Thursday 17 September 2015

Canadian Politics Roundup: September 17, 2015: Still a three way race, debate tonight!

Hello undecided voters! I'm sorry I haven't been able to update my blog as much as I'd like lately, but I'm quite busy with my classes and extra-curricular activities at the University of Northern British Columbia where I am a student. At UNBC I'm an English major, a political science minor, I'm an undergraduate student representative on the UNBC Senate, I'm on the Pedagogy and Experiential Learning Action Group for the UNBC Academic Planning Committee, I'm the secretary of the English Student Society, and a member of the Political Science Student Association. As you can imagine, I'm really quite busy. I don't reveal all of that to brag, but rather to show that I'm involved in a lot of activities, so the activities that are of a more personal nature, like this blog, must unfortunately fall by the wayside. Fortunately, I'm having a blast with all of it, I just have to suppress the urges to update this blog so I can do some reading, homework or attend a meeting. Anyway, back to the Canadian politics!

Polling still showing a three way race

All the election opinion poll watchers out there will be unsurprised to discover that Election 42 is still a close three way race. In a previous roundup from exactly two weeks ago I pointed out the exact same phenomenon, and while there has been some jockeying in the polls since, we're still at a place where everything is neck in neck in neck.
To start, EKOS Research has the NDP leading with 29.9%, the Conservatives in second with 29.6%, and the Liberals in third with 27.5%. The Green Party is at 7.6%, and not in contention (I'm sorry all you Greens out there), though that's a pretty good number for the greens.

Forum Research has the Conservatives gaining and the New Democrats losing, and as such they're predicting a Conservative minority government:
In a random sampling of public opinion taken by the Forum Poll™ among 1402 Canadian voters, close to one third will vote Conservative in the coming federal election (32%), compared to 3-in-10 who will vote NDP (30%) and just fewer who will vote Liberal (28%). These results represent a sharp loss of vote share for the NDP since last week (September 10 - 36%). At the same time, there has been a slightly smaller increase for the Conservatives (from 28%). Few will vote Green (6%) or Bloc Quebecois (4%) or for other parties (1%).
Nanos Research is showing the Liberals in the lead by a slim margin and the Conservatives in third, also by a very slim margin.
None of the three major parties have been able to break away from the pack over the past seven days. The three day tracking completed last evening has the Liberals at 30.9%, the NDP at 30.4%, the Conservatives at 30.1%, and the Green Party at 5.8%.
Environics Research has the NDP leading, the Liberals in second and the Conservatives in third:
Across Canada, the NDP (34%) currently has a small five point lead over the second place Liberals (29%). This is within the margin of error. The Conservatives are in third place with the support of 26% of Canadians. Another eight percent support the Green party and four percent support the Bloc Québécois (15% in Quebec).
It should be noted that Environics's poll has a margin of error of 3.6% 19 times out of 20.

For full disclosure: Most of these polling companies will release a regional breakdown that I don't usually report on. The first reason is time. I have a limited amount of time to write this blog, so I don't want to get too detailed. The second is that when you are polling 1,000 to 4,000 people across the country, your margin of error for regional polls will be much higher. The regional numbers are much more suspect for tracking what people's voting intentions are. In a perfect world, we could poll roughly 400 people per riding to get a low margin of error for every riding and then know roughly the exact seat count, but that would mean polling about 100,000 people nationally, and that's simply not possible.

And that is why the only important poll, the only poll you should ever care about, is on October 19th, election day. Unless you are a politics nerd (like me), working for a political campaign, a polling company, a political comentator, or a pundit, you should just ignore all these polls, because they aren't telling you anything and you can't eally use them for anything.

Right now we are seeing a very close horse race with all three major parties in the lead. I wouldn't be surprised if most pollsters have everyone well within the margin of error. The most we can conclude from the polls is that every major party is at roughly 30% (and the greens are at roughly 5%).

Debate tonight!

Another exciting thing happening this election and sure to influence the opinion polls is the Globe and Mail debate on economic issues tonight. You can watch the debate in the above link, or here on YouTube. The debate will be at 5:00 PM PST, 6:00 PM Mountain Time, and 8:00 PM Eastern Time. The Globe and Mail has published a good primer on the debate for anyone interested.

What can we expect during this debate? Expect talk about the recession that was announced two weeks ago, the "surprise" surplus the federal government announced for the 2014/2015 fiscal year, running surpluses or deficits, and other economic issues.

Getting ready for the debate we have some pre-debate commentary from the chattering classes, such as this article by Andrew Coyne on what the party leaders won't say during the debate. Coyne was educated as an economist and even attended the London School of Economics (Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the fictional James Hacker also attended school there). Coyne is an avowed neo-liberal, but he knows his stuff when it comes to economics. In my opinion, his economics pieces tend to be his best work.

Today the Toronto Star published an opinion piece by Jordan Brennan and Jim Stanford on why the Conservatives and Prime Minister Stephen Harper has the worst economic record since the Second World War. It should be noted that both these men are economists, but they work for Unifor, which is the largest labour union in Canada. That doesn't make anything they say invalid, but it does mean that they have a definite bias, much like Coyne's neo-liberal bias, to keep in mind while reading this article.

Yesterday, the New Democrats tried to head off criticism at the pass by releasing a fully costed accounting of their platform. Essentially, what spending, taxes, and cuts they will make to fulfil their campaign promises and keep to their promise to balance the budget. Most pundits and commentators seemed really disappointed that this amounted to a single page:
“This isn’t the Red Book, it’s a back page of the Red Book,” quipped Toronto Star national affairs columnist Chantal Hebert, who along with a few others in the room took part in the 1993 Red Book lockup—coincidentally or not located in a conference room of the Delta Hotel, which the 1993 Liberals also used, admittedly at a different spot then two blocks down from the Delta’s current location.
The New Democrats are claiming they will release more soon:
The NDP candidates—literally besieged by a crush of journalists after they outlined the program and answered or deflected questions—explained that the absence of specific detail was due to the fact that the party has so far unveiled two-thirds of its platform and will disclose the rest over the remainder of the campaign to the Oct. 19 election. While NDP distributed the brochure to journalists who attended the news conference, and posted a news release on its party web site, no detailed version had been posted on ndp.ca as of 5 p.m. Wednesday.
However, none of this prevented the NDP from using their new costing to attack the Liberals for not also having a costed platform:
In an harbinger of what may come Thursday evening, the NDP was out of the gate early in the day, accusing the Liberals of a faulty fiscal framework, and overestimating personal income tax revenues by about $1 billion.

“What’s even more troubling is that he’s run up the bill without committing a single dime to health care or education,” Andrew Thomson, an NDP candidate in Toronto and former Saskatchewan finance minister, said in Ottawa.

“How much more debt will he force on Canadians? How much bigger will the deficits get? Which of the programs Canadians rely on is he going to cut?”

Thomson said his party went to the trouble of doing its own costing of Liberal promises because the Grits have yet to do so.
It seems to me that a costed Liberal platform is far less necessary than a costed NDP platform because the Liberals have promised to take a classic Keynesian approach and post a $10 billion deficit for the first three years they're in government spent on infrastructure, green industries, and employment to boost the Canadian economy from its current stagnation, while the New Democrats have promised a lot of new spending as well as a balanced budget from the very first year they are in office. We know the Liberals are going to go into deficit to pay for everything they are promising, but the NDP have promised spending and balanced budgets.

Finally, Elizabeth May, the leader of the Green Party of Canada, is suggesting that the obsession with balanced budgets is hurting the Canadian economy and the prospects of people in Canada:
This election campaign has zeroed in on the trivial in economics, steadfastly ignoring the big picture. Whether the budget is balanced this year or last is not a significant economic question. A $1-billion to $2-billion surplus or deficit in a $2-trillion economy is unimportant. It will not get people to work or stimulate investment.

But for Stephen Harper’s political commitment to balance the books in time for an election, we would not be so focused on the question of deficit. Moving the budget to late April to book the sale of GM shares to 2015, while slamming the brakes on needed investment in transportation infrastructure, delaying needed military procurement and short-changing First Nations communities and the processing of refugees suggests panic, not prudent planning.

The worst thing about this superficial fixation on the deficit is that not spending on infrastructure and imposing austerity measures worsens the big picture.

We are in a recession. Our economy has been stagnant for the past three to four years. Investment is simply not occurring. Prudent government spending makes sense. To get out of recession, we need investment in those things that meet a public purpose.
As a side note: Elizabeth May was excluded in this debate, so she plans to tweet videos of herself responding and reacting to the debate in real time. I don't think she should have been excluded from the debate, shame on the Globe and Mail for that, but this is the next best thing, so check that out as well as the debate.

I think most economists seem to agree that as long as the debt to GDP ratio is shrinking (how much debt Canada has in relation to what Canada's GDP is), going into a deficit isn't that big a deal. Andrew Coyne says as much in the above linked article:
Likewise, you are unlikely to hear any of the leaders say that it doesn’t matter whether we run a deficit, at least of the kind that any of them are talking about. It doesn’t matter in a negative sense — a $10-billion deficit would scarcely be detectable against the continuing decline of the debt-to-gross domestic product ratio — and it doesn’t matter in a positive sense: whatever miracles might be claimed on behalf of “fiscal stimulus,” a deficit of one-half of one per cent of GDP is not going to work them.
All in all, this will turn out to be an interesting debate that could very well change the course of the election. I hope anyone who has the opportunity should make an effort to watch it and see what the leaders have to say. As for myself, I can't promise any post-debate commentary here on Outside the Cacophony, but I will try to update soon! Maybe next week. If I'm not too busy. If you're lucky.

As always, you can follow me on Twitter: @WendelSchwab. Thanks for reading!

Wendel Schwab
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Thursday 10 September 2015

Canadian Politics Roundup - September 10, 2015 - Election fever, new polls, and the Conservative campaign in trouble

Election 42 is ramping up


Now that Canadians are waking up after a nice summer and paying attention to the political scene we're going to start seeing a lot more campaigning than we saw previously for Election 42. We should expect to see more partisan advertising, more third-party advertising, more political news, and more polls and poll analysis.
  1. On the partisan advertising front, we should expect to see ads that the parties have held onto until summer's end or ads they've been crafting all summer for specific use after Labour Day.
  2. Because there are strict limits on what third-parties (as in unions and business, not political parties) can spend during the election campaign, a lot of third-parties have been holding off on spending any money until after the summer is over and the electorate is paying more attention. In a previous Roundup I talked about how some unions are planning a big offensive against the Conservatives until after Labour Day.
  3. Political news and analysis will now probably start to increase as there will simply be more news to report. We should see political shows like At Issue or Power and Politics run more often as well.
  4. One of the topics of news discussion will be opinion polls. Who's winning? Who's losing? Is it still a three way race? These are the important question pollsters will be answering from now until the election. Some pollsters, such as Nik Nanos, plan on releasing polls every few days instead of weekly or bi-weekly.
For Canadian politics watchers like me, this phase of the campaign is when things get really interesting. Unfortunately, I might not be able to update this blog as often as I like since the beginning if the hectic portion of the campaign coincides with the start of the new semester. As a university student, my studies take priority over this blog, so I won't be able to update as often as I would like. It would be nice to be able to update more often, especially since the polls show the federal election is getting really quite interesting.

Polls, polls everywhere!


Get ready for a deluge in polls now that Election 42 is going full steam. On September 8th, Éric Grenier and the CBC Poll Tracker had a close race with the Liberals gaining and the Conservatives losing.
The New Democrats still hold the lead in the CBC Poll Tracker, as they have since the start of the campaign. The party is averaging 32.4 per cent support, with the Liberals following in second at 30.2 per cent and the Conservatives at 26.9 per cent.
Today, with the newest updated polls, Grenier puts the Liberals at a light lead:
The Liberals have been gaining steadily in the CBC Poll Tracker since Sept. 1 on the strength of several polls showing higher levels of voter support. The party has picked up 3.8 points since then, and now stands at 31.5 per cent in the polling average.
That puts Justin Trudeau's party just a tenth of a percentage point behind the New Democrats, who cling to the lead with 31.6 per cent support. The Conservatives remain in third with 28 per cent, while the Greens stand at 4.7 per cent. In Quebec, the Bloc Québécois continues to struggle with 14.5 per cent support.

On the seat projection front, an analysis done on September 8th by Global and the Laurier Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy has the Liberals also on the upswing:

The Liberal party has gained momentum, according to the latest seat projections from the Laurier Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy (LISPOP), and is coming within striking distance of forming the official Opposition.

The Liberals have gained 17 seats, mostly in Ontario and Quebec, for a total of 103 since last week’s numbers. Liberal gains come at the expense of both the NDP and Conservatives, which have been hit hard, losing four seats, and 13 seats, respectively.
According to LISPOP's projections the NDP are still in the lead fort seat count, and an Ipsos poll done for Global shows the NDP still leading by percentage of popular opinion:
The NDP remains in first place among decided voters across the country, according to Ipsos, edging up a single percentage point to 34 per cent support. The Liberals and Tories haven’t changed with 30 per cent, and 29 per cent support, respectively.
This poll mirrors every other poll out there it seems: Still a very tight race, but the Conservatives are now in third with the Liberals and NDP fighting for first place.

On September 8th, the Huffington Post also released some seat projections, and they show the Liberals now in second with the Conservatives in third:
On the other hand, the Tories have traded places with the Liberals. This is almost entirely because of Ontario. Justin Trudeau now enjoys a decent lead there (some polls give him as much as a 10-point lead) and is projected to win 60 seats, compared with 42 in the most recent previous projections. These gains are made from the Tories (10) and the NDP (eight).
If the recent polls are true, then it seems Ontario may have reached a turning point after weeks of an undecided three-way race. And this is hurting the other two major parties almost equally. The other changes mostly come from British Columbia but aren't comparable to what the seat-rich Ontario can provide.
In all, the HuffPo analysis shows the New Democrats at 122 seats, the Liberals at 111 seats, and the Conservatives at 104 seats.

All in all, this election is shaping up to be incredibly interesting if you just watch the opinion polls. However, I wouldn't put too much trust in polls as things could change from a moment's notice and it's less than 6 weeks away from Election Day. The only poll that really counts is on Election Day, October 19th, so get out there and mark an X on a ballot.

Conservatives campaign faltering


With all the polls indicating that the Conservatives are either in third place, or falling in public opinion nationally, the Conservative election campaign seems to be faltering. There is now talk of mutiny in the Conservative camp, and CTV News is reporting disfavour with the Conservative campaign manager:
A senior Conservative strategist tells CTV’s Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife that the campaign needs a reset and there’s discontent with campaign manager Jenni Byrne.
She has been criticized by party insiders for a style they call secretive and dictatorial, and has also been accused of freezing out experienced party operatives.
CBC News is reporting that Jenni Byrne, the Conservative campaign manager, has been sent back to Ottawa to right the listing campaign ship:
One of Stephen Harper's closest advisers is being sent back to Ottawa after a series of missteps knocked the Conservative leader's re-election bid off message, CBC News has learned.
Conservative campaign manager Jenni Byrne, who has been travelling with Harper, is returning to Ottawa.
The article goes on to suggest that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is holding Byrne responsible for #PeeGate and #WankerGate:
Sources tell CBC News she is bearing the brunt of Harper's anger over this week's decision to boot two candidates who made it through the party's screening process, which she was supposed to oversee.
Also from the CTV News article: It also seems that the Syrian refugee crises is having an internal effect on the Conservative Party as not everyone seems to agree with the closed door policy for Syrian refugees:
One top cabinet minister has also told CTV News that disgruntled Tories are also upset about Harper’s unwillingness to open Canada’s borders to more Syrian refugees, in addition to other issues like the Mike Duffy scandal.
This issue was bound to shake the Conservative Party as there must be many Conservatives who see accepting more Syrian refugees as a compassionate stance while doing nothing is more of an unfeeling stance.

David McLaughlin, writing for the Globe and Mail yesterday, speculated that the Conservative campaign needed to shake things up and change the course of their campaign because they were losing to the Liberals and NDP, as those parties promising one thing the Conservatives can't: Change.

So the Conservatives seem unwilling to change their tactics, they want to "stay the course," which is one of the broader themes of their election campaign. This is mirrored in Stephen Harper shooting down the idea of doing something different when it comes to Syrian refugees.

Writing for the Toronto Star, Tim Harper suggests that the Conservative war room has been gutted and the only people left standing are ideologues from the Reform days who prefer the hard-line conservatism the CPC has descended to in recent times and surrounded themselves with yes men who won;'t challenge that particular brand of conservatism:
The most common complaint is that Byrne has surrounded herself with a lean team of like-minded zealots, all cut from the same cloth, certain their way is the right way, unwilling to change course.
As one Conservative put it Thursday, “They’re all drinking their own bath water.’’
Byrne, Harper’s chief of staff Ray Novak and his communications director Kory Teneycke all cut their teeth as young Reformers, enthusiastic kids riding the buses and spreading the gospel in the late 1990s.
On the other hand, Paul Wells, in an excellent piece for Maclean's, speculates that Harper knows he's losing:
Maybe Harper knows something we don’t. Maybe he can’t see the gathering clouds. Or maybe the Conservative leader knows what we know—that this may be his last hurrah—and he’s okay with that.
Wells goes on to speculate that perhaps Harper is actually leading the Conservatives, despite the appearance of a mounting defeat, because he wants the next Conservative Party leader to be able to reshape the party and lead them to a victory rather than parachute in a poor sap to take the fall:
But, unlike most leaders, Harper has grown used to thinking of his party’s future after his own leadership ends. I believe this habit of mind provides the best explanation for why he’s even bothered to lead the party into this campaign.
As all kinds of observers were saying a year ago, most leaders facing polls as lousy as the ones he was looking at would have resigned and handed the leadership over to some poor chump who could take the fall, a John Turner, a Kim Campbell.
The fate of such replacement leaders is well-known. It takes a different kind of leader to engineer a soft landing for a party that can’t win. Jean Charest managed that feat in Quebec in 2012. Louis St. Laurent did it in 1957, losing to Diefenbaker by seven seats. Both men left behind Liberal parties that would not stay out of the game for long.
At every stop, Harper tells his hand-picked audiences he is the man who must win. But there is no keener student of Canadian political history than Harper, and he must know that, should it come to this, for Canadian conservatism, he is also the best man to lose.
This is an interesting theory, but of course Harper doesn't want to lose this election. Wells speculates on the possibility that there is a secret weapon in the Conservative campaign that they're ready to mash to win:
Maybe he’s going to win. Maybe he has a plan to turn this campaign around, and he’ll punch the secret button any day now. This possibility should never be discounted, as it is how the elections of 2006, 2008 and 2011 ended. In both 2008 and 2011, the final vote the Conservatives obtained was a few points higher than the average of the polls at the end of the campaign. But every poll in 2011 showed the Conservatives in first place. This year, almost none has. And the trend is heading in the wrong direction.
Wells wrote this article yesterday, and it was an astute piece full of on point observations. However, I think he was wrong on one point: I don't think there ever was a secret button. Events that unfolded today show that the Conservative campaign is trying to shake things up, and every well may be panicking. What happened?

It seems Jenni Byrne has been replaced by a man they call the "Wizard of Oz."


Stephen Harper’s Conservatives are reaching overseas for expert election help in a bid to regain their footing and halt a slide in the polls, bringing in globetrotting Australian campaign doctor Lynton Crosby.
Crosby is known as the Wizard from Oz, and is considered one of the world’s top political strategists. He helped David Cameron retain the prime minister’s office in Britain, and just last month engineered victory in Sri Lanka’s election.
Crosby also helped Boris Johnson get elected mayor of London.
This is a pretty huge shakeup. It indicates that the Conservatives really fear that they're going to lose and they have no other way to really pull things out of the fire at this point. So what can we expect from this new campaign manager, how will Conservative tactics change?

The British newspaper the Guardian gives a short breakdown of what tactics Crosby has been known to use in the past (the Guardian also calls Crosby the "Lizard of Oz" rather than the "Wizard of Oz"):
Crosby, who has drawn comparisons to George W Bush’s campaign chief Karl Rove – is known for bringing a sharp focus to campaign messaging.

But he also comes with a reputation for an aggressive style and a playbook that includes negative campaigning and so-called “wedge politics” – a tactic using often controversial social issues to split voter opinion in their favour.
The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, whose 2008 and 2012 wins Crosby helped orchestrate, once described him in an interview as “a man who never lets an abusive thought form in his mind without immediately forming it into a text and sending it to the object of his wrath”.
I wonder if bringing in Crosby will be a help to the Conservative campaign. The Conservatives are well known for trying to exploit wedge issues to get elected, but if that strategy isn't working this election, will bringing in an outsider change any of that?

Thanks for reading this longer post, I hope to update again soon, but in the meantime follow me on Twitter: @WendelSchwab

Wendel Schwab
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Monday 7 September 2015

Canadian Politics Update: #PeeGate last night, #WankerGate today

Hello pee-ers, wankers, and followers of Canadian politics! Since the news sometimes moves so very fast in Canadian politics, I thought it would be fun to write a small update to the events of last night. Of course I got a kick out of writing about #PeeGate, and while peeing in a mug in a kitchen is a genuinely horrible thing one can do to an unsuspecting person, the humour factor is off the charts. This would have been an issue I wrote about, chuckled about and then moved on, but today brings more events that I wanted to write an update about all the goings on.

One Conservative Party candidate flushed for #PeeGate


According to the Globe and Mail, it took less than a day for Jerry Bance to get turfed as the Conservative candidate for the riding of Scarborough Rouge Park in Toronto:
A man who was reportedly caught on camera urinating into a coffee cup while working as an appliance repairman is no longer a candidate with the Conservative Party.
A party spokeswoman says Jerry Bance will not be running in the east Toronto riding of Scarborough Rouge Park.
The news comes a day after the CBC reported that in 2012 hidden cameras on its show Marketplace caught Bance doing the act while he was on a service call.
According to the CBC, Bance was kicked out by the party, rather than resigning in shame, for "failing to disclose information during the candidate vetting process."

When asked to comment on this incident, Thomas Mulcair, leader of the NDP, had this to say:
Speaking to reporters before the Labour Day parade in downtown Toronto, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair made light of the incident.
“We have, like a lot of you, taken note of the number of times Conservatives have broken the law,” he said.
“I guess this was one mugshot that Canadians weren’t expecting from the Conservatives.”
Mulcair added: “This must be someone who’s adept at Stephen Harper’s trickle-down theory of economics.”
The Conservative Party simply cannot afford candidates like this. Bance was a huge liability, especially with the Conservatives flagging in the polls. Which explains why a second candidate was turfed today.

One Conservative Party candidate whacked for #WankerGate


CBC News is reporting today that a second Conservative Party candidate has been kicked out of the party after it was revealed he was a prank caller called the "UniCaller." Tim Dutaud, the Conservative Party candidate for the riding of Toronto-Danforth:
Tim Dutaud, who was running for the Tories in Toronto-Danforth, was forced out Monday after he was identified as a man known as the UniCaller in prank YouTube videos that included him pretending to orgasm while on the phone with a woman and mocking people with disabilities. The videos appear to have been posted about six years ago.
When asked about both these candidates, Prime Minister Stephen Harper responded:
"What this means is that we keep the highest standard for candidates and these two individuals are no longer candidates," Harper said.
Harper said there would be new candidates in the ridings.
I think it probably says something about the Conservative Party's vetting process, how the Conservative Party never stood a chance of getting a candidate elected as MP in those ridings and thus they weren't inclined to try, and quite possibly to the quality of the characters of people attracted by the Conservative Party.

This scandal was actually reported a few days ago in a blog called "Some Random Political Blog," but was not picked up by the media until the Conservatives kicked Dutaud out as the candidate for Toronto-Danforth. "Some Random Political Blog" seems to be a blog devoted entirely to digging up dirt on Conservative Party candidates.

Twitter erupted in a hashtag tweet-fest over what's now been dubbed #WankerGate sending #WankerGate to the top today much as #PeeGate was sent to the top last night:





I would say that this has been a bad two days for the Conservative Party. There are, of course, the bozo eruptions that may help sink the Conservatives' fortunes that I wrote about last night. What effect these scandals will have on the polls remains to be seen.

Thanks for reading this update and follow me on Twitter: @WendelSchwab!

Wendel Schwab
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Sunday 6 September 2015

Canadian Politics Roundup - September 6, 2015 - Poll update, Conservative strategy, and #PeeGate

Welcome Canadian politics watchers to the Canadian Politics Roundup for Sunday, September 6th, 2015! Today we'll be looking at the latest poll aggregation for the Canadian federal election 42, vote on October 19th, what the Conservative strategy may be this election and what monkey wrenches may have been thrown in the works, and finally, one of those very monkey wrenches was thrown in this very day.

Polls, seat count projections, place Conservatives in third


The latest polls coming in are showing interesting movement, even though all three major parties are within a few percentage points of each other so it's still a very close race.

Two new polls have come out, the first is a Léger poll printed in the Globe and Mail on Friday, September 4th which show the NDP still in the lead, but the Conservatives in third place:
The New Democratic Party has the support of 31 per cent of respondents at the national level, ahead of the Liberals at 30 per cent and Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party at 28 per cent.
This poll is a little out of date, so we haven't see the impact of any major news stories since it was taken:
The poll was conducted between Monday and Wednesday of this week as Canadians learned that the country was in a recession in the first half of the year, but before the Syrian refugee crisis came to dominate the campaign.
The second poll was a Forum Research poll that was published in the Toronto Star on Saturday, September 5th. It showed much the same thing as the Léger poll, namely the Conservatives falling into third place:
When it comes to the overall horse race, the battle between the NDP and the Liberals is tightening, while the Conservative party continues to trail in third place, the latest weekly Forum poll found.
Support for Mulcair’s party has dropped slightly, though it still leads with the support of 36 per cent of the 1,384 respondents. Trudeau’s Liberals are also up slightly with the backing of 32 per cent of Canadians.
But Harper’s Tories are now far behind the others, registering just 24 per cent support.
Of course, this poll is also a snapshot of the recent past rather than a reflection of what's going on today:
The poll, which was conducted between last Sunday and Tuesday, is considered accurate to within three percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
As regards to seat counts, the average that the CBC poll tracker currently has is the NDP in the lead with 122 seats, the Liberals next with 114 seats, and the Conservatives third with 101 seats. The CBC poll tracker (in conjunction with threehundredeight.com) is a pretty nifty little tool for tracking where the polls say the political parties are at.

In all, it seems that the NDP's lead is shrinking, the Liberals are gaining support, and the Conservatives are slipping into third place. But, the election isn't until October 19th, and so much could happen between now and then. There's also suggestions that the campaign hasn't started in earnest yet, and that the Conservative Party has a strategy to win.

Conservative strategy and how it might all go very wrong


In an interesting article for the Winnipeg Sun, Lorne Gunter reports on the strategy of the Conservative Party for Election 42. The first part of the strategy is the well known cash angle. The Conservatives have more cash and can spend it with a longer election period:
The Tories were thought to be the only party with all the cash (more than $25 million) already in the bank to sustain just the traditional 37-day battle. But a doubly long campaign permits parties to nearly double the amount they may spend according to election finance laws.
On this front Gunter reports that his highly placed anonymous Conservative friend told him:
"We thought that we would either run the other guys out of cash early or force them to hold on to their cash until the latter days. Either way it was a bonus for us. Either they wouldn’t have money left during the last couple of weeks and we would have the field to ourselves at the very time most voters are making up their minds. Or we’d get out ahead and have the first few weeks to ourselves when voters were forming their first impressions.”
Anonymous highly placed Conservative goes on to say that the Conservatives had hoped to run out the clock on any bad news for the lazy summer portion of the campaign while letting the other parties exhaust the bad news so that the electorate eventually tunes the other parties out completely:
The Mike Duffy trial, the weak loonie, the soft recession in the first half of this year – the Tories were sure the Liberals and New Dems couldn’t resist the temptation to jump on those issues often in the early days of the election.
And they were right. Mulcair and Trudeau have been almost shrill in their attacks on the Tories’ ethics and on their economic management.
“We were hoping they’d either wear themselves out, run out of things to say or just annoy voters by saying the same things over and over for 70 days.”
I don't know if all of these words are Gunter's or highly placed anonymous Conservative, but the bias in this piece is obvious with the term "almost shrill." This theme is continued in the article as Gunter characterizes opposition criticism of the Conservatives as "incessant whining." Back to the strategy itself: This seems to be an incredibly cynical strategy on the part of the Conservative Party. It assumes that the Canadian electorate will either grow tired of hearing about negative news about the Conservatives and tune it out, or that the electorate will forget about this negative news come election day. Gunter continues:
It’s kind of a Rope-a-Dope ploy, baiting the opposition into flailing away at Harper and the Tories until Mulcair and Trudeau are worn out or voters are worn out from hearing their incessant whining. Then in the last few weeks or even just the last few days, the Tories intend to come out swinging.
This strategy relies on three things: The electorate getting worn out or sleepy during the final stage of the election campaign, Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair getting worn out or sleepy in the final stage of the election campaign, and the Conservatives never screwing up, no scandals or mistakes coming to light and smooth sailing for the Conservative campaign.

I think this article is too optimistic about the chances of success for the Conservative Party. Here are a few reasons why:
  1. Third parties have their spending restricted during the election campaign, and it seems they've been biding their time until now. Even if the other political parties can't spend anymore, it's a good bet that third parties will take up the slack.
  2. The Liberal Party has stated they will be spending the full amount on the campaign, even if they have to go into debt. They'd be stupid not to.
  3. The refugee crises seems to have thrown a wrench in the Conservative works, there's another issue the opposition parties can beat the Conservatives up over (more on that soon).
  4. The criminal trial of Bruce Carson is slated to start up on September 14th. A former top aide to the Prime Minister standing trial in a criminal case has the potential to inflict a lot of splash damage back onto the Conservatives and Stephen Harper personally.
Finally, there's the regular "bozo eruptions" that politicians are prone to, for example getting caught on hidden camera peeing into a mug in someone's home.

Conservative candidate caught with his pants down


It turns out that in 2012 current Conservative candidate Jerry Bance, fighting to get elected in the riding of Scarborough Rogue Park, was caught on a hidden camera peeing into a coffee mug and pouring it down the sink according to CBC News:
In 2012, Bance responded to a service call at a house where Marketplace had hidden cameras set up as part of an investigation into the skills and ethics of home repair service companies.

The cameras caught Bance urinating in a coffee mug and then dumping the contents into the kitchen sink while the homeowner was in the next room.
Of course, something like this isn't going to be the number one issue in an election campaign, but I think it will leave a yellow stain on the Conservative Party. I imagine that as you read this the Conservative Party top brass are telling Bance that he just has to go.

According to the above linked CBC News article,. Bance was an appliance service technician who owned his own company. He was servicing someone's appliances in their home and was caught on hidden camera by the CBC's consumer affairs show Marketplace. Bance had this to say for himself:
"I deeply regret my actions on that day. I take great pride in my work and the footage from that day does not reflect who I am as a professional or a person," Bance said when contacted by CBC News for comment.
This event might not reflect on Bance as a professional, but he's effectively become an internet joke. Twitter lit up with #PeeGate, and #CPeeC jokes (the latter being a pun on the abbreviation of the Conservative Party of Canada: CPC).

Some of the Tweets included:
Woo, we made the American news! Go Canada Go!






Thank for reading all you beautiful people! I hope to update again in the next few days on two Canadian politics stories I've been following. Stay tuned, and follow me on Twitter: @WendelSchwab!

Wendel Schwab
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Thursday 3 September 2015

Canadian Politics Roundup - September 3, 2015 - Close election, recession!, and border wall

New polls shows neck and neck federal election race


A new poll put out by Abacus Data on Monday shows that the federal election is a three way, neck and neck (or perhaps the better term would be "neck and neck and neck?") election so far. Maclean's, reports that after recent polls showing an NDP surge, their support is now dropping, while Liberal support is up:
According to the firm’s online survey, conducted Aug. 26-28, the NDP’s national support stood at 31 per cent, down from 35 per cent just two weeks earlier. The Conservatives were up over the same period by a single point to 30 per cent, virtually tied with the NDP, with the Liberals breathing down their necks, up two points to 28 per cent.

In the Toronto Star, Chantal Hébert writes that the Conservatives are finally reorienting their attacks towards the New Democrats, who could now been seen as the clear front runners:
But the frontal attack on the NDP — as delivered by one of Harper’s most political ministers — does mark a shift in Conservative strategy. It is the biggest signal to date that Harper and his brain trust no longer assume that New Democrat fortunes are, on balance, a positive development because they add up to a more divided non-conservative vote.
Hébert, always a shrewd analyst of Canadian politics, continues by bringing in the Abacus poll from Monday into the mix:
According to an Abacus poll published on Monday, the race has tightened and that is mostly because outside Quebec the Liberals have reversed their pre-campaign decline in support.
Trudeau may not be leading the pack — his polling numbers are in the same ballpark as Stéphane Dion’s election night results — but he is softening up the Conservatives for a possible kill in some regions of the country.
Hébert believes that unlike the effects of a split vote on the left in 2011 that boosted the Conservatives to power, this time around it seems to be the Liberals and Conservatives splitting the vote on the right boosting the New Democrats to power.

 Also in the Toronto Star, Richard Gwyn suggests that due to the historic closeness of the polls currently, and the potential that they will lead to a historic three-way seat split in the House of Commons,  the politicking and campaigning might not be over with the federal election non October 19th. Such a thing would be fascinating to see and very much unprecedented in Canadian politics.

 The bottom line is: The is an incredibly close, by a nose, too close to call election the likes of which we have never seen before. Everyone should be a part of this historic occasion and get out to vote on October 19th!

Is Canada in a recession?


It was somewhat expected, and it came to pass. Statistics Canada is reporting a contraction of the Canadian economy in the second quarter of the year. Sound the alarm bells! All hands on deck! Man the lifeboats! It seems we're in a recession! This is just like in 2008! Well, except it isn't really like 2008 at all. As reported by the Canadian Press:
Canada's economy hit reverse for the second straight quarter of 2015 — knocking the country backwards into its first technical recession in six years, fresh Statistics Canada data revealed Tuesday.

But the data suggests the recessionary dip could, perhaps, already be something of the past.

The federal agency said real gross domestic product contracted at an annual pace of 0.5 per cent in the April-June quarter, which followed a revised decline of 0.8 per cent in the first three months of 2015 from its original estimate of a 0.6 per cent drop.
What does this mean? It means that we are in a "technical" recession, it meets the technical definition of a recession, but it isn't anything all that serious. In fact in June the economy may have began growing again (apart from a few pesky economic sectors), and the recession might be over before it had really begun.

Have the major political parties made this a campaign issue? You bet they have! Whereas we saw the Liberals and the Conservatives beating up on the New Democrats last Roundup, thid time we see the NDP and Liberals piling on the Conservatives.

Even Fox News, the bastion of right-wing news in America, seems a little incredulous of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's position on the matter:
Government agency Statistics Canada reported Tuesday the economy contracted at an annual pace of 0.5 percent in the second quarter and 0.8 percent during the first three months of 2015. Economists deem two conservative negative quarters a recession.

Harper refused to call it that, saying "we've had a few weak months" but the economy is bouncing back. He pointed to growth in June.
The CBC Power and Politics Twitter feed posted an interesting graph to put things into some perspective:
According to this graph, Canada has had some of the worst GDP growth in the G7, which doesn't square with the usual Conservative talking point that we're doing better than any other G7 nation, or among the best in the G7 in terms of growth. It seems that the real worry about the Canadian economy shouldn't be recession, but rather stagnation.

Update on the Great Canadian/American Border Wall


A CBC article posted on Tuesday breaks down the logistics of Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker's US/Canada border wall I wrote about last Roundup. According to the article, the whole thing would be a huge logistical nightmare:
For starters, it would be hugely expensive to cover the 8,891 km of frontier, 40 per cent of which is water — probably on the order of $30 billion, extrapolating from the $3.2 billion cost of building just 1,040 km of border wall with Mexico.
With Justin Trudeau proposing $30 billion in federal spending for infrastructure projects over the next three years if the Liberals are elected to office, Scott Walker's Wall could be a huge boost to the Canadian economy if we build it! Of course, I say we make the Americans build the wall if they want it. Building this wall will cause some pretty major inconveniences:
But more than that, it would be a logistical nightmare. An opera house would be forced to close, people's kitchens would be cut off from their living rooms, farmers would be stranded without access to roads, a half dozen airports would have to shut down— even a golf course would lose all its players.
The article goes on to list these inconveniences. It's an interesting an amusing read.

Thanks for reading and come back soon for more Canadian political news and views! Follow me on Twitter: @WendelSchwab

Wendel Schwab
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