Strategic voting in the 1999 Ontario election failed to defeat the PCs. Can it work in 2018?

Two Ontario Elections

The Mike Harris PC government went to the polls on June 3, 1999, having been elected to a majority government in June 1995.  One striking curiosity about the two election results is that the Tories won just as great a vote share in 1999 as in 1995 but their share of seats in the legislature was smaller. They garnered 63.1 percent of the legislative seats in 1995, 57.3 percent  in 1999 - a consequence of strategic voting. I drafted a 17-page paper on the topic after the election. I discuss some of my conclusions below.

Two Ontario Elections, 1999 & 1995 

	Ontario Election		June 3, 1999
	PC	L	NDP	Others	Total
Votes	1,978,059	1,751,472	550,807	109,869	4,390,207
Percent	45.1%	39.9%	12.5%	2.5%	100.0%
Seats	59	35	9		103
Seats - In %	57.3%	34.0%	8.7%	0.0%	100.0%
	Ontario Election		June 8, 1995
1995	PC	L	NDP	Others	Total
Votes	1,870,110	1,291,326	854,163	142,771	4,158,370
In %	44.97%	31.05%	20.54%	3.43%	100.0%
Seats	82	30	17	1	130
Seats - In %	63.1%	23.1%	13.1%	0.8%	100.0%

The PCs had made a lot of enemies by 1999 - teachers, nurses, trade unionists, residents of Toronto, etc. The issues made strategic voting a theme of the election even though it was largely avoided by the parties themselves. Several strategic voting organizations inserted themselves into the campaign regardless. I think their impact was minimal to non-existent, but their mere presence reflected the real grassroots consciousness of strategic voting that had developed. That consciousness did have an impact.

In eight ridings where PC candidates were defeated, strategic voting appears to be the key factor which accounts for the outcome.  Of the eight PC losses, one was to a New Democrat, the other seven to Liberals.

It was not enough to change government. Simply put, about 45 percent was too close to 50 for the combination of opposition votes to achieve the objective of preventing a PC majority. But there were also nine 'near misses' or outright strategic voting 'failures' that, if they had gone the other way, would have left the government holding less than half the legislature.

Strategic voting demonstrated real potential.

Can strategic voting play a significant role in the 2018 election?

I think the answer is yes. However, what will determine its success will be the level of support for the Conservatives.  As the 1999 outcome demonstrated if the Conservative vote is high enough strategic voting, which will inevitably be imperfect, won't succeed. The current PC average in the CBC poll tracker is 41.1 percent and they have a large lead over the NDP currently in second place. Even so, Doug Ford, like his brother before him, is a deeply divisive figure. If anything, he is even more likely than Mike Harris to trigger a coalescing of opposition forces into a strategic vote that could finally succeed this year. To me a strategic voting success in this context is one where a relatively high PC vote is overcome by strategic voting. If PC support collapses (as it did in the 2015 federal election) that is a different phenomenon.

In the eight ridings where strategic voting worked in 1999 the winning percentage ranged from a low of 44.4 percent to 50.6 percent.  The losing PC candidates in all but one case obtained more than 40 percent. That is what we should expect to see if strategic motivation brings opposition voters together around one candidate.

Recent polls suggest it may be the NDP this year that plays the role of appropriate strategic alternative overall. That would mean a dramatic departure from the voting patterns of 2014. NDP support then was uneven, very weak in some places, much stronger in others. To be successful the NDP vote would have rise dramatically in some regions where they were weak last time, taking over from the Liberals the role of principal opponent to the Conservatives. It would have to have a wave like character, certainly a possibility.

A shift of this magnitude would make it difficult to predict individual ridings. My seat forecasting model did not project the 1999 outcome accurately because the pattern of voting changed greatly from 1995. It would be the same this time compared to 2014, not just for my efforts but for others as well.

The turnout last time was low. It would not surprise me if Ford Nation motivated quite a few new voters to turn out for the first time to support them. Intense dislike of Ford could do the same on the other side of the equation.

I will have more on strategic voting in subsequent posts.

*As a footnote the term 'strategic' is not really the precise terminology, 'tactical' would be better but I use the more commonly employed language here and will continue to do so.

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.

The Green Vote and Strategic Voting in the 2013 BC Election

The May 14, 2013 BC Election created an unusual circumstance that allows us to make an assessment of the potential of strategic voting.  The circumstance was the universal perception that the NDP was going to win - the consequence of the inaccurate polling and punditry (see TC's three previous posts). This post will analyze the Green vote in this election and look at the strategic implications.

Even if Green voters thought that the NDP was preferable to continued governance by the Liberals (a majority of New Democrats and a plurality of Green supporters made the other party their second choice in this poll) this unique context meant Greens had no reason not to support their first choice given the expectation that the NDP would win without any help. There was nothing to hold back Green performance in this election with the exception that the party did not run a full slate of candidates, something they did do in 2009.

On its face the Green performance in BC was little different in 2013 from 2009.  The Green share of the popular vote actually declined slightly from 8.21 % in 2009 to 8.13 % in 2013. Nevertheless, the Greens and most observers saw the election result as a triumph because they elected their first member to the legislature, Andrew Weaver in Oak Bay-Gordon Head.

Andrew Weaver - Oak Bay-Gordon Head

In fact, the Greens performed better in the popular vote than might seem to be the case at first glance. If we look only at the Green share of the vote in the ridings they did contest, we find the party capturing 11.2 % of the popular vote, a significant improvement from 2009, when the Greens won 8.5% of the vote in the same list of constituencies. This showing is second only to the 12.4% of the popular vote overall the Greens garnered in the 2001 election in the context of collapsing support for the NDP.

The question arises then: what impact did the absence of strategic voting on the part of Green voters potentially have on the election outcome.  I ran a number of scenarios to analyze this. Scenario one: if we absolutely take away all Green votes and give them to the NDP while leaving Conservative votes in place the NDP would have won 46 seats to the Liberals 38 (the actual result was Liberal 49/ NDP 35). This suggests a purely hypothetical maximum for the NDP in 2013 but is not realistic.

