Thoughts on Canadian politics post the 2019 election

National political context emerging from 2019 election

Polling during the 2019 election left many with the impression that the Liberal government was on the ropes. However, the distortions of the first past the post system disguised the fact the Liberals were actually comfortably ahead in most of the country. The Liberals trailed the Conservatives in the national popular vote:

However, the popular vote share disguised an important regional dimension. The strong Liberal national lead in MPs elected was an outcome based on the regional implications of first-past-the-post. An enormous Conservative lead in two provinces - Saskatchewan and Alberta - produced the following:

Many of these were 'wasted' votes. Elsewhere, the Liberals had a comfortable eight point popular vote lead when you look at the combined results in other provinces. That national popular vote looked close, but when it came to MPs elected, once we exclude the two most Conservative provinces, we find a majority of the seats going Liberal in the rest of Canada.

This illusion disappears if seats are distributed by proportional representation, but the current political reality is that what might look close in the national poll standings really isn't.

The Liberals

The Liberals emerged from the election in a minority, the first Liberal minority government since 1979. After the 1972 campaign the Liberals ran an adept and strategic minority that turned into a majority in 1974. In 1980, following numerous strategic and tactical errors on the part of the PC Joe Clark government (that governed as if it had a majority), the Pierre Trudeau Liberals were back for four years with a majority. Other than Carolyn Bennett the current group of Liberals have no prior experience governing as a minority. The Liberals were last in a minority in 2004 to 2006. It remains unclear to me if they will govern as the 1972-74 Liberals, or closer to the Joe Clark model. They had no logical partner in 2004-006 although they did get just enough to win one vote in 2005 with the help of the NDP.

At the moment, they have a get of jail free card until after the Conservative convention, and they are close enough to a majority that only a combined opposition can bring them down so there is some measure of safety. To get back to a majority, unlike in 1974 and 1980, they can't realistically base it on gains in Ontario. A small but achievable increase in popular support in Quebec appears to be the most realistic path to another Liberal majority but don't be surprised if a new election produces another minority.

Since the election Justin Trudeau has handled issues that have arisen reasonably well, particularly the aftermath of the Iran air crash, as well as the rail blockades (although some of the polling on this has been negative for them) and the result is that their position is still strong. Take this March 4th albeit opinionated assessment on the election forecasting blog leantossup.ca.

A lot of sound and fury has been raised over the allegedly broken nature of Canada recently, all of it stupid.... Finally, today, we got enough data to update the LeanTossup Canada Model, and contrary to so many assumptions about how the blockades and issues around resource extraction are hurting the Liberals, they’re actually up in seats. 

I suspect a greater threat to the Liberals could come from the negative economic impact of COVID-19, an impact certain to extend to all incumbent governments.

The NDP

Historians will no doubt forever treat the NDP's decision to get rid of Thomas Mulcair as a strategic error. From 2015 to 2019 the party dropped from 44 to 24 seats won. Their losses were particularly dramatic in Quebec. Nationally their popular vote dropped by 3.9 percentage points. However, in Quebec it dropped 14.7 percentage points and they lost all but one of the 16 seats they had won in 2015. There is no doubt the NDP exercised collective bad judgment in getting rid of Mulcair, who likely would have been gone after 2019 in any case.

In the 2019 election tactical voting hurt the NDP.  In closing polls the NDP nationally averaged 18.3 per cent but on voting day received only 15.8% of the Canada-wide vote, a gap of 2.5 percentage points.  Poll error would be part of the explanation but I suspect tactical voting (for the Liberals as the preferred alternative to the Conservatives) accounts for a substantial portion of the difference.

However, seen in the context of the longer term, it suggests there is more underlying support for the NDP than the 2019 election result would suggest. As well, there is some poll evidence that after a poor start as NDP leader Jagmeet Singh's election performance has left a positive impression on the electorate. There are a number of different polling questions one can pose to evaluate support for a given leader. One that I like is asked weekly by Nanos Research on whether a specific individual has the qualities of a good leader. Although Singh badly trails Trudeau and Scheer if the question is about which leader is your preferred choice for PM, he does quite well when poll respondents are asked if he has the qualities of a good political leader. Recently, he has been scoring in the high forties on this one just behind Justin Trudeau and well ahead of Scheer (Mulcair also performed well on this question).  This strongly suggests he has the potential to do well in the future overall. I think Singh is a net asset to the NDP and does not hold back its popularity. The party should not repeat the error of its past and seek to remove him from the post.

