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.

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Canada’s counter-tariffs to the U.S. tariffs went into force on Tuesday. They were then countered by counter-counter-tariffs and import restrictions from the United States.

It’s not an easy time for Canadians. But polls suggest their resolve isn’t about to break anytime soon.

Surveys published over the last week by Nanos Research, Léger and the Angus Reid Institute all point in the same direction: a remarkable unity on what approach Canada should take against the United States.

Support for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s decision to reject a trade deal with the U.S. remains very high, with Nanos finding that 85% of Canadians support or somewhat support rejecting the deal (with only 10% in the “somewhat” category). That’s a huge number, made all the more notable since the Nanos questionnaire explicitly included mention of “the potential economic risk to Canadians” that came with ceasing negotiations.

This is in part driven by the fact that Canadians have had enough of Donald Trump and his ongoing insults. Nanos found that 74% of Canadians think that the United States is not a trustworthy ally, while Léger found that 41% now view the United States as an enemy country. Fully 85% of Canadians reject the idea of becoming a U.S. state, according to Léger, with only 9% thinking that it’s a good idea.

When it comes to next steps, there is broad support for the retaliatory tariffs imposed by the Canadian government. Léger put that support at 74%, while Nanos gauged it at 80%. Again, Nanos asked respondents if they’d support tariffs “even if that means Canadians end up paying higher prices for goods”. This means that these support levels are despite a reminder to Canadians that they might have to foot the bill for hitting back at the Americans.

The Angus Reid Institute backs this up — it found majority support for staying the course on refusing to make important concessions even if household costs rose by as much as 20%, or if Canada entered a recession or if local businesses started shutting down. Only when major factories start closing and people lose their own jobs does support for sticking to our guns fall below the majority threshold. Even so, a plurality would still be in favour of not backing down.

Support for taking a “hard approach” and refusing to make difficult concessions has risen to 73% in the ARI survey, the highest its been since the ARI started asking this question last summer. The only division on this question is among those who voted for the Conservatives in 2025 — they’re split down the middle between a hard and a soft approach.

This is the challenge facing the Conservatives and their leader Pierre Poilievre. Their own voter base is split on this, but virtually everyone else (82% of Bloc voters, 88% of New Democrats and 92% of Liberals) is unwilling to compromise. The Conservatives can’t entirely ignore their own supporters who want to see a more conciliatory approach, but in doing so they risk alienating the other half of their own voters, as well as the vast majority of those who aren’t currently backing them.

It’s also a challenge for Paul St-Pierre Plamondon and the Parti Québécois, who made a faux pas when he dismissed Trump’s threats of retaliation (against Bombardier, for example) as “just a tweet”. The PQ leader appears to be frustrated that the U.S. president has interfered with his path to an easy majority victory in the ongoing Quebec election. But he risks throwing the campaign entirely if he can’t align himself more closely with the mood of Quebecers, who are among the most anti-Trump voters in the country.

Carney is currently at the front of the parade and other leaders, like David Eby in British Columbia, Wab Kinew in Manitoba, Doug Ford in Ontario and Christine Fréchette in Quebec are trying to join him there. The political stakes are sky high at the moment and any misstep could prove very costly. Canadians will be looking to see if any of their leaders’ nerves will crack, because for the time being their own nerves seem rock solid.

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

• How to interpret last week’s provincial byelections in Ontario, plus leadership news out of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and among the federal Greens, as well as a new party being formed in British Columbia and a byelection on the way in Alberta.

• Polls show the Liberals ahead by a wide margin, plus new numbers out of Ontario and Toronto.

• #EveryElectionProject: One last time for Joey Smallwood (except it wasn’t).

• Upcoming milestones for Pierre Poilievre and Wab Kinew.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Cautionary warnings for Ford in byelection results

Doug Ford’s Ontario PCs held on to their two seats in last week’s three provincial byelections, while the New Democrats held on to their single seat in a night that maintained the status quo at Queen’s Park.

The PCs should have breathed a sigh of relief after seeing these results — because they could have been quite a bit worse.

Read more

It’s been a quieter week on the national polling front, so with only a few new data points to add to the projection model there’s been very little shift in the numbers. The Liberals lead with 45.5% — a minor gain of 0.2 points since last week but their highest projected vote share since the end of May — and are leading in 220 seats, winning 213.6 seats on average.

The Conservatives have slipped another 0.2 points to 33%. They’ve been hovering around that number for the last few weeks and are leading in 83 seats, the same number as last week. But more worryingly for the party is that their average seat wins are only 95.8. That’s the lowest ever in the model (since the 2025 election). Remember that the average projection takes into account the number of toss-ups and the Conservative tendency to beat their polls.

So, even if they win their fair share of toss-ups and outperform their polling levels, the Conservatives would still win only around 96 seats. Twice before the Conservatives have won 99 seats (in 2004 and in 2015), but never since the party was formed out of the merger of the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservatives in 2003 has the party won just 96 seats.

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

Moving over to Quebec, a new poll published this morning from Léger shows numbers that are, once again, nearly identical to the latest Pallas Data survey. That being the case, the projection has not shifted much since yesterday’s update.

The Parti Québécois is leading in 59 ridings across Quebec, but their upper ceiling sits at 64 seats — the very threshold for a majority government. The PQ would need to win all of the toss-ups in which they are projected to be leading as well as flip a few seats in which they are trailing in order to form a majority government. That’s not impossible, but it sure would be lucky for the PQ.

