Election 2015

[Bruce Monkhouse]

The question still stands...

 

[a_majoor]

Given the average Canadian family of four has between 40-45% of its income taken by taxes and government fees (different studies come up with different figures, depending on the methodologies, but they all end up on the same region), the real way to boost the middle class is to roll back government spending and cut fees and taxes. Imagine the effect on the middle class and the Canadian economy if the average family of four received the equivalent of a 10% pay increase by reducing the tax burden from 40% to 30%......

 

[Edward Campbell]

The Liberals and the NDP are not the only ones dumping fruitcake candidates ... the CPC has dumped "Jagdish Grewal, a candidate in suburban Toronto who defended therapies that attempt to turn gays straight and who penned an editorial that referred to homosexuality as "unnatural behaviour" and heterosexuals as "normal.""

But how, please, does the case of this NDP candidate differ, materially, from that of the former CPC candidate ... except that the NDP candidate's apology is accepted while the Conservative is forced to resign?

 

[Scott]

My guess: he not only apologized, but he says he's changed his tune.

Meanwhile, the punted CPC neanderthal defends his views.

 

[Cloud Cover]

I actually found the LPC child care plan.

You can read it if you like. Be warned, it doesn't fit the narrative the attack ads give. Might be because there are more than a few lies in those attack ads.

It starts off "the typical one parent family...". After that that sentence alone, the entire document became suspect to me. It is very obvious who this plan is targeting and more importantly, who would have a harder time qualifying. 

 

[Edward Campbell]

In this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from that journal, Bloomberg Business looks at the Canadian election and, more specifically, at Prime Minister Harper:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-08/canada-s-harper-is-unpopular-except-with-those-who-worship-him

Canada's Harper Is Unpopular Except With Those Who Worship Him

Theophilos Argitis

October 8, 2015

Stephen Harper, the longest serving leader in the Group of Seven after Germany’s Angela Merkel, faces headwinds the likes of which usually destroy political campaigns: voter fatigue, scandal and a wobbly economy.

So how is it that less than two weeks away from the Oct. 19 election polls show Harper remains in the race? The folks who like him, it seems, like him a lot.

No other party in Canada has as loyal a following, and that matters in a “first-past-the-post” system in which candidates with the most votes, though not necessarily a majority, win. Forty-two percent of Conservative supporters say they don’t even have a second choice, more than double the levels for the opposition Liberals and New Democrats, according to polling by Nanos Research.

A phenomenally dedicated base of supporters in western Canada and rural parts of the country give the Conservatives a head start, with many seats practically uncontested in a way rivals could only dream. On the other hand, tending to this base limits Conservative appeal with more centrist voters.

In places like Simcoe County, a farming community about 80 miles north of Toronto, lawn signs for Conservative incumbent Kellie Leitch outnumber those of her rivals by what seems like 50 to one.

“The base is doing just great,” Leitch, the labor minister, said in an interview while meeting voters in her district last month. “These folks here have been Conservatives literally for decades, generation upon generation, and they are solid. My responsibility is to make sure they understand their voice is represented in Ottawa.”

Conservative Coalition

In winning three consecutive elections, Harper has extended his appeal to suburban immigrant groups -- particularly Asian communities -- that have latched onto his focus on family values and low taxes. They were the voters who handed the Conservatives their first majority in 2011.

All indications are Harper’s electoral coalition -- western, rural, and suburban -- is holding. Conservative voters “are either going to double down with Stephen Harper or they are going to stay home,” said pollster Nik Nanos.

The latest national averages compiled by polling aggregator ThreeHundredEight.com show the Conservatives at 33 percent, the Liberals at 32 percent and the NDP at 24 percent, giving Harper the inside track to win the most seats in Canada’s legislature but not a majority.

Liberal Resurgence

The majority victory in 2011 with 40 percent of the vote was a high-water mark and won’t likely be replicated. Harper benefited then from a relatively strong economic performance during the financial crisis and a mid-campaign meltdown in Liberal support under previous leader Michael Ignatieff. This time, the Liberals are competitive again under Justin Trudeau, who is challenging Harper in the key suburbs around Toronto. Even some immigrant communities -- particularly Sikhs and Muslims -- are gravitating back to the Liberals.

It’s surprising that Harper, who first ran for office in 1988, is competitive at all, having exceeded the typical best-before date for a Canadian leader. Some 70 percent of voters went into this election saying they wanted change. His approval ratings reached new lows during the campaign, with 49 percent saying they have negative feelings and just 28 percent feeling positive, according to Abacus Data.

Harper’s opponents have also been attacking him on the economy, one of his traditional strong points. Growth has been weak and consumer confidence stands near its lowest in more than two years.

