The story of Campaign 2015: The Niqab and Anyone but Harper

A version of this post can be found at iPolitics

The 2015 campaign and its likely outcome can be boiled down to two factors: the Federal Court of Appeal decision on September 15 that allowed Zunera Ishaq to be formally sworn in as a Canadian citizen while wearing a niqab, and the fact that while a significant percentage of the Canadian population was content to see either the NDP or Liberals win, they wanted more than anything to see Stephen Harper leave. They were ABH - Anyone but Harper.

Widespread feelings of antipathy towards Harper have fundamentally framed the choice — but until mid-September it wasn’t clear which of the other two parties was going to be seen as the appropriate alternative. The polls then were telling us that it was a three-way national tie.

That’s where the niqab came in. A part of Quebec’s francophone population, which up to that point was willing to vote NDP, had a strong, visceral, negative reaction to the niqab. It was powerful enough to push large numbers to abandon the NDP for the Bloc and the Conservatives (Take a look at the Bloc's ad on this). Tom Mulcair defended the right of women to choose what they want to wear, and paid a price.

There was an early impact. Any new development takes a few days to register with the electorate (keep this in mind when thinking about the Gagnier affair, and don’t expect to see any significant impact before Sunday in the polls). Shortly after September 15, the NDP rise in Quebec stopped and then started to fall — fast. After a short delay the impact grew and was reinforced by the first French TV debate, but it was clearly visible before. The NDP decline began to be reflected in national polls — again, prior to the debate. The Liberals had the same position on the niqab but managed to escape the backlash largely because their Quebec support is disproportionately anglophone and allophone.

You can see it in the following two graphics — the first is the Quebec polls from September 1 to mid-October. (Note that I use a three-poll moving average to smooth the natural fluctuations you get from polling).

And with a short delay, a gap between the Liberals and the NDP opens up in the national polls.

The gap gave the clear signal to anti-Harper voters. The Liberals and Justin Trudeau have been the clear winners because Quebec turned against the NDP as a consequence over the niqab — a bitter irony for Stephen Harper, who tried to exploit anti-niqab sentiment and had been running anti-Trudeau TV commercials in constant rotation.

There has long been evidence of strong dislike of the Harper government among many Canadians. It’s why you hear so much talk of strategic voting. The expectation of many advocates is that such voting would efficiently topple just enough Tories to do Harper in. Whatever its micro impact in individual constituencies, it’s clear that we’re seeing the effect of strategic anti-Harper positioning on a broad national scale.

But what about the rest of the campaign — is this really all that mattered? There were some Liberal gains on the NDP between mid-August and mid-September in Ontario that could be attributable to their efforts to outflank the NDP on the left, but it might also have been simply a movement back to the pre-Alberta election polling norm. Such movements did occur in Western Canada a little earlier.

The debates (except in Quebec) were generally a fiasco — bad television with tiny audiences largely composed of the politically-committed. Trudeau did exceed expectations in the debates, which helped him in news coverage, while Mulcair fell short. Trudeau had an effective ad (the one on the escalator) while the NDP made the mistake of not advertising early enough — campaigning as a frontrunner when they really weren’t that far ahead.

But the real explanation for the pattern this election has taken is really quite simple: the niqab controversy wound up signalling to Canadians how they could best express their opposition to Harper.

And the 2015 election has been about Harper, his protests to the contrary notwithstanding. Its zeitgeist has been captured well in Michael Harris’s acerbic columns in iPolitics. Canadians can expect to wake up to a very different House of Commons come Tuesday morning.

Who got it right in 2011: Pollsters and Accuracy

This has been cross posted at iPolitics

It can be difficult at the best of times to make sense of the flood of polling data issuing forth from Internet and airwaves. And there’s a fair amount of social media buzz out there about which pollster is getting it right in this election.

Two of Canada’s major polling firms, EKOS and Nanos, have been reporting different parties in the lead — the Liberals on the part of Nanos over the past week, the Conservatives in the case of EKOS (although the latter’s most recent release gives the Liberals a slight lead that puts them in a statistical tie with the Conservatives, given the margin of error).