Conservative Leadership Race

There is a Conservative leadership race for a number of reasons: critiques of Scheer's performance in the election, the scandal about party finances that emerged and so on. However, I think the key consideration was a product of the results themselves. The Conservatives deceived themselves into thinking that their strength in national polls translated into enough support to win at least a plurality of the seats. Finishing 36 seats behind the despised Justin Trudeau was more than they could take. (Somewhat similar disappointment coming out of 2015 had an impact on the NDP.)

The race is now on for the Conservative leadership, and like the NDP race in 2017, some of the expected strong candidates - Rona Ambrose, Pierre Poilievre - did not enter.  Of greater significance is that the global zeitgeist has moved against the political right. If we look back three decades some of the key issues of the time and the way they were framed in public debate - free trade, lowering taxes, deregulation - were matters on which the party appeared to have a comparative advantage. The Mulroney PCs negotiated NAFTA, the Liberals at the time were unwilling to change it, and today they completely embrace it.

Today's zeitgeist is quite different. For example, the Conservatives are particularly weak on issues such as climate change and inequality. They are on the defensive and historically on the wrong side of the argument on both matters. As well, social conservatism on issues such as abortion or LGBTQ rights have transformed it from being an asset for the Conservative Party to being such a handicap in polling that we now see leading party activists lobbying to suppress social conservativism in the current race. And they are being successful. The party recently prohibited social conservative Richard Decarie from being a candidate.

However, the party still tilts right on key issues where their positioning is clearly a long run liability. As the Globe and Mail reported in January:

The key contenders in the Conservative leadership race say they plan to keep fighting the federal carbon tax, if they win the party’s top job. 

While Peter MacKay, Erin O’Toole and Marilyn Gladu have tried to distance themselves from other elements of outgoing leader Andrew Scheer’s election campaign, all confirmed to The Globe and Mail that on the carbon tax they agree with Mr. Scheer. 

The Conservatives remain mired in climate change myopia; it will hurt them over time. Cutting taxes such as eliminating the carbon tax is all the Conservatives have to say on inequality. Yet this is an era where public opinion has been moving in the direction of higher taxes for the wealthy.

There is considerable evidence that politics in North America is steadily shifting leftward. You would have no inkling of that if you look the current Tory leadership race.

The current global health crisis also illustrates the weakness of conservatives as they flounder in response. Let's not forget that one of the decisions of the PC Ford government was to cut public health spending.

Some thoughts on the US Presidential Race

The first thing that needs to be said about the US system of choosing presidents is that it is absolutely insane. Apart from the unfairness of advantaging some states and not others in the sequential series of primaries and caucuses over time, from the perspective of the parties it makes no sense. To take the case of the Democrats, instead of initial contests in small unrepresentative states like Iowa and New Hampshire, it would make more sense to stage these races in consequential swing states such as Pennsylvania and Florida.

It also advantages candidates who are well known. One simple reason Bernie Sanders has had an advantage over Elizabeth Warren despite similar policy positioning is that he is better known having run before. Joe Biden did well in many early polls for no better reason than that as Obama's VP he was well known. Campaigning changes this as a candidate's weaknesses become known but it does matter.

Because there are no effective spending limits the American political system also advantages money as we are seeing now with two billionaires (Bloomberg and Steyer) achieving some polling success simply because they have spent so much on ads.

A curious aspect of this campaign partly produced by the features described above is that we have three candidates who are realistically too old for the office - Bernie Sanders (will turn 79 this year in September), Michael Bloomberg (just turned 78) and Joe Biden (recently turned 78).

State of the race

Previous Democratic presidential nominating contests have tended to be rapid winnowing processes,  based previously on first past the post principles, but continuing even after more proportional rules for awarding delegates were adopted. However, the potential for a convention where no candidate captures a majority of delegates pre-convention is stronger this year than before. Currently the website Five Thirty Eight ranks Bernie Sanders with the best prospects of winning more than 50% of the delegates but has 'No One getting a majority' ranked second.

This is partly because the pre-race favourite of "centrist" Democrats, Joe Biden, performed poorly in the first two contests. He could well be displaced in his role by another very senior citizen, Michael Bloomberg, who has all the money in the world to finance his campaign. As well, Bernie Sanders who is leading did not perform particularly strongly in Iowa and New Hampshire so he is not dominating.

