Canadian Federal Election 42: Misconceptions and Truths about Canada's system of government and how elections work

Hello voters and soon to be voters! It's one week until election day, and to help everyone make an informed decision I will be writing a series of blog posts about the candidates and parties and other things related to Election 42! To start off, here are some common (and just invented) misconceptions about how our system of government works. A lot of people seem to be in the dark when it comes to how we govern ourselves in Canada. I think the reason for this is not enough focus on civic education in school and our bombardment by American media. It's possible that many Canadians know more about how the American government works than they do our own!

Misconception #1: We vote for the Prime Minister of Canada in this election.

I think this misconception has roots in two places: The first is the importance political parties place on who their leaders are and what their leaders are doing. The party leaders say they are running to be the Prime Minister of Canada, and while they are technically correct, they don't get to be Prime Minister based purely on the results of the election. Secondly, I think a lot of people confuse American presidential campaigns with our elections. In the United States, they elect their political executive/head-of-state, while in Canada, we do not.

The Truth: You are actually voting for a local candidate, and the person who gets the most votes will be sent to Ottawa to sit in the House of Commons of Canada as a Member of Parliament (MP). As an example of this Purple Party, led by Ms. Grape, has chosen a candidate to run in your riding. You can vote for Mr. Jelly of the Purple Party in the hopes they will become your Member of Parliament, but you cannot vote for Ms. Grape. The exception to this rule is if you live in Ms. Grape's riding. Party leaders are also seeking a seat in the House of Commons, just like every other candidate for their party.

Then how is the Prime Minister of Canada chosen? Generally, the political party that manages to get the most Members of Parliament elected to the House of Commons gets to form government, but not always. More on that later. That means the party leader gets to become the Prime Minister and gets to choose more MPs to become cabinet ministers. The Prime Minister of Canada and their chosen cabinet ministers then run the country and they make up the government.

Misconception #2: Coalitions are a coup d'état. They are wrong and represent the losers overthrowing the rightful winner of an election.

This misconception can be traced to 2008 when the Liberals and NDP tried to form a coalition government with the support of the Bloc Québécois that would have unseated the Conservative minority government that was in power at the time. The Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, and the Conservative cabinet ministers, said that such a move was illegitimate, wrong, a coup d'état, and a "coalition of losers." Many people believed them and continue to believe that coalitions are not right in our system of government.

The Truth: Remember how I said that the political party that gets the most seats in the House of Commons gets to form government? This is actually a simplistic way of breaking things down. In reality, because we have something called "Responsible Government," the party leader who can maintain what we call the "confidence of the House," is the person who gets to be the Prime Minister. When we have a "majority government," or a political party getting more then 50% of the seats in the House of Commons, this is pretty straightforward. When we have a "minority government," or no political party getting over 50% of the seats in the House of Commons, but one party getting more seats than the rest of the parties, then things get a little more up in the air. A minority government must rely on another political party to help them stay in power. This can be either through getting the other party to vote for bills they try to pass, forming a formal coalition where both parties share the duties of government, or getting another party to agree to vote for their bills.

Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party wanted people to believe that because they had the most seats out of any party, they had the right to be the government and no other party had that right at all. But this was wrong. As long as a party leader can be sure that more than 50% of the Members of Parliament in the House of Commons will vote to pass his government's bills, then he gets to be the Prime Minister.

For example, if Mr. Mustard of the Yellow Party has 135 MPs in the House of Commons, Ms. Grape of the Purple Party has 115 MPs, and Mr. Hummus of the Brown Party has 88 MPs, any of these party leaders can form the government and become Prime Minister if they can convince another party to support them. Mr. Mustard insists he gets to be the Prime Minister because he has the most seats out of any other party at 135. But, if the Purple Party and the Brown Party won't vote for his bills, he cannot keep the "confidence" of the House of Commons and he must either resign as Prime Minister or a new election must be held. Because the last election was only one month ago and nobody wants another election right away, Ms. Grape convinces Mr. Hummus and the Brown Party to vote for her bills, and she gets to be the Prime Minister. The combined Purple Party and Brown Party MPs in the House of Commons is 203 MPs. Since only 170 MPs are needed to have over 50% of the seats in the House of Commons, they get to pass all the bills they want. Mr. Mustard could try to claim that the Purple/Brown coalition is invalid, or that it is a coup d'état, but our system of government wants to be as stable as possible, and a Purple/Brown coalition is far more stable than the Yellow Party trying to rule the country with the support of less than 50% of the MPs in the House of Commons.

Misconception #3: My party only needs 35 more seats to beat that other party and win the election!

Just cast my vote! Only 35 seats more and #NDP can replace Stephen Harper and bring change we can trust. #TM4PM. pic.twitter.com/lAuFzYOP8j

— Peggy Nash (@PeggyNashNDP) October 10, 2015

This is a misconception being floated by the NDP late in the campaign as an attempt to convince people to vote for them to defeat the Conservatives instead of voting for the Liberals. It's based on outright lies as to how our system of government works plus a misunderstanding of how some aspects of polling work.

Hey @NDP_HQ, you need to stop doing this: It's false, it isn't how things work, it's intentionally lying to voters. pic.twitter.com/grEc4YQPiT

— Wendel Schwab (@WendelSchwab) October 10, 2015

The Truth: To start off, the New Democratic Party can't win the election by getting only 35 more seats. If the NDP did that, they'd have only 35 seats total! Why? Because when the election was first called, it is preceded by an event known as the "dissolution of Parliament." This means that there currently is no Parliament in Canada, each party has exactly zero (0) seats in the House of Commons, which is why if the NDP got 35 more seats added to their current seat amount (0) they would have exactly 35 seats. I'm pretty sure nobody in the NDP wants that to happen.