That’s why the average seat projection for the PQ is just 49.1 seats. Many of the PQ-CAQ toss-ups are likely to go the CAQ’s way, particularly when poll after poll shows the CAQ’s support being concentrated among the older voters who actually turn out to vote. The CAQ is projected to be leading in just 17 seats but wins an average of 30.6 seats in the projection model. That puts them nearly on par with the Liberals.

The story in Quebec remains one of stability following Christine Fréchette’s and the CAQ’s modest recovery, thanks in large part to Donald Trump. His renewed attacks on Bombardier, which occurred after the Pallas and Léger polls, could further assist Fréchette. But there is a lack of enthusiasm for any of the parties or their leaders in Quebec, so it’s also possible that the numbers won’t shift much.

That’s not the case federally, however. The Liberals appear to be benefitting from another Trump bump and Mark Carney’s personal numbers seem to be on the rise again. I’ll delve into this in further detail in Thursday’s Weekly Writ.

Updated September 8, 2026

The Liberals would win a large majority government if an election were held today, as polls have boosted the party into the mid-40s in popular support as the Conservatives fall back. The gap between the two parties now sits at more than 12 percentage points. The Liberals would win well over 200 seats and the Conservatives would likely win fewer than 100. The NDP and Bloc Québécois are holding relatively steady, though the NDP is in a better position to win official party status than it was in the last election.

Note to Readers: These projections are presented using Datawrapper’s interactive charts. They are best viewed on a desktop. In most cases, you can click, tap or hover over the charts to interact with them.

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.

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, tracking charts going back to the 2025 election and riding projections for all 343 seats in Canada are available for subscribers of The Writ below 👇

Read more

Updated September 8, 2026

Polls this week from Léger and Pallas Data suggest that the parties have largely moved into a holding pattern, indicating that the movement in the polls picked up earlier in the campaign might have ceased.

That is good news for the Parti Québécois, as its lead seemed vulnerable as the Coalition Avenir Québec gained momentum. The projection now shows the PQ leading in 59 seats and winning an average of 49 in the model’s 10,000 simulations. The PQ’s average seat haul is lower than the number of ridings in which it is leading because of the high number of closely-contested seats involving the PQ and the CAQ. The PQ would need to win all of its tosses, as well as a few seats in which it is trailing, to approach the majority threshold. Since that is unlikely, especially as polls show the CAQ has more support among older voters, the model gives the PQ an 80% chance of winning the most seats, but only a 6% chance of a majority government.

The Liberals remain in a position to potentially win enough seats to form the official opposition. The Conservatives and Québec Solidaire are trending slightly upwards and would win some 15 to 20 seats between them.

Note to Readers: These projections are presented using Datawrapper’s interactive charts. They are best viewed on a desktop. In most cases, you can click, tap or hover over the charts to interact with them.

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 provincial and regional polls. The weighted average is then used to project the outcome in all 127 ridings across Quebec, 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 provincial vote projection for each party.

The Seat Leading 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, as well as the number of toss-up contests across the province.

Wondering how to interpret the Seats Leading 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 a party is leading in 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.

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

The table below includes all recent provincial 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.

Vote and seat projections broken down by region, tracking charts, maps and detailed projections for all 127 ridings across Quebec, as well as vote projections for smaller regions within the province, are available for subscribers of The Writ below 👇

Read more

Welcome to the Election Writ, a special-edition newsletter to get you up-to-date on the ongoing campaign in Quebec.

It’s been a relatively placid week on the Quebec election campaign trail, though not through want of trying to mix things up.

With five parties in the running to win seats, all with pockets of strong support in different parts of the province, there’s been a cacophony of platform policies, candidate controversies and attacks against one leader or another. The end result, though, is that nothing has really broken though to capture voters’ attentions.

Perhaps accordingly, the latest Pallas Data poll (the only survey published since September 1) shows very little change in voting intentions. But the changes that did occur, primarily at the regional level, have improved the Parti Québécois’s chances.

Today’s projection update has the PQ leading in 58 seats, a gain of 10 from the last projection update. The party wins 49 seats on average in the model’s 10,000 simulations, another indication of the high number of close contests involving the PQ (the odds are they can’t win all of them). These gains have come at the expense of the CAQ and the Liberals, each down about three seats in the average projection.

The Liberals have fallen below 20% in the vote projection because of how the party’s support is distributed regionally (the vote projection model is not just an average of the polls, but takes into account regional results and turnout) and are leading in 33 seats. On average, they win 30.1 seats — a touch lower than the CAQ’s average haul of 31 seats. If the CAQ beats its polls (and its support among older voters suggests that is likely) and wins enough of the toss-ups, the CAQ could finish second in the seat count and push the Liberals down to third place. The Liberals have never finished worse than second in Quebec.

The PQ’s improved position is due to stronger numbers from Pallas in the regions of Quebec — all those predominantly francophone ridings outside of the Montreal and Quebec City areas. In fact, the projection shows the PQ slipping on the island of Montreal and in Quebec City. But 1) there are not as many seats in those regions and 2) the PQ is not in contention in very many of them, so the PQ can easily afford to lose a step in the two biggest cities if it means doing better where their target seats are located.

Also in today’s newsletter: A deeper look at the Pallas poll and a trip to the Bas-Saint-Laurent.

But if the election is settling in as voters try to locate themselves in the midst of a rather confusing campaign, that doesn’t mean it still isn’t on a razor’s edge.

Read more

This week on The Numbers, we break down what happened on Monday night. We also take a look at the latest federal polling numbers, as well as lay out the state of the race as the Quebec election enters the second week of the campaign. Plus, we preview tonight’s provincial byelections in Ontario and take a look at some new polling numbers out of Alberta.