Media bias 

Major institutions of the U.S. media have had in the past a highly influential, sometimes negative impact on U.S. politics. In 2016 the major U.S. media overall were less negative towards Donald Trump than they were towards Hillary Clinton. A major study of this by the Shorenstein Center said: "...over the full course of the election, it was Clinton, not Trump, who was more often the target of negative coverage... Overall, the coverage of her candidacy was 62 percent negative to 38 percent positive, while his coverage was 56 percent negative to 44 percent positive."

One disadvantage for current candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is that the major U.S. media institutions have tended to frame their proposals for comprehensive medicare known popularly as 'medicare for all' negatively. Here is an example from New York Times columnist Tom Friedman.  I said 'framing' and I meant it. His column of February 11 says of Sanders that he, "wants to take away the private health care coverage of some 150 million Americans and replace it with a gigantic, untested Medicare-for-All program..." Notice the word 'gigantic'. Would it not be more appropriate to describe the American heavily private health care system relative to all others as 'gigantic'?  In 2018 16.7 percent of the US GDP went to health care, the largest by several percentage points in the world. And untested? Other western countries including Canada and others have medicare-for-all type systems. Hardly untested. This is a very solipsistic world view.

What will determine the outcome?

In trying to determine the outcome various theories have been offered: the state of the economy, the dedication of Trump's base, the views of suburban Republican women who switched to the Democrats in 2018, etc. One new figure in this debate gaining attention is political scientist Rachel Bitcofer (see this profile in Politico and this statement of her views in the New York Times).

The reason her views matter is that they are at odds with traditional ways of looking at the race of how it all comes down to a few swing voters, ideologically situated between the two alternatives.

Here is a summary as she outlined them in the Times:

The high levels of hyperpartisanship and polarization in the electorate have profoundly affected the political behavior of Americans and, by extension, made the outcome of our elections highly predictable. 

Always powerful, partisanship has become the be-all and end-all for American voters. ... 

Yet a key aspect of polarization has been somewhat overlooked: negative partisanship. Voters with this attitude are mobilized not by love of their own party so much as by hatred of the opposition party. Negative partisanship especially benefits the party that doesn’t hold the presidency, because out-party voters find themselves living in a world where their political preferences are under constant assault, or at least appear to be so....

...I predicted — in July 2018 — that negative partisanship would allow Democrats to pick up 42 House seats and sweep “Reagan country” in Orange County, Calif. At first, my model was an outlier, but by Election Day, the FiveThirtyEight “classic” forecast, Sabato’s Crystal Ball and the Cook Political Report all agreed with my forecast. [My note: The Democrats actually gained 41 seats]

Motivated by the threat posed by the Trump administration, casual Democratic voters, especially college-educated women, have been activated since Mr. Trump’s election and will remain activated so long as the threat he presents to them remains. And the complacent Democratic electorate of the 2010 and 2014 congressional midterms as well as the 2016 presidential election is gone (for now). It has been replaced by a galvanized Democratic electorate that will produce the same structural advantage for Democrats that manifested in the 2018 midterms.

Her forecast for the 2020 race made last year can be found here.

Economics do matter to any political race and the advantage on this so far favours Trump. However, a new wild card in all of this is the coronovirus - Covid-19. Canada's Minister of Finance Bill Morneau has already suggested it will have a negative economic effect. It may only be mild as is apparently the case for many who have contracted the illness but conceivably it could be profoundly negative. For example, Nouriel Roubini comments:

The COVID-19 outbreak ...is likely to be more severe than currently expected, and the  disruption to the Chinese economy will have spillover effects on global supply chains – including pharma inputs, of which China is a critical supplier – and business confidence, all of which will likely be more severe than financial markets’ current complacency suggests.

TC's Choice

If I had a vote it would go to Elizabeth Warren who is the best qualified of the candidates by far to be the next president. Whether she will be seems unlikely at the moment but a week in politics is still a long time.  I would argue that a must read on this is the item by Ezra Klein on Warren in Vox. He summarizes his argument thus:

The case for Warren over her competitors is threefold. She understands America’s problems better than anyone else in the field, in part because it’s her research and analysis that now forms the base for much of the policy debate. She understands how to focus and wield the powers of the regulatory state better than anyone else, because she’s actually done it, and because it’s core to her political project. And she is, far and away, the candidate with the clearest plan for making ambitious governance possible again.

Apart from the summary, I was struck by this section about her experience running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Obama:

I reported on Warren’s construction of the bureau, and what impressed me most in those years was something that is rarely discussed in politics but is of deep importance to the presidency: her skills as an organizational leader. 