There are a few explanations as to why the NDP strategists think this will work. They may be counting on the dismal civics education in this country and are pinning their hopes on the fact that people don't realize that this is not how Parliament works. They may be trying to take advantage of a misunderstanding of the "incumbency effect," which is a thing pollsters and statistics nerds take into account when figuring out whether a long-serving MP will win an election against a complete newbie (indeed, the CBC Poll Tracker seat count takes incumbency effect into account when figuring out which party is likely to win the most seats in the House of Commons). The third possibility, which I don't believe personally, is that this is how the NDP actually thinks Canada's system of government works, they honestly believe they need only 35 more seats to beat the Conservatives. In the extremely unlikely event the third possibility is true, I wouldn't trust the NDP to run a hot dog cart, let alone the Government of Canada.

However, it would be foolish for the NDP to assume that they'll automatically get to keep all 103 seats they won in the 2011 election, especially since they're currently polling in the low to mid 20% range while the Liberals and Conservatives are polling in the low to mid 30% range. This means that the current poll numbers show they are far more likely to lose 35 seats when compared to their 2011 popular vote share (30.63%) rather than pick up 35 more seats from what they got in 2011.

Can the #cdnpoli media please call the NDP out on this crap? When HoC dissolves, all parties reduced to 0. #elxn42 pic.twitter.com/1F5o2WOBrP

— Cdn Politico (@CdnPolitico) October 12, 2015

Don't listen to the NDP. Every party begins at zero. We have to earn Every. Single. Vote. @calgarykiaguy pic.twitter.com/lssvmYMZQV

— Seamus O'Regan (@SeamusORegan) October 12, 2015

Misconception #4: When I elect an MP, they have the duty to listen to my wishes and do whatever I say!

This misconception probably comes from how the USA's government works (funny how that seems to happen a lot) as well as changing attitudes towards people we as Canadians consider higher on the social ladder.

The Truth: In Canada we have a system of democratic representation called the "Trustee Model." This means that when we elect an MP, we send them off to Ottawa and trust that they'll make good decisions on our behalves. This is why political parties, party platforms, and party leaders are so important to us. Through those instruments, we know how the MP we trust to make decisions for us will make their decisions, and roughly what decisions they will make. This is also why party discipline is so important in our system of representation. It doesn't matter what the constituents want, you can't ever defy the party leadership. This may seem unrepresentative, but this is actually what the electorate seems to want in Canada. If you voted for Mr. Pear of the Yellow Party, you would be pretty upset if Mr Pear voted against a measure in the Yellow Party platform that you really wanted to see the Yellow Party implement after they got elected. You would probably also be pretty upset if Mr. Pear "crossed the floor" (joined another political party after getting elected) to the Purple Party after you voted for him because you liked the Yellow Party and Mr. Mustard, the Yellow Party leader.

On the other hand, the American system of democratic representation is called the "Delegate Model." When American voters elect a representative and send her to Washington, they expect her to act as a delegate representing their wishes. The party, the party platform and other considerations are still there, but they aren't as strong of a driving force for American voters as they are for Canadian voters. This is why a congressman or congresswoman will vote against their own party if they know their constituents are dead set against what the party wants. They probably won't be punished by the party leadership, or they won't be punished in a way that matters anyway, and they will still be welcomed as a member of their party.  This is why you get a Democratic congresswoman who lives in a state where the citizens don't believe in gun control voting against a Democratic gun control bill even though the entire Democratic Party and the entire Democratic establishment supports the bill and wants it to pass. The congresswoman knows that if she votes for the bill, she'll face the wrath of her electorate in the next election, and she's likely to be voted out of office. While the Democratic congresswoman's electorate agrees with 98% of the things the Democratic Party stands for, gun control is the one issue that is important to the Democrats that they can't abide. The rest of the Democrats in Congress know this too, so they'll give her a pass for voting against this one important Democratic issue knowing she'll support them on most other issues.

In the United States, elected representatives are afraid of the people who voted for them. In Canada, our elected representatives are afraid of the leaders of their political party. I think this attitude is starting to change somewhat as I see more and more people complaining of their MP toeing the party line and voting for what the MP's party leadership wants rather than what the MP's constituents want. There is also something happening in Canadian society called "the decline of deference," named after a book of the same name. In a nutshell, Canadians used to be more deferential toward elites and authorities, like the leadership of a political party, for example. However, there is a shift in Canadian culture where we are no longer as deferential toward authority the way we once were. I think this can lead to people questioning why their MP must always toe the line rather than bowing to the wishes of their constituents. At the same time, remember the scenarios above where Mr. Pear votes against his party's platform or crosses the floor to join another party? While people may be less deferential toward authority, they definitely seem to mostly vote based on party, party leader, and party platform before they vote for a local representative.

I hope this post cleared up any misconceptions you may have had. If there are any more, just post them in the comments below and I'll tackle them when I can. Remember, only 7 days until the election on October 19th! Get ready to vote, or go to the last day of advanced polling today and make your voice heard!

Wendel Schwab

Follow me on Twitter: @WendelSchwab

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.

Polls today: Environics: 34% NDP, 29% LPC, 26% CPC Forum: 32% CPC, 30% NDP, 28% LPC Nanos: 31% LPC, 30% NDP, 30% CPC

— Éric Grenier (@308dotcom) September 17, 2015

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

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