A more realistic way of looking at the potential of strategic voting is Scenario two: take one third of Green votes and deliver them to the NDP, as it is highly likely that only a minority of partisans would vote strategically.  In this scenario the Liberals would have led the NDP 45 seats to 39 compared to the actual (in this scenario the Green seat goes NDP). If we add as a parallel shift one third of Conservative votes to the Liberals the margin increases to 47-37.  These are hypothetical projections, but it is clear that Green voting combined with the flawed polling did not cost the NDP the election. The failures of their campaign accomplished that.

There was some evidence of strategic voting by BC Conservative voters.  Early in the campaign, the party was at 11 to 13 % in the polls (without forgetting their doubtful accuracy) and had been over 20% during part of 2012.  The attack ads aimed at the NDP by the BC Liberals no doubt had an impact in bringing these voters home (most were previous BC Liberal voters). The Conservatives ended up with just 4.8% overall (they averaged 7.3% in ridings where they had a candidate).

Strategic voting potential, however, was there. TC heard anecdotal evidence of a willingness on the part of some Green supporters to switch to the NDP. Would the Greens have finished closer to 8% if there was a context to motivate strategic voting? The question will remain unanswered.

Perhaps better described as tactical voting, this type of second choice voting is a fact of life in Canada and likely to be of increasing consequence in future elections, providing polling companies can do a better job of measuring vote intentions.

SMALL ADDENDUM: One observation I made in looking at Green voting is that in general Green and NDP support overlap geographically: both parties are strongest on the coast, Vancouver Island and the lower mainland.

In my next post, I will comment on the Ontario by-elections. I have come to some conclusions about the results, some of which may seem counter intuitive.

Ontario election near the finish line: Can strategic voting put the NDP over the top?

When the Ontario campaign got underway it appeared the PCs were headed for an out-sized majority. They stumbled, largely because they are led by an unctuous idiot. The Wynne Liberals, as I noted in an earlier post, never had a chance, a fact that Wynne recently, and for some bizarre reason, candidly acknowledged.

It is the NDP that clearly poses a challenge to the PCs but even with the late breaking family finances scandal most polling suggests the Conservatives should eke out a victory. There are no shortage of seat predictions, but all, including my own, are likely to suffer because of the massive shift in the political landscape from 2014. I have developed a modified version of my seat prediction model that alters how I calculate the number of NDP seats. I call it the NDP Strategic Voting Model.

First, here are recent public polls, released since the beginning of June:

A slight advantage to the Conservatives but still close. Most of these individual polls put the PCs ahead. However, Abacus Data is an outlier and has the NDP up by four. 

So what does all this mean in seats?  Let us look first at what the polling average in the table above (PCs ahead by 0.7 of a percentage point) would produce using my conventional model and then with the NDP strategic calculation.

The point of the NDP strategic model is that it takes the concentrated NDP support from last time and spreads it around more evenly.  I believe some version of this effect will occur.

So what would we get if the Abacus Poll has it right that it is the NDP that leads (note there is always some poll closer to the actual result than the average). Here the impact of the NDP Strategic Voting Model is more profound.

The Abacus poll if it proves accurate would, by my estimate, produce a PC minority using a conventional calculation, but a comfortable NDP majority (based on a four point lead in the popular vote don't forget) if we use the NDP Strategic Voting Model. The model of course is neat and symmetrical. In the real world strategic voting is likely to be messy and idiosyncratic.  Many voters will be baffled trying to figure out what they should do to oppose the Tories. The NDP Strategic Voting Model calculates that the PCs have a one and a half point structural advantage - the NDP would need a lead of that amount to get ahead of the PCs (others suggest they would need something larger).

All this serves to illustrate just how uncertain things are in Ontario at the moment. One correspondent suggests we rename it Peyton Place. He has a point! A majority in the new legislature is 63 seats. It now looks like we will have to wait until the polls close to know what party (or parties) will form government post June 7.

Ontario Election: Final Assessment

Ontario's 2014 provincial election is tomorrow and has been characterized by an unusually high degree of negativity. After 11 years and various scandals there are considerable negatives attached to the incumbent Wynne government. However, the opposition PCs have behaved in some respects as if they don't want to win. Their promise to cut 100,000 jobs was a major blunder and making an elementary error in arithmetic is unforgivable as well as a perfect way to demonstrate the party's unfitness to govern. I have the impression (as do others such as Lispop's Barry Kay) that a more careful, moderate campaign might have had Mr. Hudak's party sailing into office. Instead he appears to have maximized the small 'c' conservative character of his platform. NDP leader Andrea Horwath could not articulate a clear rationale for opposing Kathleen Wynne's budget and has suffered an unprecedented degree of internal party dissent (for an opposition party), particularly in Toronto. It is rare for an opposition party to do such a poor job of appealing to its own base.

The closing polls so far appear to be headed slightly in the direction of the Liberals. However, that doesn't mean they are headed for a majority.  The following blogs plus the Laurier Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy all provide estimates of how many seats each party is expected to win in the election for the 107 members of the Ontario legislature. Note: this is probably not their final estimate.

All these sites in my view are quite capable and know the art of forecasting seats well.

Strategic / Tactical Voting

Strategic voting has emerged in Canadian politics in the past 15 years. It is a consequence of the federal and provincial Conservative and Progressive Conservative parties moving to the right opening up a large ideological gap between them and the NDP and Liberals on the Centre-Left. I think it more precise to use the British term 'tactical voting' as it is simply a decision by individual voters to opt for a second choice to prevent a third party from winning. In Canada this typically means NDP voters casting a ballot for the Liberals to block Conservatives (as a consequence partisan New Democrats hate it).

It first bloomed in a major way in the 1999 Ontario provincial election where it succeeded in contributing to several Liberal victories and one NDP win. In this election the Wynne Liberal strategy has as a key element a pitch to NDP voters to prevent a Hudak victory. The last Forum research poll estimated that 37% of 2011 NDP voters have moved to the Liberals this time, indicating that it is likely to be partially successful. There are groups online such as http://www.one-big-campaign.blogspot.ca/ that advocate tactical voting although it is doubtful that many voters will even become aware of the existence of this or other such groups let alone be influenced by them. Nonetheless many will cast a tactical ballot.