I have never covered an agency where the morale was as high, the sense of mission as clear, and the collection of talent as impressive, as the CFPB under Warren. During those years, I spoke with CFPB employees ranging from senior leadership to midlevel lawyers to junior communications staffers, and you couldn’t make it three minutes into those conversations without getting some aphorism from Warren, or anecdote about Warren, quoted back to you. Her ability to inspire not just loyalty but a sense of mission in her staff was unique.... 

Warren’s work on the CFPB gave her something rare among political candidates. One is interest in, and experience with, the federal bureaucracy itself. She understands the regulatory process, how it works, who has access to it. She knows which meetings matter, where power sits, which explanations for why something isn’t possible or isn’t happening are merely stalling tactics. She has seen, firsthand, the entry points that lobbyists and special interests use to hijack the process, the difficulties of collaboration among agencies.

This tells you Warren knows government better than any of the others. She ought to be the Democratic candidate. Whether she will be is another matter.

UPDATES:  Warren performed well during last night's TV Debate in Nevada, which had a large audience of 19.7 million, a new record high for a Democratic debate. Warren's fundraising jumped during the debate.

What would the October election have looked like if based on PR

After I published my previous blogpost on December 9 I received a comment on Facebook asking what the results would have looked like using proportional representation.  Good question. I have now done just such a calculation, the results of which can be found below.

In the post I emphasized that the federal Liberals were effective in appealing to Ontario voters to "vote for a progressive government, not a progressive opposition". The key role of strategic/tactical voting in the election makes it clear that had proportional representation been in place, the voting shares would inevitably have differed from what actually took place. Knowledge on the part of voters  of the existence of PR would on its own certainly have produced a number of differences in the pattern of voting.

With those provisos, here are the seat results that would be produced by simply distributing seats based on a proportional voting system applied to the October 21 results.

As noted in the table I used a St. Lague PR voting calculation to calculate seat distribution using the vote shares produced in the October 21 election except in the northern territories. I used vote shares in each province and applied a 5% threshold rule - a party must have won at least 5% of the vote to be eligible to win seats (this excludes the PPC and independents such as Jody Wilson-Raybould). 

This is the same method used in Germany and New Zealand in their national elections for their list seats. However, they both use a mixed member system where half the seats are chosen in constituencies.  To simplify the calculus I assumed an all list system. My guess is that if Canada were ever to adopt PR it would be based on a mixed member system. However, assuming a proportional system were to emerge from the inevitably complicated and controversial reform process, the shares of seats we see in the table above would remain the about same.

The seat distribution seen here closely reflects the vote shares in the 2019 election at the national level.

Some observations about these results:

1. The largest single gain in seats would go to the NDP, the largest proportionate gain to the Greens.
2. The Liberals, Conservatives and Bloc all lose seats and seat shares.  The Liberals lose the most.
3. The logical coalition that would emerge here would be Liberal-NDP - the two parties would have 173 seats combined.

This is all of course completely hypothetical.  A PR system would likely produce more parties and multi-party coalitions.

Doug Ford and the federal election

I previously posted a revised version of an article published in Inroads last spring on the forthcoming federal election, part of a series of regional analyses.  It concluded provincial politics were likely to play a role in the fall federal election.  A few days after the October 21, 2019 event I submitted the article below, which appears in the new issue of Inroads. After the article there is an update and additional analysis.

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In the Summer/Fall issue of Inroads, I noted at the end of my election preview article that while Ontario’s provincial politics played no role in the federal elections of the seventies, by all appearances that was not going to be true in the upcoming election. Last December and January, prior to most of the major political developments of 2019, the federal Conservatives were averaging about 40 per cent in the Ontario section of the national polls. On October 21, Andrew Scheer’s Tories picked up just 33 per cent of the vote in Ontario, down slightly from the last election, while the Liberals, despite slipping a few points, won 79 seats, just one fewer than in 2015.

The difference can be chalked up to Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Sworn into office June 29, 2018, Ford had become such an unpopular political figure that Justin Trudeau made the Ontario Premier a staple of his political messaging. Trudeau warned that, should Andrew Scheer become prime minister, he would copy Ford’s spending cuts, such as those to education and other services. In the two weeks leading up to the election, Trudeau campaigned hard in the hopes that NDP and Green supporters would vote Liberal, arguing that they should vote for “a progressive government, not a progressive opposition.” The appeal to such voters to accept the necessity of casting a ballot for their second choice to avoid a Conservative government was particularly effective in Ontario.

