This week on The Numbers, we take a look at the national polling landscape, which seems to be in a moment of some flux. Then, we take a look at the approval ratings of provincial premiers, including Doug Ford’s dropping support. We also dissect new provincial polls out of Alberta, where Danielle Smith’s referendum drive might be hurting the UCP, British Columbia, where the B.C. Conservatives are up following Kerry-Lynne Findlay’s leadership victory, and Quebec, where the PQ has opened up a wider lead over the slumping Liberals. Then, Philippe closes with a 1957-themed Quiz.

Looking for even more of The Numbers? If you join our Patreon and support this joint project of ours, you’ll get ad-free episodes every week, bonus episodes several times per month and access to our lively Discord. Join here!

The bonus episodes are also available via an Apple Podcasts subscription.

Looking to add The Numbers to your favourite podcasting app? You can find it on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Overcast

• Pocket Casts

• Podcast Addict

• RSS Feed

Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history that lands in your inbox every Thursday morning.

Reading this in your email inbox and having trouble viewing any of the charts? To optimize them for your device, click/tap the charts or view them on thewrit.ca.

After last week’s head-scratching divergences in the polls, the new numbers published over the last seven days did not provide much more clarity — though, thankfully, they also didn’t add to the confusion.

In addition to the two trackers from Liaison Strategies and Nanos Research, we also got a new national poll from Abacus Data and a Quebec-only poll from Synopsis Recherche for La Presse.

As expected, the trackers reverted to the mean somewhat. Though Liaison had the Liberals dropping one more point to 40%, Nanos had them back up to 42%. The NDP, meanwhile, went from 16% last week in Liaison’s poll to 15% this week. These are insignificant movements, but they suggest some movement back to the average rather than a further divergence. Adding to this was that Abacus had the Liberals down to 44% and the NDP up to 11%, putting its numbers closer to the trackers than to Léger’s poll from last week. This suggests the new normal might be the Liberals being in the low-to-mid-40s rather than the mid-40s, and the NDP increasingly scoring in the double-digits.

The Conservative numbers should remain concerning to Pierre Poilievre. All three of the national polls had the Liberals down since when they were last in the field with independent samples (two weeks ago for Liaison, four weeks ago for Nanos). But the Conservatives got no real lift. Instead, they dropped to 29% in the Nanos poll. With the exception of two EKOS polls conducted earlier this year, this is the first survey to put the Conservatives below 30% since August 2022 — before Poilievre became party leader.

Even the relatively good Abacus poll gets worse for the Conservatives when looking at only those certain to vote. Surprisingly, the NDP’s number holds firm at 11%. But the Liberals get bumped up to 46% and the Conservatives slide to 33%.

The Synopsis poll shows little movement from when it was last in the field a month ago, though it does have the Liberals down two points. This would seem to add to the general trend of Liberal softness in support — if we conclude that Léger might have been on the high-end of things with the party’s 50% nationwide.

The field dates don’t quite match and it is largely coincidence, but all three of the national polls have the Liberals down three points, even if that movement is not statistically significant.

The across-the-board gains for the New Democrats (and the loss of support for the Conservatives in the Nanos poll) are statistically significant, so that does add some heft to the notion that the NDP is getting a lift at the moment. Whether it is momentum, though, is another matter entirely, as both the Liaison and Nanos trackers do not show forward movement in the shorter term, only compared to where things were two and four weeks earlier, respectively.

While the party might be up a few points, perceptions of Avi Lewis haven’t shifted much. Abacus has his positive/negative ratings at 17% to 26%, with no real change in those numbers since he became NDP leader. Similarly, Liaison has Lewis’s numbers holding steady over the last few weeks at 25% favourable, 21% unfavourable. This lack of progress for the leader might act as a weight on the NDP’s support.

Signs of softness in Mark Carney’s support might also act as a weight on the Liberals. Abacus finds that government approval is down seven points since mid-May to 52%, its lowest level since January. Carney’s positive/negative impressions were 51% to 30%, down from 56% to 26% a few weeks ago. Liaison, too, has Carney’s approval down four points in the last two weeks to 55%.

Granted, those are still good numbers that any political leader would envy. But they do suggest that the Liberals might be returning to a level of support closer to where they were on election night in 2025.

Which, normally, would be good news for the Conservatives. But they are down significantly from where they were a little over a year ago and despite all the movement amongst the parties to the left of them, the Conservatives haven’t budged. Poilievre’s personal ratings haven’t shifted either, with Abacus giving him a 37% to 45% positive/negative impression score (which means no real change for months), while Liaison has his favourable/unfavourables at 37% to 51%, again signalling no change of note. Nanos has Poilievre 26 points behind on preferred prime minister, 49% to 23%.

This is not a situation that should worry the Liberals much for the time being — they can afford to see the NDP performing a little better if the Conservatives aren’t getting themselves off the mat. For now.

Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:

• News of a new leadership race in New Brunswick, a fifth candidate for the OLP leadership and a denied former leadership candidate in Manitoba.

• Polls show the UCP in the lead, but Danielle Smith getting failing marks on the separation issue. Plus, the B.C. Conservatives get a lift post-leadership, a new poll shows broad support for expansion of Alberta’s energy industry and new numbers put the PQ comfortably ahead as the Quebec Liberals fall back.

• #EveryElectionProject: The Liberals see off the CCF, Social Credit and John Diefenbaker in the 1938 Saskatchewan election.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

NB Green leader David Coon resigns

David Coon, leader of the New Brunswick Greens since 2012, announced last week that he would step away from his post as soon as his party chooses his successor. By the standards of the Greens, they will be big shoes to fill.

Read more

The Liberals remain well in front of the pack, however, with 45.3% of the vote (+0.2 from last week, thanks in large part to a big 50% in last week’s Léger poll and an uptick in the Nanos tracker). They are leading in 219 seats, down one, and win an average of 208.2 seats (-1.7) in the projection model’s simulations.

The Conservatives are up 0.4 points since last week’s update to 33.9%, giving them the lead in 86 ridings (+5) and netting them an average of 103.5 seats (+4) in the projection model. Much of this increase in the seat projection is in Ontario, where the Conservatives flipped nine seats back to them as the Liberals slipped below 50% and the Conservatives got themselves back over 35% after falling below that threshold in the two previous updates. Those swings were nearly made-up for by the Liberals, however, in B.C. and Quebec.

After surging in the projection last week, the New Democrats only fell back a little this week with 10% (-0.8). They are leading in 15 seats (-1) and win an average of 11 (-1) in the projection. That has them still flirting with, but not guaranteed to win, recognized party status.

For fully interactive charts, tables and maps, head to The Writ’s website:

A small uptick for the Liberals in Quebec has flipped three seats back to them from the Bloc Québécois, which drops the Bloc down to leading in 21 seats and winning 18.7 (-1.6) on average.

Good numbers for the Greens in British Columbia have boosted them to 2.4% nationally (+0.3) and their average seat haul to 1.6 (+0.3), with their high range reaching three seats for the first time since the last election.

Of course, all of these numbers are merely a reflection of where public opinion is at the moment. They are unlikely to be tested at the ballot box anytime soon — except in at least five ridings across the country where sitting MPs have indicated they will resign over the summer. We don’t know when those resignations will actually occur or when byelections will be called to fill the vacancies. But where do things stand in those five ridings right now?

Read more

Full regional breakdowns and tracking charts are available for subscribers below, as are complete riding-level projections. A full methodological explanation of how the vote and seat projection model works can be found here.

The Vote Projection is based primarily on a weighted average of all publicly-available national and regional polls. The weighted average is then used to project the outcome in all 343 ridings across the country, taking into account local candidates. Those individual riding-level projections are then weighted by the number of eligible voters in each riding and past turnout to determine the national vote projection for each party.

The Seat Projection shows the number of seats in which each party is projected to be ahead. Parties are assigned a range of likely vote share in each riding based on past polling and modelling errors and 10,000 simulations are run to assign to each party a number of ridings in which they are in contention. The High and Low ranges take into account 95% of all likely outcomes, while the Avg. Projection shows the average number of seats each party wins in these simulations, which takes into account the tendency for parties to under- or out-perform their polls.

Wondering how to interpret the Seat Projection and the Avg. Projection? While the Seat Projection is The Writ’s “official call”, the Avg. Projection is an important guide to understanding the projections, in conjunction with the high and low ranges. Seat projections are rarely right on target, so the Avg. Projection should set expectations. In other words, if the Seat Projection for a party is 25 seats but the Avg. Projection is 21.2, your expectation should be that the party will win around 25 seats, with a greater likelihood that the party under-performs that target rather than beats it.

The percentage of simulations in which each party wins a majority or a plurality of seats is shown below.

Complete riding and sub-regional projections are available for subscribers of The Writ:

A full breakdown of the methodology behind the vote and seat projection model can be found here:

The table below includes all recent federal voting intentions polls that are publicly available. You can click or tap on the name of the polling firm in the left-most column to go directly to that polling firm’s original poll release. Rows containing polls conducted in a single region are highlighted in different colours.

Vote and seat projections broken down by region and tracking charts going back to the 2025 election are available for subscribers of The Writ below 👇

Read more

Detailed projections for all 343 ridings across the country, as well as vote projections for smaller regions within each province, are available for subscribers below 👇

Read more

On October 19, Albertans will be voting on 10 referendum questions, including several on immigration and constitutional issues. But there will also be a question related to Alberta independence, though asked in a roundabout way. The wording of the question is:

“Should Alberta remain a province of Canada or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?”

With many polls likely to be published in the coming months on this issue, The Writ has launched the Alberta Referendum Poll Tracker, which will aggregate all of the polls published during this campaign. The chart below shows the current polling average, encompassing all polls, regardless of question wording, that include results on Alberta separation in general or the referendum question in particular. The chart on the left shows the current average with undecideds shown, while the chart on the right is after the removal of undecideds.

The table below includes all publicly available polls on Alberta independence conducted since the beginning of 2026. Note that the question wording is not always consistent between pollsters (Léger, for example, has included an option of Alberta joining the United States in its questionnaire, which has been grouped into the “Independence” column below). When both a generic independence question and the exact wording of the referendum question is included in a poll, the latter result is shown in this table.

You can click or tap on the name of the polling firm in the left-most column to go directly to that polling firm’s original poll release.

The method used to calculate the polling average is similar to the methodology described here for The Writ’s Vote and Seat Projections. No adjustments are made to the polls, however, to take into account any potential turnout effects.