The size of the NDP vote will have a critical impact on the overall shape of the election and here is where polls disagree. Support for the NDP has been reported at various levels between 30% and 17% and overall there has been a significant difference between online and phone polls (including IVR) in both early and late campaign polls - an average of five or six points.

My observation is that online polls have overstated NDP support in the past. Regardless, the real level of support matters. As an illustration, if we assume that the most recent Ekos likely voter model numbers (L - 41.1, PC - 33.2, NDP - 17.1) are accurate it would easily produce a Liberal majority. (While Ekos' likely voter model adds to Liberal support, others such as Angus Reid do the opposite boosting the PCs at the expense of the Liberals.) The key is that the 17.1% for the NDP would represent a large drop from their 22.7% in 2011 and the direct loss of seats to the Liberals. It is third parties who create minority legislatures if the race between the two leading parties is close. The chances of a majority for either party rises in direct relation to the increasing or declining strength of the third party.

Based on the 2011 election we can say the Liberal vote is the most efficient.  That voting pattern, if something like it prevails again, would permit the Liberals to be as much as two points behind the PCs but still be ahead in seats. The Ekos likely voter model seems improbable to me. It is my impression that likely voters models should boost the Conservative share. We will soon see. Overall the polling points to the Liberals having the most seats.

A Final Word on Polls
No one pollster is the most accurate in each election.  I have been tracking this for some time.  The most accurate pollster in the 1999 Ontario election was Ekos.  In 2003 and 2007 it was Harris-Decima (known simply as Decima in 2003) while in 2011 it was Forum Research with Abacus close behind. In reviewing these old spreadsheets I made one amusing discovery: in 2003 the Lick's Hamburger Poll was slightly closer to the election result than one of the commercial polling firms.

Some observations about the Ontario 2014 election

There had been a sufficient number of close polls during the election that the result, a Liberal majority, came as a greater surprise than perhaps it should have. In my final blog post I uncharacteristically did not offer a seat forecast. This reflected my own lack confidence in the outcome of an election where polls consistently suggested high levels of dissatisfaction with the state of the province and the incumbent government.

Nevertheless I did make a prediction in an email to my brother-in-law that turned out to be prescient.  I averaged the last Ekos and Forum Polls (ignoring the Ekos likely voter model), entered the data in my electoral model, and turned up a seat count of Liberal-59, PC-33 and NDP-15. When the actual vote shares are entered in my model the seat totals are identical to the actual results, albeit with 10 individual errors that offset to give the accurate total. More confidence in what I produced would have been the order of the day.

What determined the Outcome
The outcome actually was determined early. It is clear that Hudak made an enormous strategic miscalculation to promise to eliminate 100,000 public sector jobs - a fact unequivocally confirmed by PC candidates post-election who said the pledge came as a complete surprise to them. Paul Wells in commenting on the results offered this contrast to how Stephen Harper dealt with prospect of federal layoffs likely to come from his spending cuts.

Hudak ... decided his target audience was people who think eliminating public sector jobs is always excellent. Compare and contrast: During the 2011 federal election, I worked hard to get a succession of federal Conservatives — Jim Flaherty, John Baird — to give me any indication of the scale of public sector job cuts the Harper government had in mind. Baird pledged, with a straight face, to protect the National Capital Region’s bureaucrats from the kind of ravages the Chrétien-Martin Liberals had inflicted in the 1990s.

The outcome of this ideologically polarized election will no doubt reinforce the federal Tories' penchant for circumspection and secrecy. But they are likely feeling chills down their spine. This election made clear that voters rejected the Hudak PC program, which was identical in its essentials, if not how it was communicated, to the Harper Conservatives.

In mid-campaign economist Paul Boothe, a former senior federal finance official and Saskatchewan finance deputy offered the following summary of the three parties fiscal platforms (the whole thing is worth reading).

The Liberals and NDP propose to maintain Ontario’s already relatively low program spending at approximately the current level.  In contrast, the Conservatives propose to lower program spending substantially to finance a large corporate tax cut now and lower personal taxes once the budget is balanced. 

Overall voters preferred a Liberal program based on a relatively austere budget offering slightly slower deficit reduction, which nevertheless included a variety of progressive measures such as a wage increase for home care workers, and an income tax increase for those receiving higher incomes. The NDP offered a partially similar, if somewhat incoherent, program that appears to have been based on identifying popular bits and pieces from polls and focus groups. In terms of their major fiscal/economic positioning, they embraced the Liberal timetable on deficit reduction, implying that they would have required their own austerity program.

Numerically, what gave the Liberals a majority was the 7.4% gap between them and the second place PCs, up from a 0.8% advantage in 2011 that left the Liberals just short of a majority at the time. The NDP performed relatively well, particularly in southwestern Ontario where the economy has particularly suffered during the recession following the 2008 financial crisis. However, they did lose three seats in Toronto largely, I would argue, due to the relatively small 'c' conservative character of their platform and its accompanying campaign and rhetoric. An "exit poll" conducted by the Globe and Mail confirmed that the NDP had some appeal this time for PC voters:

Jarring though it may be with long-time followers of Ontario politics, the NDP seems in particular to have made headway with PC supporters. Twenty-eight per cent of respondents who voted for the Tories said their view of the NDP had become more favourable during the campaign, next to 20 per cent who said it had become less favourable. The NDP also split with the Liberals for second-choice support among PCs. 

Remember these are voters who embraced Hudak and his extreme program of austerity and tax-cutting who are saying this. The conservative nature of the NDP's pitch appears to have had political benefits in the southwest and costs in Toronto.

The Polls 
A polling experiment conducted by the Toronto Star during this campaign explains well the polling issues generated by the campaign (I think the print and broadcast media have overstated the degree of polling inaccuracy). The most striking aspect of the campaign polls was the wide variation in reported support for the NDP.  The experiment found that IVR (Interactive Voice Response, essentially a talking computer that makes phone calls) tends to understate NDP support while online polls overstate it. This is certainly consistent with the results of the polls released during the campaign.