To help out his federal counterpart, Ford suspended the provincial legislature until after the federal election and kept a generally low profile as Premier over the course of the campaign. However, he could not avoid governing, or the daily reporting that comes with it. As students returned to schools, universities and community colleges, tales of consequences of education cuts reinforced the impression of the unpopular austerity that dominated the first year of the Ford government. The promise of tax cuts had little impact on the negative feelings evoked by Ford’s regime.

There is a constituency for this kind of governance, but it achieves political success in Canada in our first-past-the-post political system only in particular circumstances. A deeply unpopular Kathleen Wynne regime coming at the end of 15 years of Liberal rule in Ontario produced the Ford victory in 2018, a situation without parallel in the 2019 federal election.

As the federal Liberals did not win a majority, they may not control the timing of the date of next federal election. The two most recent federal minority governments, both Conservative Harper regimes, each lasted about two and a half years (from January 2006 to October 2008 and from October 2008 to May 2011). If the same were to be true of the incoming federal Liberal minority government, there would be a federal campaign in the spring of 2022. The next Ontario election is currently scheduled for June 2, 2022. The last overlap of federal and provincial election campaigns in Ontario happened in 1945. If this occurs in 2022, we could see a repeat of this year’s federal-provincial dynamic.

Update and further analysis: 

Since the election additional polling from Leger has made it clear just how unpopular Doug Ford continues to be, with 73% of those Ontarians with an opinion, expressing a negative view of him. Now that the federal Liberals find themselves in a minority situation they will be thinking how they might turn their current position into a majority in the next election. Ideally, they would like to have Doug Ford there to run against, but Ontario is not where the Liberals can find additional seats.

In the rest of Canada the October 21 election looked in some ways like a reversion to the long term average for the Liberals.  In Atlantic Canada, Manitoba and BC, the CPC and NDP picked up some long held seats lost to the Liberals in 2015 wave election. The place with the greatest potential next time for Liberal gains is Quebec. There the Bloc Québecois won 22 more seats while the Liberals had net loss of five. Many of the Bloc seats could be picked up by the Liberals next time with just a small increment in the popular vote. While they need to pay some attention to the unhappiness in Alberta and Saskatchewan, there is little political benefit to the Liberals in making strenuous efforts there. It is Quebec that matters.

However, making gains in Quebec will be thorny.  A key factor in the Bloc gains was a xenophobic nationalism protective of the provincial government's  Bill 21, the legislation that bans the wearing of religious symbols. How that may evolve over time is unclear.  The federal Liberals (like their provincial counterparts) have so far been deferential to the legislation. They need an electoral competition in Quebec next time with a different focus.

The Liberals have won support for the throne speech from the Bloc, but there is a danger for them in relying for support on what remains, at least nominally, a party that supports Quebec independence. They need to find support from the NDP for at least some of their measures. In the elections following 1972 and 1974 winning back disaffected voters in Ontario brought the Liberals additional majorities. However, four of the last six elections (2004, 2006, 2008 and 2019) have produced minorities and the path to another Liberal majority is much less clear.

Election 2019: Where are we headed?

Polls and Seats: Divergent messages

The polls in this campaign appear on the surface to be telling a similar story: a close election, outcome uncertain. However, different surveys, examined closely, reveal dramatic contrasts.

Here are two examples covering the same October 8 to 10 period (the day after the English debate to the day of the second French debate), one survey from Nanos Research, the other from Angus Reid. I provide a seat projection below based on the provincial/regional numbers from the two polls. What matters, however, is the dramatic difference between the two: one a Liberal plurality of seats won, the other Conservative.

There is also higher uncertainty because the polls are more variable at the level of regional details. So which survey should one trust? Even past performance is not an absolutely reliable guide since a given polling firm can have a bad result. That said, the best performing firm in elections since 2006 has overwhelmingly been Nanos. With the exception of 2008 when they had a bad result, Nanos has either been the most accurate pollster, or just a whisker away from being the most accurate. The table below tells us what happened in 2015. It compares the national numbers in the polls for each party compared to the election result. Overall the polls performed well. The firms are ranked by total absolute error. The red numbers indicate numbers that fell below actual vote shares, the black are above. The polling was fairly accurate, mostly within the margin of error.

I have been tracking polls compared to election results for some time. Generally polls conducted by phone either with a live interviewer or electronically by a method called Interactive Voice Response (IVR) have been the most accurate as in the table above. However, on occasion, an online survey outperformed the others.