We also answer questions from our members, including on what is happening with the B.C. Conservative Party. To listen to the extended mailbag segment, join our Patreon right here!

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!

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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.

Now that Monday’s three byelections are in the books, it’s time to look ahead to the next set of byelections — and what Monday’s results might tell us about what’s in store.

There are currently five vacancies in the House of Commons and a sixth is slated to occur in the coming weeks. Those vacancies are:

• Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton: This Quebec riding is located between Montreal and Quebec and is the centre of the province’s dairy industry. Bloc MP Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay vacated the seat in June and is running for the Parti Québécois in the ongoing provincial election.

• Scarborough North: Liberal MP Shaun Chen vacated this Toronto seat a few weeks ago due to health issues caused by a car accident last year that makes it difficult for him to travel to Ottawa.

• Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie: Alexandre Boulerice left the NDP caucus earlier this year to sit as an Independent after announcing his plans to run for Québec Solidaire in the provincial election. Boulerice was the last surviving NDP Quebec MP elected in the Orange Wave of 2011.

• Laurier—Sainte-Marie: Located next door to Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie in downtown Montreal, Liberal MP Steven Guilbeault first left the Liberal candidate and then resigned this seat, citing disagreements with the Carney government’s environmental policies.

• Yorkton—Melville: Conservative MP Cathay Wagantall resigned this rural Saskatchewan seat on Monday. She was first elected in 2015.

• Brantford—Brant South: Conservative MP Larry Brock has signalled his intention to resign this seat in southwestern Ontario later this month. (Note: the riding is officially called Brantford—Brant South—Six Nations, but will have the “Six Nations” portion dropped from the name in a few weeks at the request of the Six Nations of the Grand River.)

As Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton was vacated in June, Mark Carney has until December 19 to call this byelection. Assuming he does not want to call a holiday byelection campaign, it seems more likely this byelection will be called sometime in October or November, after the completion of the Quebec election. If the Liberals intend to call all six byelections at the same time and avoid too much overlap with municipal elections (the last of which will take place in Saskatchewan on November 9), the calls could come in early November, with the byelections being held in early December.

(If the Liberals decide not to call these byelections at the same time, then we could see five of the six called in early 2027.)

This is an interesting set of byelections, with three in Quebec, two in Ontario and one in Saskatchewan. There is a mix of urban seats (Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, Laurier—Sainte-Marie and Scarborough North), seats with a rural component but centred on a small city (Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton and Brantford—Brant South) and a rural riding (Yorkton—Melville). In the last election, two were won by the Liberals, two by the Conservatives, one by the NDP and one by the Bloc. So, every party will be playing defence.

And at least one party will be playing offence.

The results from the last election suggest that a few ridings are unlikely to change hands. The Conservatives won Yorkton—Melville with 77.6% of the vote, beating the Liberals by more than 60 points. The Liberals won Scarborough North with 63%, beating the Conservatives by nearly 30 points. And Laurier—Sainte-Marie went to the Liberals by a margin of 33 points over the NDP. Barring an upset, the incumbents should easily win these three seats and they are all projected as ‘Safe’ for the incumbent parties.

There will be things to watch in these three safe ridings beyond who wins them — the Liberals will want to hold their vote in their two seats and see how much progress they can make in Yorkton—Melville, the NDP (and Bloc) would like to put up some good numbers in Laurier—Sainte-Marie and the Conservatives desperately need to halt the hemorrhage of support they’ve suffered in the last six byelections — but the real interest will be in the other three seats.

The results in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord on Monday have to be making the Liberals kick themselves for not calling a byelection in Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton at the same time (which they could have, as it has been vacant for longer than both Chicoutimi—Le Fjord and Beaches—East York). If the Liberals can get over 50% of the vote in a riding like Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, they can get that share of the vote in almost any riding in Quebec. The Bloc won Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton by just over 10 points, but the swing that took place in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord was big enough for the Liberals to easily overcome that margin if repeated here.

Considering what just happened on Monday, the Bloc will have to work harder than it might have thought to hold this seat. Nevertheless, with the polls where they are in Quebec at the moment, my projections classify it as a Bloc Toss.

Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie will be a key test for the New Democrats. Since 2011, this riding increasingly became a Boulerice seat rather than an NDP seat, but the New Democrats will nevertheless be the incumbents (and have a decent candidate in Pierre Céré). The party demonstrated in Beaches—East York that, when they put some resources into a byelection, they can put up a strong result. Quebec, however, is a different beast for the NDP and this byelection will be a challenge for them. Flipping it will also be a challenge for the Liberals as the last six byelections have not shown big boosts for the Liberals in urban ridings like this one, and their focus might be elsewhere. The model has it as an NDP Toss, but how much of Boulerice’s coattails the NDP can still ride is hard to project.

The Liberals might instead have their focus concentrated on Brantford—Brant South. The Conservatives won it by just over 11 points, but the shift in the polls we’ve seen in Ontario against the Conservatives has put this riding in doubt. The model has it as a Liberal Toss, and chatter in Conservative circles is also that the party could struggle to hold this seat.

That would be a tremendous blow for Pierre Poilievre. The Conservatives have held this part of Ontario since the 2008 election. It’s never been a rock-solid seat, as the Conservative vote ranged between 40% and 41% in the 2015, 2019 and 2021 elections. But it is nevertheless a seat the Conservatives have held for nearly 20 years. If the Conservatives can’t hold Brantford—Brant South, there are many Conservative-held ridings in southwestern, central and eastern Ontario with a similar profile to Brantford—Brant South that will suddenly look in real danger for the first time since the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservatives merged to form the Conservative Party in 2003.