I measured polling accuracy in two ways: I compared the election vote shares to the reported poll shares for the three major parties only and then a second calculation that includes the Greens and Other. I convert the errors to absolute values and sum them.The justification for doing two calculations is that it is the strongest parties that determine outcomes in a first past the post system. The errors on Greens and Other are interesting from a polling perspective but matter little in determining seat outcomes.

I have ignored the likely voter reports, which were estimates that were not as accurate as the basic eligible voter polls. I think it likely that if someone is willing and patient enough to answer a poll on politics, it is likely that individual is a voter and no further effort should be necessary. The performance is worth noting. (Note negative values indicate the poll underestimated the actual vote, positive that the performance was over-estimated.)

The online pollsters Angus Reid and Abacus performed well as did IVR pollster Ekos and phone pollster Oraclepoll.  Phone pollster Nanos had a poll that concluded on May 26 that could be deemed the most accurate, but it finished up two and a half weeks before voting day so I have excluded it here. Ekos was closest on the Liberals and PCs and Oraclepoll closest on the NDP.  All pollsters had at least one error outside their reported margin of error and most had two.

The polls despite the errors did perform better than the impressions left by the media (and I certainly agree with Paul Adams' assessment of the value of the polls during elections). The media convinced themselves that a Liberal majority was impossible. While most of the predictions ahead of time were for a minority the major prognosticators had the Liberals in the high 40s or above. At those levels just a slight shift in the polls is all that is necessary to produce a majority.

TV Debates
Part of the explanation for all the surprise was that Kathleen Wynne was perceived to have lost the TV debates. Most commentary I think misses the point about a TV debate. It can affect public assessment of the capacity of the participants. This matters more in the U.S. where voters are asked to make a direct choice between individuals. In Canada, however, debates are mainly about issues. Where they can matter is raising the importance or salience of a given issue. In this case the key moments were about the gas plants scandal, which already had a very high profile and no new information about it came out. As a vote consideration it had already been largely factored into how voters felt about what mattered, which turned out to be not gas plants, but rather the Hudak plan for governance. The Liberals had the most money for this campaign, and no doubt bombarded the airways in the final week with ads like this one, effectively overcoming what they might have lost during the debate.

As a more general observation I would say that while scandals matter to newspapers and the electronic media for sales, they matter a great deal less to the public when it comes to casting a vote. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is a cynicism that reflects a generalized "they all do it" belief. But the other is that most scandals simply don't matter in material ways to the average voter. Thus we have had two Liberal governments in Quebec and Ontario recently re-elected in spite of the various scandals laid at their door, and one in BC a year ago.

Strategic or Tactical Voting
There are two questions one can pose about tactical voting. First, did it occur, and, if so, did it matter. The point of those who engaged in this kind of voting was to defeat Hudak. At a macro level it is clear that strategic/ tactical voting did not matter simply because the PCs were so decisively beaten. When you finish seven points behind your opponent you are always going to lose.

Was there identifiable strategic/tactical voting? I have not crunched the numbers for all the ridings but took a close look at several that changed hands using both the raw numbers and my projections to see how well parties performed in an individual constituency compared to the overall trend.  I examined Burlington, Cambridge, Durham, Halton, Newmarket-Aurora, which all switched from the PCs to the Liberals and Oshawa, which went NDP. Tactical voting appears to have added to the winner's margin in all cases except Durham but all would have been won on the overall trend regardless. Nominally it appears that it may have been decisive in Oshawa, but the numbers are close enough in the calculation that one can't be sure. Assessing this kind of voting behaviour is a difficult exercise in my view (we cannot read voters' minds after all) and simple calculations should be viewed with caution.

Looking Ahead
I doubt that either tactical voting or scandals will be decisive in the 2015 federal election. I would add that whether or not Stephen Harper wins next year will likely have little to do with the scandals such as the Senate expenses affair (for which he is properly being blamed). It will more likely be issues that matter - especially the role of government. The more the federal opposition parties can identify damage done to public services and jobs by Stephen Harper, and there has been plenty, for example, the damage to the federal government's core public administration I wrote about in February, the stronger will be their case for replacing Harper in 2015. Mike Duffy is likely to be a footnote when we look back on the 2015 federal election.

Ontario's greatest challenge is restarting its slow-growing economy (not repairing its finances as is commonly assumed). Average growth has been very slow over the past decade because of the financial crisis and subsequent economic downturn. Ontario has been 10th out of 10 in Canada because it is not resource rich,  and manufacturing has suffered because of the downturn and the overvalued Canadian dollar.

Slow economic growth in Canada's industrial and financial heartland should be seen primarily as a federal government failure. However, if the Bank of Canada encourages a lower Canadian dollar (we'll see), and the American economy continues to gain strength albeit slowly, the fiscal challenges facing the Wynne regime will be diminished. It was the "Roaring Nineties" in the United States, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz dubbed them, that allowed the federal Liberals to balance their budget quickly while economic growth continued. And average voters care more about jobs than balance sheets.

The upside down world of Ontario politics and economics 2018

Current polls suggest an easy victory for Doug Ford on June 7, although this is not yet certain. Assuming he wins, what should we expect that to mean?

To listen to his rhetoric it would mean tax cuts. He has suggested cutting the current corporate tax rate from 11.5% (already lowest in the country) to 10.5% and has even suggested a tax cut for those on the minimum wage (an alternative to actually raising the wage, an action that would leave those affected worse off).

To finance tax cuts would mean cutting spending, which Ford suggests can be achieved by finding efficiencies and not destroying jobs. In an interview with CBC radio morning host Robin Bresnahan he said, as Tabitha Southey put it in Maclean's:

...his “economic plan,” ... is to find close to $6-billion in “efficiencies.” Bresnahan enquired what exactly these efficiencies might be, a question that seemed to alarm the freshly minted PC leader, as if “efficiencies” were in fact small skittish creatures easily spooked by journalists asking questions about them.

Of course most of what government spends is on wages and salaries for teachers, fire fighters, paramedics, nurses, doctors, road maintenance crews, bus drivers etc. etc. Even if we make the unlikely assumption that Ford would find such "efficiencies", they would unequivocally cost jobs and wages.