I still regard online polls as experimental partly because there is no standard commonly accepted methodology. For example, some of the internet panels (meant to stand in for the Canadian or provincial population as a whole) are randomly recruited on the phone while others are self-selected or put together using other methods.

I would like to see full transparency in this area, which does not happen now: the size of the panel (including the size of provincial and regional sections), how it is selected, the number of surveys distributed and response rate. Online polls are attractive to polling firms because they are cost-efficient so they are probably here to stay. Online polls do generally report a margin of error. However, it should be remembered that the margin of error is simply a function of sample size. Online poll samples are drawn from the limited population of the internet panel, whereas phone or IVR polls sample all of the population with access to a phone (land line or cell). This difference is something that appears to be widely misunderstood. When you see margin of error in an online poll the population that it applies to is the population of the panel not the population of Canada. Sometimes a poll such as the Reid poll above will describe the margin of error using fudge language such as: "For comparison purposes only, a probability sample of this size would carry a margin of error of +/- 1.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20." In fact the margin of error does apply to a sample of the size noted but the population it applies to is that of the internet panel.

Election trends: growth in support for the NDP and the Bloc

It is clear by now that the NDP has dramatically improved its prospects in the last couple of weeks, in part because of Jagmeet Singh's performance in the debates and his deft response to the Trudeau blackface controversy and other issues.  The Bloc has been growing too, in part because the new leader, Yves-François Blanchet, is an effective communicator, but also because of the appeal in Quebec of the province's xenophobic Bill 21 (it imposes restrictions on the headgear of religious minorities) especially to older, more rural residents (see the demographic numbers on page 5 of this Leger survey). However, Chantal Hebert also makes a convincing case that other factors are at play.

I don't think the NDP is doing better because of Singh's debate performances per se. Instead, it has rejigged the campaign because his performance has drawn voters to take a new look at the positions he has emphasized. Voters don't look at elections as beauty contests (I get the impression some reporters do), but rather as a way to solve problems they face, so the NDP's promises in areas like dental care or housing and other issues are ultimately what is delivering the support to the NDP not the qualities of his debate performance.

In a way this should not be a surprise. All governments disappoint and it has been clear for some time that some of the electorate has been casting about for an alternative. The NDP does appear in current circumstances to be drawing at least some support from both the Liberals and the Conservatives reflecting the new dynamic.

Historically, the NDP has done well in elections following Liberal majorities. This happened in the elections following Liberal wins in 1968, 1974, 1993 and 2000. It is not a new phenomenon. At the moment the NDP would not match its 2015 seat total of 44 but there are several days to go. Intuitively, I have wondered if this election might produce a scenario like that in 1972 when the Liberals of Trudeau the elder finished a single seat ahead of the Stanfield PCs. The next two years brought a Liberal government dependent on support from the NDP.  However, increasing Bloc strength suggests it may be a House of Commons where neither major party can govern with the support of just one opposition party. This suggests a period of parliamentary instability to follow.

It will be remembered by some that there was considerable speculation about how well the Green Party would do following their by-election win in May. The situation is actually the same now as then. The Greens have improved in the polls since the last election but they only have real strength on Vancouver Island. Their leader Elizabeth May has stumbled during the campaign in part because of her dishonesty. For example, she claimed a new Quebec recruit from the ranks of the NDP was a sovereignist not a separatist, although the two words have the same practical meaning (the new recruit used 'separate' in French himself). She has gotten away with a great deal of this kind of use of political weasel words for a long time, but the real problem for the Greens is that they just don't have much organizational muscle off the island.

The Conservatives could have improved their prospects if they weren't so determined to be a party well to the right. Andrew Scheer doubled down on this approach in the English debate - it seems he is somehow trying to thread the needle - but this behaviour overall is self-marginalizing in the context of the reality of Canadians' political views. It also inspires some fear among progressives leading many of them to look to cast a tactical ballot, even though that is a practical alternative in only a small number of circumstances.

High turnout at advance polls mean some of the result is already baked in, i.e. developments in the last week cannot change votes already cast (two million ballots were cast in the first two days of advance voting). That suggests the current numbers already guarantee no party will control a majority in the House of Commons come October 21.

Manitoba Election - Closer than it appears?

The Manitoba election is on September 10 and while most polling suggests an easy PC win, it may be closer than it appears.  The most recent poll from Mainstreet Research has an overall margin of nine points - 43% to the NDP's 34% with the Liberals trailing at 15% and the Greens at 6%. The Free Press headlined it Poll Predicts Tory Majority.

However, this same poll actually gives the NDP a six point lead in the City of Winnipeg (an earlier poll suggested the parties were tied in the city) while the PCs have a thirty point margin in the rest of the province.  This is significant. The PCs win by enormous margins in rural Manitoba, sometimes by greater than sixty percentage points - a vast number of  'wasted' votes.

When I apply my seat calculation forecast using the regional numbers from the survey I get a PC majority but a tight one. Of the 57 constituencies the PCs would win 30, the NDP 24 and the Liberals 3.  There is nothing certain about these numbers. One should expect both polling error and errors from the seat forecasting methodology. However, if the poll is right about a real NDP lead in the city then this election may be closer than has generally been thought. At the individual riding level I see quite a few close margins with tight PC leads (and a few NDP). Several are suburban Winnipeg seats formerly held by the NDP under Gary Doer and Greg Selinger.

The PCs have not run this campaign as if they were coasting to a comfortable victory. They know that polling suggests that PC Premier Brian Pallister is personally unpopular. In addition the NDP with some effect has been campaigning strongly against cuts to health care.

The PCs have used attack ads including some that I think qualify as dirty politics. For example, the PCs have been running an ad attacking NDP leader Wab Kinew. For the moment you can see it here on Youtube. Kinew engaged in serious misbehaviour in his youth, which he described in a memoir, The Reason You Walk. He has acknowledged his misdeeds but is a different person, in particular because he has overcome his alcohol addiction.

The image in the ad, which appears for 4½  seconds, is not long enough to read but long enough to get the impression of someone really terrible. You will note the "charged with" outnumbers the "convicted" but that is the idea, to conflate the two and leave an impression of someone unfit to be premier.  The political goal of this ad, which clearly says that Kinew's background makes him unqualified to lead, is to sow doubts about him in precisely those previously NDP suburban Winnipeg constituencies where the PCs do not have safe leads.

Something that has had next to no discussion in this campaign is anti-indigenous racism in Manitoba. Clearly it exists and will have at least some negative impact on the NDP among the non-indigenous population. How large an impact it might have is a subject for conjecture, but it will no doubt matter to some extent.

I don't really see how the PCs can lose at this point but if the NDP keeps the outcome close, it can matter in Manitoba's political future. The Pawley NDP government was re-elected in 1986 with just 30 seats. I think a government needs 31 to be assured a full term of four years. Two years after the 1986 election at a point where their popularity had plummeted, the NDP lost a budget vote. In the subsequent election they ended up in third place.

Reflections on the 1969 NDP Election Win in Manitoba

In June I attended a dinner celebrating the 50th anniversary of the election of Ed Schreyer's NDP government in Manitoba in 1969. Fifty years ago I had just turned 21 and cast my first vote that day for the NDP, having worked during the campaign for Cy Gonick, the NDP candidate in Crescentwood. His victory was one of a number of outcomes in close contests critical to the NDP's success. Most of the speeches at the dinner were devoted to the (highly successful) record of the government, which I will touch on, but I want to reflect here on how it happened.

Back in 1970 I was generously given co-authorship by Tom Peterson, a member of the University of Manitoba Political Science Department, for an article published in the Lakehead University Review titled "Some Factors in the 1969 NDP Victory in Manitoba".  This analysis reflects arguments made there but adds to them.

The Diagonal Line

Fundamental to the NDP victory was that politics in the province divided along a northwest to southeast diagonal line, poorer and more ethnically diverse to the north, more prosperous and more British to the south. Here is the line as it appeared in the 1970 article:

The pattern is clearly visible in coloured maps of the 1969 results below:

The line would become deeply entrenched over time.  Several factors converged in 1969 to produce the NDP victory:

1. Redistribution and the end of rural preference. For decades Manitoba had legislated rural over-representation. However, the provincial government had also implemented a non-partisan system for redrawing constituency boundaries in 1955. Further reform meant a 1968 redistribution permitted no more than a 25 percent allowance on riding size. This increased representation in Winnipeg where the NDP's victory was centred - the party captured 17 of 27 constituencies with 45.4% of the vote (compared to 38.3% province-wide).

2. The Liberal party had not been small 'l' liberal for a long time. There was a reform Liberal government in Manitoba from 1915 to 1922 but it lost to the United Farmers (later the Progressives) in the 1922 election, and thereafter was a small urban party. The Liberals entered into coalition with the Progressives in 1932 and became part of a small 'c' conservative regime that lasted until 1958. I described the consequences in a paper in 2008: "By joining a farmers’ movement with its emphasis on fiscal frugality the Manitoba Liberals put themselves on a course that would leave them vulnerable in a modern urban world that wanted a more activist state than their inherited beliefs would permit."