So who is getting it right? We won't know for sure until we take the ballots out of the box on Oct. 19; until then, we can do little more than speculate.

What we can do is look back at earlier elections. In 2011, when it came to national numbers, the firm with the fewest errors was Angus Reid, a repeat of its 2008 performance. Reid finished just ahead of Nanos, which in an earlier incarnation as the firm SES had been closest to the mark in the 2006 election.

The table below compares the performance of polling companies in 2011 with respect to national vote shares:

No one pollster gets it right all the time. Compas, no longer providing polling reports, was last on this list in 2011 but the most accurate in 2004 (with Ipsos and Léger just a whisker behind). EKOS ranked relatively low in 2011 (to its credit, EKOS performed a post-election evaluation of its performance). However, EKOS was closest to the election result in 1997, while Environics had that honour in 2000. The title has been widely shared.

One interesting pattern easily discerned from this list is that most firms underestimated how well the Conservatives would do in 2011. On the other hand, Conservative support was widely overestimated in 2004 and Liberal support was underestimated. As a result, we had election night surprises: a Conservative majority in 2011 and a stronger than expected Liberal minority in 2004.

While getting close to the actual result is important to firms, in terms of election outcomes the national number is something of a beauty contest. When it comes to seats, what’s happening in the provinces and regions is what really counts, and it’s difficult and expensive to obtain accurate polling numbers that capture all of Canada’s political diversity.

The table below takes the regional numbers from the pollsters above (except Compas) and then creates an average of errors in the regions for each party. A total lets us compare them. You will see the order of finish is somewhat different.

While the rankings differ from the national picture, that’s not what is most important. Many values are relatively large. In a first-past-the-post system, a small deviation of two or three points one way or the other can have a significant impact on ridings won or lost.

The under-estimate of the Conservative vote led directly to forecasters’ missing the impending Harper majority. Going into voting day, Harper had an average 6.2 percentage point lead over the second place NDP — but wound up with a nine point lead. Of particular significance was a 9.4 percentage point poll lead in Ontario that wound up on voting day as a 19-point lead.

Since 2011 we have had polling fiascos in Alberta in 2012 and British Columbia in 2013. The polls in these two elections created strong expectations of a win by the opposition that never materialized. This year, despite the radical change the Alberta election produced, the polls were generally accurate in forecasting the outcome (Léger Marketing was closest to the mark).

Methodologies have changed and diversified. For example, we have traditional telephone polling from Nanos and Environics, computerized telephone polling from EKOS, Forum Research and others, online surveys from large Internet panels from Ipsos, Abacus, Léger Marketing and Angus Reid and others. Resistance to answering polls has also increased, adding to the variation in results and the uncertainty.

A new Internet methodology that has seen some use in the United States is the Google Consumer Survey, which is a short survey that randomly pops up on computer screens. According to polling guru Nate Silver, a Google survey was the second-most accurate poll in the 2012 presidential election; this could be a glimpse of our polling future.

I am old enough to remember provincial election campaigns with no polls. However, polls have proliferated as never before, as have the individual riding surveys that attempt to drill down into the dynamics of close-fought local races.

Will strategic voting make a difference to the outcome of the 2015 election?

This has been cross-posted at iPolitics.

Since the 1960s, the Conservative party — in its various identities — has been moving steadily to the right. This has opened a widening gap between what is now a very right-wing party and the various parties of the centre and left.

Most voters do not have strong partisan alignments, but a large number hold values and political views that place them a considerable ideological distance from Stephen Harper. They have a strong incentive to vote strategically and they likely will. Their impact on the election could be significant.

The first person in Canadian politics to embody Harper’s ideological outlook was former Ontario Premier Mike Harris (several of Harris’ former ministers became part of the Harper cabinet, including Tony Clement, the late Jim Flaherty and John Baird). In 1999 Harris was the first major target of strategic voting.