The stakes will be high in these six byelections. If we’re still in a similar public opinion environment as today when they occur, the Liberals will enter the byelections the same way that they did the three on Monday: confident they will hold what they’ve got, and confident that they can make some gains. The Conservatives will be under tremendous pressure not to lose another seat and to avoid serious vote-share losses, while the Bloc will have to make good on its claim that they’re the only viable alternative to the Liberals in Quebec. Avi Lewis will have to prove that the New Democrats aren’t entirely doomed in the province and, in order to avoid the mixed reviews from Monday, show their vote has recovered at least somewhat in ridings like Yorkton—Melville and Brantford—Brant South, where they could expect double-digit support as recently as the 2021 election.

Let the next round of byelections begin!

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

• What to watch in today’s Ontario provincial byelections, plus news on an imploding B.C. Conservative Party, the passing of an MLA and a new candidate for the PEI Liberal leadership.

• Polls show strong support for ending trade negotiations with the United States, and maybe a bump in support for the Liberals. Plus, where things stand in Alberta.

• #EveryElectionProject: The 1959 Prince Edward Island provincial election.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Trio of Ontario byelections to test Ford’s rebound

The byelection fun continues in Ontario today, as voters in three provincial ridings are called to the ballot boxes. These byelections are:

• Scarborough Southwest: Vacated by the NDP’s Doly Begum earlier this year when she opted to run for the federal Liberals in the same riding.

• York—Simcoe: This seat located north of Toronto was vacated by PC cabinet minister Caroline Mulroney, who decided it was the right moment to spend more time with her family. Interestingly, she did not rule out a return to politics.

• Hamilton East—Stoney Creek: This riding was vacated by the PCs’ Neil Lumsden before the completion of his second term as MPP.

These byelections are coming at an interesting time in Ontario politics. Support for Doug Ford and the PCs seemed to be declining over the summer, especially in the wake of the controversy over the purchase (and subsequent cancellation) of a private jet for the premier. But then Donald Trump injected himself once again into domestic politics, targeting Ontario in particular after Ford took to social media and the airwaves to insult the U.S. president. Two of these ridings are located on the shores of Lake Ontario (now called Lake America by the U.S. government and lackeys), which Ford has used to his advantage by putting up a big sign with the lake’s name on it. The early indications are that his support is up.

But the polls have been inconsistent over the last few months, so these byelections will be a useful gauge of where the mood sits in the province. York—Simcoe, which the PCs won by nearly 36 points over the Liberals in the last election and have held since 1995, should be an easy hold for the governing party.

But the margin was only 10.5 points in Hamilton East—Stoney Creek. Not only do the PCs have to hold off the Liberals, who appear to have gotten a bit of a boost from the popularity of their federal cousins, but they will have to hold off the New Democrats, who have nominated former Hamilton Mountain MPP Monique Taylor as their candidate.

The importance of the NDP’s incumbents will be tested in Scarborough Southwest, where Begum had won by just over 12 points over the PCs in the last election. Can the New Democrats hold this riding without an incumbent on the ballot? Both Scarborough Southwest and Hamilton East—Stoney Creek could prove to be three-way races, making them harder to predict.

Unless, that is, Ford is getting the same sort of boost that Carney has gotten in the polls (and in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord). If the PCs are able to hold their two seats, they might have Trump to thank for reviving their fortunes once again.

I’ll have an analysis of the results in next week’s edition of the newsletter.

Are the B.C. Conservatives falling apart?

The B.C. Conservatives, who were just a few thousand votes short of forming government in the 2024 provincial election, have found themselves down nine MLAs in just the last few weeks as internal turmoil appears set to rip apart this party whose success was largely due to the internal turmoil of another party.

The issue is the leadership of Kerry-Lynne Findlay, who narrowly won the B.C. Conservative leadership race in May. She’s replaced people within the party’s organization with further-right loyalists (some of whom have had links with the separatist movement in Alberta), has cozied-up with former Conservative MLAs who were either booted from or quit the party in solidarity with those expulsed MLAs and has adopted a style and language that have made some within the caucus uncomfortable. A caucus meeting scheduled for Monday was abruptly cancelled, ostensibly due to the calling of a byelection in Abbotsford-Mission, but more likely to avoid an open revolt.

The caucus seems to be growing smaller by the day. In mid-August, her former leadership rival Peter Milobar quit the party (and plans to start his own). He was followed in quick succession by the departures of Ian Paton, Rosalyn Bird, Teresa Wat, Brennan Day, Bruce Banman, Áʼa꞉líya Warbus, Donegal Wilson and Scott McInnis. With the resignation of Reann Gasper in Abbotsford-Mission to provide Findlay with a seat in the legislature, the Conservatives are down to just 28 MLAs. They had 44 MLAs after the last election. It’s expected the number might continue to slide.

(Note: I wrote this midday on Wednesday and twice had to come back and increase the number of quitting MLAs. So, at this rate there might be more than nine by the time you’re reading this on Thursday morning!)

Premier David Eby was quick to call the byelection in Abbotsford-Mission for September 26, which will heighten the pressure on Findlay as a victory there is by no means a certainty. Gasper won with 55.4% of the vote in the 2024 election against the NDP’s 44.6% and the New Democrats were able to win in 2020 when there were more candidates on the ballot. It won’t be a two-horse race this time with CentreBC running a candidate (there could be others; nominations close in a few days). If the Conservatives continue to disintegrate over the next few weeks, voters in Abbotsford-Mission might not be so keen to sign on for that.