Under leader Gil Molgat the Liberals did project a moderate image in the sixties. After by-election defeats in February 1969 Molgat resigned and was replaced by Robert Bend, a man who hailed from the coalition days, and who described himself as 'a little more right of centre'.

Although the provincial party leaned right there were many small 'l' liberals in the province (many had voted for Pierre Trudeau the year before). For them Ed Schreyer was an attractive commodity. The Liberal convention that chose Bend preceded the NDP convention by a few weeks. However, the name of everyone's lips at that convention was not Bend or his opponents. It was Ed Schreyer.

3. The PCs also shifted to the right. When they selected Walter Weir to replace the urban and reform minded Duff Roblin it represented a significant ideological shift within the PC universe. More progressive candidates were defeated at the leadership convention that chose Weir.

With an echo of today's Ford-Trudeau relationship, media accounts at the time suggested Weir had successfully confronted ideological adversary Pierre Trudeau in February at a federal-provincial conference. Shortly thereafter his party won three of four by-elections. He also made it clear that French language rights would be a low priority for him. The PCs subsequently tested the waters with a private poll, the only political poll of any kind taken in 1969 in Manitoba. Thinking they would catch their leaderless opponents off guard, they called an early election.

4. Luck mattered.  Something that should never be underestimated in politics. While three of the four February by-elections were won by the Weir PCs, the fourth in Churchill was won by the NDP's Joe Borowski. Key to the June 25 victory were the three wins in the northern seats of The Pas, Flin Flon and Thompson (a new constituency in 1969 won by Borowski). I think the by-election win had a demonstration effect that encouraged voters in the other two northern ridings to view the prospects of the NDP as a realistic alternative in electoral contests at a point where they were ready to vote for change.

The leadership contest the NDP were forced to call in the middle of the campaign received extensive television coverage, granting free media to a party that could not afford to buy time on TV. The northern seats have been dominated by the NDP ever since.

5. Ethnic diversity in Manitoba in 1969 was quite different from diversity and politics as it is thought of today in much of Canada. Ethnic political strategy in the current environment is conceived of as appealing for votes among relatively recent immigrants. In 1969 the NDP made significant gains among Manitobans of Indigenous and Francophone descent, although the latter continued to exhibit residual loyalty to the Liberals. Other minorities from non-Anglo-Saxon backgrounds were composed mostly of a population that had immigrated to Manitoba prior to World War I more than fifty years in the past in 1969. Initially Liberal and Conservative politicians were highly successful in recruiting leaders in ethnic communities and, by granting recognition and status to them, they were able to secure electoral support. However, by the sixties as Thomas Peterson noted the "second and third generations of non-British immigrants became less susceptible to ethnic appeals. Among this younger group, in contrast to the 'hesitant conservatism' of their elders, there was a greater drive toward improvement of their material circumstances as well as a skepticism that this could be achieved within the existing system." [This is drawn from an article by Thomas Peterson titled Ethnic and Class Politics in Manitoba]. CCF-NDP leaders had always been from British backgrounds. The selection of Schreyer as a leader signalled that the NDP was a party that could be trusted by minorities whose class status inclined them to support social democratic reforms. Increasingly, they were less interested in questions of ethnic status.

6. Mistakes by the governing PCs mattered.  An increase in health care premiums just prior to the campaign became a major election issue. Manitoba joined the national medicare program on April 1, 1969, nine months after the federal implementation date of July 1, 1968. Prior to that Manitobans paid health care premiums to help finance the already existing hospitalization program, introduced in the late fifties. As a political gambit, the Weir government created a premium 'holiday' for the period leading up to medicare implementation. However, when premiums returned with the introduction of medicare they were dramatically increased. The unpopularity of this move made slashing premiums a key election plank for the NDP.

Following the election, the NDP secured a governing majority when re-elected Liberal, Laurent Desjardins, supported the NDP.  Weir's hostility to French language rights compared to Schreyer's support for bilingualism made the difference.

The new government called an early session and adopted the outgoing government's budget with two key changes, the premiums were cut, and personal income tax rates were increased to pay for the change. It was the first of a series of fiscal changes that led to a more progressive tax structure in Manitoba by the time the NDP left office in 1977.

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The election represented a fundamental departure in the province's history, what political scientists would call a re-aligning election. Its consequences for Manitoba's politics are still clearly discernible today.