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 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. John Geddes, writing for 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:

Here's that graphic with GDP growth numbers for G7 nations this year: #pnpcbc #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/kR4PdDSnVq

— Power & Politics (@PnPCBC) September 1, 2015

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