‘Bad Movie’

“He’s asking you for a fourth term as prime minister,” Trudeau told a rally in the Toronto suburb of Brampton last week. “It’s like a bad movie franchise. By the time you get to the third or the fourth sequel, most of the stars are gone and the plot’s getting really thin.”

Just a month ago, pundits were predicting Harper’s demise with his party beset by one problem after another, including a Senate scandal that had his former chief of staff on the witness stand in Ottawa. Conservative support hit a campaign low of 26 percent as Harper faced criticism he wasn’t doing enough to address the Syrian refugee crisis.

Yet the more trouble Harper faced the more he reached out to a base that often felt marginalized before he engineered a 2003 merger between the moribund, center-right Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance, a populist western based party. His embrace of social conservative values won him a faithful following while also limiting his potential pool of voters, which is smaller than that of his rivals.

Galvanizing Support

Harper has doubled down in the campaign on his two main messages: economic and national security -- portraying his opponents as dangerous and naive on both. His decision to go slow on the Syrian refugee crisis, while condemned by other leaders and the media, proved popular with his backers. It also helped the Conservatives bring topics such as terrorism and citizenship to the fore, galvanizing core supporters.

He’s driven a wedge between his party and its challengers over his opposition to allowing Muslim women to wear face coverings during citizenship ceremonies.

“He’s got to stand up to people in the world,” said Julian Lautenschlager, 60, a retired soldier and long-time Conservative voter from Angus, Ontario. “These other guys are too wishy washy.”

The big test will be whether he can hold the immigrant-heavy suburban vote around Toronto, where according to Ipsos Public Affairs pollster Darrell Bricker the “real battle” will take place. The Conservatives are offering their tried-and-true agenda of tax cuts and balanced budgets. The Liberals counter by saying they will increase taxes for the top one percent and cut them for the middle class, and run deficits to prime the economy with infrastructure spending.

Whether Harper can hold these 2011 latecomers to his coalition could be the story of the election.

“The new Conservative base is made up of new Canadians,” said Defense Minister Jason Kenney, who led his party’s outreach to immigrants. “If only new Canadians were voting we’d expect to do better than the overall population.”

It's those suburbs, especially the ones in the Golden Horseshoe, again ... the key battlegrounds, full of relatively new, ethnic Canadians, who don't, mostly, wear niqabs and don't care, overly, about those who do.

 

[Edward Campbell]

More on suburbs, this time in the National Capital Region, where the Ottawa Sun reports on three ridings in the region (one in Quebec and two in Ontario) where the Liberals doing surprisingly well: all three are virtual dead heats. The two Ontario ridings (Kanata-Carleton and Nepean) were thought, earlier, to be fairly safe for the CPC.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Bruce Anderson, who, despite his protests to the contrary I judge to be a Liberal partisan, gives his views on what needs to happen over the next 10 days in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/what-the-ndp-tories-and-liberals-need-to-do-in-the-home-stretch/article26716079/

What the NDP, Tories and Liberals need to do in the home stretch

BRUCE ANDERSON
Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, Oct. 08, 2015

  Bruce Anderson is the chairman of polling firm Abacus Data, a regular member of the At Issue panel on CBC’s The National and a founding partner of i2 Ideas and Issues Advertising. He has done polls for Liberal and Conservative politicians
  but no longer does any partisan work. Other members of his family have worked for Conservative and Liberal politicians, and his daughter works for Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau. He writes a weekly digital column for The Globe and Mail.

Campaign teams are exhausted. Nerves are frayed. That’s as true for the teams that are making gains as for those that are losing ground. As the clock ticks down on this most unpredictable campaign, parties have only a few choices left that might influence things. What could they do? Here’s how I would size up the backroom choices today.

NDP

Incumbent MPs will be worried – some with reason. The party is polling well behind the Liberals in an election where NDP supporters desperately want to see the end of the Harper era. The party has lost the battle to win, has in all likelihood lost the battle for second place, and now must focus on holding as many of its seats as possible. Taking an aggressive stance against the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement is one way to rekindle lost enthusiasm among the labour and far left base – but it’s something of a poison pill. The 15 per cent who will always vote NDP will like this position, but the next 20 per cent who might vote NDP see things differently.

Platform is only one of the problems for the NDP, and can only be part of any solution. The other is the campaign style of NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair. He intended to be more reassuring than Justin Trudeau, and ended up being less inspiring. Forget about finding a sixth gear, he’s got to find a fourth gear. Lovers of old-time NDP religion are the audience he needs to hold, and he’s got to preach it with fire, like there’s no tomorrow. That doesn’t mean talking about postal service, or abolishing the Senate, or cutting small business taxes or (heaven forbid) balancing the budget. It means being a champion for the poor and oppressed – the guy who’ll put his heart and soul into a fight for equality and opportunity. A narrower message, delivered to a smaller audience, with more conviction.