Beyond that many of his supporters make the assumption that the Wynne government has been spending wildly and it is time to rein in the excess (to some extent Wynne wants to encourage a variation of this view). Some Conservatives probably think of this as similar to what the Harris government confronted when elected to office in 1995. In fact that is not the case. The Ontario government spends less on government programs relative to its population than any other province and that has been true for years. It ranks 10 out of 10. However, that was not true in 1995.

Using the federal fiscal reference tables made available annually by the federal Finance Department and Statistics Canada population numbers I have created several tables to make comparisons.  In one, I ranked all provinces and their program spending over time. The results can be seen in the table below:

If one looks at this chart one can see that Ontario, as recently as 1995-96 (a year that gave us three months of the NDP under Bob Rae and nine months of Mike Harris) ranked second in overall program spending per capita. This was mainly the consequence of the last budget of the Rae government, although Harris started cutting once he got into office. By the time that the PC Harris-Eves government left office they had dropped Ontario's ranking on program spending to 9th and within a few years under Dalton McGuinty the province dropped to 10th place, a rank it still occupied a year ago.

The reality is Ontario spends too little not too much. A couple of examples. There is a website dedicated to increasing spending on school upkeep and maintenance called Fix Our Schools that succeeded in getting an increase in funds for school maintenance last year in part due to its own commendable efforts, but also after a scathing report from the Auditor-General on  the deplorable condition of Ontario schools. There is still a deficit of unmet maintenance of $1.6 billion.

Another example is health care. A recent issue of Toronto Life did a reasonable job of documenting some highly negative consequences of cuts to health care:

Ontario’s hospital-bed heyday was in the 1980s. It’s been pretty much downhill since then. Premiers Davis, Peterson and Rae kicked off the cuts, in what was partly an ideological attempt to deinstitutionalize medical care in the province. The bulk of the rest was the work of Mike Harris, who shut down 39 hospitals and forced the amalgamation of dozens of others. In 1990, Ontario had 33,403 acute care beds, and, even as the population kept growing and aging, by 2014, we had only 18,588. 

Since 1997, a low point in spending, increases to hospital funding have been mostly very modest, and in recent years have often been eclipsed by inflation. The 2008 recession made that bleak scenario even bleaker: 2017 was the first year in five that hospital budgets weren’t outright frozen, even as patient volume, labour costs, energy costs and regulatory requirements all continued to go up. Out of necessity, our hospitals have become lean. Today, Ontario spends on average $389 per patient less than the other provinces. It shows.

Of course some of the reduction of hospital beds reflected things such as moving mental patients out of hospitals into the community. One long term consequence of this, a rise in homelessness, as this web site notes contributions to homelessness include: "... inadequate discharge planning for people leaving hospitals, corrections and mental health and addictions facilities."

Of course the spending inadequacies go way beyond these examples.

What underlies this situation is the other legacy of Mike Harris - taxes that are too low.  We can't afford realistic levels of spending for health care and education and many other needed public services. What Ontario needs are higher rates of taxation, including for the affluent readers of Toronto Life (a point noticeably absent from the article). Despite 15 years of Liberal government it is the ideology of Mike Harris that still dominates government spending overall in Ontario. In terms of total revenues per capita Ontario was 9th out of 10 in the latest data after a decade as 10th out of 10.

This needs to change. If Ford wins Ontario will get the opposite of what it needs.

Of the major parties only the NDP offers some modest tax increases, on corporations and the affluent mostly. However, those increases are largely to finance new spending rather than needed fixes to existing gaps. The NDP also offer a couple of tax cuts (including one that will benefit some upper income citizens).  More ideas to increase revenue are needed from all parties.

I would argue that there is also a major journalistic failure here. What I have described above does not reflect media coverage of Ontario politics and economics. Our major institutions such as the Globe and Mail instead amplify the prevailing mythology, saying such as things as: "This is a dire time for Ontario taxpayers."

This news story and the report from the Financial Accountability Officer, on which it is based, worry about future deficits but imply only spending cuts can close the gap. Neither points out what is obviously true: that if we are worried about deficits shouldn't the province with the lowest per capita revenues be thinking about at least some tax hikes. Deficits are not one-sided affairs.

But can Ford triumph? Can tactical (commonly called strategic voting) keep him from winning a majority?  I will address this in subsequent posts.

Ontario election: conflicting polls, Hudak's math & Horwath's bad day

The Ontario election continues to confound observers. Long-serving governments should typically find it harder each time they go to the polls to get re-elected. Scandal-plagued Liberal governments led for the first time by women who served in the cabinet of their discredited predecessors before becoming premier would, one would think, be doomed: just ask Christie Clark. Oh wait.

Politics is a tricky and complicated game. Just when you think you have it figured out something wholly unexpected arises. So it is in Ontario 2014. With conflicting polling messages and results, the way forward this time seems especially opaque.

Here is a table comparing polling done since May 6 online with polls conducted using telephone IVR (interactive voice response, essentially a talking computer).

Translated into seats it is the difference between a potential Liberal majority and a PC minority. And there is still a long way to go.

Hudak's Math
Jim Stanford, economist with the union Unifor, as well as the Liberal Finance Minister Charles Sousa, have been crunching the numbers on Tim Hudak's 'million jobs' plan and have found that the math does not add up. Put simply, Hudak's arithmetic says 2 + 2 = 100.

Stanford's post on the Progressive Economics blog is worth quoting extensively:

When Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak kicked off the current election campaign with a plan to “create a million new jobs” in Ontario, he tried to dress up the platform launch with a certain scientific respectability.  The party released a “technical backgrounder” showing the precise composition of the million new jobs, along with two commissioned consultants’ reports that were said to justify the estimates contained in the plan.

Stanford goes on to note that the PCs did not post these online, but some reporters did, allowing him to do some forensic analysis.  He goes on to say:

There are many important economic and methodological issues with the policies proposed by the PCs, and the way they have used the consultant reports to try to justify their numbers.