It was always going to be tough to keep the B.C. Conservatives together, especially as it has drifted further to the right. B.C. politics has long been dominated by the presence of two big parties, one on the centre-left (the NDP) and one on the centre-right (Liberals or Social Credit in the past). Those centre-right parties have been successful when they have managed to earn the support of both federal Conservatives and federal Liberals, but the purity-testing of Findlay and her supporters risks alienating those centrists that decide who forms government in British Columbia.

Prior to the collapse of the re-christened B.C. United, the B.C. Conservatives were little more than a fringe party. They benefited from the unpopularity of Kevin Falcon and the Liberals’ rebrand as B.C. United largely because the Conservative had the right branding at a time when Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives were surging in national polling. There was nothing in particular that made British Columbians flock to a party that earned less than 2% of the vote in eight of the previous 10 elections except its ability to capitalize on brand confusion. A virtuous cycle then emerged as the party rose in the polls — higher polling begot more fundraising and more media attention, which helped further boost the party in the polls.

But the Conservatives found themselves with a partial slate of candidates that were nominated when the party was still on the fringes. The withdrawal of B.C. United from the 2024 election forced the Conservatives and BCU into a shotgun marriage. The populist, red-meat conservative elements of the party found themselves shoulder-to-shoulder with the more moderate former B.C. Liberals. The tensions tore the party apart under John Rustad and the leadership race that followed did nothing to calm that tension, particularly when Findlay ran a campaign that continued to emphasise the importance of purging the party of “Liberals”.

Eby, whose personal popularity has been declining, has been blessed by his opponents. He was barely able to beat a relatively weak and unpopular leader in Rustad in the last election. In the next election it now seems likely he will either face a divided field of parties to his right or a leader who has been severely undermined by her own party.

However it goes, the Abbotsford-Mission byelection looks like a win-win for the New Democrats. Either they defeat Findlay and disrupt the Conservatives even further, or Findlay is elected and secured as the leader of a rump B.C. Conservative Party. Everything’s coming up Eby.

ELECTION NEWS BRIEFS

BC MLA PHILLIP PASSES - Joan Phillip, the NDP MLA for the riding of Vancouver-Strathcona, has passed away. An Indigenous and environmental activist, she was first elected in a 2023 byelection after having previously run for the federal New Democrats in the B.C. Interior. Phillip won her seat by a margin of 50 points over the Conservatives in the last election. The NDP has held this part of Vancouver without interruption since 1972. My condolences to her friends and family.

PEI LIBERAL LEADERSHIP - The Prince Edward Island Liberals have their first candidate for the leadership position vacated by Robert Mitchell earlier this year following his second failed attempt to win a seat in a byelection. Dan Kutcher, the mayor of Summerside, has resigned his post to run for the leader’s job. Kutcher has pledged to run for the Liberals in the district of Summerside-Wilmot whether or not he wins the contest on October 25.

POLLING HIGHLIGHTS

Federal poll update

Over the last week, we’ve gotten new polling by Abacus Data, Ipsos (for Global News), the Innovative Research Group, Synopsis Recherche (for La Presse), Liaison Strategies and Nanos Research. Not all of that polling, though, tells us much about what has shifted since the end of negotiations with the United States.

Five of the six polls give the Liberals a double-digit lead, ranging from 10 points in the Abacus poll to 17 points in the poll by Liaison. The Innovative Research Group (which can sometimes stand alone) has the gap at only five points. The NDP ranges from between 9% to 13% in these surveys.

The two pollsters who have been regularly in the field and have recent post- and pre-rupture surveys to compare suggest the Liberals have gotten a bump. Both Abacus and Liaison have the Liberals gaining three points since early or mid-August.

Ipsos shows little change from its previous poll, but that survey was conducted back in April when the Liberals were already at a high. The IRG shows little change compared with its (unreleased) polling over the summer, while the four-week Nanos poll still predominantly includes survey work done before the collapse of negotiations late on August 21.

The polls published over the last week include lots of insight on how Canadians are feeling about the state of relations between this country and the United States. The broad strokes are that people are concerned, angry at the Americans and ready to retaliate. The polls also show:

• Not that we needed a poll to tell us this, but Donald Trump is back on the agenda. Abacus finds that 45% of Canadians name Trump and his administration as one of the top three issues, up seven points from mid-August. Only the rising cost of living (62%) ranks higher. In Quebec, Trump ranks as the very top issue with 63% listing it in the top three, the highest in the country. Among those who has Trump as one of their top issues, the Liberals are preferred over the Conservatives by a crushing margin of 62% to 18%.

• Support for Carney’s decision to end the trade negotiations is very high in two polls. According to Abacus, 71% of Canadians say it was the right decision, while just 17% say it was the wrong decision. According to Pollara, 78% agree that it was the right thing to walk away, while just 13% disagree.

• Carney gets high grades for his handling of the file, with approval for his handling of the trade negotiations at 60% to 18% disapproval, according to Abacus, and his management of Canada-U.S. relations sitting at 68% to 23% disapproval, according to Pollara.

POLLING NEWS BRIEFS

UCP HOLDS LEAD IN ALBERA - Two new surveys suggest the United Conservative Party has held its lead in Alberta in the run-up to October’s independence referendum. Léger finds the UCP leading by 10 points at 51% to 41% for the NDP, with another 9% of Albertans saying they’d vote for another party. The NDP led by 11 points in Edmonton while the UCP was ahead by seven points in Calgary and 33 points outside of the two big cities. The margin is smaller in a new Research Co. poll, with the UCP leading by three points, 46% to 43%, though the poll has some odd regional results with the NDP ahead by just three points in Edmonton and the UCP ahead by two in Calgary and by just 10 in the rest of the province.