In the 1999 Ontario election, Harris was re-elected. Nonetheless, that election saw a wave of strategic voting that had an impact. Harris received a vote share almost identical to that received by his party in 1995. However, the same voting support that won the PCs 63 per cent of seats in the legislature in 1995 secured just 57 per cent of Ontario constituencies in 1999. A detailed analysis of voting patterns I prepared after the election identified at least eight of a total of 103 seats where strategic voting accounted for the defeat of the PC candidates (seven of those ridings were won by Liberals, one by a New Democrat). In five more constituencies this voting pattern narrowly missed defeating Tories. The Dalton McGuinty-led Liberals were the principal beneficiaries as the NDP continued to be hobbled by the unpopularity of the Bob Rae regime defeated in 1995.

The 1999 precedent suggests that similar behaviour in the 2015 federal election could be a factor in up to 40 constituencies. Let me draw attention to some ridings on the front lines of the strategic voting war.

In Winnipeg, the riding of Charleswood-Assiniboia-St. James-Headingley has long been assumed to be safely in the hands of former Harper cabinet minister Steven Fletcher. However, Liberal support is up dramatically in the province and a recent province-wide survey by Manitoba pollster Probe Research reports the Liberals and Conservatives tied at 39 per cent each. In 2011 the Conservatives won 53.5 per cent of the Manitoba vote versus 16.6 per cent for the Liberals.

Much attention has been paid to the possibility of three south-end Winnipeg ridings switching from Conservative to Liberal, but little to this west-end constituency. However, my seat projection model suggests this seat is ripe for the picking by the Liberals and strategic votes from the approximately fifteen to twenty per cent of the vote won by the NDP and Greens last time could make the difference. The fact that the NDP recently replaced its candidate here makes the chances of it happening even greater.

In Saskatchewan, where the NDP last won a seat in the 2000 election, there has been a similar decline in Conservative support from the 56.3 per cent they won in 2011 to somewhere in the low forties, while both NDP and Liberal support is up. Since the last election a significant redrawing of boundaries has opened up the possibility of deep erosion of the near-monopoly of seats held by the Conservatives (the exception in 2011 was Liberal Ralph Goodale).

Several New Democrats could end up taking seats in Regina and Saskatoon, possibly shutting out the Conservatives. A recent riding poll in Regina-Lewvan placed the NDP six points back of the Conservatives (note of caution: constituency polls don’t have a great track record and have a difficult time properly locating the residences of cellphone users). If enough Liberal supporters vote strategically in Saskatchewan’s cities for the NDP, several Conservative-held seats could fall.

In 1999, several strategic voting organizations set up in Ontario to endorse candidates. However, their organizational strength and financing paled in comparison to the political parties; their efforts were too little, too late. Political parties are highly organized in every constituency they think they can win. They knock on every door and make direct appeals to voters by phone. They build up databanks of “positive” supporters and pull them out to vote. Strategic voting advocacy groups simply cannot hope to match this.

Strategic voting in 1999 was a grassroots phenomenon on the part of highly-motivated voters. There are strategic voting groups active in this campaign with the resources to do their own polling — at least one is planning to call households on election day — but my guess is most voters who want to cast a strategic ballot will simply do it on their own, as they did sixteen years ago.

There are two weeks left until voting day, and the split in the polls that has opened up between the Liberals and the NDP suggests the Liberals will be the principal beneficiaries of strategic votes. But voters need to do their homework. Canada is a large and complex country. Those who feel strongly about getting rid of Harper ought to take their local, regional and provincial circumstances into account before making a decision.

No party should automatically get a strategic voter’s ballot if the point of it all is to replace the Harper government as efficiently and effectively as possible. The Harper government could be dispatched on October 19, and strategic voting could well play a role.

Election polling: Plenty of noise, not much signal

This has also been posted at iPolitics.

Nate Silver became an overnight sensation as a polling guru early on in the 2008 Presidential when he contradicted the conventional media interpretation of the race for the Democratic nomination. The pundits were promoting the inevitability of a Hillary Clinton nomination victory. An early supporter of Barack Obama, Silver shrewdly distinguished between good polls and bad, and early on anticipated the Obama presidency. He went on to write a widely-read book, The Signal and the Noise, about statistical probability and prediction.

What we see in Canada is desperation to figure out where the election race is headed with endless parsing of the smallest nuance in the latest poll. There is an abundance of statistical and media noise, but little in the way of clear signals about where the overall election race is headed.

As the Oct. 19 election date approaches, the outcome will likely become clear enough. Meanwhile the media should be patient and allow the public to weigh their choices. They could assist by emphasizing and clarifying policy choices facing the electorate, as well as asking some tough questions about how the polls are conducted.

Instead as we see a headline across the top of an inside page in in the Globe and Mail, “In Quebec, Trudeau Aims to Connect”, a piece of poll-driven mush (the NDP are slipping/ is Trudeau catching up?), while consigning an Employment Insurance announcement from Thomas Mulcair to a capsule at the bottom of the page under the heading: Election Digest. Unemployment and the impact of EI premiums on the economy, is that an issue?

Meaningless analysis of political psychology compared to a key policy announcement. The editorial choice is clear.

This week we have completely contradictory polls from two of Canada’s most respected polling companies. EKOS Research, which just released a survey giving the Conservatives a clear lead. The daily Nanos Poll releases the past two days suggest a completely different picture, a continuing tight race with NDP second, the Conservatives third. A new Forum poll says no to both of those – the Liberals and Conservatives are tied, the NDP is in third. You get the picture.

Polling is having a hard time these days. The media, with news budgets cut by internet competition, won’t pay for much of the polling that is reported (Ekos/iPolitics and Nanos/CTV are exceptions). However, most pollsters pay for and release their own polls simply as a means of promoting their market research business, so there is no shortage.

The media helps out by reporting every number available, mostly without context, but the polls are suffering from a lack of respondents. Response rates to polls as Nate Silver puts it “are dismal these days”. The growing public resistance to answering poll questions may partly explain the polling fiascos we have seen in recent years.

A good example was the 2013 B.C. election where polls and the media anticipated a significant NDP victory. Instead majority victory went to Premier Christy Clark and her B.C. Liberals. Another part of it may be new polling technologies and methods.

The polls were wrong in this year’s UK election. As Nate Silver noted “polls of the U.K. election — most of them conducted online — projected a photo-finish for Parliament instead of a Conservative majority“.

Polling technologies and methods ought to be placed under the media microscope – instead their results are treated as just another poll. One new technique is a variation on the traditional telephone poll. Interactive voice response (IVR) surveys – essentially computerized robots – dial your number and ask questions in an electronic voice. This technique is used by Forum and EKOS among others.

There are several online pollsters (including Leger Marketing , Ipsos and Angus Reid) that conduct surveys via the internet with samples drawn from previously recruited panels, which can number into the hundreds of thousands. The panel is supposed to represent Canada as a whole and act as a substitute for randomly selecting respondents from the whole population. The media should be asking how big the national panel is, and how big are the panels in the provinces and regions reported in the polls.

Are these smaller panels an adequate substitute for the population of smaller regions and provinces? What matters in determining seat counts is regional support so the issue is important. We should also know exactly how these polls are conducted.

What do their reported margins of error mean? Surely all the margin of error tells us is how confident we can be the sample is representative of the panel, but is this really comparable to a telephone poll that could call any landline or cellphone anywhere in population. We should also get information and analysis from the media on whether polling companies contact both cellphones vs landlines and what that means.

Some polling firms are more transparent about their methods than others, but there is nothing to stop pundits and media from asking pointed questions about this vital source of campaign information. One friend who formerly worked in market research said in her company there were problems with response rates for the online polls, another issue the media could investigate.

But polls can also be quite accurate. There is randomness to the order of things. It is entirely possible for a poll not to be done well, but still be accurate. Even hamburger polls have been right. I am not aware of any burger polls this year and I lament their passing – I like hamburgers. A burger poll at the Pacific National Exhibition in 1972 correctly anticipated the demise of B.C.’S Social Credit dynasty. In the 2003 Ontario provincial election the Lick’s Hamburger Poll outperformed one of the commercial pollsters that year. Now there is a media polling story I would love to read in 2015.

The Ethnic Vote in 2015

This has been cross-posted at iPolitics

Waves of immigration throughout Canada’s history have made ethnic sub-populations key targets for Canadian election campaigns. Historically this has benefited the federal Liberals; the party supported mass immigration while governing Canada for two thirds of the 20th century, making ethnic voting a staple of Liberal politics. Challenges have come in recent years, notably from the Conservatives — who achieved considerable electoral success in immigrant ridings in 2011 — but also from the NDP.

