A Few 2015 Election Scenarios

So UBC has an election calculator for 2015. You key in vote movement from one party to another and it gives you a new seat count. Thought I'd play around with it. My 'the NDP performs well, the Conservatives perform adequately, and the others tank' calculation went like this:

• The Liberals retain only half their vote, with 25% going to the NDP and the remainder split evenly between the Tories and the Greens.
• The Bloc also retain only half their vote, with 25% going to the NDP and the remainder split evenly between the Tories and the Greens.
• The Greens split in half, with half of their 2011 vote going to the NDP and the other half staying with them.
• The Tories retain 90% of their support, with 10% shedding to the NDP.
• The NDP keep every one of their 2011 votes.
• One-third of 2011 non-voters starts voting NDP.

This would be, as you can see, a great improvement for the NDP. Unrealistically great, you could say. In fact, it would result in a sad 3.0% for the Bloc, an improved 5.1% for the Greens, a horrid 9.5% for the Liberals, a pretty-similar 39.1% for the Tories, and an astounding 43.2% for the NDP - in first place by four percent.

But here's the kicker: according to the UBC model, that would be a majority government... for the Conservatives. It would be a strictly bipartisan parliament with not a single Liberal, Bloc or Green MP, the NDP would bet 144 seats, anf the Tories would get 164, losing only three and maintaining a comfortable majority.

Surprising, eh? One could imagine how loud the electoral-reform talk would be in such a circumstance. It'd look like this:

• 19 CPC seats in the Atlantic (+5) to 13 for the NDP (+7).
• An amazing 71 NDP seats in Québec (+13) to a pathetic 4 for the Tories (-2).
• 72 Ontario seats for the Tories (-1) to 34 for the NDP (+12).
• 21 CPC seats in Saskitoba (-3) and 7 for the NDP (+5).
• No change in Alberta - 27 Conservative seats and one NDP.
• 20 Conservative seats in BC (-1) and 16 (+4) for the NDP.

Essentially, what would happen is that current Liberal and Bloc seats would subsume into NDP seats, while Tory seats would stay Tory (presumably, anyway - I'm not looking at a seat-by-seat projection).

The NDP can't go anywhere without eroding the Conservative vote.

So let's look at that: The CPC collapses and the NDP are one of several beneficiaries. So I imagined the Conservatives able to hold onto only 60% of their 2011 vote, losing 20% to the NDP and 10% each to the Liberals and the Greens. I don't know how it would calculate a 10% loss to the Bloc, since we're not talking uniform swing, so I skipped it. In fact, I disbanded the Bloc, giving half their vote to the NDP and 25% each to the Liberals and to the Greens. The NDP, Liberals and Greens retained all their vote, and non-voters stayed non-voters. The result? It's just as bizarre. With no BQ, we'd have the Greens at 9.5%, the Conservatives in 3rd place for popular vote at 24.0, the Liberals at 24.6% and the NDP as king of the hill at 41.9%. With this, the Greens would keep their one seat, the Conservatives would fall into a dismal third with 62 seats (-105), the Liberals would be the official opposition at 70 and the NDP would have a 175-seat majority. Region by region:

• In the Atlantic: 16 Lib, 15 NDP, 1 CPC.
• In Québec: 69 NDP, 6 Lib.
• In Ontario, 43 NDP, 38 Lib, 25 CPC.
• In Saskitoba, 15 NDP, 7 CPC, 4 Lib.
• In Alberta, 24 CPC, 4 NDP.
• In BC, 26 NDP, 5 CPC, 4 Lib, 1 Green.

And then here's one more: the NDP rake it in, stealing votes from left, right and centre. I have the NDP getting 100% of the Bloc vote, 75% of the Green vote, 50% of the Liberal vote, 25% of the Tory vote, and 25% of the people who didn't vote at all in 2011. This would give the NDP 59.5% of the vote and a ridiculous 88.0% of the seats - 271, with a dismal 37-seat rump Tory opposition (28 of those seats would be in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba).

One last one: here's 'The Liberals shift to the right': the Conservatives lose 25% of their vote to the Liberals, who lose 25% of their votes to the NDP. Nothing else changes. That would leave a total vote of 3.9% for the Greens, 6.1% for the BQ, 24.3% for the Liberals, 30.0% for the Conservatives and 35.7% for the NDP - that would be a loss of 10.0% for the CPC, split roughly evenly between the Liberals and the NDP. The seat count would be 1 each for the BQ and the Greens, 51 for the Liberals, 122 for the CPC and 133 for the NDP - an interesting hung parliament with the Liberals holding sway and able to decide who to support for PM, like we currently see in the UK.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Non-Voting

Frank Graves, the head honcho at EKOS, has gone from a meticulous analyst of Canadians' opinions to a meticulous analyst of the meticulous analysis of Canadians' opinions in little more than a single month. Good for him - if nothing else, he's a very thoughtful, intelligent person.

He's come to the conclusion that the main reason pollsters were so far off on their election predictions this year is that they could not accurately predict who, among people who said they were going to vote, actually would vote.

And past that there's nothing very surprising: the young vote way less than the old, the undereducated vote less than the educated, NDP supporters vote less than Conservatives.

That is to say, a larger percentage of people who told EKOS or other pollsters before May 2 that they would vote NDP didn't actually bother to go vote on May 2 itself. Larger than the percentage of people who said they were going to vote Conservative.

So someone who supports the Conservatives is more likely to actually vote than someone who supports the NDP.

How much so? Well, if you trust Graves's numbers, among the 40% of voting-age Canadians who didn't vote, but whose voting intentions can be extrapolated by comparing EKOS's polling numbers ot the election day results, fully 32.1% would have voted NDP. Now, that's not far off the 30.6% the NDP really did get (which explains why while EKOS's numbers overall were a disaster, their NDP numbers weren't half bad), but the yawning gap between what could have happened on May 2 and what really did is best illustrated by looking at the Conservatives' numbers:

Merely 24.8% of Canadians who registered an opinion on party preference but didn't actually go and vote on election day preferred the Conservatives. In an inverse election where those who voted found their opinions ignored and only those who didn't vote were able to choose the government, the NDP would have come in first by almost eight percent over the now neck-and-neck Conservatives and Liberals. And combining those numbers (meaning that every voting age Canadian actually voted) would have brought about the seat count Graves predicted on May 1: a Conservative minority with ample legroom for an NDP-led majority coalition with the Liberals, had they been able to work that out.

The Conservatives didn't win this election: we lost it. Or rather, both are true, because the Conservatives are blessed to have a voting bloc who realises that you get the people you want elected elected by electing them - by going out and voting for them. And congratuations to the Conservative voting bloc for having the energy to go out there and vote in numbers great enough to secure a majority government for your party.

After all, this is what ensured that; not any real shift in the overall support that the nation feels oward the Conservative Party. Throughout April and up to voting day, our country experienced a distinct leftward shift on an almost unprecedented level: the Conservatives showed only the most minimal of an increase in support while the NDP went through the roof. What was the result of this? A distinctly rightward shift in our House of Commons.

No small blame for this must lie with NDP supporters nationwide, who got out the vote in numbers significantly smaller than did the Conservatives. I know NDP doesn't exactly correlate with youth doesn't exactly correlate with disenfranchised doesn't exactly correlate with 'didn't vote'. But there are overlaps here too great to ignore. Disefranchisement, especially among the young, is a vicious circle, and it is a very real phenomenon. Young Canadians don't feel Ottawa represents them, so they ignore it. In feeling that the governmnet is out of touch, they effectively ensure it remains out of touch. It's frustrating as hell to think we could have had the government that Canadians want to have if only we had gone out and made it happen. To think that a certain percentage of Canadians - a measurable number and probably a number large enough to determine the state of Canadian politics for the next four years - said, effectively, 'not enough people vote for my party for them to win, so I won't vote either'.

Which is not only patently ridiculous but is also self-defeating. We're having the rug pulled out from beneath us as a party with the support of a distinct minority of Canadians gains more and more control in this country. Our getting frustrated enough by the process to tune it out is exactly what they want. Just think of how well it's worked for them so far.

EKOS and the Wild Ride

Beating a dead horse? Nah. The 2011 Federal Election was way too important to just suddenly stop talking about. I'll be talking about it for years to come.

But this time out, it's not me talking. Rather, it's Frank Graves, head honcho at EKOS, one of Canada's bigger pollsters. I've been looking back at his 'analyses' which accompanied each of his press releases with new sets of numbers. They're interesting in that, with the benefit of hindsight, you can see what a really wild ride Election 41 really was. I've picked out salient soundbites from the analyses pertinent to the NDP and their come-out-of-nowhere surge that, merely five weeks on, has already started to feel permanent. Note as the election progresses that the frequency and urgency of the press releases increases, and that Graves goes from including parenthetical observations about the NDP for the sake of fairness to letting the NDP entirely dominate his discussions. Whatever Graves's own politics happen to be, his commitment to making polling interesting has him toward the end almost breathless with admiration for the NDP and their surge. Here it all is, taken from his PDFs which I'm too lazy to link to individually but which you can find at ekospolitics.com:

MARCH 10: "The NDP are now within the margin of error of the Conservatives in Quebec. Coupled with other findings in the survey, there is evidence that the NDP could be poised for something of a breakthrough in Quebec."

MARCH 25: "While the Liberals and Greens are poised to make some minor gains at the expense of the Conservatives and the NDP, there is little chance that we will see any major changes in the balance of power."

MARCH 28: "Do the NDP really think that the Layton Liberals will flock to their leader when the chips are down?" "The NDP are not far off from their position going into the last election (although they are short of their 2008 election performance). But they are doing best on second choice and have the most liked leader so they have plausible aspirations for matching if not eclipsing their last performance."

APRIL 1: "Joining the Conservative Party in forward movement is the NDP who saw a significant bump up in support, largely at the expense of the Green Party and, to a lesser extent, the Liberals." "There would appear to be opportunities for the Liberals and NDP in Quebec, as the confidence in the current federal government has virtually evaporated in the province. But so far, there is little evidence of any rallying hub for federalist forces in Quebec."

APRIL 6: "Contrary to the erratic impression from reading the welter of various polling reports out there, the race appears to be evolving in a relatively orderly pattern with a clear logic."

APRIL 8: "The regions are all in different stages of flux as well. British Columbia sees a Conservative lead, but they are in close pursuit by the NDP and the Liberals, with the Green Party showing enough strength to possibly signal a breakthrough for Elizabeth May." "The Atlantic Provinces aren’t very happy with the federal government and they are showing low enthusiasm for this election. They are oscillating between the Conservatives and the Liberals, and the NDP have some chances there as well." "Overall, it appears that both the NDP and Liberal Party have the most opportunities to grow, although a fair bit of that would be cannibalizing each other (according to the breakdowns of second choice by current preference)."

APRIL 13: "The other main story of this poll is that the claimed demise of the NDP is clearly premature. The New Democrats are showing important new strength, particularly in Quebec and British Columbia where they now lead." "Women voters are defecting from the Conservative Party and there is now a very large gender gap. The NDP, meanwhile, is doing very well with women and has broadened its demographic constituency."

APRIL 15: "The NDP does very well in British Columbia and looks surprisingly strong in Quebec. It is also attracting women’s votes. Less auspiciously for its prospects, the party attracts the highest number of voters who would consider changing their minds."

APRIL 18: "The NDP, meanwhile, continues to follow an upward trend line and, at 20.0 points, they are the only party to have clearly demonstrated upward momentum throughout the campaign (which they began around 6 points below their current standing)." "While support for national direction has improved, support for the current government in Canada has reached a low point for the campaign. So far, it is the NDP who have tapped into this growing disaffection for the incumbent government, but it could be a force in the final stages of the campaign."

APRIL 21: "Building on a solid if unspectacular rise from the outset of the campaign, Jack Layton’s NDP party is scaling heights not seen since the NDP’s salad days under Ed Broadbent." "On March 24th, the NDP stood at 14.2 points. Since then, they moved up steadily to around 17 points, then they started closing in on 20 and, in this poll, they find themselves at 24.7, tying themselves with the Liberals and only 9 points shy of the once-distant Conservative Party. This steady progression from “also ran” to contender has been a smooth and steady. It is very uncertain whether it will be sustained or whether it could even advance further." "Shockingly, the NDP have how eclipsed a clearly faltering Bloc Quebecois (down nearly 15 points)."

APRIL 25: "After several years in a political rut characterized by trench warfare between the Conservatives and the Liberals, Jack Layton and his NDP party appear poised to reshape Canada’s political landscape." "These results, if they were to hold, would produce a profound transformation in the Canadian political firmament, tantamount and arguably more far reaching than the Reform explosion in 1993." "The NDP have experienced an unperfected doubling of their poll support from 14 to 28 points since the writ was dropped. They now have a large lead in Quebec and are poised to gain the lion’s share of the 75 seats there (up from their current single seat). They also now lead in the Atlantic and are within the margin of error of the lead in British Colombia." "They may not have reached the ceiling of this JackQuake which is shaking the country."

APRIL 26: "The NDP has captured new voters from across the political spectrum in a remarkably eclectic fashion. Looking at how 2008 voters have migrated, we see the Conservatives almost entirely intact whereas the NDP is now an amalgam of defected Conservative, Liberal, and Green supporters. In particular, the NDP surge has been driven by a wholesale transfer of Bloc Quebecois supporters in Quebec."

APRIL 27: "The Conservatives remain at 34.0 and the NDP is at 28.1. The Liberals have not been able to reverse their fortunes and are now at 22.9 which may be a new nadir in our polling for the Liberals." "It is unclear whether the electorate has truly grasped the significance of the sweeping changes that the NDP surge (now plateaued) has produced. The chief remaining question is how Ontario will deal with these new realities in the closing portion of the campaign."

APRIL 28: "As for a massive NDP collapse, that likely isn’t going to happen. Jack Layton’s orange train has left the station and it’s just a question of how far it will take him. With a very slight uptick, he could see himself arriving at not only Stornoway, but even Sussex if the new government were to be defeated promptly. Heady stuff for a party that entered the race at a mere 14 points."

APRIL 29: "The NDP, who began the campaign at a scant 14 points, have now more than doubled their support and at 29.7% and are breathing down the necks of the stalled Conservative Party." "The NDP now have significant strength in British Columbia, and have risen sharply to tie the Liberals in Ontario. They have a huge lead in Quebec and are tied for the lead in the Atlantic. The Conservatives are strong in the west and, due to a newly split NDP and Liberal vote in Ontario, have a 12-point advantage over the Liberals and the closing NDP." "While the Conservatives remain very strong with older Canadians and males, the NDP are showing strong connection with the Gen X and Gen Y, where they now lead. The NDP have also seized much of the university-educated vote from the Liberals and have significant representation in all regions and demographic groups, outside of over 65 voters who are the lynchpin of Conservative support."

MAY 1: "The Conservatives are at 34.6 points, while the NDP is three points back at 31.4 and the Liberals at 20.4." "Using these numbers, and we will reserve the final forecast until later this evening, we would see a Conservative minority where the NDP were within 20 seats and the NDP and the Liberals combined would have a narrow majority between them. This means that if there was common will between the NDP and the Liberals, they would have both the legal (and according to our recent polling on the topic) the moral authority to swiftly dispatch Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party." "Quebec is abandoning the Bloc Quebecois even further and the NDP could virtually sweep that province in a breathtaking development." "The NDP ceiling is now 55 points, fully 11 points above the Conservative Party." "Quebec is painting itself orange in a remarkable display of unanimity. The Atlantic provinces remain locked in a tight three-way struggle but the NDP are showing a late spurt there which has placed them in the lead."

MAY 3 (POST-MORTEM): "While we believe EKOS did a very good job in charting the direction of the election and some of the historical shifts that occurred, we were caught flat footed in capturing the majority victory for the Conservative Party." "EKOS correctly noted early in the campaign an important shift to the NDP which we correctly estimated would see the NDP as Official Opposition with over one hundred seats. We were roundly pilloried for this prediction from those who claimed nothing was happening in the campaign and that the NDP vote would collapse." "There was a late movement of Liberal supporters to the Conservative Party which shifted about three points to the Conservatives (half of our shortfall)."

A Cross-Post from Poll Vaulting

I just posted this at my Poll Vaulting blog, but I like it and I thought I'd stick it here too:

So I'm looking at Elections Canada's results. One thing that intrigues me, and has always intrigued me, about Canada's electoral system is how far from consensus we ever are: a party can come as close as possible to acclamation in one riding and be a complete non-entity in another riding. I realise this is just a reality of the federation we happen to call home, where disparate interests are brought together in a union that, for better or worse, is frequently more pragmatic than ideological. We might even come, one day, to see these schisms as positions of strength.

 

The Bloc Québécois were, of course, beaten pretty heavily this time out, squeaking ahead of the competition in only four ridings in the province. Yet in most of Québec, they still managed to come in second, and their overall vote tally remained second as well - where the Liberals and the Conservatives both managed more seats int he province than the BQ, that's because they rely on certain pockets of support. The BQ is now a victim of their broad across-the-board appeal.

 

Well, mostly across the board. It should come as no surprise that Mount Royal (excluding of course the 233 ridings where they did not field a candidate) is the riding where they performed worst, with a laughable 2.9% of the vote. It's one of ten ridings, however, where they failed to obtain even ten percent of the vote - and not all of those ridings are in Montréal. While their best performance was, not surprisingly, one of the four ridings that they took, Bas-Richilieu--Nicolet--Bécancour with 38.3% (still nowhere near 50%, I hasten to add), their second-best turnout of 36.4% was in a riding they lost to the NDP, Verchères--Les Patriotes. Their four victories came in their first, third, seventh and twelfth-best contests.

 

 With the Liberals, the real extent of their current predicament is visible in these riding-by-riding results. As of this most recent election, there are currently a rather horrifying 91 ridings where Liberal support is in the single-digits. Not for the first time, Jonquière--Alma takes the cake for 'worst Liberal performance', with a horrid 1.98% of the vote representing barely a thousand votes (in second-worst-performing Saskatoon--Rosetown--Biggar, their 2.3% was less than 700 votes). This is fringe-party-level support, and indicates that the Liberals will have to do a lot of work to be seen as a truly 'national' party again.

 

The only real glimmer of light in the Liberals' disastrous May 2nd was the one that came first - Newfoundland, the only province they 'won' in terms of popular support. It should come as no surprise that the Liberals' three best performances in the country are all on the rock, including Bonavista--Gander--Grand Falls--Windsor and Humber--St. Barbe--Baie Verte, at 57.7% and 57.0% respecively the only ridings in the country, two of 308 contested, where the Liberals took a majority of votes. That's two more than the BQ managed, but that must be small consolation for them.

 

The NDP, by comparison, have to be looking at these riding-by-riding results with a certain degree of satisfaction. There's a tendency at the moment to see the NDP's breakthrough as strictly a Québec thing, but consider this: of 308 ridings, there are only two, Crowfoot and Portage--Lisgar, where the NDP managed less than ten percent of the vote - 9.1% and 9.8% respectively - two is a smaller number and 9.1% is a higher number than any other party in the country, meaning that when they turn to 2015, they'll find a higher basement than the other parties regarding room-for-growth on a riding-by-riding level. The fact that their two worst performances are in the Prairies ought to give them an idea of how to progress as well.

 

The toplines are satisfying too for the NDP, I imagine, with king-of-the-hill being Jack Harris in St. John's East, where his remarkable 71.2% actually represents a drop from 2008. Jack Layton's own performance of 60.8% was merely fifth-best, though satisfyingly the top five are all from different provinces (Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, British Columbia, Québec and Ontario, respectively). All-in-all thirty-six of their 102 seats were won with bare majorities of 50% or more - a decent number but by no means sensational. As regards local hegemony, for sensation we must look elsewhere.

 

The Conservatives arguably have less across-the-board consistency than the NDP at the moment, with much more embarrassing bottom-of-the-barrel numbers. Yet their peak performances are that much higher - the Conservatives won this election not by being 'Canada's party' so much as by having extraordinary levels of success in certain parts of the country. And, of course, by squeaking by in many others.

 

The Conservatives' worst performance is a rather horrid 3.5%, in Gilles Duceppe's own former riding of Laurier--Sainte-Marie, where fewer than 1800 people cast their vote for the party who now has a majority government in the country. That the basement is in Québec should come as no surprise: amazingly their forty-two worst ridings are all in La Belle Province, with my own riding of Davenport the worst in the so-called 'RoC'. Only 23 of those are less than 10%, though, a much smaller number than the Liberals currently have to contend with.

 

Their best performance nationwide should come as no surprise: it's Kevin Sorenson's fiefdom of Crowfoot, where the only two times since the creation of the riding in 1968 that the conservative candidate has won less than 70% of the vote were two elections in which the conservative vote was split in two. United, they anaged this time out to award Harper's party with a shocking 84.0% of the vote. In fact, 13 of the top 16 Conservative victories were all located within Alberta, and they were all more than 70%.

 

There were a stunning 107 ridings in 2011 in which the Conservatives got more than 50% of the vote - almost two-thirds of the ridings that they won. Anyone wanting to blame 'vote-splitting' or a disunified opposition for the Conservatives' victory needs to consider this very important fact: where the Conservatives are strong, they are very strong indeed, and it's tough to imagine any other party forming a proper national government in Canada without making very serious inroads into those 107 ridings. At the moment, there are more ridings where a completely united opposition would still not shake the Tories' victory than there are ridings won in total by any other party in the country. The NDP managed an impressive 102 seats, squeaking by with less than 50% in two-thirds of those ridings. And yet the Tories' fortress ridings actually amount to a larger number than that. And they actually managed to obtain at least one of these bare-majorities in every province in the country except Newfoundland and Labrador: one in PEI, two in Nova Scotia, four in New Brunswick, one in Québec, 40 in Ontario, nine in Manitoba, ten in Saskatchewan, 25 in 28-seat Alberta, and 15 in British Columbia.

 

That's a remarkable coast-to-coast victory, and it indicates the breadth of Harper's current mandate, which is much deeper than a popular vote of less than 40% might indicate.

From 2007 on Democracy

I wrote this in 2007 regarding the last Ontario provincial election. Seemed worth looking at again:

You know, I was thinking about it this morning while walking in the chilly morning air to work. The thing is that I don't really care at all that we here in Ontario just went ahead and re-elected the reptilian kitten-eater who has ruled, and lied to, us for the past four years. Hell, we had four personality-free chumps to choose from and the people of Ontario decided that it's better the chump you know than the chump(s) you don't know... I can't say I blame them. It's a pretty hollow victory, but then again any victory is a victory, right? (Note to campaign advisors: possible future Liberal Party slogan: "Liberals: Because You Don't Really Care Enough to Vote for Anyone Else!")

But whatever. A little ailurophagy never hurt anyone (non-feline). Nobody with the name "Dalton" can clearly be overly scary or intimidating, so the big machine fails to have a new face atop it. Whatever.

What did get me thinking in the chill winds this morning, however, was the other thing we were asked to do this week, which was to vote on changing our electoral system. The long, short and boring on this is as follows: It failed, which is hardly surprising coming from an electorate so afraid of change that they elected the same political party 12 times in a row from 1943 to 1981, but if it hadn't failed it would have made our parliament a split between 'first-past-the-post' and 'proportional representation'. It would have been a bit confusing but it would have given a greater chance to a wider number of parties to have representation in parliament. It would have looked a lot like how they do things in New Zealand and in the completely meaningless parliaments of Scotland and Wales.

The cards were stacked against it, and not just because the main party in power got there because of the old system. The main opposition, whose federal counterpart was driven to extinction a decade ago by the old system, came out in favour of it. Plus, in Ontario change is scary. The same old same old is preferable.

After all, the new system would lead to perpetual minority governments. And Ontarians (and Canadians as a whole) don't want minority governments.

How do I know that Canadians don't want minority governments? Well, because newspapers and TV keep telling me that. They keep pointing out that a minority government immediately means instability and, within a week, we'd be reduced to Somaliaesque rule-by-warlords. It is, media tells me, absolutely unthinkable that a minority government could still be effective, could be more accountable and responsible, could even (cover your children's ears) be better than handing a blank cheque every four to five years to one political party or another. Yes-men in parliament who stand up and engage in empty debate when, in the end, what the party leader wants will be - according to our media, this is representative democracy at its best. This is what Canadians long for.

Americans should know this very well - living in a country where bipartisanship is so institutionalized that Ross Perot in 1992 could get 19.7 million votes and yet not a single vote in the Electoral College, the closest Americans can get to 'minority government' is having a majority in Congress held by the party who the President doesn't belong to (like at the moment). This might explain why Americans vote at about the 50% mark. Ontario's not far off that.

Americans, at the very least, elect at every level of government (yeesh, you guys elect your fire chiefs). What strikes me as hysterical is that, at the federal level anyway, our democratically elected parliament can, theoretically, watch its bills be stricken down by an obsolete and unelected senate. Who can then, theoretically, watch its bills be stricken down by an obsolete and unelected Queen (or rather an unelected Governor-General acting on her behalf). It's true - only our third most powerful body is democratically elected. Yet we`re meant to be a shining example of democracy.

But what gets me is this - pro-senate and pro-monarchy pinheads talk a lot of bollocks about accountability and checks and balances. They talk about how quasi-dictatorial unelected people are completely necessary to make sure that elected people never turn quasi-dictatorial. If we didn't have a bunch of cretins living large off of the public pay-cheque, the argument goes, parliament would have the abilitry to pass whatever bills they like!

A blank cheque, if you will...

Nobody seems to ever point out that all of the safeguard that twits in the Senate (and/or Buckingham Palace) are meant to provide could also be provided - dare I say it even better - by (shock! dismay!) a minority government... If all of these so-called safeguards that the Senate and the Queen are meant to provide are in some way necessary, then you'd figure the additional safeguard of accountability provided by a minority government would be a good thing... something Canadians would want...

But that's not what my newspapers tell me. My newspapers are pro-Senate, pro-Queen, yet pro-Majority Governments.

And pro-taking-people-for-fools...

Some of My Reddit Election Chatter

During the election campaign, I spent a lot of time on Reddit, at the r/canada subreddit, talking about politics. If nothing else, it was nice watching the 'orange tide' happen among a certain demographic. Being a lifelong NDPer, I found the Reddit crew being strongly anti-Harper but otherwise divided at the beginning of the campaign, with loyalties seemingly evenly split between the four 'opposition' parties and lots of talk about 'strategic voting'. By the end, that was all dead, and it was all moustache, all the time.

Here's a sampling of moments of pithiness (and on occasion sincerity) on my part in the world of Reddit.

Responding to a question asking who thinks the New Democratic Party should rename itself the "Democratic Party": "Jack Layton does. Or at least did. ¶ They talked about it last year. One reason they decided not to is that the'd become the 'Parti Démocratique' and they would be called 'pédistes', which is slang for a paedophile. At the time (just a year ago, Jesus Christ) there was talk about, 'well how much does the French name really matter?' I think that might have changed by now..."

Talking about newspaper endorsements: "Notice that the vast majority of newspapers, who have over the past month been gated behind steel bars, fed false information, drowned out, ignored and humiliated by Stephen Harper and his Conservatives, still are throwing their weight behind Harper and his party - something which hardly bodes well for journalistic access in the future. The Hamilton Spectator, a TorStar paper in an overwhelmingly NDP city, is stumping for the Tories. The Montreal Gazette, in a city where the Tories are perhaps polling at 10%, wants a Tory majority. The Economist, which is not even Canadian, endorses the Tories."

Talking about the 'happy ending massage parlour' would-be scandal: "It's no more obscene than Sun Media masturbating Stephen Harper."

Responding to someone saying vote splitting will elect a Conservative majority: "Here's an alternate scenario that I haven't been able to shake from my mind: pollsters have formulae for tweaking their results. They don't actually post the raw data from their phone calls but numbers that they've altered, based on previous results, to get what they believe are more accurate results. Everyone always says the NDP poll higher before e-day than they do on e-day. For the reasons you've listed above. So pollsters would have been fools not to account for that. I wonder if the raw data from their phone polls isn't closer to an even split for the Tories and the NDP. ¶ And there are two reasons to think that the NDP will be better able to GTVO this time: One is that people get cold feet on e-day because they realise the NDP don't have a chance - which is clearly not true this time out. Two is because the new NDP supporters are coming from the Liberals and the Bloc - who usually have high turnout. So it's more politically committed people currently inflating Layton's numbers. And I don't think the pollsters have taken that into consideration. ¶ You might be right. But you might also be completely wrong.

Responding to someone laughing at a sign about the 'NPD' and presuming it's a typo: "Dude, I totally saw some election signs that totally misspelt 'Conservative' by putting 'eur' at the end, and I saw some where there was this line above the 'e' in 'Liberals'... Hilarious."

In reference to Harper's quote that the NDP is proof that the Devil lives and interferes in the affairs of men: "Hail Satan."

A sarcastic rejoinder to someone expressing surprise that his union asked him to vote NDP: "OMFG a union supporting the NDP? Whatever is the world coming to...? ¶ Oh, wait, isn't the Canadian Labour Congress a founding member of the NDP?"

In response to a claim that the name of the Conservative Party is proof that they're good with a dollar: "Don't you know that you should vote for parties based only on their name? After all, it's only a dislike of the monarchy that makes Americans vote Republican, and it's an appreciation of hard work that makes Brits vote Labour."

Replying to a claim that a Harper majority would have people on he streets protesting for Proportional Representation: "That's true. When Chrétien won a majority with only 38.5% of the popular vote in 1997, the streets were filled with people demaning Proportional Representation. Man, FPTP was all people could talk about back then."

Chiming in on an analysis of where the Liberals went wrong: "Another way of analysing that split: Ontario Liberals and Québec Liberals. The Ontario Liberals kept the Bay Street dollars flowing and the Québec Liberals brought the passion. The rest of the country didn't matter very much. It was a pretty efficient system."

Again: "I agree on the first point. The red-door-blue-door thing is a bust, and he hasn't really inspired with policy. Apparently his town halls are roof-raisers, but those are partisan events. ¶ Personally I think Ignatieff is good at what he does. He'll be a good pundit. But politician does not seem to be his vocation, despite being a politician from the top of his head to his tippy-toes, or whatever that god-awful quote was."

Also on Liberal failure, in response to someone asking about differences between Tory attack ads during Dion and during Ignatieff, and asking that I call the latter 'by his full name' and not 'Iggy': "That's an interesting question. I think Stéphane Maurice Dion is by nature more left-wing than Michael Grant Ignatieff, and I think in fact Michael Grant Ignatieff holds several views that are right-wing enough to appeal to small-c conservatives. I think against his will he's been pushed to embrace a more left-wing agenda. Do you recall that when Michael Grant Ignatieff became leader, the wife of Stéphane Maurice Dion started musing aloud on Twitter about a defection to the NDP? ¶ Regarding the Conservatives - in both case they've fought largely on the 'not a leader' angle. But Ignatieff is more savvy in front of a camera if nothing else, and that might have made a bit more of a difference in 2008. With the environment off the agenda in 2011, Dion might have been a less polarising figure, but he'd also have lost much of his raison d'être. ¶ A pleasant parlour game, but what matters is who comes next. I doubt it's Bob Rae, and I'm really curious who it would be. Marc Garneau would be interesting."

My initial comment on Liberal failure, which netted me a lot of upvotes: "There are a few reasons why. Among other things, I think the Liberals haven't really shown a willingness to learn from mistakes. People still remember sponsorship, they still feel that Liberals have a false sense of entitlement, and Ignatieff's umbrage at Harper's democratic failings ring hollow. ¶ Igntieff is a good man and the Liberals are a good party. But they need a serious start-from-zero rethink. They need to be 'the little guys', I think, and claw their way back up. Because what used to work for them isn't working anymore."

When someone suggested incredulously that the NDP might be taking votes from the Tories: "That's not as surprising as it might seem in Ontario and in big cities. The NDP and the Conservatives both originated as Western populist protest parties, after all. They have a decent amount of common ground regarding stance, if not policy. People who supported Harper 100 years ago as 'one of us' might now find he's too Ottawa now, and Layton might be looking more like the new 'one of us'."

Talking about the leaked Tory-compiled list of Harper quotations: "Do you know what's creepy as hell? Each quote is properly annotated, and in the 'context' section, Harper is always referred to not by name but as 'The Leader'. Capital T, capital L. ¶ Jesus Christ, this man is Kim Jong-Il."

Commenting on Joe Volpe's assistant throwing out Green pamphlets: "What's sick is that while Volpe's riding is one of the most hotly contested in the 416, the Green are barely even a spoiler (let alone a contender). It's like a heavyweight boxer deciding that in order to take on the other heavyweaight, he'd better beat up a few toddlers first."

When someone asked why there was no 'unite the left' movement: "No Unite the Left movement? It seems like I never hear anything else. ¶ I'm amazed at how Ignatieff's Liberals are considered 'left'."

When someone got insulted that I suggested that airing Ignatieff's infomercial during Easter Sunday was a mistake since those likely to be watching were likely to already be Liberal supporters: "Why is it insulting? Single adults and the non-religious vote Liberal in higher numbers than the rest of the population. I didn't say all Liberals are family-hatin' god-hatin' types. I said the demographics likely to be tuning in on Easter Sunday are more likely to be Liberal than the other parties. I could have said the same thing about a hockey game. It's just sheer demographics. ¶ And there is one way I'm insulting - or at least criticising - the Liberal party, which I'll stand by: they've made too little of an effort to wrest votes from the Conservatives. Too much of what they've been doing feels like preaching to the converted."

When someone asked, regarding an EKOS typo, what 'British Colombia' was supposed to be: "Shakira with bad teeth."

Attempting to explain differences between polling houses: "There are a lot of tiny factors that can tweak results: (1) do you list leader's names when asking who you'll vote for (favours NDP)? (2) do you even list parties at all or just ask the person responding to name them (lowers Green numbers)? (3) do you use only landlines (favours Cons)? (4) do you only speak French when polling in Québec (favours BQ)? (5) do you poll during hockey games (favours Libs)? The list goes on and on."

Criticising strategic voting: "Hear hear. Strategic voting is holding us back from making real, positive changes to our country. Being told 'your only hope of preventing Harper is voting Liberal' is just as insulting as being told 'the only way to prevent instability is a Conservative majority'."

A huge upvote for a comment in response to the first polls that showed the NDP and the Liberals neck-and-neck: "What this means is that 'strategic voting' sites no longer know what they're talking about - their logic is that you should vote Libs if they're ahead of the NDP or vice versa if vice versa. But noody knows who's ahead anymore in a seriously large number of ridings. ¶ After all, if your heart's with the NDP but you want to cast your lot with the Libs to keep the Cons out - might that not now be counterproductive?"

In response to someone asking why people vote NDP if it might split the vote and lead to a Tory win: "I am not merely voting against the vision of Canada that I disagree with, I am voting for the vision of Canada that comes closest to my own. ¶ I am approaching forty years old but I still believe that government is a power that can and should be used to make the world a better place. I believe people are stronger when they look out for each other and when they stand together; I believe that governmnet is a tool that the people have at their service to best attain these goals. I believe that the sick should be looked after, that workers should be treated with dignity and that the future of our planet should be the starting point for all of the decisions we make that can effect it. ¶ I believe that the people who represent us should hold the same values; they shouldn't merely be beholden to the whims of popular opinion. I have to know that my MPs are progressive, not merely that they can drape themselves in a progressive flag when it suits their interests. ¶ I have only one vote; only one way to add my voice to the way we are governed. I choose to use it to try to build the Canada I want to see, not merely to prevent a Canada I fear seeing. ¶ I refuse to lose hope or to lower my aim; so I vote NDP."

A Few Election Predictions: a Report Card

On the 24th of March, as the election became an inevitability, I posted some 'campaign predictions'. I didn't make 'the big prediction' - who would win, or more realistically by how much - but I did consider many other things. Let's look back and see how well I did, now that the election is over.

1. We'll see an initial jump in Conservative numbers - they'll jump into the forties for a week or so. Not only because the 'no-election' camp will support them (if they're not already) but also because their camp is more firmly established, and the 'undecideds' will rise (an event which is hidden in polling soundbites), dipping from the other four parties' support. This was kind of true. There was the tiniest of bumps. But campaign-long, the Tories' numbers remained very consistent in the polls - polls which, of course, are eating crow at the moment.
2. We'll also see an initial NDP jump, though perhaps a more moderate one. It will have longer legs, though. Well, I'd like to be smug here - but in a sense this was wrong. After all, just a few days after the writs were dropped, the NDP had sunk down a few percentage points. In the early days of this campaign, the NDP were looking like a non-entity.
3. At some point in the campaign, we'll see the NDP within five percentage points of the Liberals, and there will be plenty of talk about the NDP replacing the Liberals as the main federalist alternative. I can say nothing about whether or not that bubble will make it to election day. I need to take credit here though. I couldn't have guessed how quickly 'within five points of the Liberals' would become 'within five points of the Conservatives': during the campaign, there wasn't much talk about the NDP replacing the Liberals because it seemingly became 'fact' overnight, though many refused to believe it until they saw it on May 2nd. The talk now is about whether it's permanent or not.
4. Jack Layton's health will be a recurring bugaboo, and perhaps surprisingly it will be the Liberals who will push it as an issue. I was completely wrong here, and kudos to the Liberals, and the other parties, for not quite sinking that low. I was, at least, right about the Liberals attacking Layton.
5. Ignatieff will change his tone during the campaign, trying to redefine his image as something more prime ministerial. It might work. I'm not sure how to assess this one. Ignatieff changed his tone on several occasions during the campaign. He impressed in certain ways, but I don't know that he ever really approached 'prime ministerial'.
6. The NDP's Québec bubble will burst. The only way this can be seen as anything less than history's most stupendously poor prediction would be if I claimed that by 'burst' I meant 'expand rapidly in all directions'. My tendency toward pessimism is visible here - though to my credit at least in March I had the prescience to say that there even was a Québec bubble. Few others did. And more on that below...
7. The Liberals will reveal a few more Conservative scandals that that've been holding onto. They will not have much of an effect. There were a few ineffectual Conservative scandals, yes. Actually quite a few, with such a numbing regularity that by the end they meant nothing at all. But the prediction surmises that the Liberals had had them up their sleeves, waiting for the perfect moment, and that seems to attribute to the Liberals a long-term strategy that they seem incapable of actually possessing.
8. The Conservatives will largely succeed in defining the election on economic terms as opposed to ethical terms. The Liberals will follow suit, and in the second half of the campaign will talk Conservative overspending more than Conservative abuses of power. This was very true of the Conservatives, and should have been true of the Liberals too. By the end, contempt of parliament was pretty much a dead issue. But then again, the Liberals were too.
9. The debates will be hard on Harper. He will come across as aloof, surly and tired. This one was wrong. He did good enough in the debates, actually. History will be rewritten to show these two debates as resounding victories for Jack Layton, but that wasn`t really the general consensus at the time.
10. Elizabeth May will utterly fail in getting her voice heard. Depends on how you look at this one. Nationally? Completely true. The only time the media paid attention to her was when she was talking about how the media won't pay attention to her. But locally, she was amazingly successful, and more power to her for it. Ultimately, I think the Greens made the right decision in going super-local instead of national.

 These come down to 'not bad'. Few of what I predicted was especially radical, and few of what happened that was truly radical was reflected in my predictions. A failure, then?

Well, not a success at any rate. So I can comfort myself with this: All the way back in August of 2010, I wrote something on the NDP in Québec that turns out to be really eerily prescient. In a piece that goes from sober observation of some inconsequential polling numbers to wild extrapolation and in to the realm of pure science fiction... and that turned out to be almost 100% true from start to finish. Please feel free to read it. It'll make these predictions seem beside the point entirely.

To the New Young NDP MPs: Please be Awesome

Dear young new members of the NDP's Québec caucus,

Please be awesome.

In the eyes of Canada's mass media, you represent the weak point in Jack Layton's armour. With their eyes already focusing on 2015, the 'establishment' in Canada's traditional élites recognise that they must humiliate the NDP, as quickly as possible, as efficiently as possible. They will do this by targeting you.

They will try to make you look like fools, green neophytes who chanced into your jobs and are hopelessly unfit to serve. Please take every given opportunity to wipe that smirk off of their faces by exceeding their expectations.

Ruth Ellen Brosseau, you are first in line. That single photograph that seems to exist of you is already a ubiquitous visual representation of Québec's folly. It has been plastered everywhere not only to make you yourself and the NDP look bad but the people of Québec and of Berthier-Maskinongé in particular. The media has a vested interest in embarrassing all of you, and that gives you common interest with your constituents. You are a single mother who makes ends meet by working at a bar, and in its arrogance, the mass media implies that this disqualifies you from serious consideration as a legitimate candidate.

Shove this arrogance in their faces, Ruth Ellen. By not being a middle-aged male lawyer, you represent 'one of us' in ways the élites can never understand. Your local constituents will be hostile for your linguistic abilities and your lack of association with the riding, and to be frank, they ought to. You'll have to do everything you can to overcome those weaknesses, but never forget this: you may be distant from your constituents, deep in the heart of Ottawa, but philosophically you are distant from Ottawa, too. You are an outsider, and in an election where millions of Canadians voted to shatter the inbred cronyism of the status quo, you are precisely the outsider we ought to be proud to have elected.

Make us proud. Make the people of Berthier-Maskinongé elect you in 2015 based on who you are, not merely on your party leader. The powers-that-be want you to be powerless, because they want women like you, single and working-class, to be powerless. Nothing frightens them more than the idea of politically active young working class people. Yet you have sought power despite that, and the people have given you power despite that. Use it on behalf of millions of Canadians just like you.

With the Las Vegas fiasco, it's started badly, and people will want you to be a sacrificial lamb. Defy their expectations. Stay away from Ottawa, a city you know too well, and spend as much time as possible in your riding. Be a grassroots ambassador for the underprivileged in this country, the people who know the importance of a holiday because it's come after a year of hard work. Don't give them the satisfaction of 'proving' that working single moms have no place in politics.

Pierre-Luc Dusseault, you are next in line. You represent everything that was revolutionary about the 2011 election. This campaign started out with smug satisfaction as the media complained about so-called youth apathy while simultaneously revelling in it. Somewhere along the way, just as this election served to defy everyone's expectations on a million other topics, young Canadians rejected the idea that they were apathetic, that the were not motivated, that they saw politics as having nothing to do with you. Vote mobs, campus voting booths, social media... all of these things were stories in and of themselves, yet you, Pierre-Luc, are a bigger story than any of them.

There is nothing funny or ridiculous about your candidacy: it was incredible and something Canadians as a whole should be proud of. The media wants to treat you as a joke because secretly they are terrified of you: you represent a generation that refuses to be taken for granted. And represent them you do, Pierre-Luc. You go to Ottawa on behalf not only of the people of Sherbrooke but of the youth of this country as a whole, who have always been shut out of the corridors of power by middle-aged men who have long overgrown the idealism and determination of youth. They mock young candidates because they fear them, and until this week, the voters have allowed themselves to agree.

You have a hard road ahead of you, and I hope you are up to it. People will want you to fail, so succeed. Exceed expectations. Spend these four years as Ottawa's voice of the youth, as the representative of students nationwide. Be a hero to your generation, and in time you will be a hero to all of us. Build tirelessly on the chance you've been given, and you'll turn 'student MP' from an arrogantly-delivered epithet to the badge you can proudly wear even as your age falls in line with other MPs in Ottawa. Even when you're 60, you'll still be 'that politically-motivated 19-year-old', or more excitingly perhaps you'll be 'that groundbreaking first of many politically-motivated 19-year-olds'.

To the rest of you: don't be daunted. Millions of Canadians, people just like you, have voted for radical change. None of us know who most of you are, and there's a lot of trepidation out there, but prove us all wrong and destroy the mass media who will try to destroy you. Have the last laugh. You are young, you are Québécois and you are social democrats: the élites want to paint you as fools, and in so doing they want to paint the young, the people of Québec, and social democrats as fools. They want nothing more than for you to fail to prove that people like you made a mistake in trusting you, in believing in political change, in getting involved in politics.

Make no mistake: their goal is not to get people like you to vote for 'the other' parties; it's to get them not to vote at all. You represent a threat because you are from the very groups they want to keep down: the young, the progressive, the French-Canadian. The outsiders, the people who want to be PMs out of a belief in the power of government to change society for the better, as opposed to insider cronies out to milk the system for their own personal gain. It's not a bad thing that you're new to the political scene; it is, in fact, the very thing that may come to be your greatest advantages.

You have the potential to be the very embodiment of real progressive change to the Ottawa status quo that Canadians got so tantalisingly close to realising this week. The rest of this country, the people with a vested interest in preserving that status quo, are keenly aware of that, and will try their hardest to destroy you; be indestructible. They will want you to fail; succeed. They will want you to be laughingstocks; be inspirations. They will want you to be mediocre; be awesome instead.

They will try to make sure that your constituents regret voting for you. Instead, believe that with time, with effort and with work, Canadians will see your electoral victories as the best thing ever to happen to our country.

Conversations With a Liberal

Did you know that I'm personally responsible for the Conservative majority? It's true: by being one of the 31% of Canadians who cast their vote for the party most strongly opposed to Stephen Harper's ideology, I myself gave him his coveted majority. I'm expecting a senate appointment pretty soon in return.

At least, I would if there were any truth, or logic, to the arguments I had to listen to today while speaking to that endangered species, the Canadian Liberal.

Capital-L, that is.

This person was abundantly clear: the NDP lack ethics, they are opportunists. The NDP split the vote with wild promises. They attacked Ignatieff. Ignatieff did nothing wrong, he was the best man for the job, he was the victim of smear attacks. The Liberals remain the best party, sooner or later voters will come back, the Liberals don't need to change anything.

Etc. etc. etc. Okay, one day after his party's worst-ever defeat, and he has a right to be angry. But I wonder what percentage of staunch Liberals agree with this assessment: for their own benefit, I hope it's next to zero, but I'm not at all sure it is. If the Liberals really do fade into obscurity (and I don't think they will), it will be through nobody's fault but their own. Their stubborn refusal to change, to accept defeat, would almost be funny if it weren't so damaging to one of Canada's proudest political legacies. Look what they've done to themselves in a mere decade:

• 2000: 40.85%
• 2004: 36.73%
• 2006: 30.23%
• 2008: 26.26%
• 2011: 18.91%

Yesterday, fewer than one in five Canadians cast their vote for the Liberal party. With only 60% turnout, that's closer to 11.5% of Canadian adults. You can blame Stephen Harper, and perhaps you should. You can blame Jack Layton, and perhaps you should. But the vast majority of the blame has to fall with Michael Ignatieff and with a party that was crashing and burning before he even lived in Canada.

I personally believe the Liberals have a continued relevance and place in Canadian politics, even if the Liberal cognoscenti themselves question it at the moment. This guy himself, and plenty of others, had plenty to say about 'the death of Canadian multipartisanism'. This is rich, and emblematic of the problem: the Liberals are so confident of their assured and rightful place in Canadian politics that the mere act of them on one occasion being a third party causes them to presume that they've been permanently gutted. Otherwise, how else do you come to describe the historic ascendancy of a third-party as the death of multipartisanism?

This person, and so many others, presume that the NDP have stolen away votes that rightfully belong to the Liberals - so 'rightfully' so that the Liberals didn't seem to think they were worth fighting for. The Liberals fought a bipartisan smear campaign (and despite what my colourblind friend claims the Liberals fought much dirtier than the NDP) out of the basic presumption that all it took to bring votes to the Liberals was to undermine the Conservatives. Any other party in Canada was a mere distraction, a mosquito in the ear.

My friend was one of those who look at vote tallies and talk about 'vote splitting'. He was angry that the NDP had the audacity to run candidates in all 308 ridings, while presuming it was the birthright of the Liberals to do the same. He pointed out 905 and 416 ridings where the combined Liberal and NDP votes were higher than the Conservative votes. He very sincerely believes that it was 7,731 NDP voters in Etobicoke Centre who turned that riding blue, as opposed to 21,661 Conservative voters in the same riding. Observations like the fact that my hometown of Oshawa has historically had a Liberal spoiler who by the same logic has repeatedly denied the NDP the seat (not last night, I hasten to add, where the Tories won it fair and square) fell on deaf ears. Did the Liberals take advantage of the retirement of an incumbent to use a star candidate in order to 'steal' the NDP's most loyal seat in a by-election last year? Irrelevant... what matters is the fact that NDP voters should have known better than to stray from Daddy LPC.

One party cannot steal votes from another. Parties don't determine elections, the individual decisions of millions of Canadians do. And if barely one in five were convinced by Ignatieff's claims that only he could stop a Conservative majority - if, in fact, only 32% of the anti-Harper vote were - it's for no other reason than the fact that he, and his party, were not convincing enough.

I am as sad, angry and upset by yesterday's events as the rest of the anti-Harper majority of Canadians. But I am entirely unrepentant. I chose to exercise my democratic right yesterday by doing the right thing. By opposing Harper in the firmest way possible and in support of the party with the best vision. If you choose to see it this way (I don't), yesterday it was the Liberals, not the NDP, who were the spoilers. Who, by 'splitting the vote' (whatever that even means), handed Harper his majority.

But don't tell them that. It was all our fault, not theirs.

This Space Intentionally Left Blank

So this is the 'big day', a day suddenly so much bigger and so much more meaningful than we figured it would be when the writs were dropped.

There's a lot I'd like to say, but I'd like to respect the tradition of keeping mum while polls are open. And then once the polls have closed I'm certainly not going to be blogging. I'll be stuck to the news.

So no political talk today, and neither did I want to stick something random and apolitical here either. We'll be back to business as usual, or so I suspect (to be honest I don't have much of a backlog at the moment and I've always relied on a backlog while doing this blog). For people not interested in politics, I apologise for the past five weeks. Back to complete randomness, I promise. And to some of the recurring-themes that I've more or less put on hold these past few weeks.

And as for today, no political talk. But if you are Canadian, and if you haven't already... go and vote. Who you vote for is less important than that you vote.

Some Final Words on Election 41

So I'm working on an assumption. Odd for an election where polls have been so crucial, in this last stretch, the polls aren't able to give us the first clue what'll happen tomorrow.

So I have an assumption. It's by now a pretty conservative one, and I'm not going to pretend to be a prognosticator. But my assumption is that no part will get 155 seats, but that the Conservatives will get the most seats, followed by the NDP. I have no clue whatsoever what will happen after that, and at the moment am not even interested in addressing it.

Be that as it may, coming in second and preventing a Harper majority - if they can pull it off - is an astounding success by any measure for the NDP. Sure, it's not as big a success as being able to form a government, but it makes the NDP the winner tomorrow. By almost any standard of 'winning' you can define.

And it makes it hard as hell to keep an objective poker face. I've supported the NDP since I was a little child. My commitment to the NDP is actually a formative influence on my personality - so I can be, to a small extent, defined by my allegiance to this party, to this party that I sincerely believe has acted in the best interests of Canadians for fifty years now and has routinely been shoved into the corner.

I must confess, even this late in this remarkable campaign, to having a recurring anxiety that it will all have been a dream, that when they calculate the polls tomorrow we'll see the NDP at 15% and the vast majority of votes piling up in front of those red and blue doors. It's tough to have been an NDP supporter since the halcyon days of Ed Broadbent and not have developed that particular neurosis.

But it seems unlikely, really. Even if it's still Harper on top, we're entering a distinctly new era in Canadian political history. And I am excited, elated, honoured and proud as hell to be living through it.

It's not just partisan rah-rah. It's not just the home team's unprecedented successes. There are several reasons why this election is game-changing. Let's look at them.

1. HAVING QUÉBEC BACK AT THE DINNER TABLE: One of the things that satisfies me most about this particular election is the sense that Québec and the RoC are strolling off into these uncharted waters, hand-in-hand. It is, of course, Québec who are entirely to thank for this new redefined electoral landscape, and while obviously the partisan in me loves Québec for making such a decisive (apparent) commitment to the part I've supported my whole life, it's not just that. It's not Schadenfreude at the collapse of a seperatist party, either. But Québec seems part of the national debate in a way it hasn't for a full generation now. What Québec says and wants matters in a way that their steadfast BQ support has, since 1993, precluded them form being able to do. We are all on the same page, and that's exciting as hell. I can't count how many times this election I've had to use Google Translate because I've wanted to know what La Presse and Le Devoir have to say. That hasn't really been true in elections past.

I have recently read a wonderful analysis, one that discusses how the BQ has in its own way contributed to the rise of Stephen Harper and the rightward shift of Canadian politics by taking the significant portion of Canadian progressives who live in Québec out of the main Canadian body politic. In their absence (in that the BQ were easy to ignore or dismiss), the progressive voice in Canada was diminished, to the benefit of the Conservatives. Does this election reverse that trend?

2. REWRITING THE NARRATIVE: Stephen Harper is very fond of saying, 'Canadians want...' and 'Canadians don't want...' It's frustrated those of us who, down the years, have repeatedly come to the conclusion that Stephen Harper is completely out of touch with Canadians and what they want. This election was supposed to be 'about nothing'. That was the Conservative line, that it would change nothing and wasn't necessary. The Conservatives were smiling at the concept of 'voter fatigue'; they wanted this election to be as boring as possible. The Liberals, for their part, wanted to paint this election as one about momentious change, but it's been clear that the Liberals have not represented that 'change' for the majority of Canadians. The first step forward for this historical party, I think, will be a contrite discussion about exactly why that is. In the meantime, the people themselves have seized control of this campaign and forced the issue of what it's all about. And it really is about disgust with the current system and a desire to scrunch it up and start again. Thank God this really is a democracy after all.

3. ATTACKING THE ATTACK ADS: An interesting feature of this election is not merely the ugly depths to which negative campaigning has sunk but perhaps moreso the unexpected contrary result they may have helped create: oddly enough, the surge that the NDP are currently experiencing might well consist of people whose opinions of Michael Ignatieff and of Stephen Harper have in no small part been influenced by each other's attack ads. This election was predicated on false dichotomies, from Harper's fallacious 'us vs. the coalition' to Ignatieff's insulting 'red door and blue door'. So comfortable were each in their strategies that they presumed a little mud-slinging would do nothing other than convince voters to switch from Brand X to Brand Y. Conservatives painted Ignatieff as an élitist foreign opportunist thinking - perhaps wrongly - that that would send Liberals across the pond to the Conservatives. And Liberals tried to paint Harper as a tyrannical threat to Canadian democracy and decency figuring that it would get people into the 'big red tent'.

This strategy has worked very well in the bipartisan USA, but up here, I think we've learned that it doesn't work at all. After all, the only way attack ads can work in a legitimately tripartisan system is to attack both your opponents simultaneously - something that a future Liberal party will have a much harder time doing than either the Tories or the NDP will, 'two sides of the same coin' fallacies notwithstanding. It makes much more sense to distinguish yourself from the opposition by emphasising your positive traits than to sling mud on a crowded battlefield - especially since another lesson of Election 41 is that a positive demeanour - a smile and a relaxed confidence - works wonders on the public, especially when the contrast is with combative scowls.

4. THE PAIN-IN-THE-MASS MEDIA: While I remain stunned that the Toronto Star has officially endorsed the NDP, the fact remains that they'll be alone, so far as I can see - in fact, they'll be alone in resisting the Conservatives, excepting Le Devoir obviously endorsing the Bloc and a few parties explicitly sitting on the fence. The litany of papers trudging out insincere whitewashed messages of support for Harper is sad in light of Harper's shocking disdain for the media. He's locked them behind steel barriers, had his partisans drown out their questions, fed them false stories, and refused to take questions from them... and they respond by calling for him to be given a strengthened mandate.

But ultimately this spectacle is likely to matter little: newspapers have decided to make Layton a bogeyman at this late date, but it means nothing: as opinion-makers, the mainstream media has never been less influential.

5. ANYTHING-BUT-STRATEGIC: Danny Williams is to thank for the cool acronym 'ABC' - 'Anything But Conservatives' - which suggests that any MP from any party other than the Conservatives is preferable to a Conservative MP. We've been stuck with this mentality for a good few years now, and it's gained legs. At the outset of this campaign, it was something I heard plenty of: that New Democrats should hold their noses and vote Liberal in certain ridings, and vice versa. And Greens should hold their noses nationwide. The children of Pierre Trudeau should vote for the children of René Lévesque if the numbers - meaning of course a rough calculation based on the previous election results and provincial uniform swing - warrant it. Nothing else in politics, from the detailed gradations of the political spectrum to the unpredictable aspects of the local contest, mattered except 'get out the Conservatives at all costs'.

This tasteless approach to politics, rather disturbingly dressed up as 'democratic', has been a complete failure, even as its proponents ramp up their rhetoric during the home stretch. The simple fact is that strategic voting really encourages the status quo, refuses to allow us to dream or hope for something better. It suppresses any urge to change the system.

Put it this way: at the outset of the election, scant weeks ago, strategic voting resources would have recommended an NDP vote solely in Gatineau in the whole province of Québec. This so-called 'orange tide' everyone is talking about would not have happened. Strategic voting, had it been successful, would have gone out of its way to quell the NDP surge in Québec, calling it nothing other than unhealthy vote-splitting. A strategic voting proponent would like nothing more than to polarise the whole country into 308 two-way races, pitting the Conservatives against someone else, someone representing the 'anti-Harper' vote that is nowhere near as homogeneous as some, on both sides of the divide, would like us to think.

6. NO MORE MR NICE GUY: And speaking of that... there's something else out there now - an anti-Layton vote. If you haven't heard much of it yet, you will. There is every chance that after tomorrow three of our five parties will see their overall vote cut in half from 2008 - largely thanks to the NDP. All three have a real need for humble contrition and for a rethink. All three need to reconsider what their raison d'être really is - watching the car I support overtake the others doesn't change my perspective: we need a Liberal Party, a Green Party and a Bloc Québécois; we're richer for them, and I have no desire to see them cast away by the wayside. But they need to ask serious questions. They need to admit defeat, learn from their mistakes, and grow again.

And I don't think they will, any of them. Not yet. Their first instincts on May 3 will be to strike out at Jack Layton and the NDP, instead of offering congratulations (May's Greens might perhaps be an exception here). They'll seek the enemy without instead of the enemy within, and I don't think that'll necessarily be Harper anymore. After all, there is a devil-you-know factor at play here.

The amazing coalition of Greens, Liberals, Bloquistes and even some Conservatives currently joining long-term New Democrats like myself bring a new dynamic to the party that hopefully Layton and his caucus will recognise. Truth be told, if a scenario comes to pass that allows Layton to assume the mantle of Prime Minister, he's going to need to take a journey to the middle of the road in a way Americans might currently recognise. Jack Layton might have a slightly better mandate than Stephen Harper (based on his momentum and on the large number of voters still listing the NDP as their second choice), but a PM Layton would still have far from a consensus. And the Liberals, the Bloc and the Greens will do everything in their power to regain their parties' support - by bringing them back from the NDP. Layton now has four enemies, and that's a huge difference. He might find himself even hoping for a Stornoway doorkey instead of a Sussex one, just to let that heat simmer a little bit.

If he can withstand it, though - if he can look like the natural opposition or alternately step on the world stage as a natural leader - the demise of those three parties might start looking like a permanent thing. That's a topic for another day, though.

7. THE HARPER PROBLEM: We still have a Stephen Harper problem. On Tuesday, he'll still be here, with that weird smile of his. He will have been elected by some one-third of Canadians - people who, for reasons I can never fathom, trust him and like him. Their voices do matter and ought not to be dismissed the way the anti-Harper majority's voice has been on so many occassions. There are hints this weekend that Harper might actually attempt to incite a constitutional crisis if he's unable to get his way. This man will no leave without a fight. And as far as ugliness goes, we may in the near future come to look back nostalgically on the election campaign itself for the decorum and manners we witnessed during it.

Strange times ahead. But in 1988 there was a thirteen-year-old geek of a kid sitting in his house in Oshawa watching his hometown giant-slayer breathe fire during the leaders' debate and thinking, 'this is what public service means'. A kid who learned that politics can inspire us to dream, to hope for something bigger and better than what we have, to refuse to accept mundane limits on our potential.

A kid who hasn't really gone anywhere in 23 years, even as idealism has come to seem like the silliest of platitudes. A kid just as edge-of-his-seat excited in 2011 as he was in 1988, when it all kind of went wrong in the end.

It's for that thirteen-year-old I used to be that I'll be casting my vote for the New Democrats tomorrow, same as I always have. Same as I always will.

An Alternate Voting Proposal

One day, the internet will be seen as trustworthy enough that we'll be able to vote online, from the comfort of our houses. And then that might be the time to consider an alternative method of voting, one that I've carried in my mind for years. There are huge practicality issues, but I can't help liking it as a concept and wishing it were true. Start with the electoral system exactly the way we have it right now here in Canada: 300-some ridings, first past the post, Prime Minister the person who holds the confidence of a majority of MPs in Commons, etc. But eliminate the concept of an 'election day', and replace it with this: every adult citizen gets one vote, but keeps it 'parked' with a certain party - or rather with a certain local candidate. So if at some point in time I realise that I like the Liberals most, or like the local Liberal MP more than whoever I previously supported, I log on to the election website and transfer my vote from one person to the Liberal guy. Inasmuch as this isn't enough to change the 'winner' in my riding, it probably wouldn't affect anything. However, if over time enough voters in the same riding shifted their voting allegiance that the Liberal candidate surpassed the sitting MP (let's say he was NDP, just to make the hypothetical less predictable), then the sitting MP would stand down and be replaced by the Liberal. At a certain point, if this happens in enough ridings that it affects the overall confidence of Parliament (perhaps by having one party lose an overall majority), then the Prime Minister changes. Obviously there are certain kinks here - for example, for a riding to change hands, it must pass a point where the two parties are at approximately equal numbers. In this transition period, the person in the lead might vacillate back and forth. So we might insist that the contender maintain a lead over the incumbent for a month continuously before officially making the change. Similarly, seats might vacillate frequently enough that an evenly split house would find it difficult to maintain a consistent majority. To ensure the Prime Minister did not flicker back and forth between two candidates, we could require the new status quo to hold for a month or something, or perhaps require a slight supermajority - say 156 seats in 308. Additionally, this might possibly result in stasis. A certain number of people might never change their vote, making it difficult to overturn incumbents. Two possibilities here are (1) that a vote would 'expire' if it were not 'renewed' every, say, two years. So the apathetic would find that their vote was parked with nobody until they chose to re-park it. Additionally, upon retirement of an incumbent, all of the electors in that riding could perhaps be required to recast their ballots. Not on a particular day, of course, but within a few weeks of the party selecting a replacement. What I like about this idea is that we could return to majority governmnet without fear of sacrificing half a decade to the whims of any one person: the moment Canadians started to disapprove of the 'man in power', we would be able to replace him. We would be able to ensure that our vote always reflected our current preferences. And all without having to drop $300 million on elections. Or without parties ever campaigning. It would make the democratic proces a constant one, not a once-every-few-years one. or indeed - if regular voting bothered you, you could abstain and only vote when your vote needed renewing. Either way. I'm not sure how feasible it would be, but the idea holds real appeal to me.

Can't Trust the NDP

I tried posting this fake poster on Reddit, where by and large they didn't seem to geddit.

Hint: it's pro-NDP.

YouGov Could Have Asked Canada

So I've been reading so many polls about voter intentions in Canada that I thought I'd take a break from it... and look at voter intentions in the UK.

So I looked at YouGov, the only British pollster I could remember by name. Labour well over Conservatives, LibDems still performing horrible. Business as usual.

But I found something interesting, where they took a few sentences and asked the people they polled which party (or 'none of them') the phrase applied to most. I'd be curious how those would look if asked of Canadians. Here are my speculations:

• It seems rather old and tired. In the UK, Labour still leads regarding this slight. In Canada? Well, it's been clear since the dropping of the writs that within Québec, most people would say that about the Bloc (which remains one of Canada's newest parties). In the RoC, I'd have to guess it'd be the Liberals who would lead in this category.
• Even if I don't always agree with it, at least its heart is in the right place. The NDP was made to score well on this. Green would be a good answer too, if people thought of Green at all, really.
• It seems to have succeeded in moving on and left its past behind it. Well, this doesn't apply to the BQ. It probably doesn't really apply to the NDP either. It applies to the Liberals, but isn't complimentary when it does so. Whether or not Canadians would say it (and they probably would), it's the Conservatives who deserve this accolade - getting over their 90s rift and their early flirtations with populism and Western alienation.
• It seems to appeal to one section of society rather than the whole country. God, where do we start? Perhaps this has always been true in Canada, but it feels probably even more true now, as the Conservatives reach for their majority by poring through demographics with a fine-tooth comb and the Liberals, bizarrely, seem content to let their support atrophy across all but a few key demographics. Live in Toronto or Montréal and the fact that the Tories are leading in the polls seems like science fiction. Live in Calgary or in rural-almost-anywhere and the fact that they don't have a majority seems bizarre. The BQ are a regionalist party, of course, and the NDP's current boost obscures the fact that they're dead in the water in suburbia and were a sub-frings party in Québec until... well, about last week or so, right?

Containing My Excitement

I've supported the NDP my whole life. It's a frustrating activity - every now and then you get this surge of optimism, this feeling that 'this time is ours'. And then again and again we are disappointed. Something happens along the way - cold feet, maybe. Or a gas tank only half filled. Who knows.

And that's been a long, long time now - enough to temper my natural tendency towards excitement right now. Put that differently - I feel like dancing in the streets right now. Yesterday, I read poll stats in a daze and looked at the commentary again and again...

But I keep telling myself, 'don't rush to conclusions; we've been here before'.

I mean, we haven't. 1988 was probably my inaugural election as a person paying serious attention (I was 13), and it was a serious heartbreak for the NDP (and for Canada). But there's a lot different tis time out - most obviously 'the Québec issue'. We're entering a long-weekend family holiday with a most curious situation: one of the NDP as real contender. Obviously everyone else will sharpen their knives against Layton over the next few days - Duceppe in particular will need to spend the rest of the campaign doing nothing other than attacking Layton. But if the surge holds, or indeed if it even continues, all the attacks in the world might be too little too late. Indeed, attacks against Layton are more likely to backfire than attacks against anyone else because the man is just so damned likeable.

In fact, this might be what's currently happening: that the large numbers of people who like Layton as an individual, or who say they'd like to see him as Prime Minister, have realised that the best way to support him is by voting for his party. One hell of a realisation, surely.

And of course, if it is... if it really holds to 2 May, and we see a parliament that has a much strengthened NDP caucus... well, then I'll celebrate. I'll dance in the streets like I'd like to now. It's what I've wanted to see since I was a little boy.

But until then? Well... call me superstitious. Maybe I just don't want to jinx anything.