Conservatives

Every morning, Conservative strategists have to watch two things on their dashboard: Is Trudeau still growing? Is our base pumped?

In an ideal world, you could hype the base without everybody else hearing the things you say to make that happen. In the real world, that’s not so easy.

Forget the arguments made by some Conservatives that they are only answering questions about Muslims and they wish people would stop asking. Day after day, comment after comment (snitch line, Bill C-24, risky refugees, niqab-wearing in everyday life), Stephen Harper is letting voters to know that it’s okay to fear Muslims, it’s a prudent thing to do, and maybe even a matter of Canadian honour.

This, too, is something of a poison pill. The more Mr. Harper uses this issue to rally the intolerant or fearful, the more resistant to his message the larger majority of Canadians become. Mainstream voters, hearing these themes over and over, become more tempted to coalesce around the Liberals or any local candidate that can beat a Conservative.

The Conservatives know that over-prosecution of the anti-Muslim theme gives Trudeau an opportunity to profit from a backlash, and makes voters forget about whether Trudeau is ready to manage the economy of the country.

So the logical choice is to use advertising to knock his economic chops with a broad cross-section of voters while using seemingly small tactical moves and off-the-cuff comments to keep the angry and fearful angry and fearful. My guess is that’s the mix they will finish the race with, unless the nightly numbers make it clear they’ve got it wrong. At the end of the day, Stephen Harper’s eye is on a win, and he’s fully comfortable with, and accustomed to, being disliked.

Liberals

The Liberal campaign has passed two important tests so far. First, they have made the case for a platform of investment and growth, and stolen the change argument from the NDP. And second, the Liberal Leader has become the talk of the election, and not in the way his opponents had intended.

Now, the Liberals face a few key choices. To win, they need to find four to five points more support in Ontario, and a bit more in B.C. as well. They can find these among disaffected progressive type conservatives and among NDP voters who are willing to vote red to avoid blue.

Ideally, you’d find a way to do both, which probably involves messages that are a blend of more respect for minority rights than the Conservatives and more economic prudence than the New Democrats. The right speeches and ads could likely balance these, and avoid having one message distract from or weaken the other.

In some ways, the bigger question for the Liberals comes down to whether what it takes to finish on top is more about passion or reason. It may be tempting to assume that voters will react to rational, fact-based arguments, but it’s probably more true that voters have already priced in all the facts and figures and policy ideas that they will consider. What’s left to be resolved is emotional in nature.

Welcome to the home stretch of the most exciting election campaign in modern Canadian history.

 

[Altair]

It starts off "the typical one parent family...". After that that sentence alone, the entire document became suspect to me. It is very obvious who this plan is targeting and more importantly, who would have a harder time qualifying.

I screen shot that section because it had the chart in it. The section above has a part that starts with "the typical 2 two parent family with two kids"

Sorry for the misunderstanding.

 

[Pencil Tech]

Really.  So there isn't a separate dress code for men and women who are "real Canadians"...of which I am not one, as I am also an immigrant to this wonderful country.

Did you happen to also look from your balcony and see young Canadian (for you, read white) girls of, say 10-12 years old that were dressed in a distressingly sexualized manner?  Did you notice the well heeled and well dressed soccer Mom next to her slovenly fat and ill-dressed (white) husband?

Did you also notice the dress code for Canadian girls of Jamaican, Chinese, Korean, Slovenian, Ukrainian and Russian decent?  And how their "dress code" differed from the men that they were with?

I'm fine with you being a racist xenophobe - it is a free country....but I will insist that you admit it.

:nod:

 

[Edward Campbell]

More polling data, this time from Ekos, 3-5 Oct, n=1658, MOE=2.4% 19 times out of 20:

If you swap the red and orange we are closing in on (trending towards) a repeat of 2011 (the Liberals are almost exactly where the NDP were four years ago, the NDP is only 3% above where the Liberals ended up, and the CPC is 4+% away from a majority).

Source for all three graphs, below, is: http://www.ekospolitics.com/index.php/2015/10/after-20-day-lead-conservatives-now-find-themselves-in-a-statistical-tie/


And here is Ekos just a day later:

It's a statistical tie.


This graphic, which suggests Liberal Momentum is building at just the right time, is more interesting:

But there is bad news for the LPC, too, in this graphic which shows that support for the Conservatives rises in step with likelihood of voting:

M Trudeau's only statistical strength lies with those least likely to vote.

 

[Altair]

Source for all three graphs, below, is: http://www.ekospolitics.com/index.php/2015/10/after-20-day-lead-conservatives-now-find-themselves-in-a-statistical-tie/


And here is Ekos just a day later:

It's a statistical tie.