The polling averages broken down by region, demographics and voting intentions, as well as tracking charts going back to the beginning of this year, are available for subscribers of The Writ below 👇

Regional, demographic and partisan polling averages

Read more

But what’s really going on?

This week on The Numbers, we try to make some sense of the latest polls that don’t seem to agree on what’s going on with either Mark Carney’s Liberals or Avi Lewis’s New Democrats. We also break down the results of the B.C. Conservative leadership race and what it means for the province going forward. Then, Philippe has a Quiz.

Looking for even more of The Numbers? If you join our Patreon and support this joint project of ours, you’ll get ad-free episodes every week, bonus episodes several times per month and access to our lively Discord. Join here!

The bonus episodes are also available via an Apple Podcasts subscription.

Looking to add The Numbers to your favourite podcasting app? You can find it on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Overcast

• Pocket Casts

• Podcast Addict

• RSS Feed

Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history that lands in your inbox every Thursday morning.

Reading this in your email inbox and having trouble viewing any of the charts? To optimize them for your device, click/tap the charts or view them on thewrit.ca.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times — depending on which poll you might be looking at.

It’s been awhile since we had a good old-fashioned polling discrepancy. But it happened this week when the two tracking polls from Nanos Research and Liaison Strategies showed some low numbers for the Liberals and high numbers for the NDP, numbers that suggested the two parties might be on the move.

Nanos had the Liberals slipping again this week to just 40% support, the lowest the party has been in any poll since mid-February (which was also a Nanos poll). Meanwhile, the survey had the NDP at 13%, one of the higher scores for that party that we’ve recently seen.

But it was the poll by Liaison that might have captured more attention. While it had the Liberals down to a nine-point lead over the Conservatives (41% to 32%), it remarkably had the New Democrats at 16% — a five point jump in a week and the highest level of support recorded for the NDP in any poll since before the 2025 election campaign began.

Then came Léger.

The poll from Léger for Postmedia pegged Liberal support at 50%, the highest support recorded for the Liberals in a Léger poll in a decade. The Conservatives trailed by 16 points and the New Democrats scored only 6%, on par with where they were in the last election and, with the exception of a handful of polls that put the NDP at 4% or 5% earlier this year, about as low as the party has managed since that disastrous campaign.

Any hopes from New Democrats that they are on the upswing might have to be dampened. One of the most respected polling firms in the country — and one that over-estimated the NDP by two points in the 2025 election — shows the party is nowhere near 16%.

That doesn’t mean that either Liaison or Léger is the outlier here. Before Liaison’s numbers were added to The Writ’s Vote and Seat Projection on Tuesday, the party was projected to have 9.3% support. Léger is on the lower side of that average. Liaison is clearly on the much higher side, but considering we have seen a few polls with 11%, 12% and 13% for the NDP in recent weeks, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they might register a 16% (or a 6%) from time to time.

But not only are the numbers diverging, the trends are heading in different directions as well. Léger had the Liberals up two points since the end of April. Nanos has the Liberals down five points since its survey ending on May 1, while Liaison also has them trending downward. Both Liaison and Nanos have the NDP on the upswing, but Léger has them flatlining.

The Liberal drop in the Nanos poll and the NDP gain in the Liaison poll were statistically significant. But that doesn’t mean they can’t still be noise.

The thing to remember with both the Nanos and Liaison polls is that they are tracking surveys. Liaison runs its polls over two weeks, replacing the older week of polling with the newer week with each new iteration of the poll. Nanos, meanwhile, polls over four weeks. There are good reasons to poll like this — for example, it’s cheaper to have two or four smaller weekly samples combined into one poll rather than having one big sample every week — but it does mean that these polls are lagging indicators, especially compared to polls conducted over a shorter time period.

Léger was in the field from May 29 to June 1. Liaison was out of the field on May 30 but its polling started on May 17, 18 days ago. Nanos was out of the field on May 29, but entered the field on May 2, now over a month ago.

To put this into perspective, I’ve plotted out the three new polls, as well as recent polls by Pallas Data, Research Co. and Abacus Data that were in the field on at least some of the same dates as the Liaison and/or Nanos polls. It shows that polls that were in the field at the exact same time came up with some very different results.

You can see that the two trackers (the dotted line is Nanos, the dashed line is Liaison) were not far from one another for both the Liberals and the NDP. But the other polls all showed worse NDP numbers and better Liberal numbers. Mode of contact is one factor, as Nanos uses live-callers and Liaison uses IVR, while Abacus, Léger and Research are done online. But Pallas, which also uses IVR, was closer to the online polls than the trackers.

Considering the margins of error of probabilistic samples (which, admittedly, the online polls technically aren’t), it isn’t impossible, or even that unlikely, that polls can go into the field on the very same days and come out with results between 40% and 47% for the Liberals and between 6% and 13% for the NDP. It’s more unlikely, however, that polls would come out with results of 40% and 50% for the Liberals and 6% and 16% for the NDP when polling the very same universe.

This should give us pause before drawing any sweeping conclusions about where things stand at the moment. Are the Liberals more popular than ever? Probably not — but they probably aren’t also in free-fall. Similarly, is the NDP making a dramatic comeback? Probably not — but they probably have made at least some progress since the last election.

The Léger poll, for instance, had Mark Carney’s approval ratings slipping, as were satisfaction levels with his government. Léger had support for the Liberals up two points since the end of April, but had Carney’s approval and government satisfaction down three points. Both were robust at 56% and 54%, respectively, but it does suggest some underlying softness in the Liberal numbers that make the 50% support for the party look like it could be on the higher end of where the party actually stands.

The NDP, too, has reasons to curb its enthusiasm. While Liaison showed a five-point gain for the party, it actually had Avi Lewis’s favourable ratings down two points over the last two weeks. It suggests the NDP’s bump might be more of a fluke than a real thing.

The softer Carney and government satisfaction numbers in Léger, a poll in which the Liberals hit a new high, and the softer Lewis favourability numbers in Liaison, a poll in which the NDP hit a new high, suggest we should probably expect a reversion to the mean when these pollsters next put out some new numbers. So, don’t be shocked if the Liberals drop in the next Léger poll and the NDP comes back to earth in the new Liaison poll.

We might not be at a turning point in public opinion just yet, but there is good reason to keep an eye on the numbers in the coming weeks to see if something is really going on.

There’s little to say about the Conservatives, though. These three new polls had the Conservatives between 32% and 34%, well within the range of numbers we’ve seen from these pollsters and others over the last few weeks. The silver lining for Pierre Poilievre is that things aren’t getting any worse for him or his party, but it’s a thin lining indeed when these were the scores that weren’t good enough for Andrew Scheer in 2019 or Erin O’Toole in 2021.

Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:

• News on another upcoming vacancy that’ll force yet another federal byelection, plus the numbers behind Kerry-Lynne Findlay’s B.C. Conservative leadership win. Also, a new entrant joins the fray in the OLP leadership contest.

• #EveryElectionProject: The 1993 Manitoba Liberal leadership.

• Upcoming milestone for PEI Green leader Matt MacFarlane.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Savard-Tremblay resignation ups byelection tally to five

Last week, Bloc MP Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay announced he would resign his seat in the House of Commons over the summer and run for the Parti Québécois in this fall’s provincial election. It increases the number of anticipated vacancies and future federal byelections to five — and this one could be among the more interesting of the bunch.

The PQ and BQ are not the bosom-buddies they might have once been. There’s a degree of tension between the two, in part due to the tension between the two leaders, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon and Yves-François Blanchet. The two parties share many of the same volunteers and donors, as well as the same sovereignist position, but they aren’t always glad to be associated with one another. And there is a rivalry for candidates and resources — the loss of Savard-Tremblay to the Bloc might be a gain for the PQ, but that doesn’t make it easier for Blanchet to swallow. The two leaders made a point to put on a show of unity at an event announcing Savard-Tremblay’s move, with the two of them literally hugging for the cameras.

This resignation will take some pressure off of Mark Carney and the Liberals when it comes to their majority in the House. The government currently has 174 MPs on its benches (including the Speaker) while the opposition musters 169 MPs. Three Liberals are supposed to resign over the summer (Jonathan Wilkinson, Steven Guilbeault and Nate Erskine-Smith), which would reduce the Liberals to only 171 seats, giving them a shaky one-seat majority on votes (the Speaker only votes to break ties).

But two opposition MPs (Savard-Tremblay and Alexandre Boulerice) will also be resigning, reducing the opposition to 167 MPs. The net effect is a reduction in Carney’s majority from five seats to four. Not huge by any stretch, but certainly workable.

That means the Liberals might not feel the urgency to fill these vacancies before the House returns in September. They could choose to wait until after the Quebec election (as well as the municipal elections in B.C. and Ontario) to call these byelections.

Whenever the vote does take place, the byelection in Savard-Tremblay’s seat of Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton will be an interesting one to watch.

This riding is located in the Montérégie region east of Montreal. It’s centred on the small city of Saint-Hyacinthe, which is surrounded by agricultural areas. It is very French (94% reported it as their mother tongue in the 2021 census) and white (only 6% reported being a visible minority) and is the kind of riding that is normally fertile ground for the Bloc Québécois.

Savard-Tremblay won with 43.9% of the vote in the last election, beating out the Liberal candidate by just over 10 points (33.6%). The Conservatives finished third with 18% and are unlikely to be a factor here — we saw how much their vote collapsed in Terrebonne when they weren’t seen as one of the contenders.

That was a fairly typical vote share for the Bloc, which took 41% in 2019 and 48% in 2021, but was a big boost for the Liberals. The party was up about 11 points from the 2021 election, a gain that was similar to what it experienced in similar ridings nearby. In the previous two elections, the Liberals were stuck at just 21% and 23%.

The Bloc remains the favourite in this riding as the Liberals will struggle to overcome a margin of 10 points. My projections show a margin of similar size between the two parties, but circumstances might be different when the vote actually takes place.

It’s probably a good thing for the Bloc that the byelection in Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton will likely be held at the same time as the byelections in Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie and Laurier—Sainte-Marie. It’ll increase the spending limit for the party and also take the pressure off of them to perform well in the two Montreal seats, which might have been a challenge. If the Bloc can come out of the byelections holding their one seat that was at stake, that’ll be enough to claim victory.

The Liberals might have a hope of picking up Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie and will need to demonstrate in Laurier—Sainte-Marie that the departure of Guilbeault has not set them back. Failing to flip Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton on a night where they win one or both of the ridings on the island of Montreal would also be more than enough to claim victory.

But the outcome in this seat is not a given. It’ll be a test of the Bloc in what should be a reliable riding in a vote that takes place either just before or just after the Quebec provincial election. It’ll also be a test to see how the Liberal vote is holding up in a francophone, rural seat. It’ll even be a small test for the Conservatives who, in another time, might have had Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton on their target list.

If all of these byelections take place on the same night, it should be one heck of a spectacle.

B.C. Conservatives choose Kerry-Lynne Findlay

Even if many were expecting a surprise, nail-biter outcome in the B.C. Conservative leadership contest that ended on Saturday, I’m not sure many predicted what actually occurred.

The winner of the race to replace John Rustad as the permanent leader of the fledgling party was Kerry-Lynne Findlay, a former Conservative MP and cabinet minister in Stephen Harper’s government. Findlay, who ran and lost in the 2025 federal election, is without a seat in the legislature but takes over a party that forms the official opposition in British Columbia and, at least according to a recent poll, is leading in provincial voting intentions.

The first ballot result showed that Findlay was going to be tough to beat. She started with 30.5% of the points (each riding was worth as many points as there were voting members, up to 100 points per riding), with Caroline Elliott in second at 25.8% and Iain Black in third with 20.3%. Elliott was widely expected to place first on the first ballot and struggle to gain on subsequent ballots, so her second-place showing suggested she was in for a rough night.

Yuri Fulmer finished fourth with 13%, followed by Peter Milobar with 10.5%, roughly in line with expectations.

On the second ballot, nearly half of Milobar’s support went to Black, with Elliott also picking up some. Very little went to Findlay or Fulmer, but Findlay’s lead was holding with 32.2% to 28.6% for Elliott and 25.3% for Black.

The elimination of Fulmer boosted Findlay significantly as she took nearly half of his points and kept her lead with 38.6%. Black was also a big gainer and closed on Elliott but came up just short, 31.3% to 30%.

Black was a strong consensus second choice, as he grew his vote by 9.7 points between the first and third ballots. Findlay grew hers by 8.1 points and Elliott by just 5.5 points. Fears that she would have trouble gaining after the first ballot proved accurate, but the assumption was that she’d be ahead of Findlay, not behind her.

On the last ballot, Elliott needed just over 62% of Black’s vote to win. Instead, she got 59%. Findlay held on with a 51% to 49% victory, thanks in large part to her strong first-ballot showing as well as the respectable performance of Fulmer.

Fellow election-enthusiast Kyle Hutton mapped out the results of the vote on his Substack. It shows that Findlay did best in the B.C. Interior, on Vancouver Island and south of the Fraser River on the first ballot, with Elliott and Black being strongest in Metro Vancouver north of the Fraser. On the third ballot, Findlay was winning nearly every riding outside of Metro Vancouver with the exception of cities like Victoria and Kelowna. Elliott was holding on in Vancouver, while Black was ahead in Burnaby and Richmond. The last ballot produced a somewhat more mixed map as Black helped Elliott win a handful of ridings in the Interior, but generally speaking Findlay won with the more Conservative-friendly ridings, while Elliott was the choice of members living in ridings that tend to vote for the New Democrats.

This might be a signal of some of these members’ doubts about Findlay’s ability to grow the tent. She arguably ran the most right-wing campaign of the leadership contest. Amelia Boultbee and Elenore Sturko, two Conservative MLAs who were critical of John Rustad’s leadership before departing the caucus to sit as Independents, have signalled they do not intend to return to the caucus under Findlay’s style of leadership. Rather than broaden the tent to include centrist British Columbians who might be disillusioned with David Eby’s New Democrats, Findlay could potentially polarize politics in the province once again, propping up the NDP (and, perhaps, pushing progressive strategic voters away from the Greens).

The next set of polls out of the province will be worth watching to see if Findlay’s leadership victory will boost the Conservatives or not. Polls suggested that no leader was likely to give the party an immediate surge as they were relatively unknown to the broader public. We should soon get a glimpse of how British Columbians’ first impression with the new Conservative leader is going over.

ELECTION NEWS BRIEFS

CERJANEC JOINS OLP RACE - The list of contestants for the Ontario Liberal leadership has grown to four with the entry of Rob Cerjanec into the race. Cerjanec, the Liberal MPP for the GTA riding of Ajax, was first elected in the 2025 provincial election. Along with Lee Fairclough, he is the second sitting MPP to enter the contest. The Ontario Liberals haven’t had a permanent leader with a seat at Queen’s Park since Kathleen Wynne resigned following her defeat in 2018. That’s a long, long time to go without a real leader in the legislature. It’ll undoubtedly be one of the main arguments that both Fairclough and Cerjanec will make during the leadership campaign.

12-MONTH ELECTORAL CALENDAR

• June 23: Chéticamp–Margarees–Pleasant Bay provincial byelection

• October 5: Quebec provincial election

• October 17: New Brunswick Progressive Conservative leadership

  • Candidates: Daniel Allain, Don Monahan

• October 17: Municipal elections in British Columbia

• October 19: Alberta referendum

• October 26: Municipal elections in Ontario

• October 28: Municipal elections in Manitoba

• November 2: Municipal elections in Prince Edward Island

• November 9: Municipal elections in Saskatchewan

• November 21: Ontario Liberal leadership

  • Candidates: Navdeep Bains, Rob Cerjanec, Lee Fairclough, Dylan Marando

• November 28: Nova Scotia Liberal leadership

• Byelections yet to be scheduled

  • ON - Scarborough Southwest (to be called by August)

  • PE - Cornwall–Meadowbank (to be called by September)

  • MB - The Pas—Kameesak (to be called by September)

  • AB - Calgary Shaw (to be called by November)

  • ON - York—Simcoe (to be called by December)

  • CA - Beaches—East York (resignation pending)

  • CA - Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie (resignation pending)

  • CA - North Vancouver—Capilano (resignation pending)

  • CA - Laurier—Sainte-Marie (resignation pending)

  • CA - Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton (resignation pending)

• Party leadership dates yet to be set

  • Federal Greens (Elizabeth May announced on August 19, 2025)

(ALMOST) ON THIS DAY in the #EveryElectionProject

Liberals choose Edwards, but Lamoureux endures

June 5, 1993

This was originally published on June 5, 2025.

Under Sharon Carstairs, the Manitoba Liberals achieved something they hadn’t enjoyed for decades: relevancy. In the 1981 election before her arrival, the Liberals were shutout of the Manitoba legislature entirely after being reduced to a single seat in 1977.

But Carstairs and her populist style earned the Liberals some respect. Taking advantage of the growing unpopularity of the NDP government she won a seat in 1986 and then leap-frogged the NDP entirely, winning 20 seats and 36% of the vote in 1988. The Liberals were just five seats short of the Progressive Conservatives, who formed government under Gary Filmon. For the first time in over 20 years, the Liberals won enough seats to form the official opposition.

The Liberals couldn’t move further ahead, however. Filmon secured a majority in 1990 and the Liberals were back to third party status with just seven seats.

Carstairs was criticized for squandering what was seen as an opportunity to finally put the Liberals back into power. By 1993, after leading the party through three back-to-back election campaigns and taking a prominent role in opposing the Charlottetown Accord, Carstairs announced her resignation in late 1992.

There wasn’t a lot of interest in the leadership contest to replace her, but the Manitoba Liberals had an opening. Filmon’s government was pushing through unpopular austerity measures and Gary Doer’s NDP still hadn’t shaken off its defeat from 1988. The Liberals, on the upswing elsewhere in the country and only months away from taking power federally, seemed to be a party heading in the right direction.

The race to decide who would take the party to the next level came down to two young MLAs from Winnipeg, both first elected in the 1988 election.

Paul Edwards, 32, was the favourite of the party establishment. He promised to keep the party in the middle of the spectrum, saying that “the genius of the Liberal Party is that it refuses to indulge in extreme positions.”

His one and only rival was Kevin Lamoureux, 31. According to the Canadian Press, the contest was between a “well-connected young Winnipeg lawyer [Edwards] or a hard-working ‘professional’ politician [Lamoureux].”

The Liberals were struggling to garner attention for the leadership race, with one debate held just a few days before voting attracting an audience of less than 50. But a little controversy helped the contest get into the headlines.

For the first time, the party was abandoning the delegated convention and instead sent out ballots to all 8,104 members eligible to vote. Members could cast their ballots by mail or at regional polling stations, with the result to be announced at the Winnipeg Convention Centre on June 5, 1993.

But there were some complaints that not everyone got their ballot in time to return it. The party responded by extending the deadline for receiving the mail-in ballots, a move that was decried not only by the Lamoureux campaign but by the leadership convention chairman, Ernie Gilroy, who said that he “no longer believe(d) that the candidates are playing on an even playing field”.

The argument was that the extension would give the lacklustre Edwards campaign more time to sign-up new members. Lamoureux’s team had managed more than twice as many new member sign-ups as the Edwards team, and it was argued the delay would let Edwards close that gap (it wasn’t explained why the Lamoureux campaign wouldn’t be able to also use the extra time to its advantage).

Following the outcry, the party reversed its decision and kept the deadlines as they were. In the end, it didn’t really make much of a difference — though it might have impacted turnout.

Just under 2,000 members of the Manitoba Liberal Party cast a ballot, a turnout of less than one-quarter. Of those who did manage to vote, Edwards received 56.1%. Lamoureux took the remaining 43.9%.

The low engagement in the party’s leadership race foreshadowed trouble ahead for the Liberals. The next provincial election was not held later that year, as some in the party had predicted, but would wait until 1995. Filmon and the PCs won that election with the NDP retaining its official opposition status. Edwards would manage to lead the party to just three seats (including Lamoureux’s, but not his own). Nevertheless, the 24% of the vote the Liberals captured in that election, though lower than what Carstairs managed in her last two outings, has yet to be bettered by the party.

While things didn’t get better for the Manitoba Liberals, Lamoureux’s political career was just getting going. He’d have a few more terms in the Manitoba legislature before making the jump to federal politics in a 2010 byelection and being one of the few federal Liberal MPs to survive the 2011 campaign. Since 2015, Lamoureux has served as the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader in Ottawa.

More from the #EveryElectionProject

MILESTONE WATCH

• On Sunday, Matt MacFarlane marks one year as leader of the Prince Edward Island Greens. The party holds three seats in the 27-seat Legislative Assembly. The province is slated to go back to the polls next year, but the most recent poll suggested the Greens were actually in the lead. We’ll have to wait to see more (and public) releases to get an idea of what’s actually happening in PEI.

Is it a blip? We’ll have to wait to find out.

The Liberals dropped one point in the vote projection to 45.1%, the lowest they’ve been since the end of February. The party now leads in 220 ridings across the country, a drop of 10 seats since last week, while their average number of seat wins has dropped 5.1 seats to 209.9.

The Conservatives and Bloc have hardly budged in the vote projection, but they’ve both jumped four seats apiece in the number of ridings in which they are projected to be leading with 81 and 24, respectively. Their average number of seat wins in the projection was up 0.9 and 1.5 seats, to 99.5 and 20.3, respectively. This reflects how a few toss-up ridings in which they were trailing last week have flipped over, but since they already had a decent chance of winning them their average number of seat wins hasn’t shifted so dramatically.

Not so for the New Democrats. The party is up 1.5 points nationally to 10.8%, the first time the NDP has hit double-digits since mid-January. The party is leading in 16 ridings, a gain of two since last week, but more importantly wins an average of 12.0 seats in the model. That’s a jump of 2.6 seats from last week and puts them in a position to regain recognized party status — even after taking into account the party’s tendency to under-perform the polls and the number of close contests the NDP is involved in.

For fully interactive charts, tables and maps, head to The Writ’s website:

What’s behind this jump for the New Democrats? A big part of it is the five-point jump in NDP support in this week’s Liaison Strategies poll, from 11% last week to 16% this week. The other polls added to the model in this update (from Pallas and Nanos) have the party in the more-usual 11% to 13% range, but the real test for the NDP will be whether their apparent bump into the low-to-mid-teens is replicated in the next set of polls from Abacus Data and Léger, which have routinely had the New Democrats stuck in single-digits.

I’ll delve more deeply into the polling numbers in the Weekly Writ newsletter on Thursday. Perhaps we’ll already have some more numbers to help us understand what may or may not be happening to the NDP. Stay tuned!

This week on The Numbers, we discuss what the polls suggest could be the motivations behind Smith’s referendum push, as well as what it could mean for the future of the United Conservative Party — and Pierre Poilievre’s federal Conservatives, too. We also chat about the latest federal polls and what they say about support for the Liberals after what looked like a dip last week. Then, we break down new polls out of Ontario and Nova Scotia and briefly chat about this weekend’s B.C. Conservative leadership race. Finally, Philippe has a few trivia questions about past referendums in Canada.

Looking for even more of The Numbers? If you join our Patreon and support this joint project of ours, you’ll get ad-free episodes every week, bonus episodes several times per month and access to our lively Discord. Join here!

The bonus episodes are also available via an Apple Podcasts subscription.

Looking to add The Numbers to your favourite podcasting app? You can find it on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Overcast

• Pocket Casts

• Podcast Addict

• RSS Feed

Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history that lands in your inbox every Thursday morning.

Reading this in your email inbox and having trouble viewing any of the charts? To optimize them for your device, click/tap the charts or view them on thewrit.ca.

Steven Guilbeault, the one-time environment minister and long-time environmental activist, made it official on Wednesday that he’ll resign his seat of Laurier–Sainte-Marie later this summer and end his tumultuous time as an MP.

His departure will undoubtedly please some of those on the right who saw him as the embodiment of everything that stood in the way of Canada’s energy industry. After making many compromises over the years, his departure might not sadden as many environmentalists and those who care about combating climate change as it would have a few years ago. He left Mark Carney’s cabinet over the MOU with Alberta back in November, so what little influence he still had left over the Liberal government was already long gone.

Guilbeault did not leave in a huff, however. He’s going to stay on in the Liberal caucus until after Parliament adjourns for the summer and the letter announcing his resignation did not criticize the Carney government beyond implying that he can have more of an impact on the climate file outside of the House of Commons.

Keeping the environmental wing of the Liberal Party within the tent will remain a challenge for Carney, though to date he seems to have managed it well enough. The Liberals are polling better than they did when Guilbeault quit cabinet in November and surveys suggest that Canadians have had a change of heart from the days when Guilbeault was first elected when it comes to prioritizing environmental protection over economic growth. In some ways, Guilbeault was a product of his time — he was a star candidate for the Liberals when the environment was a top issue once again. The pandemic, the cost of living crisis and the re-election of Donald Trump pushed climate change down on the list of Canadians’ priorities, where it now remains. Once a star, Guilbeault might have become a liability.

There are broader vulnerabilities on this file that Mark Carney will eventually have to face in the coming years, but the immediate challenge will be when the vacancy in Laurier—Sainte-Marie has to be filled. Without Guilbeault, can the Liberals hold the seat?

This riding is located in downtown Montreal (and includes the Vieux Montréal, which most tourists to the city have passed through). It is a dense, city-centre riding, the kind of riding that the Liberals hold throughout Canada. In downtown Montreal, only the neighbouring (and also soon to be vacant) riding of Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie isn’t already a Liberal bastion.

Guilbeault won Laurier—Sainte-Marie with 52.1% of the vote in the last election, beating the NDPs Nimâ Machouf by a margin of 33 points. This was Machouf and Guilbeault’s third face-off in the riding. He beat her by 17 points in 2019 and five points in 2021.

There’s no doubt Guilbeault was a star for the party in 2019. He boosted the Liberals that year by 18 points in Laurier–Sainte-Marie compared with the 2015 result, a far bigger spike than in neighbouring ridings where the Liberals were only up three or four points.

But his star might have faded by 2021. His drop of nearly four points in the riding was a little bigger than the losses suffered by Liberal candidates in neighbouring seats. His gain of 14 points in 2025 was only marginally bigger than those of neighbouring Liberal incumbents, Rachel Bendayan and Marc Miller. While the 2019 result suggested some star power, the 2021 and 2025 results suggested Guilbeault wasn’t performing much better than a typical Liberal incumbent.

This would suggest that his departure might not hurt the Liberals all that much, assuming they can find a good replacement.

They should be considered the favourite to hold this — and potentially quite comfortably. That’s because if the Liberals don’t win it, who would? The NDP has not shown signs of any serious momentum under Avi Lewis, particularly in Quebec. They would need to find a stellar candidate to flip a 33-point margin and that simply doesn’t seem to be in the cards for the party right now.

The Bloc? This was once a stronghold for the party and the site of its first electoral victory when Gilles Duceppe won a byelection in 1990. But the riding swung to the NDP in 2011 and was one of the 16 in Quebec that stayed with the party in 2015. Duceppe was defeated both times. Under his leadership, the party had a lot of support among urban progressives in Montreal. But, under Yves-François Blanchet, the party no longer has the same level of support on the island of Montreal. In 2008, the Bloc held six seats on the island and won more than 20% of the vote in four others. In 2025, it won one and cracked 20% in only two more.

Unless either the NDP or the Bloc can find a candidate that is able to win this seat solely due to their own profile, the Liberals look likely to hold Laurier—Sainte-Marie.

Whether they can hold the voters that once looked to Guilbeault as a standard bearer of their movement within the Liberal Party is another question entirely — one that likely won’t be answered for some time yet.

Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:

• News on the Alberta referendum (and what it means for Danielle Smith’s leadership of the UCP) and the upcoming B.C. Conservative leadership vote. Plus, two ridings will keep their Indigenous names after all, the OLP gains a leadership contestant and rebuffs Nate Erskine-Smith, Caroline Mulroney resigns, Éric Duhaime chooses a riding and Nova Scotia calls a byelection. Lots of news!

• Polls suggest the dip in Liberal support in last week’s trackers might have been nothing, plus how voters in 11 Liberal ridings feel about pipelines, how voters in Ontario feel about Doug Ford and how voters in Nova Scotia feel about Tim Houston.

• #EveryElectionProject: The 1902 Ontario election that was won by a margin of five votes.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Question on independence added to Alberta referendum

In the least surprising turn of events ever, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has added a 10th, independence-adjacent question to the nine questions Albertans were already going to vote on in the October 19 provincial referendum. While the idealist might see this move as a way to give Albertans their democratic say on the future of the province, it doesn’t take much of a cynic to believe that this referendum is, instead, about internal party dynamics within the increasingly-ironically named United Conservative Party.

Read more

It’s a referendum that could prove to be the country’s most impactful vote since the referendum on Quebec independence in 1995. And, just like that referendum (and the one before it in 1980), it might be just as effective at putting the issue of separation to bed.

With the referendum now confirmed, many polls on the question will undoubtedly be published over the next five months. We’ve already seen over the last year that polls can differ quite significantly on this issue. To try to simplify matters for readers (and to give you a one-stop-shop for polls on the Alberta referendum), I’ve launched The Writ’s Alberta Referendum Poll Tracker, an aggregation of all the recent Alberta independence polls that have been published and all those that will be published between now and October 19.

In the first update, the “Remain” side is leading comfortably with just under 63% support, with support for independence (or the beginning of the process toward independence) sitting at just 30%. After the removal of undecideds, support for remaining in Canada hits two-thirds.

The Poll Tracker will be updated regularly as new polls are published. All polls on Alberta independence are included, but questions that use the actual wording of the referendum take precedence over questions that more refer to separation more generally. Hopefully, as we approach the actual vote, pollsters will have transitioned to asking the referendum question (or how people intend to vote in the referendum).

The provincewide averages, as well as the database of polls (with links to the original releases), will be publicly available on The Writ. Paid subscribers will get to go a little deeper, and will have access to the tracking charts and regional, demographic and partisan polling averages. If you aren’t already a subscriber and would like to get access to all the numbers (as well as the federal Vote and Seat Projections), now’s the time to take the plunge!

Subscribe now

This referendum campaign is one that will have reverberations that we will certainly feel across the country for the next few months, and possibly for the next few years (and, maybe, decades). If the polls continue to show that the “Remain” side should win, that doesn’t mean there won’t still be repercussions in Canadian politics. Prime Minister Mark Carney and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre will have to wade into this campaign, while Alberta Premier Danielle Smith appears to be gambling not only the unity of the country on this referendum, but potentially her own leadership of the divided United Conservative Party, too. As the polls suggest, Smith’s position on the side of Canada in this referendum seems to put her at odds with most of her party’s own supporters.

For fully interactive charts, tables and maps, head to The Writ’s website:

So, this will be an ongoing story and I hope the Alberta Referendum Poll Tracker will help you navigate the deluge of polling numbers we can expect.

Speaking of which, the Vote and Seat Projections were also updated today. They continue to show the Liberals with a big, growing seat advantage over the Conservatives.

I’ll delve more deeply into the federal polls published over the last week in Thursday’s Weekly Writ, but the biggest driver of the Liberals’ dominance in the seat projection is Ontario. The three new polls added to the model all had the Liberals above 50% in Ontario, which is absolutely crushing for the Conservatives.

While the 230 Liberal seats and 77 Conservative seats look rather extreme in this projection, the Avg. Projection, which takes into account the number of toss-ups at stake as well as the tendency of parties to beat or under-perform their polls, still has the Liberals at (a comparatively modest) 215 seats against 99 for the Conservatives.

I’m increasingly leaning on the Avg. Projection rather than the Seat Projection in the model, as I feel it might be the more accurate reflection of likely outcomes. Yes, the Liberals are leading in 230 seats in the model, but so many of them are by tiny margins that it isn’t all that plausible they’d win all of them. I’ll keep mulling this over.

This week on The Numbers, we set our expectations for the coming months as we return to a game we last played in September. We also dissect the latest federal polling numbers and take a look at what could be a CAQ comeback in Quebec.

Looking for even more of The Numbers? If you join our Patreon and support this joint project of ours, you’ll get ad-free episodes every week, bonus episodes several times per month and access to our lively Discord. Join here!

The bonus episodes are also available via an Apple Podcasts subscription.

Looking to add The Numbers to your favourite podcasting app? You can find it on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Overcast

• Pocket Casts

• Podcast Addict

• RSS Feed

Les chiffres : Fréchette fait grimper la CAQ

La CAQ est-elle de retour dans la course ? Dans ce nouvel épisode du balado Les chiffres, nous revenons sur le plus récent sondage Léger, qui mesure une forte amélioration de la satisfaction envers le gouvernement ainsi qu'une remontée caquiste dans les intentions de vote. Nous discutons également de la nouvelle projection Qc125, qui continue de faire du Parti québécois le favori, tout en montrant une course plus complexe et volatile qu'il y a quelques semaines.

Bref, un portrait fascinant d'une opinion publique québécoise en plein mouvement et imprégné d'incertitude...

Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history that lands in your inbox every Thursday morning.

Reading this in your email inbox and having trouble viewing any of the charts? To optimize them for your device, click/tap the charts or view them on thewrit.ca.

It’s not yet at a Carney-level of turnaround, but Christine Fréchette has given the Coalition Avenir Québec new life and, just maybe, new hope that the October provincial election won’t be an unmitigated disaster for the governing party.

Last week in this newsletter, I highlighted two new Quebec polls from Pallas Data and Liaison Strategies that put the Parti Québécois and Quebec Liberals (PLQ) in a tie, with the CAQ rising to either 18% or 19%.

This week, we have a new poll from Léger for Québecor — and it suggests that the trends picked up by Pallas and Liaison are continuing to boost the CAQ from potential spoiler status to long-shot contender.

The poll still puts the PQ in first place with 30% support, down one point from when Léger was in the field a month ago. And it shows the PLQ unchanged at 28%. But it has the CAQ up five percentage points to 22%, a statistically-significant shift. The Quebec Conservatives have fallen three points to 11%, while Québec Solidaire is unchanged at 8%.

While that is a lot of movement for the CAQ in just four weeks, there has been even more movement if we look back to a late-March poll from Léger that was done before Fréchette won the party’s leadership race. Compared with that poll conducted only two months ago, the CAQ has catapulted forward by 13 points, with losses suffered by the PQ (three points), the Conservatives (four points) and the PLQ (five points).

The CAQ’s gains since the previous Léger poll in April have been concentrated in the greater Montreal and Quebec City regions, while the Conservatives have fallen back outside the two major centres. The CAQ’s biggest increase among the various demographic groups is a gain of eight points among the 55 and older crowd, which is now a three-way race between the CAQ, PQ and PLQ.

The Parti Québécois still holds the advantages, however, thanks to its 11-point lead among francophones. But that is smaller than the 13- and 15-point leads picked up by the earlier Pallas and Liaison polls. It’s starting to put a majority government out of reach of the PQ.

With these regional numbers (and using a simple swing model), the PQ would likely win around 58 seats, with the PLQ taking 33 seats and the CAQ surviving with 21 seats. Québec Solidaire (seven) and the Conservatives (six) would split the rest.

The PQ would still be heavily favoured to win the most seats with these kinds of numbers, but it is not implausible that the National Assembly could look a lot like the minority legislatures of 2007-08 or 2012-14 (with the parties somewhat re-arranged). Quebec’s experience with minority government has been relatively brief — both of those governments went back to the polls within two years.

But there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty heading into this pre-election campaign. Léger finds that 42% of PQ voters say their choice isn’t definitive, while 50% of Liberal and 60% of CAQ voters say the same thing. The potential for more significant movement between now and October is huge.

And though the PQ’s Paul St-Pierre Plamondon and the PLQ’s Charles Milliard haven’t had the best few weeks, this shift does seem to be because of Fréchette.

On who Quebecers prefer to be premier, Fréchette is up four points since last month to 20%, putting her just two points behind St-Pierre Plamondon. That’s the best score for a CAQ leader in a year, while St-Pierre Plamondon has slipped eight points on this question since September.

Most remarkable of all, the number of Quebecers who say they are satisfied with the government’s performance has surged 18 points since January to 47%, with dissatisfaction plummeting by half to 33%. This is the same sort of remarkable turnaround in government satisfaction numbers that we saw when Mark Carney replaced Justin Trudeau in March 2025.

These aren’t the firmest held views — nearly all of those who say they are satisfied chose the “mostly satisfied” instead of the “very satisfied” option. But even the intensity of opposition has fallen, with only 16% of Quebecers polled saying they are very dissatisfied.

More to the point, Léger found that 39% think Fréchette is doing an excellent or good job, while just 15% say she is doing a bad or very bad job. It’s been only a couple of months since two-thirds (or more) of Quebecers were upset with François Legault’s government.

Léger found that 35% of the CAQ’s current supporters are voters who left but have since returned to the party, while 22% say they are new supporters to the CAQ. That’s an interesting development. While not a huge portion of the total electorate, this suggests that about four or five percent of all Quebecers are now saying they’ll vote for the CAQ after having not supported them in the past.

There was another poll published this week that also looks good for the CAQ, but it comes with some big question marks. The poll by Mainstreet Research had the Liberals leading with 31%, followed by the CAQ at 25% and the PQ at just 23%, a score that is quite out of step with where every other pollster has put the PQ in recent months (and years).

Adding to the question marks was the very poorly-translated poll report originally published with a methodological statement that had either not been updated since the 2021 census or suggests that Mainstreet weighed the poll according to the 2016 census. More concerning was that the total sample of 1,225 “l’habitant” [sic] included only 21 respondents under the age of 35 and just 120 under the age of 50. Those were weighted up significantly (which adds to the potential for error), but even the weighting was unusual as 66% of the weighted sample was over the age of 50, while the percentage of Quebec adults actually over that age is closer to 50%.

Regardless of what this particular poll showed, the broader trend picked up by the Pallas and Liaison surveys, and now corroborated in the more recent Léger poll, suggests that the next election in Quebec is very far from a foregone conclusion. And, contrary to what might have been expected, the shift might not be simply because the Parti Québécois has put an unpopular referendum on the table. Instead, a change of leadership has entirely changed the game. Sound familiar?

Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:

• News out of British Columbia on a recall petition that just might have a chance (but probably doesn’t) and some cabinet resignations in Alberta.

• The latest tracking polls suggest Mark Carney’s Liberals could be sliding a little. Is there something to the numbers, or is it noise? Plus, another poll shows Doug Ford’s Ontario PCs sliding, while Ottawa mayor Mark Sutcliffe holds a narrow lead in a divided field.

• #EveryElectionProject: The 1972 B.C. Liberal leadership race.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Read more

The Liberals are projected to be leading in 227 ridings across the country, a gain of three since last week and they highest the party has been in the model — not by a lot, mind you, as the party hit 226 seats in the April 21 update. But a new high is a new high.

This was partially due to new detailed regional polling out of Quebec from Synopsis Recherche which, among other things, tipped the Liberals into being favoured in Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, Alexandre Boulerice’s soon-to-be vacated seat. It’s worth emphasizing that much of the Liberals’ gains are in precarious territory, as reflected by the average of 213.9 seat wins in the model’s simulations, which is actually a drop of 1.6 seats since last week. The Liberals have moved ahead in more ridings than ever, but so many of them are projected to be marginal toss-ups that, inevitably, the Liberals can’t be expected to win them all.

The Conservatives continue to struggle with 33.8% in the vote projection, a drop of 0.2 points (following a drop of 0.5 points last week). This puts them tied for their lowest-ever vote share in the projection. Leading in only 82 seats puts them at their lowest point as well.

The New Democrats stand at 14 seats in the projection (winning nine on average) while the Bloc Québécois has slid behind in three seats, pushing them down to just 18. That also matches the party’s average number of wins.

For fully interactive charts, tables and maps, head to The Writ’s website:

The trend lines have simply been holding pretty stable for the Liberals — though perhaps there has been a sign of softening in some of the latest polls (more on that later this week in the Weekly Writ). But, for now, the regional numbers are still looking remarkably good for the party. Let’s take a look at them.

Read more

This week on The Numbers, we discuss some new polling numbers out of Alberta and what they say about the path forward for the UCP government. We also chat about Ontario Liberal leadership hopeful Nate Erskine-Smith’s nomination defeat in Scarborough Southwest and recent polls that show Doug Ford’s Ontario PCs losing support. Plus, we have new federal and Quebec polling numbers to dissect before closing with a byelection-themed Quiz.

Looking for even more of The Numbers? If you join our Patreon and support this joint project of ours, you’ll get ad-free episodes every week, bonus episodes several times per month and access to our lively Discord. Join here!

The bonus episodes are also available via an Apple Podcasts subscription.

Looking to add The Numbers to your favourite podcasting app? You can find it on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Overcast

• Pocket Casts

• Podcast Addict

• RSS Feed

Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history that lands in your inbox every Thursday morning.

Reading this in your email inbox and having trouble viewing any of the charts? To optimize them for your device, click/tap the charts or view them on thewrit.ca.

Politics tends to lose its frenetic energy when a majority government descends upon Ottawa. But while Mark Carney’s Liberals seem safe from worrying about an election in the short term, that doesn’t mean that politics is about to get boring.

Sure, there are still some elements of intrigue and uncertainty at the federal level — byelections, floor-crossings, defections and resignations, not to mention leadership questions — but most of the action seems to now be moving to the provincial scene.

That action will impact federal politics sooner than later. But there’s already a few things to circle on the calendar.

October is going to be an incredibly important month. Quebec is holding its provincial election on October 5 and the outcome is entering “unpredictable” territory. The polls (more on that below) suggest the Parti Québécois and Liberals are neck-and-neck and that the Coalition Avenir Québec might just be able to claw itself back into the race — or at least into some level of relevancy. The PQ is still favoured to win, however, because of its broader support among francophones. But a majority is far from a certainty, or even a likelihood, which might put Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s referendum plans on ice. If the PQ manages to get its majority, then the country stands a very good chance of finding itself in the midst of a Quebec referendum within the next four years and all the uncertainty that will come with it.

An Alberta referendum is already scheduled to be held in the short term. The province is already holding a referendum on nine immigration-related questions on October 19. There is a very strong possibility that Premier Danielle Smith will make it a nice round list of 10 referendum questions, with the 10th being on Alberta independence, though a court quashing the separation petition in a ruling yesterday complicates matters.

Polls suggest that a referendum on Alberta independence is unlikely to pass (see poll below). But referendum campaigns can easily take on a life of their own. And even a defeat of an independence push will not necessarily put it to bed, as the 1980 Quebec referendum — won rather handily by the No side with nearly 60% support — has demonstrated. Whatever the outcome, the referendum will put intense pressure on the governing United Conservative Party, which is nominally on the federalist side but with a membership (and voter base) that seems to be more separatist than not.

This referendum hangs over the discussions between Smith and Carney and colours the federal government’s shift on pipeline policy. In some ways, the provincial tail is wagging the federal dog on this.

These are the two hinge moments (to borrow a Carney phrase) that will be the most important for the country in the coming months. But politics in other provinces are also in transition, with repercussions that will be felt over the coming years.

There’s the B.C. Conservative leadership race, which will select a potential premier-in-waiting (as discussed last week) by the end of the month. That contest has pushed the party rather far to the right on Indigenous reconciliation and DRIPA, which looks likely to be a dominant issue in British Columbia politics in the run-up to the next scheduled election in 2028 (or earlier, should David Eby’s razor-thin majority government fall).

In Ontario, the Liberals are choosing their next leader in November. The turmoil within the leadership contest itself (more on that below) is dramatic enough. But polls suggest the Ontario Liberals have closed the gap on the PCs, meaning the next leader of the party will have a real opportunity to put pressure on Premier Doug Ford. When governing parties are up against the wall, that’s when they can be the most unpredictable.

Politics in Canada’s four largest provinces are in flux at the moment and that uncertainty will have (and already has had) some repercussions for Prime Minister Carney in Ottawa. A dull, stable majority government? Not so much.

Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:

• News out of the Ontario Liberal leadership race as Nate Erskine-Smith loses the Scarborough Southwest Liberal nomination, plus a new electoral map for Quebec and some new numbers on Indigenous voting in that province. There has also been a floor-crossing in Nova Scotia and some municipal results out of New Brunswick.

• Polls show the Parti Québécois and the Liberals are still neck-and-neck in Quebec, with the CAQ showing signs of life. Plus, an update on the newest federal polls, a survey about pipelines, new Alberta polling numbers and more signs of trouble for Doug Ford’s PCs.

• #EveryElectionProject: Lomer Gouin wins the 1912 Quebec election.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Erskine-Smith loses nomination, OLP leadership bid now in question

The best-laid schemes of mice and Ontario Liberal leadership contenders…

Nate Erskine-Smith’s hoped-for path to the leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party hit a bit of a roadblock on the weekend, when the Beaches—East York MP failed to win the OLP nomination in the riding of Scarborough Southwest by a margin of just 19 votes — a result Erskine-Smith feels should be invalidated if the allegations of irregularities he has highlighted are proven to be true.

Read more

Poilievre often references the number of votes his party received in the last election as a proof-point of the strength of his leadership and the importance of his Conservative opposition.

With the caveat that the Conservatives did not, in fact, receive 8.3 million votes in the last election (they received 8,113,484, which would normally be rounded off to 8.1 million, or maybe 8.2 million if one is being very generous, but not 8.3 million, a mistake that Poilievre has made before) Poilievre is not wrong that his opposition mandate comes from the millions of Canadians who voted for him in 2025.

But the rhetorical strength of that mandate is somewhat diminished when, today, the Conservatives no longer seem to have the support of 8.1 million Canadians (or, for that matter, 8.3 million).

According to The Writ’s latest update to the Vote and Seat Projection, the Conservatives currently sit at 34% support, a drop of 7.3 percentage points since the last election. That would suggest that, if an election were held today and if turnout was a constant, the Conservatives would receive roughly 6.7 million votes, a drop of just over 1.4 million in little more than a year.

We’ll delve into where these losses have occurred in a moment, but first here is where the projection stands this week:

There’s been little change since last week, with the Liberals up marginally to 46.3% and leading in 224 ridings. The projection awards them 215.5 seats on average (which takes into account potential polling and modelling errors), an increase of 4.1 seats since last week. The average Conservative seat haul has dropped 3.6 seats to 99.8. The New Democrats have ticked up a small amount to 9.1% of the vote and win an average of 8.3 seats, while the Bloc is largely unchanged.

For fully interactive charts, tables and maps, head to The Writ’s website:

But let’s take a deeper look at the Conservatives, where their losses have been steepest and why it’s a bit of a stretch to lean on the party’s results from more than a year ago.

Read more

This week on The Numbers, we take a dive into some of the latest federal polls. We also break down new fundraising numbers and discuss the ongoing Conservative leadership race (and provincial voting intentions) in British Columbia. We then close with a prime ministerial Quiz.

Looking for even more of The Numbers? If you join our Patreon and support this joint project of ours, you’ll get ad-free episodes every week, bonus episodes several times per month and access to our lively Discord. Join here!

The bonus episodes are also available via an Apple Podcasts subscription.

Looking to add The Numbers to your favourite podcasting app? You can find it on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Overcast

• Pocket Casts

• Podcast Addict

• RSS Feed

Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history that lands in your inbox every Thursday morning.

Reading this in your email inbox and having trouble viewing any of the charts? To optimize them for your device, click/tap the charts or view them on thewrit.ca.

By the end of the month, the B.C. Conservative Party will have a new leader and the province, just maybe, will have a new premier-in-waiting.

While it’s clear that the Conservatives appear to have some momentum against David Eby’s B.C. NDP government, figuring out who will actually win the leadership race isn’t very straightforward.

Let’s start with the slate of candidates. The list was as long as 11 at one point in this race to replace John Rustad, who led the party to 44 seats and official opposition in the 2024 provincial election. It has since been whittled down to five candidates: Iain Black, Caroline Elliott, Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Yuri Fulmer and Peter Milobar.

Milobar is the only sitting MLA among the field, Black is a former B.C. Liberal MLA and Findlay is a former Conservative MP. Fulmer ran for the party (unsuccessfully) in 2024 and Elliott was involved with B.C. United before it collapsed ahead of the election. To simplistically profile these candidates, Milobar and Black are more typical centre-right politicians, Findlay and Fulmer are running to the right of the field (Fulmer boasts an electoral pact with the very right-wing OneBC party), and Elliott is somewhere between them. One of the major themes of the contest has been fighting over who is the “real” Conservative — which is an awkward debate to be having, considering that most of the party’s voter base used to vote for the B.C. Liberals.

For the time being, it does seem that this contest has largely been an internal fight with a greater focus on what the Conservative membership prioritizes vs. what the broader electoral cares about. That’s not unusual for a leadership race, but the heavy weight given to arguments over issues like DEI and Indigenous reconciliation do not seem well-attuned to the pocketbook issues that top polls in British Columbia.

That it’s an inward-looking race is also reflected in the polls. British Columbians simply don’t have strong views about these five contestants.

A recent poll by Research Co. suggested that most voters in the province either were unsure of their opinions of or did not recognize the candidates. The most recognized were Elliott and Milobar, but even for those two 64% of respondents drew a blank. There was also no big difference among British Columbians when it came to their views of the candidates — Elliott had the best net score at +2 (19% favourable to 17% unfavourable) while Black had the worst net score at -4 (14% to 18%). This does not suggest that any of these candidates have broken through.

This extends to the B.C. Conservative voter base. Among people who voted for the party in the last election, no candidates registered more than 45% recognition. Elliott had the highest favourable ratings among past B.C. Conservative voters at 27%, but there were only a few points separating her from the other four. No candidate is all that divisive, either, with Milobar have the highest unfavourables at 20%.

Polling of the general population can give us some signals in a leadership contest, but normally only when there is a clear frontrunner. When a candidate has mass appeal, that appeal often extends to the membership or, at the very least, gives that membership a very clear indication of who is the most electable candidate. Party members rarely ignore those signals entirely.

But polling of the general population gives us no such clues in this case. The candidates are still largely unknown and none is way ahead of the others. Research Co. tested voting intentions with each of the candidates and found no significant difference. Elliott gave the Conservatives a two-point lead. Findlay and Fulmer put the party behind by two points. It’s all marginal stuff.

More useful are polls of those party members. Polling for Elliott’s campaign, Pallas Data conducted a survey of 1,253 members of the party, using the membership list and weighting the results by region, which replicates the B.C. Conservative leadership system that gives each riding an equal weight (as long as they have 100 members).

Of course, being a poll commissioned by a campaign raises some cautionary flags — it seems like every poll that has been published throughout this campaign has shown the commissioning candidate in the lead. But the results are nevertheless worth diving into, as this is a poll drawn from the membership list and Pallas does good work.

The poll finds that Elliott leads with 31% support, followed by Findlay at 24%, Black at 18%, Milobar at 9% and Fulmer at 7%. Another 12% were undecided.

It’s hard to know if this matches the vibes of the race, though it does seem that Elliott is considered the frontrunner. Regardless, the results suggest that there are a few paths to victory for the top three candidates.

Elliott is the second choice of enough members to help her keep growing from one ballot to the next. Her combined first and second choice support is 42%, higher than any other candidate. She does particularly well among Black and Milobar supporters, suggesting that she should get a significant boost from the elimination of these two candidates. But it could be a problem if Black is on the final ballot with her, rather than eliminated on the penultimate ballot.

Black has a lot of opportunity for growth. He ranks second to Findlay among Fulmer supporters and then gets a third of Milobar’s second choice, which could be enough to boost him beyond Findlay and put him on the final ballot with Elliott. At that point, Findlay’s second choices seem more likely to go his way than Elliott’s, which could crown him the winner.

For Findlay, she looks likely to grow from the elimination of Fulmer. But her path is tougher than that of either Elliott or Black, because Elliott and/or Black ranks ahead of her for second choice support among all the other camps.

One other factor here could be ballot exhaustion. Members aren’t required to rank any candidates second (or third). Pallas found that those who say they have no second choice comprise a significant portion of the membership, running from a low of 25% among Fulmer supporters to a high of 43% among Elliott’s. In all, 37% of members say they have no second choice. For these members, if their candidate is eliminated on one of the ballots their vote will no longer be active.

By simply lowering the denominator, ballot exhaustion always benefits the frontrunner. If Elliott is the leading candidate then she will be the beneficiary. (Here’s a simple way to explain it: imagine if Elliott has 41% of 100% of active ballots and then 20% of those active ballots disappear. Without gaining a single vote, she now has 41% of 80%, a majority, and wins.)

If this poll is an accurate reflection of the ballot, we would likely see one of the following two scenarios play out:

1. Elliott vs. Black

   1. Fulmer is eliminated on the first ballot and Findlay is the biggest beneficiary, keeping her in second but not boosting her enough to surpass Elliott.

   2. Milobar is eliminated on the second ballot and enough of his support goes to Black to boost him past Findlay. Elliott also gets a big chunk and moves closer to victory, aided along by ballot exhaustion.

   3. Findlay is eliminated and her support goes predominantly to Black, but it might not be enough. The final ballot might be either a relatively clear Elliott win or a toss-up that could go to Black.

2. Elliott vs. Findlay

   1. Fulmer is eliminated on the first ballot and Findlay is the biggest beneficiary, keeping her in second but not boosting her enough to surpass Elliott, who will continue to be the biggest beneficiary of ballot exhaustion.

   2. Milobar is eliminated on the second ballot but it does not boost Black enough to push him past Findlay.

   3. Black is eliminated on the third ballot and the combination of his second choices and Milobar’s third choices gives Elliott the win.

In order for Findlay to come out ahead, she would need to perform much better on the first ballot and would need Fulmer to do far better than the 7% in this poll. It’s hard to see a path for her unless her and Fulmer do far better than the combined 31% in this survey.

While the Research Co. poll suggested that none of these leaders do head-and-shoulders above the others in the match-up against the B.C. NDP, a new poll from the Angus Reid Institute suggests that the prize up for grabs is a good one — because the Conservatives have moved ahead of the New Democrats, and comfortably so.

The poll gave the Conservatives 46% support, a gain of two points from the previous ARI poll conducted in March. The NDP was down six points to 36%, putting them well back. Much of that support appears to have gone to the Greens, who were up four points to 13%. Support for other parties was down three points to 4%.

The survey showed the NDP and Conservatives effectively tied in Metro Vancouver and on Vancouver Island and along the North Coast, with the Conservatives leading in the Fraser Valley and the B.C. Interior. That would easily deliver the Conservatives a majority government.

But it seems clear that it is not necessarily the B.C. Conservative leadership race that has boosted the party — we’ve already seen that it hasn’t resonated to the broader public. Instead, it’s the performance of the NDP government that has put wind in Conservative sails.

The recent debate over DRIPA has been a flashpoint in the B.C. Conservative leadership race but it has also been clumsily handled by Premier David Eby, who had to back down on his plan to hold a vote on DRIPA in the legislature when it wasn’t clear that he get his own caucus entirely behind him. The ARI found that 55% of British Columbians feel Eby has done a bad or very bad job “balancing the land rights of Indigenous peoples with private property rights”. Only 22% think he has done a good job on this.

The premier’s approval ratings have dropped. It’s no surprise that the NDP’s support has dropped along with it. And it isn’t just the polls that have indicated softness in NDP support, as first quarter fundraising also corroborates these poll numbers to some extent. Elections BC reports that the Conservatives raised $1.1 million over the first three months of the year, outpacing the NDP’s $700,000. This is only the second time the Conservatives have raised more money than the NDP in a single quarter, the first being in the run-up to the 2024 election.

So, the stakes are high in the B.C. Conservative leadership race. The next leader, whoever it is, will take over a party that is very well-placed to defeat the New Democrats in the next provincial election. That’s only scheduled for 2028, but the NDP has the slimmest of majorities (47 seats in a 93-seat legislature) and it is by no means guaranteed that the government can survive for another two years.

B.C. Conservative party members have an important choice to make on May 30. Parties often claim that leadership races are to choose the next premier or prime minister. This time, it might be truer than it usually is.

Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:

• News on party fundraising for the first three months of 2026 and another upcoming vacancy in the House of Commons that spotlights Avi Lewis’s refusal to run for a seat. Plus, the Alberta separatists submit their petition signatures and the Saskatchewan NDP loses an MLA.

• Polls show little change at the federal level, but suggest increased confidence in Carney’s negotiating skills. Plus, another poll in Quebec puts the Liberals and PQ in a tie.

• #EveryElectionProject: The electorate polarizes (again) in the 1979 B.C. election.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Party fundraising remains high one year after election

While the last election is now in the rear-view mirror and the next election could be years away, that doesn’t mean political parties have stopped fundraising. Indeed, the four parties that file quarterly combined for $18.3 million in fundraising over the first three months of 2026. Only in the first three months of 2025, when parties were gearing up for an election and the campaign began, have the four parties ever combined for a bigger start to a year.

The Conservatives led the way for the 17th consecutive quarter with $9.4 million raised from just over 40,000 contributions. That’s down slightly from the last non-election first quarter (Q1) in 2024, but is still more than the party raised in Q2, Q3 and Q4 of 2025. It’s actually quite rare for parties to raise more money in Q1 than in Q4 of the previous year, but the Conservatives did just that, and for the first time since 2022.

While the Liberals haven’t been able to match the Conservatives’ fundraising juggernaut, they have certainly upped their game from the end of the Justin Trudeau era. With $6.8 million raised from about 36,000 contributions, the Liberals registered their best Q1 on record with the sole exception of last year’s election Q1. Like the Conservatives, they also saw growth between Q4 2025 and Q1 2026, the first time they’ve managed that outside of an election.

The New Democrats had a good fundraising quarter by their more modest standards. The party raised $1.7 million from about 28,000 contributions, making Q1 2026 the party’s best Q1 since 2015, when the NDP was in the official opposition role, with again the sole exception of Q1 2025. The NDP’s leadership contestants also combined for an additional $1.5 million in fundraising. The combined $3.2 million that went into the broader NDP pool would rank Q1 2026 as the NDP’s best quarter (wherever it falls on the calendar) since the 2021 election.

It was a more typical Q1 for the Bloc Québécois, which raised $330,000 from about 2,000 contributions. In the non-election Q1s of 2022, 2023 and 2024, the Bloc raised between $323,000 and $353,000, putting this most recent quarter comfortably within that range.

These fundraising numbers suggest that the landscape remains competitive between the Liberals and Conservatives. Though the Conservatives out-raised the Liberals by about $2.6 million, the gap averaged $5.6 million between Pierre Poilievre’s arrival as Conservative leader and the end of 2024. In that last year of Trudeau’s leadership, the Conservatives out-raised the Liberals by a total of $26.6 million. While they still have more cash sloshing around party coffers than do the Liberals, the Conservatives simply don’t have the same crushing advantage they once had.

(Since the Greens and People’s Party did not hit the threshold of 2% of the vote in the last election, neither party is required to file quarterly. As with other small parties, the Greens and PPC only need to file annual reports. These are usually available during the summer.)

Jonathan Wilkinson to vacate seat this summer

As was long rumoured (though it seemed to have been put on ice earlier this year), Liberal MP and former cabinet minister Jonathan Wilkinson will be appointed as Canada’s ambassador to the European Union. He says he will take the post and vacate his seat likely in July.

Wilkinson was first elected in the riding of North Vancouver (now North Vancouver—Capilano) in the 2015 election and served stints as the minister of energy and natural resources, environment and climate change and fisheries, oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard in Justin Trudeau’s government. He was left out of cabinet in Mark Carney’s first post-election shuffle.

His departure sometime in July will set the clock ticking on a byelection to fill the vacancy. With once-NDP, now-Independent MP Alexandre Boulerice expected to vacate his seat of Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie late in the summer ahead of Quebec’s provincial election, and Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith also slated to resign his seat of Beaches—East York as part of his bid for the Ontario Liberal leadership, we appear set for a trio of byelections sometime this fall.

The Liberals might try to rush these byelections earlier (or hold them separately). But if they intend to hold them at the same time, the municipal elections in British Columbia and Ontario and the provincial election in Quebec, all scheduled to be held in October, could complicate matters.

We don’t have a clue just yet who might run in these byelections, let alone when they will be held. But we do know who won’t be on the ballot: NDP leader Avi Lewis.

Lewis says he wants to tour the country to speak to voters and to build the party — a laudable goal. But it is surely no coincidence that Lewis would struggle to win any of these three byelections. While he would argue otherwise, it is hard to make the case that the NDP is better served by not having a leader in the House of Commons. Lewis has often been in Ottawa when Parliament is sitting anyway. And, though fundraising is up, the New Democrats can ill-afford to use any of its resources to pay Lewis a salary (which, according to The Globe and Mail, Lewis is not yet receiving from the party). Lastly, it is hard to make the case that voters should send more New Democrats to the House of Commons, and that they have an important role to play there, when the leader is not making it a priority.

It’s not as if these aren’t plausible seats for Lewis.

Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie is an NDP seat, and it is natural for a seatless party leader to seek their seat in a riding formerly held by the party — as Jagmeet Singh did in Burnaby South in early 2019 and as Pierre Poilievre did in Battle River—Crowfoot last year.

Beaches—East York was won by the New Democrats in 2011 and was won by the Ontario New Democrats in 2018. In addition to its modern NDP roots, Lewis’s father Stephen represented the adjacent riding at Queen’s Park in the 1970s.

And North Vancouver—Capilano is across the Burrard Inlet from Vancouver Centre, where Lewis ran in 2025, and is right next door to (and, after the last redistribution, contains part of) West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, where Lewis ran in 2021. Most of the federal riding was won by the provincial NDP in the 2024 B.C. provincial election.