On the independence referendum, Léger puts support for Alberta remaining a province at 65%, while Research has it a little higher at 74%. Support for starting the process to hold a binding referendum on independence was nearly identical in the two surveys at 23% and 22%, respectively. While Albertans seem prepared to vote No to independence, they do not look as likely to vote No on the other nine referendum questions. Research found support for the referendum questions related to immigration at between 58% and 66%. Opinions were more split on the constitutional questions, but the ‘No’ option did not lead on any of them.

12-MONTH ELECTORAL CALENDAR

• September 3: Ontario provincial byelections in Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, York—Simcoe and Scarborough Southwest

• September 14: Alberta provincial byelection in Calgary-Shaw

• September 26: British Columbia provincial byelection in Abbotsford-Mission

• 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 25: PEI Liberal leadership

  • Candidates: Dan Kutcher

• 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 14: Federal Green leadership

  • Candidates: Nira Dookeran, Mike Morrice

• November 21: Ontario Liberal leadership

  • Candidates: Navdeep Bains, Stephanie Bowman, Lee Fairclough, Eric Lombardi, Dylan Marando

• November 21: Nova Scotia Liberal leadership

  • Candidates: Becky Druhan, Amanda Mombourquette

• December 5: New Brunswick Green leadership

• Byelections yet to be scheduled

  • CA - Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton (to be called by December 19)

  • CA - Scarborough North (to be called by February 13)

  • CA - Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie (to be called by February 22)

  • CA - Laurier—Sainte-Marie (to be called by February 27)

  • CA - Yorkton—Melville (to be called by February 28)

  • BC - Vancouver-Strathcona (to be called by February)

  • CA - Brantford—Brant South (resignation pending)

THIS WEEK in the #EveryElectionProject

PEI goes with the flow

September 1, 1959

This was originally published on August 31, 2022.

It was 1959 and Prince Edward Island was in an awkward spot. For the first time since the 1920s, the province had been governed for an extended period of time by a party that also didn’t hold sway in Ottawa.

That had to be fixed.

First elected in 1935 a few months before Mackenzie King’s Liberals returned to federal office, by 1959 the PEI Liberals had been in power for 24 years under four different leaders. The latest was Alex Matheson, who took over in 1953 and won the 1955 election.

Louis St-Laurent was the Liberal prime minister at the time. But in the late 1950s the country had swung to the Progressive Conservatives. John Diefenbaker was elected with a minority government in 1957 and he quickly turned that into a landslide majority the year later. That landslide included a sweep of all four seats in Prince Edward Island.

Undaunted, Matheson sent the province to the polls to boast of his “forward-looking program”, which included free text books for elementary school children, pensions for unmarried women and widows starting at the age of 60 and new trading relationships abroad.

All well and good, but what about Diefenbaker?

All four of his PEI MPs actively participated in the campaign to help elect their provincial cousins, now under the leadership of Walter Shaw.

A 71-year-old farmer and retired deputy minister of agriculture, Shaw didn’t have a seat in the legislature when he took over the opposition PCs, who had just a handful of seats. Matheson obliged Shaw by giving him a bench he could sit on on the floor of the legislative assembly in order to provide some guidance to his MLAs.

Shaw’s platform included the provincial government taking over the portion of teachers’ salaries paid by cash-strapped local school boards. He also pledged support for fishermen and farmers and called the PCs the “party of the causeway”.

Of course, Diefenbaker had merely promised an engineering study about a possible causeway linking Prince Edward Island to New Brunswick, but Shaw made it seem that a vote for the PCs meant a vote for a causeway that was definitely going to happen (it didn’t).

Shaw leaned hard on the notion that PEI needed a friend in the prime minister’s office, saying that Islanders “see the advantage of keeping the province in line with a generous Conservative administration in Ottawa.”

With some degree of self-interest, Matheson said that provincial and federal politics should be kept separate. But his campaign understood they were swimming against the current and instead put a “Matheson government” forward in its advertisements rather than the Liberal brand. Shaw and the PCs, meanwhile, featured Diefenbaker prominently in their advertisements.

It was an unsubtle message, but it worked.

After winning only three seats in 1955, the PCs captured 22 in 1959. The Liberals were reduced to just eight seats, six of them in the southeast corner of the island.

Despite the lop-sided seat result, the voting was actually quite close — the PCs took 50.9% of the vote, a gain of six points since 1955, while the Liberals took the remaining 49.1%.

Bagpipers and 2,500 supporters greeted Shaw for his victory speech, but the results were also greeted warmly in Ottawa. Though they had won a thumping victory only a year before, the Diefenbaker PCs needed some good news. The Liberals had successfully been re-elected on an anti-Diefenbaker message in Newfoundland the month before and new Gallup polling was showing support for the federal PCs slumping. An upset win in PEI improved the mood.

But it wouldn’t last. Diefenbaker’s government became unpopular and was reduced to a shaky minority in 1962. Similarly, Shaw experienced the loss of a few seats when he took Islanders back to the polls that same year. But he held on and in 1966 tried to secure a third mandate for his PCs.

Except by then there was a big problem for Shaw.

The Liberals were back in power in Ottawa.

More from the #EveryElectionProject

Before getting to last night’s results, let’s get to the latest update of The Writ’s Federal Vote and Seat Projection. The change since last week’s update has been marginal, but the Liberals have now opened up a 12-point lead over the Conservatives and are projected to be leading in 219 seats and win an average of 210, even after taking into account the Conservative tendency to beat their own polls.