This graphic, which suggests Liberal Momentum is building at just the right time, is more interesting:

But there is bad news for the LPC, too, in this graphic which shows that support for the Conservatives rises in step with likelihood of voting:

M Trudeau's only statistical strength lies with those least likely to vote.

Same goes for the NDP.

It's looking more and more like the NDP are going to get smacked hard on election day. I wonder who is best positioned to take a run at the ndp leadership after this. Because if Mulcair doesn't step down on the night of October 19th or morning of Oct 20th the knives will be sharpened by the 21st.

 

[runormal]

M Trudeau's only statistical strength lies with those least likely to vote.

It will be very interesting to see if the young voter turnout increases drastically this year.

I`ve noticed especially during this election that the majority of my Facebook "traffic" is young voters encouraging other young voters to vote.  At the university I`m currently attending I`ve also noticed a major increase in Elections Canada`s staff and signage compared to 2011.

Will it make a difference? Who knows, it is a lot easier to click "share" than to actually go out and vote so we shall see.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

I remember Trudeaumania. Young female students enamoured with his antics and continental style. He was voted in on these qualities by new and inconsistent voters.

We're still feeling the ill effects of those decisions.

Let's hope this time around the students, etc aren't suckered in by the same thing for his son.

However, I highly doubt the future is on their minds in the voting booth.

Most students are liberal (or NDP) until they start working for their own wage

 

[Edward Campbell]

The Globe and Mail's Election Forecast has been updated this morning, there is now a:

75% chance that the Conservatives get the most seats ~ that's up, very slightly

4% chance that the NDP gets the most seats ~ that's down, also very slightly

22% chance that the Liberals get the most seats ~ unchanged

And a

20% chance that the Green party gets more than one seat

7% chance that all three parties win 100 seats or more

5% chance that any party gets a majority ~ that's down from 8%, a statistically considerable drop in one day

More good news for the Liberals and a further indication that Liberal Momentum is real from the Globe and Mail's Election Forecast which has been updated again today and says that there is a:

69% chance that the Conservatives get the most seats

3% chance that the NDP gets the most seats

29% chance that the Liberals get the most seats

And a

20% chance that the Green party gets more than one seat

7% chance that all three parties win 100 seats or more

3% chance that any party gets a majoriy

Most of the Liberal gain came at the expense of the CPC, and the chance of a majority becomes slimmer, again.

 

[Edward Campbell]

This image is now showing up on social media:

It is good Conservative blue but doesn't have the CPC logo.

It's a good piece of advertising, no matter who made it.

speaking of advertising, I hope that who ever wins power stops letting political parties lie in their advertising

The CPC is now spreading the same information under its own name, from a National Post article:

Jason Kenney posted the graphic above ... they must think it is going to have some effect as a counter to all M Trudeau's complaints.

 

[The Bread Guy]

Interesting "refinement" over time of the Conservatives' view of facial & other coverings ....

• August 2013:  "Federal Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney is weighing in with muted concern over Quebec’s plans to legislate a new approach to minority accommodation.  Quebec Premier Pauline Marois has confirmed a bill is coming, but her government has not commented on a report that the province plans to ban the wearing of religious symbols or clothing by public-service workers.  “Well, first of all, we haven’t seen any actual proposed law,” Mr. Kenney told reporters at an event in Ottawa. “As I have said, obviously, Canadians believe that freedom of religion and conscience are universal values and we would hope that these are values and principles that would be respected.” ...."
• September 2013:  "The federal government will review any law Quebec passes that bans public servants from wearing religious symbols while on the job, Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney says.  "If it's determined that a prospective law violates the constitutional protections to freedom of religion to which all Canadians are entitled, we will defend those rights vigorously," Kenney told reporters Tuesday in the foyer of the House of Commons ...."
• October 2015:  "Conservative Leader Stephen Harper says his government would consider banning public servants from wearing the niqab, but rejects the suggestion that recent assaults against Muslim women should stifle debate about the issue ...."

 

[Rocky Mountains]

Interesting "refinement" over time of the Conservatives' view of facial & other coverings ....

The  points are not the same.  The first two concern religious symbols.  The Conservatives are presently concerned specifically with face coverings. 

Personally, I don't believe a representative of the government should ever wear a religious symbol.

 

[AgentSmith]

Well according to the CBC poll tracker, the Liberals have a slight lead. This makes me extremely happy. I hope this trend keeps going.

 

[The Bread Guy]

The  points are not the same.  The first two concern religious symbols.  The Conservatives are presently concerned specifically with face coverings. 

The the then-proposed Quebec law dealt with face coverings, too ....

(source of image)

Well according to the CBC poll tracker, the Liberals have a slight lead. This makes me extremely happy. I hope this trend keeps going.

Wikipedia actually has an interesting chart of how the pre-election polling's been going: