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.

We're going daily with our election coverage, starting tonight. http://t.co/RVDO8TG5I0 pic.twitter.com/CsqQqqGLAo

— Paul Wells (@InklessPW) September 9, 2015

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."

Reporting for Maclean's, Laura Payton writes:

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