These problems deserve a lot of further study, including:

• The apparent double-counting of fiscal savings (like the wage freeze on public servants).
• The failure to account for any employment downside from major public sector spending cuts.
• The failure to include the 100,000 direct public sector jobs that the PCs pledge to eliminate.
• The lack of any empirical support for the plan’s estimates of job gains from apprenticeship training or GTA transit initiatives.
• How they measure “regulatory reduction” and its impact on employment. ...

Ontarians can and should have a serious policy debate over whether Hudak’s proposals would have any stimulative effect on employment at all (let alone creating a million new positions).

However, those substantive policy debates may be swamped by an enormous arithmetic mistake which can be deduced by comparing the numbers in the PC technical backgrounder, with the supposedly supporting evidence contained in the two consultant’s reports.  Ontario Finance Minister Charles Sousa has critiqued this error.  Here are the details as I read them.  In essence, the two consultants generated estimates of the number of cumulative jobs that would be created from the simulated policies over several years.  But the PCs have assumed that those jobs would be created in each year of the 8-year plan.  They have thus exaggerated the number of jobs by several times (as many as eight-fold).

Does this remarkable display of ineptitude deserve to be rewarded with the keys to Queen's Park?

Horwath's Bad Day
In an online column written for the Globe and Mail on Friday May 23, longtime party stalwart Gerald Caplan strongly criticized the NDP campaign asking plaintively: Do progressives even have a place in the Ontario NDP? It slammed the Horwath campaign saying, among other things:

Your election campaign has frankly been a mess. No coherent theme, no memorable policies, nothing to deal with the great concerns of New Democrats everywhere: increasing inequality, the precarious lives of so many working people, reduced public services, global warming. I’m afraid you offer little sense that you understand Ontario’s needs and that if elected you have any serious plan to meet them.

Later the same day a letter to Horwath signed by 34 unhappy New Democrats was obtained by the CBC, which stated: "We were angry when you voted against the most progressive budget in recent Ontario history. Given your mistrust of the Liberals it still would have been better to insist they carry out their promises rather than just bringing them down. But in your campaign it seems you don't agree with the proposals in the budget From what we can see you are running to the right of the Liberals in an attempt to win Conservative votes."

The list included some with high profile New Democrats such as Michelle Landsberg, former Toronto Star columnist and wife of former NDP leader Stephen Lewis. Perhaps less appreciated today is that Gerald Caplan at one time worked very closely with Stephen Lewis. This suggests to me that although he is unlikely to say anything publicly, these actions have the tacit support of Stephen Lewis, a party icon credited with the first big electoral breakthrough in 1975, and the person who delivered a strong eulogy at the Jack Layton funeral.

It is hard to see how this won't eventually be very damaging to the NDP, which has been struggling against strategic voting on the centre-left, a phenomenon that first strongly established itself in Ontario in the 1999 provincial election. The formerly red Tory Ontario Progressive Conservative Party moved strongly to the right in 1995, and the ideological gap between the Conservatives on the one hand, and the Liberals (even of the Dalton McGuinty blue Grit variety) and the NDP, on the other, has been wide ever since.

This makes the effort by the NDP to make a rightward tilt over the past couple of years surprising, as if they could ignore with impunity the temptation on the part of their supporters to vote Liberal. When the Wynne government announced an increase in the minimum wage, quite amazingly the leader of the NDP did not instantly welcome it. Instead she mulled it over for a couple of days then announced support for a higher wage (an obvious outflanking movement), but insisted it should be accompanied by a tax cut for small business.

She has also made some symbolic gestures. For example, Horwath attacked Kathleen Wynne for refusing to meet with Rob Ford (this was after Council had stripped him of his powers) perhaps hoping to tap into some of the support of Ford had. This was an example of truly terrible political judgment. It opened her up to charges of inconsistency and hypocrisy, made effectively in this post by Liberal blogger Jeff Jedras, not to mention that fellow New Democrat Olivia Chow was shortly to announce a race against Ford. It was too small a gesture to have any political benefit. It only had costs. In a word it was stupid.

A strong rebuttal to the unhappy New Democrats was posted by Alice Funke of Pundits Guide that gives some insight into the thinking behind Horwath's strategy. She argues that traditional NDP politics had failed in earlier years leading Jack Layton and Horwath to "more prairie formulations". She says of Horwath:

She has made a bold calculation that the strong desire for regime change in the province, coupled with a fear of the extreme programme of the Hudak PCs, creates a unique opening for a modern social democratic offer that balances fiscal responsibility with progressive working class populism; one that actually stands a chance of stopping a Hudak majority, in the very regions the provincial Liberals are now weakest.

There a couple flaws embedded in all this. Horwath's approach was first conceived as a strategy against the blue Grit McGuinty. It has taken no account whatsoever of the shift within the Liberals from centre-right to centre-left with the leadership change. All Horwath has been able to offer is that the Liberals are corrupt or that they make promises that can't be believed, neither of which directly addresses the ideological issues raised.

Where it could conceivably be effective is in parts of the province that have completely discounted the Liberals. Maybe the NDP can replicate some of their success in the by-elections held after 2011 in urban ridings in southwestern Ontario, a region hard hit by the economic downturn. However, if there is some residual Liberal strength even here, it is unlikely to work. In addition there is no broad perception that the NDP can win province-wide, a condition that would be necessary to the success of the Horwath strategy.

On the prairies themselves the NDP don't have to worry about Liberals, left-leaning or otherwise. Liberal parties there have been weak for several decades. Using "prairie formulations" in a province where the political context is completely different doesn't make much sense.

In this respect I do think Funke's reference here to Layton is simply wrong. The key to NDP success in 2011 was in Quebec, where Layton's appeal could not be characterized as rooted in prairie NDP politics, along with the incompetence of Michael Ignatieff. The 2011 NDP experience has no applicability to Ontario 2014.

Of course, any strategy requires NDP supporters to remain loyal. Could Horwath have done something to keep the dissenters loyal? The unhappiness with the Horwath approach was widely discussed within party circles prior to the election. Perhaps the NDP planners needed somehow to take it into account, and could at least have done something to prevent a public outburst.

One can easily perceive strikes against all three parties: Hudak's hopeless math and ideological blinkers, the now almost 11-year Liberal record that includes the scandals and an economic downturn, and the NDP's tactical, strategic and policy blunders. The confused polling picture should surprise no one.

Ontario Byelections

The results of yesterday's byelections are better news for the Ontario Liberals than might appear to be the case at first glance. Yes, they did lose York South Weston to the NDP, but they held Markham despite efforts by the Conservatives to break into the Chinese community and held their own in Burlington. When I convert the results to province-wide numbers, the outcome would easily produce another Liberal majority.

Looking back over this government's byelection record there are two distinct patterns. One is in low income ridings (Hamilton East, Parkdale High Park, York South Weston, Scarborough Rouge River) where the NDP won the first three and made significant gains in the fourth. This strongly suggests that enough time has passed since the defeat of the discredited Rae government so that the NDP is in a position to recover lost ground in ridings which reflect the long-term pattern of their support. It is clear they can make inroads against the Liberals in poorer urban ridings. This suggests that a strategy similar to the one employed in York South Weston focused on class issues such as the minimum wage could bear electoral fruit.

The other pattern is in the more affluent 905 ridings such as Markham, Burlington and Whitby-Ajax where their vote percentages have been impressive even though they actually did not win two of the three. This bodes well for the Liberals for the October 10 election because the Conservatives simply have to do very well in 905 to win.

The NDP can't win the next election and form a government although they could affect the outcome. They boosted their vote a little in Markham and fell a little in Burlington, even while massively increasing their percentage of the vote in York South Weston. I think this implies that we are seeing continuing strategic voting. Voters who might have the NDP as a first choice but find themselves living in a Burlington appear to be giving up on their party's prospects and voting Liberal.

Addendum: The Greens did not do all that well. The Green vote comes disproportionately from younger, more alienated voters who also tend to have a low turnout. While a recent SES poll suggests 10% support for the Greens in Ontario, the byelections suggest a Green vote of about 5%, similar to the last federal election but much less than the recent media zeitgeist might suggest.

Putting the Conservatives Ahead...

A new Ipsos-Reid poll now has the Conservatives one point ahead (within the margin of error of course) of the Liberals. However, it is not all good news for Mr. Harper. Although the Conservatives are ahead in Ontario in this survey, they are in third place in B.C. And a Decima Survey that preceded Ipsos-Reid still reports the Liberals ahead.

My seat calculation based on Ipsos-Reid is Conservative – 112, Liberal – 91, NDP – 39, BQ – 66. This would permit a Conservative minority government to achieve majorities by combining with any one of the opposition parties.

This does set up the classic strategic voting paradigm: a narrow Conservative lead, a possible Tory government but a plentiful supply of NDP first choices that can be appealed to by the Liberals to switch. To be activated strategic voting will take more than just this one poll. But the 2004 end of campaign scenario is beginning to appear again.

One should note that Ipsos-Reid polls in this election have generally found more support for the Conservatives than others, as the current comparison with Decima illustrates.

Seat predictions

I think election prediction models like mine are going to be weaker in this election than previously. I see from pollsters stories of asymmetric shifts, for example unusually large gains for the Conservatives among the affluent. My guess is that we will see some ridings where there are very large swings that overwhelm the capacity of any formula to foresee them.

I am also guessing there is going to be increased strategic voting of all sorts – last minute switches from NDP to Liberal, some Liberal to NDP where appropriate, even Conservative to NDP to block Liberal wins. This too will be damaging to accurate seat forecasts.

It seems to me the same basic pattern of voting has existed since 1993 and we are witnessing a sea change, not necessarily as long-term as in 1993, but on a significant scale.

There is plenty of disagreement among the polls, and now among the seat predictors. Andrew Coyne has helpfully assembled most of them into one place here: http://andrewcoyne.com/2006/01/seven-sleeps.php

I crunched the numbers today on the latest Ipsos-Reid Online poll with its massive sample size. My numbers are very different from theirs.

Ipsos Reid Seats
C – 149 to 153
L – 64 to 68
NDP – 29 to 33
BQ – 57 to 61

TC Norris Seats
C – 137
L – 72
NDP – 37
BQ – 62

I don’t see how Ipsos get the Conservatives as high as 149 to 153 on the strength of a four point lead in Ontario and a performance in B.C. very close to the last election. Strategic Counsel has the Conservatives up seven points in Ontario and eleven in B.C., numbers that inevitably produce much better seat numbers for Harper. My intuition is that I may have the NDP too high.

However, my real hunch is that all the egocentric seat predictors like me could wind up looking foolish on the morning of the 24th.

The Campaign – Week Two

Various points:

1. To take literally the word of the Globe and Mail and other media, the zeitgeist says we will have a Conservative government. They generally don’t say it, but they imply that it will be a majority government.

However, the slow upward progress of the Conservatives seems more a product of the downward glide of the Liberals at this point than any campaign accomplishments of their own. What is being missed is NDP strength, a product not so much of a brilliant campaign, which clearly it is not, but as the logical place for defecting left-of-centre Liberals to place their votes. Recall that the Ekos poll of a few weeks ago said that Liberal second choices were roughly evenly divided between Conservatives and NDP.

2. The Liberals’ authored the dopiest stunt of the campaign this week when they sent out cabinet ministers Judy Sgro and John McCallum to harass Stephen Harper.

3. All say health care is the number one issue but I have a question: Do the public actually have confidence in any party to solve the problem? I am not sure that they do. If that is the case, then health may not determine any actual votes, despite its “importance”. We saw something similar ten years ago with the then number one issue, unemployment. I suspect running on a second order issue such as the environment, where it is more likely that the public believes that government can do something, might yield a greater electoral dividend. The Conservatives seem to be running in reality on trust and credibility.

4. The Liberals are being hurt badly by the Ontario budget in Ontario, and by sponsorship in Quebec although the latter goes back to February - the overall damage is reflected as distrust. Elsewhere the campaign has not yet taken a definite shape.

4. Overall the three parties all stumbled in various ways in week two. I will assess the TV ads below but, in general, they are all weak.

The Leaders

Jack Layton

Jack Layton recovered ground this week. The NDP campaign isn’t great, but he is a strong media performer, and that counts for a great deal in the free media part of the campaign.