But the reality is that two of these seats are near-certain holds for the Liberals, and the third is a potential pick-up. I’ve discussed before how the Liberals stand a good chance in Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie with the departure of Boulerice. The Liberals beat the NDP in Beaches—East York by their fourth-largest margin in Ontario. And the NDP managed just 4.2% of the vote in North Vancouver—Capilano in the last election. The last time the New Democrats even finished second in the riding was in 1965.

So, it makes sense for Lewis to not run to fill any of these vacancies — but primarily because of his odds of winning them, not because his time is better-served elsewhere.

When it comes to the timing of these byelections, the Liberal majority in the House, which now stands at 174 to 169, will be reduced to 172 to 168 when these three seats are vacated. The party might be willing to live with a four-seat majority and wait to hold these byelections in late November or early December to keep them out of the way of the provincial and municipal campaigns. Or, they might just want to secure those seats as soon as they can. Tick-tock.

ELECTION NEWS BRIEFS

ALBERTA REFERENDUM PETITION - The organizers of a petition asking for a referendum question on Alberta separation say they have 301,620 signatures, surpassing the 178,000 threshold set by the province for consideration. The signatures need to be verified, a process that will await a court ruling on the proposed referendum question. An earlier petition organized by Thomas Lukaszuk, a former PC minister, on Alberta staying in Canada gathered more than 400,000 signatures. One way or another, it seems likely that a 10th question on Alberta independence will be added to the nine (largely related to immigration) already slated to be on the ballot in a referendum to be held on October 19.

SASK NDP LOSES CAUCUS MEMBER - Citing disagreement with the leadership of Carla Beck, Saskatoon Centre MLA Betty Nippi-Albright has left the Saskatchewan NDP caucus and will sit as an Independent. Nippi-Albright was first elected in the 2020 provincial election.

POLLING HIGHLIGHTS

Federal polling update

Not much to report on the polling front this past week, with new polls from Liaison Strategies, Nanos Research and Léger showing the same portrait we’ve seen for weeks. The Liaison and Nanos trackers were nearly identical at 45% for the Liberals, 32-33% for the Conservatives and 9-11% for the NDP. Léger, however, had the NDP at just 6% support — fairly typical for Léger and a reminder that some of those polls showing the New Democrats in the low-teens might be on the higher side of the range.

These three polls show no statistically significant change from when they were last in the field with independent samples. That both Nanos and Léger had the Conservatives gaining (within the margin of error) might serve to give the party hopes that they’ve hit bottom and might be bouncing back somewhat. But it’s thin gruel.

This week’s Nanos poll puts Mark Carney ahead on the preferred prime minister question with 51%, a small recovery after a few weeks of trending downwards. Pierre Poilievre sits at 24%, followed by Avi Lewis at 5%.

Has the arrival of Lewis on the scene changed much? It doesn’t seem so. The last Nanos poll conducted before Lewis won the NDP leadership had support for interim leader Don Davies at 2.6%. Lewis has increased that by 2.5 points. That is a statistically significant shift, even if it isn’t all that big. But it isn’t clear where it came from. Compared with that poll, Carney is now down 3.4 points. But those who responded “unsure” are also down 2.1 points. So, it’s possible that Lewis took away a tiny portion of Carney’s support, but it’s also possible that Lewis gained from those who were previously unsure, as all the other leaders are also up (though marginally).

POLLING NEWS BRIEFS

CANADIANS ON NEGOTIATIONS - Polling by the Angus Reid Institute shows that confidence in “Canada’s negotiating team, including Prime Minister Mark Carney” to land a good deal in negotiations with the United States has increased from 42% in September 2025 to 51% in April 2026, with those saying they are “very confident” jumping from 11% to 17%. Those who are not that confident or not confident at all have dropped from 53% to 42% over that time. Of those who are not confident, nearly half of them say it’s because “the Trump administration is too unpredictable.”

TIED IN QUEBEC - In its first poll of voting intentions in Quebec, Liaison Strategies puts the Parti Québécois and the Liberals in a dead-heat at 32% apiece. The Coalition Avenir Québec follows with 16%, while the Conservatives and Québec Solidaire close out the list with 11% and 7%, respectively. Despite the close race provincewide, the PQ remains the favourite to win the most seats thanks to its 18-point lead over the Liberals among francophones. Liaison gauged support for independence at 36%, the highest registered in any poll since April 2025.

12-MONTH ELECTORAL CALENDAR

• May 11: Municipal elections in New Brunswick

• May 30: British Columbia Conservative leadership

  • Candidates: Iain Black, Caroline Elliott, Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Yuri Fulmer, Peter Milobar

• October 5: Quebec provincial election

• October 17: New Brunswick Progressive Conservative leadership

  • Candidates: Daniel Allain, Don Monahan

• October 17: Municipal elections in British Columbia

• October 19: Alberta referendum

• October 26: Municipal elections in Ontario

• October 28: Municipal elections in Manitoba

• November 2: Municipal elections in Prince Edward Island

• November 9: Municipal elections in Saskatchewan

• November 21: Ontario Liberal leadership

  • Candidates: Dylan Marando

• November 28: Nova Scotia Liberal leadership

• Byelections yet to be scheduled

  • ON - Scarborough Southwest (to be called by August)

  • PE - Cornwall–Meadowbank (to be called by September)

  • MB - The Pas—Kameesak (to be called by September)

  • NS - Chéticamp–Margarees–Pleasant Bay (date TBD)

  • CA - Beaches—East York (potential resignation pending)

  • AB - Calgary Shaw (resignation pending)

  • CA - Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie (resignation pending)

  • CA - North Vancouver—Capilano (resignation pending)

• Party leadership dates yet to be set

  • Federal Greens (Elizabeth May announced on August 19, 2025)

(ALMOST) ON THIS DAY in the #EveryElectionProject

B.C.’s politics polarizes even more

May 10, 1979

This was originally published on May 10, 2023.

At the end of a whirlwind three years in office, Dave Barrett’s quick-moving, reforming and often unfocused B.C. NDP government went down to defeat at the hands of Social Credit, which had galvanized the right-of-centre vote behind a familiar name: Bill Bennett, son of former premier W.A.C. Bennett.

The Socreds had succeeded in eating into the Progressive Conservatives’ vote and stealing away the right-wingers that were still backing the B.C. Liberals.

Nearly four years later, Bennett aimed to keep his electoral coalition together.

A day after announcing what his government called a “sunshine budget” “crammed with benefits for every taxpayer”, Bennett pre-empted the television and radio networks to make his announcement. He promised the networks it would take five minutes, but it took him 20 minutes to declare that British Columbians would be going to the polls on May 10, 1979.

That set the date just 12 days before the federal election — a coincidence that worked very well for Bennett’s Social Credit Party. The federal campaign would divide the attention and resources the New Democrats and PCs could dedicate to the provincial battle. Bennett’s party had no such complication.

The central plank of Bennett’s campaign would be the giveaway of five shares of the B.C. Resources Investment Corporation, each worth around $60, to every British Columbian. The BCRIC was a holding company that invested in B.C.’s resource industry, and the government encouraged British Columbians to invest some of their own money, too. It would eventually go bust and people would lose a lot of their investments, but in 1979 it didn’t turn out to be the campaign issue Bennett had hoped it would be — especially after Dave Barrett said that the giveaway was irreversible.

Despite his drubbing at the polls in 1975, Barrett was still leader of the B.C. NDP. He hoped to make a comeback.

The New Democrats had learned their lesson, though. While Barrett ran against the Socred record of austerity measures, he also ran against type: he was calmer, more moderate. He admitted his government had made mistakes and had tried to move too far too quickly.

The NDP had went “from the wilderness into power,” Barrett said. “It’s had a taste of power. It doesn’t like the wilderness any more. The party is more realistic. I’m more realistic.”

The move to the centre was part of a broader drift in B.C. politics. The PCs and Liberals had been decimated over the last few elections, and with the Liberals running only a handful of candidates the NDP targeted their remaining voters, especially those that could swing results in the suburbs around Victoria and Vancouver.

Bennett, whose style The Globe and Mail’s John Clarke called “heavy, sometimes inarticulate and generally humorless”, attacked the record of the single-term NDP government, claiming it had ruined the province’s finances and that any future government would be just as radical, despite Barrett’s new approach.

“Don’t be fooled,” Bennett warned. “They haven’t changed their spots; they have just put on a cloak to cover them up.”

“Before the election,” he added, “they act like Groucho Marx; it’s only after the election they act like Karl Marx.”

A key factor deciding Social Credit’s re-election would be the state of the Progressive Conservatives. Party leader Victor Stephens couldn’t gain any traction, instead garnering the most attention when he complained about the lack of support he was getting from Joe Clark’s federal Tories. There were claims the PCs had a secret deal with the Socreds, ensuring the federal party would provide no assistance to the provincial party in exchange for some funding for federal Tory candidates from Social Credit coffers.

One anecdote related to the PC campaign that was reported in the Globe and Mail was how “two Tory candidates decided to ‘come out’ as homosexuals at a Vancouver public meeting after an NDP candidate cracked that he’d ‘rather be gay than Tory’.” In a sign of how things have changed since the 1970s, the reporter used this anecdote as a reflection of how the Tories, rather than the NDP, lacked candidates who were “clear winners”.

As election day approached, the race looked tight. The NDP had run a smooth campaign and set the narrative on most days, but the increased chances of an NDP victory also ensured that reluctant Socred voters would cast a ballot, doing some of Bennett’s work for him. Social Credit also outspent the NDP by more than two-to-one, spending $2.4 million, worth roughly $9.5 million today.

Bill Bennett and the Socreds needed every advantage they could get (and, later on, their campaign would be tarred by charges of ‘dirty tricks’ involving phoney letters to the editor and unaccounted-for slush funds). The party lost four seats but secured a small majority government with 31. The party’s share of the vote dropped slightly to 48.2%, but it was enough.

The New Democrats took 26 seats, with gains in northern B.C., Victoria, Surrey, Coquitlam and Burnaby. With 46% of the vote, the NDP had jumped nearly seven points from 1975 as more than 94% of British Columbians backed one of the two big parties.

The PCs took just 5.1% of the vote and lost their only seat, while the Liberals dropped 0.5 points, with nearly all of their lost support going to the New Democrats.

It was the first time in British Columbia since the turn of the century and the beginning of partisan politics that no Independents or third-party MLAs won a seat. B.C.’s politics had polarized in a way that wouldn’t change until the final collapse of the country’s last Social Credit government in 1991.

More from the #EveryElectionProject