The Conservatives are projected to be leading in just 83 seats and win fewer than 100 seats on average, while the New Democrats are still very much in the running to achieve recognized party status as they lead in 16 seats and win an average of 12.2 in the model’s 10,000 simulations. Polling since the termination of trade negotiations with the U.S. suggests that the Liberals and Mark Carney have gotten a small bump, but the Liberals might be reaching their ceiling in public support as it is. What we haven’t quite figured out, however, is where the Conservative floor is located.

That question becomes all the more pressing when we take a look at what happened in the three byelections last night.

The respectable turnout (40% in Beaches—East York, 42% in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord and 46% in North Vancouver—Capilano) in these contests suggests that voters were engaged — or about as engaged as one might expect voters to be at the end of August just a week before the Labour Day weekend.

The Liberals’ Daniel Gobeil prevailed in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, taking 51.3% of the vote in the party’s best performance in this part of Quebec since Pierre Trudeau’s near-sweep of the province in 1980. The Liberals were up 20.2 points, an astonishing result in a deeply francophone and nationalist region. The gain was even more dramatic than the party’s 9.7-point bump in Terrebonne earlier this year and the increase was so big that the Liberals actually earned more total votes in this lower-turnout byelection than they did in the 2025 general election.

Caroline Dubé of the Bloc Québécois finished with 32.9%, an increase of only 1.7 points and still down from the party’s showing in this seat in 2019 and 2021. The NDP and Greens were largely unchanged at 2% and 0.7%, respectively.

But it’s the drop in support for the Conservatives that is perhaps the most shocking. Régis Gaudreault captured just 12.5% of the vote, a stunning loss of 21.6 percentage points.

While some of that exodus could be blamed on the departure of former Conservative MP Richard Martel, who was a high-profile junior hockey coach in Chicoutimi before he made the jump to federal politics, this score is well below the normal cruising altitude for the Conservatives even before Martel came along. In 2015, when Stephen Harper’s government went down to defeat, the party still managed nearly 17% of the vote in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord. When the Conservatives could only win five seats in Quebec in the 2011 election, 25.3% of voters supported the party here. The Conservatives also easily cleared the 20% threshold in the 2006 and 2008 elections. This result is not just an under-performance of Martel’s results. It’s an under-performance of the Conservative baseline and the worst result for the party here since 2004.

The Liberals’ Tanveer Shahnawaz secured 55.7% of the vote in Beaches—East York, a significant drop of 12.1 points compared with Nate Erskine-Smith’s performance in this Toronto riding in 2025. Much of that vote appears to have gone to Shannon Devine and the New Democrats, who were up 18.9 points to 25.8%.

It seems likely that the resignation of Erskine-Smith, who was one of the more progressive members of the Liberal caucus, liberated some progressive voters in Beaches—East York to return to the NDP. Avi Lewis and the New Democrats appear to have put more effort and resources into Beaches—East York and the jump in support shows that these efforts paid off. This was the best score for the NDP in this riding since 2015, when they were the incumbents.

The Conservatives were down eight points to 15.5%, while the Greens were up 0.4 points to 1.7%.

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

Finally, in North Vancouver—Capilano the Liberals’ Braeden Caley won with 58.6% of the vote, a small drop of 1.2 points. The Conservatives’ Stephen Curran took 29.2%, down 4.5 points from his own performance in the last election. The Greens’ Shelley Luce upset the NDP’s Stephen Tweedale for third place with a gain of seven points, taking 8.7% to the NDP’s 3.1%. That was a small drop of 1.1 points for the NDP.

So, what to make of these results?

For the Liberals, the night has to be graded very well. The loss of support in Beaches—East York was big, but Erskine-Smith’s 67.8% in the last election was among the best results for the Liberals anywhere in the country — a high bar to meet. The party also held its vote in North Vancouver—Capilano. The win in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord ensured the night can only be seen as a success, but it is the dramatic nature of the victory that mitigates what would have otherwise been a somewhat disappointing result in Beaches—East York. Of course, a win is a win and a solid 30-point victory is nothing to sneeze at.

The New Democrats should be very pleased with the result in Beaches—East York, which surpassed expectations. But the poor showings in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord and, especially, North Vancouver—Capilano point to the result in Beaches—East York being the result of hard work and the resources that were poured into the riding. If the New Democrats were organically growing, they would have done better in North Vancouver—Capilano rather than lose vote share. The party captured between 16% and 20% of the vote in this seat in the 2019 and 2021 elections under Jagmeet Singh, so a 3.1% result anywhere in the B.C. Lower Mainland should put a bit of a sour note on the NDP’s evening. Nevertheless, Lewis demonstrated that his message can resonate when it’s backed up by organization. Plus, coupled with the result in University—Rosedale earlier this year, he’s shown that the NDP isn’t doomed to under-perform in byelections, as had been the case over the previous decade.

The Bloc can’t take much from the result in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord. Their vote held up but at a level that’s too low to contend for the seat. In Terrebonne, the party had shown that in a polarized race it could corral the anti-Liberal vote, even if it wasn’t enough to take the seat. In Chicoutimi—Le Fjord all the Bloc did was get its base out.

The Greens, meanwhile, showed some life in North Vancouver—Capilano. In the context of where that party has been in the last few election cycles, that’s a good silver lining.

But there aren’t any silver linings for the Conservatives, especially when you look at how last night’s results compared with the Conservatives’ other byelection results since 2015.

Read more

Updated September 1, 2026

A strong majority of Albertans support the province staying in Canada, with nearly 70% saying they would vote to remain in the country and 25% saying they would vote to begin the process toward holding a binding referendum on independence.