It’s largely forgotten now but at one time Canadians of British origin were openly suspicious of immigrants’ politics. In 1924 one prominent Winnipeg businessman said of newcomers: “We welcome all good citizens from foreign lands but if they do not believe in the Christian religion, nor intend to keep our laws, they should be asked without delay to return from whence they came.”

Let’s look at some constituencies where there are large concentrations of Canadians from various ethnic backgrounds.

Ukrainians

Many of the immigrants that Winnipeg businessman was talking about came from Eastern Europe, particularly the Ukraine. Most came prior to World War I and settled on margins of the good farmland in the Prairie Provinces. Based on the 2013 redistribution, in 2011 the top five federal ridings with the highest concentration of ethnic Ukrainians would have elected Conservatives, all but one by comfortable margins, all in Manitoba, Saskatchewan or Alberta. Most of this population is made up of Ukrainians whose families migrated to Canada prior to World War I or shortly thereafter and no longer speak the language.

(Data on the ethnic composition of electoral districts comes from the 2011 National Household Survey, which replaced the long form census.)

The federal Liberals were successful at first with this vote, winning strong Ukrainian ridings in the twenties, thirties and forties. But the Liberals were displaced on the Prairies by the Progressive Conservatives under John Diefenbaker in the 1950s.

Harper has made support for the Ukraine in its struggle with Russian-backed secessionists a key symbolic foreign policy priority — no doubt partly for its domestic political benefit, even if many diplomats remain unimpressed. However, in 2015 Conservative support has slipped even in the party’s strongholds — and that includes ridings with significant Ukrainian populations. Four out of five of these ridings would be retained by the Conservatives today, but current polling suggests one (in urban Winnipeg) could go to the NDP. Note that this constituency, Elmwood-Transcona, is about 21 per cent Ukrainian heritage. A majority voters are from other backgrounds. Ethnicity is not the only influence on voting behaviour.

Italians

Large numbers of Italians settled in Ontario and Quebec after the Second World War, mainly in Toronto and Montreal. They reliably supported the Liberals. That may be changing.

The example of Toronto’s designated ‘Little Italy’ neighbourhood is a good illustration. The neighbourhood is located in University-Rosedale, a constituency with the 46th-largest Italian population in Canada (7.6 per cent). But many Italian-Canadians have long since moved to the suburbs. The two constituencies with the highest concentration of Italian voters are relatively prosperous GTA ridings just north of Toronto (both King-Vaughan and Vaughan-Woodbridge rank among the top 25 most affluent constituencies in Canada). Both would have elected Conservatives in 2011. Current polling suggests the Liberals could win back one of the two (and also pick up an NDP seat in Montreal). And the northern Ontario riding of Sault Ste. Marie, which elected a Conservative in 2011, is likely to go NDP.

South Asians

More recent years have seen large-scale immigration from Asia. The Conservatives targeted these ridings in 2011 and achieved significant but not universal success. Again, using the redistributed vote we find that half of the top ten South Asian constituencies would have elected Conservatives in 2011, although the NDP would have won four and the Liberals two. With the considerable improvement in Liberal support during the current election it is likely that the Conservatives would retain just a third of these constituencies; the NDP would drop two and the Liberals would make significant gains.

Chinese

We see a similar pattern among constituencies with substantial Chinese populations: considerable Conservative success in 2011 with likely large-scale losses, mainly to the Liberals but also one to the NDP, anticipated in 2015.

Over time, new Canadians become more integrated into Canadian society. As they do, their ethnic identities become less important in determining how they might vote. As second, third and fourth generations replace the original immigrants they develop political views they share with others outside of their ethnic sub-groups. Whether they are environmentalists or social justice advocates, free traders or anti-tax conservatives, their ethnic identities have progressively less influence on how they vote and view politics.

Although the Liberals continue to do well among ethnic minority voters, political support from Canada’s minorities has diversified. The efforts made by the Conservatives in 2011 met with considerable success and the NDP has made its own gains. The days of monopolizing the immigrant vote are over, and the political importance of ethnic identity clearly fades over time.

Would the Senate tangle with a Prime Minister Mulcair?

This has been cross-posted at iPolitics.

There was a time when the Senate would sleep from one election to the next. Although it has the same legal authority as the House of Commons (except that it can’t introduce money bills), its non-elected status means it has little moral authority to interfere with the elected House.

Or so you might think.

In its early years, the Senate was still active in amending bills; that role faded when the Liberals came to dominate the chamber in the mid-20th century. The Senate briefly woke from its long slumber after Brian Mulroney became prime minister in September 1984. In early 1985, during Mulroney’s political honeymoon period, the Senate’s Liberal majority delayed a borrowing bill (it was a parliamentary issue — governments are supposed to table spending estimates before raising money).

This action was widely viewed as impudent meddling by the remnant of a discredited ancien régime, and it drew hostile reactions from government representatives, pundits and members of the public. An angry Prime Minister Mulroney threatened to launch a constitutional amendment to strip the Senate of almost all its powers (he backed off, eventually).

The Liberal Senate House leader who provoked Mulroney’s ire was former Trudeau minister Allan MacEachen. At the time I was putting together a documentary on the Senate for the CBC centred on this episode, and I followed the issue closely. MacEachen was a legendary political character — a wily House of Commons tactician and a key cabinet minister in the governments of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. When we interviewed MacEachen for the documentary I got a strong impression of someone who had been publicly humiliated — and who was unlikely to forget the experience.

MacEachen did not have long to wait for an opening; the Mulroney honeymoon was over by early 1986. The Liberal-controlled Senate began to hold up bills on a wide variety of topics: transportation, drug patents, refugees, copyright and energy incentives. My impression was that MacEachen applied pressure on measures where there was public support for the Liberal position, and where Liberal MPs gave their consent for the Senate caucus to act.

This amounted to a non-constitutional — but very real — change in the Senate’s role. A Senate controlled by partisan opponents of the government can bide its time for a while after an election, read the polls and pick the right moment to oppose the government on issues where it has the public is on its side. It’s a recipe for periodic deadlock.

The most notable development in the mid-1980s came when the Liberal Senate refused to proceed with legislation authorizing the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement until after a federal election. The Progressive Conservatives did go on to win the 1988 election and the Senate passed the deal — but confrontation between the chambers didn’t end there. In autumn 1990, the Senate started holding up the legislation to create the GST.

The Liberal grip on the Senate was suddenly broken when Brian Mulroney used an arcane constitutional provision that let him appoint eight extra senators, two for each region, bringing the PCs a majority.

The new Progressive Conservative majority in the Senate did not forget their party’s treatment at the hands of the Liberals. When the Chrétien Liberal majority swept into office in late 1993, Conservative senators didn’t hesitate to exercise their authority.

Early on, the Conservative Senate blocked Liberal legislation that would have cancelled the Mulroney government’s initiative to privatize the Pearson airport. They held up the bill for several years; the issue only died when the government reached a compensation agreement with the Pearson airport developers. The Tory majority also blocked a Liberal bill to suspend and change a redistribution of seats in the House of Commons then underway, and delayed several other pieces of legislation.

The Harper period has been somewhat different. The Conservatives had a majority in the Senate by the end of 2010, before they won a majority in the House of Commons. Prior to gaining full control of the chamber the Senate Conservatives, using a procedural manoeuvre, killed an NDP climate change bill supported by the Liberals. The bill had been pushed through the House of Commons over the objections of the minority Conservative government.

Even if the NDP was willing to fill all 22 vacancies in the Senate (it says it won’t but, eventually, it might be forced to do so by the Supreme Court), it would be many years before the party could achieve a Senate majority. The same problem would not face the Liberals. Just by filling existing vacancies a Liberal government would regain effective control of the Senate. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Senates controlled by the opposition showed how it could thumb its nose from time to time at the elected House of Commons. It could happen again.

The current Senate is likely to feel some restraint in the short run, given its tarnished reputation. But that won’t last. Simple hostility on the part of a chamber controlled by Conservatives and Senate Liberals could create legislative gridlock and an unprecedented legitimacy crisis for Parliament.