I watched all of the CBC town hall and most of an interview on Le Point, plus the Martin/ Layton appearance on the Newsworld youth show. He did well overall in the town hall and gave an excellent response on the homelessness issue in a brief accountability session with Mansbridge at the end. Occasionally, he did not answer the concerns raised by the audience directly (or was too partisan) and should have more often said as he did once in the program, “I respectfully disagree…” instead of trying win over someone who clearly he couldn’t seduce. Bernard Derome conducted a tough accountability interview with Layton on Le Point, that I thought he handled relatively comfortably. I thought he was effective on the youth program as well.

The NDP does best when both the Liberals and Conservatives are weak. The 1990 Ontario election is a good example. The Peterson Liberals were in trouble on a number of fronts including the integrity issue. Just as significant the Conservative brand name had been damaged by its association with Mulroney – Meech, GST, etc. The NDP had a comparative advantage on the key issues which were health, environment and integrity. This time the Conservatives have seized the integrity issue as theirs, although it should be more an issue for the NDP as they have never held power federally. True, the B.C. NDP has some scandals in its closet but so do the Ontario Conservatives. Former provincial PC MPP’s including former Health Minister Tony Clement are running. Yet there has been no discussion of the integrity issue in relation to the Ontario Conservatives despite recent disclosures of $135,000 emails, etc.

The NDP has a morbid fear of strategic voting (which they can’t really do anything about) so they try to campaign against it, and Layton seems more comfortable attacking Martin, but at this stage his interests would be better served by switching his sights to Harper.

Stephen Harper

Pity Stephen Harper. If this were the last week of the campaign, no one might be looking closely at his proposals. However it is not the last week, and he is beginning to be picked at by the media. For example, this Toronto Star piece on the Harper war on crime.

Now that the platform has been released one can expect more. It is vulnerable on a number of fronts, especially on its numbers. See for example, the Liberal response.

His platform is highly dependent on tax cuts. That is partly why we may see a low ceiling in the Conservative performance in Ontario. Walkerton, lax meat inspection, deteriorating civic infrastructure etc. are still fresh in many voters’ minds. The attacks so far by his opponents have been weak on narrative – linking tax cuts to loss of environmental protection etc, but that could change.

However, the appetite to get rid of the Liberals that is drawing votes to the Conservatives (and the NDP) is very powerful. And determined electorates tend to believe what they want to believe.

Harper is being most hurt, however, by eruptions such as the one on abortion. It may be too much to expect that he and all his candidates will maintain what they call “message discipline" from now ‘til voting day. And that may be what he has to fear most.

Paul Martin

The only point I would make about Martin’s campaign is that I think the daycare promise was a net negative for the Liberals. It simply allowed opponents and media to focus on the 1993 Redbook and its daycare commitment, subsequently not fulfilled. Martin’s explanation that the situation was different was too technical for the average voter to comprehend. Because a key issue is trust and credibility, this promise made his situation worse.

TV Ads

The parties’ television ads are among the very most important instruments of communication in the campaign as they reach voters who tune out the news. Yet, the ones we have seen so far seem quite weak. I think the Conservatives’ have the best of a bad lot. Oddly, the newspapers tend to seek only the critique of professional ad men who haven’t a clue about the importance of the political content. Want to see the ads I am talking about – look here:

http://www.conservative.ca/english/ads.asp

http://www.liberal.ca/campaign_ads_e.aspx

http://www.ndp.ca/ - Small box on left hand side.

The Liberals

Their ads seem quite amateurish, especially visually, and the scripts simply aren’t compelling. One obvious problem is that Martin is overweight, something you can hide either with clothing or camera angles. A neglected image always distracts from the message, and that is the case here. A larger point is that the Liberals need a biographical ad that reminds the voters of Martin’s great claim to fame – his vanquishing of the budget beast. His story is that just as Canada was to hit the “debt wall”, he came on the scene with his 1995 budget to save the day. The most pertinent word in the previous sentence is “1995” – it was so long ago no one remembers, especially voters under 35, and even older voters need to be reminded of how they felt a decade ago.

The Liberals need an ad like that but there is no sign of it. It could (ideally should) be a combination of two the better ads from American politics: The John Kerry ad called “A Good American” (To be found here on the right hand side further down: http://www.johnkerry.com/videos/ ), and the Reagan ad from 1984 known as “morning in America” (enter here: http://www.ammi.org/livingroomcandidate/index_2000.html , set your video format here: http://www.ammi.org/livingroomcandidate/format.html and find the ad by year. It is the 1984 Republican ad called “Prouder, stronger, better”, the first one in the row.

The Conservatives

Their ads are the best of a bad lot. The first one called Accountability with Harper speaking directly to camera works relatively well. He is a little beefy himself but the framing and zoom in keep that from being obvious. The script is clear and understandable if trite.

The second one called carousel works well, but is your classic dirty ad (so I confess I enjoyed watching it very much). However, it is essentially unfair. The ad uses the visual and aural qualities of the medium to convey messages subconsciously to the viewers. We see scenes of money being crumpled then thrown away, and hauled away by garbage trucks accompanied by carousel music. They would never literally accuse the Liberals of this but that is what the music and pictures do. The ad also contains factual errors, so the media really should be going after Harper on this.

The final ad called Demand Better is like the first ad but has a script that is nearly incomprehensible.

The NDP
The worst of the bunch. I actually agree with the comment of the Globe’s critic who said: “The spot addresses too many issues. Ideally, you’d have one spot for each issue. Instead, Layton’s promises come across like a laundry list for saving the world.”

The ad jumps so fast from issue to issue it is hard to follow. The ad echoes the lack of a coherent theme in the broader NDP campaign.

Yet, the NDP has an opportunity like the Liberals to do a positive issue ad connected to Layton’s biography. For example, they could construct a narrative around his role in building the electricity-generating windmill on the Toronto waterfront and use it as a takeoff point for why he is best qualified on the environment issue.


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There comes a point where the campaign jells and we can see the shape of what is to come on voting day, if not the exact result. That happens some time in mid-campaign. I don’t think we are there yet. But it is coming soon.