversies.

On vaccine mandates, on abortion, on health care, Mr. O’Toole has said things that at first sound difficult, controversial, or at least noteworthy, but which on closer examination turn out to mean nothing – nothing, that is, substantively different from Liberal policy, the status quo, or both. Liberal attempts to turn these into wedge issues have accordingly largely fizzled.

Some of this facility had been in evidence even before the Conservative platform was released. The Conservative promise to balance the budget “over the next decade” is a masterpiece of meaninglessness: the latest projections from the Parliamentary Budget Office show the budget will be all but balanced – a deficit of less than 1 per cent of GDP – inside of four years. It would require heroic acts of profligacy to prevent it from balancing in 10."

Coyne is right about this meaningless promise, but it lets the Conservatives appear to be fiscally prudent, when it is probably their intent to run large deficits in budgets, which include big tax cuts for their friends, financed by additional borrowing. It is the symbolism that counts. Quite brilliant, but entirely dishonest. 

More Coyne:

".... On abortion, Mr. O’Toole’s vociferously pro-choice position seemed to deprive the Liberals of a target – until the release of the Conservative platform, with its vow to “protect the conscience rights of health-care professionals” who object to providing services such as abortion or assisted suicide. Again the Liberals pounced, only to find their wedge blunted once again: doctors are not required to provide those services now.

They are required to provide “effective referrals,” something Mr. O’Toole had promised to scrap during his leadership campaign. Would he still? Alas, no, as he later clarified: the promise now is merely to “protect” doctors’ existing conscience rights. The status quo, in other words."

Coyne should ask the rhetorical question if this is no change: why say anything?  Because that rhetoric is a strong symbolic bow towards the anti-abortion crowd within Conservative ranks.  He is saying "I am sympathetic to your feelings. I will try to do something for you." It may not amount to much - public opinion in Canada is strongly pro-choice. Stephen Harper did not try to introduce an abortion law. However, he firmly prohibited Canada's international aid money from being spent on family planning that included access to abortion. In other words he is saying he is with the anti-abortionists in spirit if not in practice.  Again, brilliant but dishonest.

We go through the same thing again on health care. Coyne again:

"By the time the Liberals shifted their focus to health care, they were already looking punched out. Still, did they really think, in 2021, after so much talk of the perils of online misinformation, they could get away with posting a video of Mr. O’Toole saying he would allow provinces to contract with private, for-profit providers, while snipping out the bit about ensuring “universal access remains paramount”?

Again: private provision of services within a system of universal public insurance is common practice now – under the current, i.e. Liberal government. All the Liberal war room achieved by this ham-fisted gambit was to make themselves the issue, rather than their intended target.

Mr. O’Toole’s talent for double-talk may not make for much coherent policy. But as a survival tactic, its merits are undoubted. The point of a wedge issue is to force a party leader to choose between his base and the broader public. It takes some artful duplicity to wriggle out of this trap: to adopt a position of such bottomless vacuity, impenetrable yet suggestive, as to allow each group to take away from it what they prefer.

Again we have to ask why say this. Because O'Toole wants to appeal to the pro-privatization part of the Canadian electorate. This includes many affluent Canadians who want to buy their way to the front of the line, something that would seriously undermine Canada's health care system. However, his rhetorical frame lets him deny it. My impression is that it seems to have worked at the symbolic level, which is the point of the gambit. However, it is remarkably dishonest and suggests to me that O'Toole is further to the right than he is letting on. Coyne seems clueless about all this: symbolic politics have a reality underneath that should not be ignored.

So far I have neglected to mention the NDP. To date they are running a successful (for a third party) 'happy warrior' campaign, and Jagmeet Singh is achieving new heights of personal popularity. More on the NDP in a future post.