AKA Why Canadian Polls Arn’t All That Useful
AKA No, You Don’t Want An Election
In a few of the more liberal quarters of the American blog world, there have been a whole series of comments about how it would be great for the Tories to force an election now, because “the NDP would double their seat count, and have to form a coalition with the Liberals,” and how it would be a great victory for Progressives everywhere. The best-cited reason is the projections off of a site called Jord.ca – which projects a near-Liberal majority, with 40 NDP seats. From everything I’ve seen, that’s just not what would happen.
If you read on, you’ll see why I don’t place all that much stock in Canadian polling, and why an election now isn’t the best results for Progressives in Canada.
Based on previous experience and documentation, polling and seat projections just aren’t all that accurate in Canada. Ignoring the qualifications of the source generally cited – I’d like to see a little more analysis than the UBC electoral market, which seems like not much more than some Markov chains – there are some “accepted realities” of Canadian polling that need to be addressed. They’re hard to quantify exactly, but qualitatively they’re a series of important factors. For all references to seat projections, I’m using the collections at NoDice.ca. Also remember the difference between “liberal” (small-L, the philosophy) and “Liberal” (big-L, the party). And unless otherwise stated, these conclusions don’t apply to Quebec – that’s a whole different ballgame.
NDP electoral support is generally lower than it polls. The Canadian 40-60 year-old generation was very liberal in their youth, and have voted consistently NDP in the past. However, nowadays they’re scared of the Tories, and don’t really trust the NDP to govern a country properly. Especially in Ontario, they all remember the Rae government (yes, I know it wasn’t really his fault, it was more bad timing) and the fallout from that. The net result is that they will say that they’ll vote NDP when it doesn’t really count – in polling and discussion – but when they walk into the polling booth, their pencil will hover for a few seconds; they’ll swallow pensively a few times, and end up marking the Liberal circle. They’ll tell themselves that they’re doing this for their children, and that they’re doing it to stop the Tories, but in reality they just don’t trust the NDP to govern the country. In the run-up to the election, the NDP were projected to win between 22 and 26 seats – in polling done on Election Day they were projected at 26, and in an average of the last 10 polls they were projected at 24. They ended up with 19. In Ontario they got two less than their projection and in the Prairies they finished down four seats off the projection. I don’t have a specific explanation for the Prairie results, as I don’t have much experience with that area.
The Tories are as vulnerable as the NDP, but for different reasons. By this I mean something similar to my previous point about the NDP, but in a much less permanent way. People poll for the NDP but vote Liberal because they’re afraid of the party, but people poll Tory and vote Liberal because they’re afraid of Stephen Harper and the Alliance wing of the Conservative party. The socially-liberal-fiscally-conservative voter is more prevalent in Canada than (s)he is in the States, and they’ll often end up in a similar situation to the NDP voter; they’ll want to vote Tory, and they would have voted for the old PC party, but they’re scared of the socially-conservative Alliance part of the Conservatives, and panic in the voting booth, with the result of voting Liberal or spoiling their ballot. The additional factor for Ontarians is that while the old PCs were an eastern party, the Conservatives are seen as a Western party, due to their Alliance component – and old-school Ontario PCs won’t vote for them. If the Tories got a leader who wasn’t as socially conservative as Harper, and who was from Manitoba or Ontario, they’d take back a significant portion of their Ontario losses. To make it short – the Tories need to get back the Belinda PCs – those who identified with her socially-liberal, fiscally-conservative, non-Western-centered type of Conservative party. Projection-wise, they were supposed to get 110-115 nationally, and 40-50 in Ontario – they ended up with 99 nationally, and 24 in Ontario.
Undecided voters usually go Liberal. This is both a corollary and a result of the previous two points. The majority of truly undecided Canadian voters, if they walk into the polling booth and are still undecided, will vote Liberal. This is the result of years of Liberal branding as “the Party that should be running the country,” as well as the general inoffensiveness of the Liberal party platform. Fundamentally, they’re a flexible centrist party. Their policy shifts around the center of the Canadian political spectrum, moving with the general whims of the public (within certain conditions). For this reason, they don’t piss too many people off. This, in addition to the previous point, is how they’ve come back from Jean Brault (an advertising exec who testified to how corrupt they were); they make not make all that many friends, but they’re centrist enough to catch stray voters from other parties, and people who don’t really know what they want. True or not, the Liberals have successfully marketed themselves as “the Party of what you’re somewhat interested in,” regardless of who you are. Look at how Liberals took seats that were projected to go Tory or NDP (remember – Quebec is a whole different political league); they were the reliable alternative after either of the two previous points took effect.
Most importantly, however…
The negatives from Bloc gains in an election held now would significantly outweigh the positives from NDP gains. And the Bloc would gain – no question there. While the Bloc is a pretty nice socialist-left party (I’d vote for them if they weren’t separatists), they want to rip the country apart. Bloc results are generally cyclical – they’ll go up when people get sick of the Liberals, and then as they’re going up, people will remember that they’re separatists, and they’ll fall. So we end up with a Liberal-Bloc cycle in Quebec, and we can live with that. But that’s not what we’re in the midst of – what we’ve got now is a nearly a perfect storm for the Bloc. In the previous Provincial election, the Liberals took over the province. For various reasons, they’ve become incredibly unpopular as of late (mostly to do with inheriting the beginning of a recession, and having to fight the Unions to get out of it). So the Bloc gets their upswing. Thereafter, the Liberals continue to drop, but people start to remember the separatism, and Bloc support beings to dip. At which point the Gomery inquiry hits, which puts the Bloc back up on an upswing – but starting from the top of their cycle, and not the usual bottom. Because of this, any federal election now would produce another decent win for the Bloc (my estimate is they’d pick up nine or ten more seats in Quebec), which would give them status as either the Official Opposition, or as serious players in a minority government. Which means that a referendum would be back on the table – the worst possible result, for all involved.
We’ll have an election in December anyways – Martin promised to call one within thirty days of the end of Gomery – hopefully, the Bloc will be on the downswing by then.
Until then, he needs to keep on the agenda: go for gold with the budget (the Tories have admitted that they don’t have the votes or the will to stop it), and give’r on same-sex marriage: a victory that will turn all socially-liberal-fiscally-anything into Liberal voters.
Plus, it would show that he stands for something – a description that hasn’t been applied to him in years.