That might fuel the NDP’s push to abolish the Senate — but unanimous provincial approval isn’t likely any time soon. If there is a Thomas Mulcair government, expect to see at least a new version of the selective delays and vetoes that bedevilled Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien in the last century.

Campaign 2015: the story so far, poll by poll

This post has already been published at iPolitics. 

Most elections experience a moment where the campaign gels — a point where political ideas and forces come into focus, framing the likely outcome. It can happen when a party or candidate departs from the pack on a key issue: think of Tim Hudak's pledge to eliminate 100,000 public sector jobs early in the 2014 Ontario provincial election. It could be a major stumble by a leader — such as John Turner's "I had no option" exchange with Brian Mulroney in 1984, or Jim Prentice's unfortunate "math is difficult" crack in the recent Alberta election.

When the moment happens, you know it; twists and turns may follow, but the campaign itself is suddenly on a track going in one direction.

The issue of Europe's refugee crisis may turn out to be 2015's moment. Soon after that shocking photo of a drowned 3-year old Syrian boy made its way around the world, the campaign narrative instantly turned to foreign policy, with Stephen Harper's Conservatives largely on the defensive. The Nanos Poll released September 6 was conducted the weekend after the issue arose, and it reported a dip in Conservative popularity that continued into the next day, dropping the incumbent party to third place.

It's still too early to tell how the refugee issue will affect the remainder of the campaign. We've been at this for 40 days now, but polling on national public opinion has changed little since the campaign began. Regional numbers tell a different story.

If we compare the average of the national polls released since August 2 to the July numbers, we find just a slight change: the Conservatives are down just over two points, the Liberals are up just over two and the NDP is up less than one, holding a narrow lead.

Monthly National Polling Averages

For all this apparent precision, there is wide variation in reported poll results. For example, in Ontario different polls have reported support for the Conservatives ranging between 40 per cent and 21 per cent since August 2.

Campaign Polls in Ontario since August 2

Ontario has the most seats, so this variability is something to watch.

The campaigns at the level of individual provinces and regions differ greatly; every party holds a lead somewhere. When it comes to individual ridings, it's the vote share in the provinces that determines wins and losses. Let's break them down.

In Atlantic Canada the Conservatives are down about four points since the campaign started, and we see a corresponding increase for the Liberals. This appears to represent an early election-related shift.

Atlantic Polls

In Quebec, NDP support has grown significantly since the campaign began at the expense of the Conservatives and the Bloc, while the Liberals have held steady but far behind the New Democrats. Decisive polling shifts are always unmistakeable; the dramatic shift during the Alberta election was a striking example. Compared to the first three months of 2015, Quebec now looks dramatically different. The NDP has gained over 14 percentage points in support since then from all of the other parties — including six points in just the first month of the campaign. This implies a repeat of 2011's 'Orange Wave'. Has the campaign in Quebec already gelled?

Quebec Polls

In Ontario we've seen a small apparent shift away from the Conservatives, more to the Liberals' benefit than that of the NDP. However, given what we know about variability, it is not clear that a shift this small is significant. Along with its size, Ontario's apparent indecisiveness will make it the key target for leaders touring the country.

Ontario Polls

When we move west to the Manitoba/Saskatchewan region we see a clear pattern of movement away from the NDP, which appears to be a partial fading of the NDP surge following the Alberta election. It peaked in July here and in B.C. The 2015 campaign appears to have had not much of an impact to date.

Manitoba and Saskatchewan Region Polls

The Alberta pattern is similar to that of Manitoba-Saskatchewan, with a slightly greater drop happening sooner here for the NDP. There has been a gradual improvement in Conservative fortunes here.

Alberta Polls

In British Columbia the NDP's upward trend preceded the Alberta election, but the Alberta outcome did give it an extra bump. The NDP's losses have gone more to the Liberals than the Conservatives. Polls here are notoriously volatile and variable, reflecting B.C.'s many political microclimates.

British Columbia Polls

The race may be a dead heat nationally; at the local level it's a different story. Given that polling is intrinsically variable, the post-Labour Day campaign is moving into a political climate of high uncertainty.