Note to Readers: These projections are presented using Datawrapper’s interactive charts. They are best viewed on a desktop. In most cases, you can click, tap or hover over the charts to interact with them.

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

Welcome to the Election Writ, a special-edition newsletter to get you up-to-date on the ongoing campaign in Quebec.

Premier Christine Fréchette kicked off Quebec’s election campaign last Thursday, giving her 39 days — the longest campaign allowed by law — to turn things around for her Coalition Avenir Québec, a party that was doomed to electoral catastrophe when she took over from former premier François Legault earlier this year.

Already, her chances to pull off an upset look decent. But as soon as the CAQ got itself somewhat off the mat under Fréchette, this Quebec election was always going to be a tough one to call.

There are five parties in contention to win seats across the province. The Parti Québécois is leading in the polls, particularly among francophone voters, and remains the favourite to win the most seats (for now). The Liberals have a core of concentrated support on the island of Montreal and a few other regions of the province, giving them a very high floor. But their lack of support among francophones also gives them a very low ceiling.

The Conservatives, after being shutout in the last election, now have enough support in the Quebec City region that they should be able to take advantage of the divided electorate and win some seats. If they do, it’ll be the first time a provincial Conservative has been elected under that banner since the 1930s.

The left-wing Québec Solidaire also has enough concentrated support in central Montreal to ensure a few seat wins of their own. But, like the Conservatives, the party’s lack of support outside of its core region limits its potential ceiling.

And then there is the CAQ. Somewhat like the PQ, the party has a broad base of generally-uniform support in francophone Quebec. This means that when the party was doing badly in the polls, it was projected to lose nearly all of its seats across the province. When the party was doing a bit better, but not good enough to really put any pressure on the PQ, it was projected to lose a lot of seats by small margins — coming up short in riding after riding.

But now that the party is back in contention (or is it? more on that below), the CAQ is running neck-and-neck with the PQ in much of Quebec. The uniform support that both parties generally have means that they are contesting a huge number of seats, and whoever ends up doing marginally better than the other could reap the electoral benefits.

Also in today’s newsletter: A new poll from Synopsis Recherche reset the narrative last week. Plus, we take a tour through the Eastern Townships, one of Quebec’s most electorally-divided regions.

The projections in the Quebec Election Tracker show what this phenomenon produces. The model has the Parti Québécois leading in 63 seats, with the CAQ leading in just 14. But the upper band for the CAQ stretches to 54 seats, while the lower band for the PQ drops to 29 seats. The gap between the low and high projected ranges for the two parties is about 40 seats. By comparison, the ranges for the Liberals, Conservatives and QS are all 10 seats or fewer.

For that reason, the average result from the model’s 10,000 simulations — which takes into account the number of toss-up races and historical under- or over-performance of parties compared to the polls — for the three other parties are not dissimilar from the number of seats in which they are each projected to be leading.

The Liberals are projected to be leading in 34 seats and win an average of 33.6 seats in the simulations. The Conservatives lead in nine seats and win an average of 7.8, while QS leads in seven seats and wins an average of six.

The PQ, however, wins an average of only 50.1 seats, well below the majority threshold. That’s because they are projected to be the leading party in nearly all of the toss-up races in which they are in contention. The odds that they win nearly all of the toss-ups are low. The beneficiary is the CAQ, which wins an average of 29.5 seats. A bunch of the toss-ups in which the CAQ is trailing are bound to fall that party’s way — particularly when we consider how the CAQ’s support is far higher among older voters, who are more likely to vote.

So, just how many toss-ups are there in the model — and who is fighting for them?

Read more

Detailed projections for all 127 ridings across Quebec ahead of the October 5 provincial election, as well as vote projections for smaller regions within the province, are available for subscribers below 👇

Read more

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.

After the breakdown of trade negotiations between Canada and the United States, Prime Minister Mark Carney appears to have locked his elbows back into an up position — aligning himself back with the Canadian mood in the same way that had propelled him to victory in the 2025 election.

There’s still some lack of clarity on just what exactly led to the collapse of negotiations, but what is clear enough is that any deal that would have been struck with the U.S. president would have been, to borrow Carney’s words, signed in pencil, not ink.

That’s why it was somewhat puzzling that the Liberals appeared to be priming Canadians for the successful conclusion of a deal in the days ahead of the collapse of negotiations. All indications are that the deal that was close to being agreed upon would have still been a relatively bad one for Canadians, and it doesn’t seem likely that Canadians were going to be ready to swallow that.

Indeed, a Léger poll conducted before the events of the last week showed that 56% of Canadians wanted the federal government to take a hard line and make no more concessions in the negotiations with the United States. Just 31% urged flexibility and concessions. Carney was at risk of finding himself out of step with the mood of Canadians on this file.

Well, no longer.

The initial response to the decision to cease negotiations has been incredibly positive. Polling by the Angus Reid Institute found that 76% of Canadians felt that Carney did the right thing to end negotiations. Just 13% thought it was the wrong move.

It’s rare to find that kind of unanimity on any decision made by a government.

And, for the time being at least, it seems unlikely that Carney will shoulder much, if any, of the blame for the failure to reach a deal. Only a third of Canadians told the ARI that they felt we had a great deal or a fair amount of control over the outcome of the negotiations. Fully 59% said we had little or no control, a recognition from Canadians that a “take it or leave it” deal was the best we could expect from Donald Trump.

Moving forward, it seems that Canadians will back the retaliatory tariffs that have been announced. The ARI found that 62% thought it would be the right response. Another 16% said we should go even harder against the Americans.

That should come as no surprise as polling has consistently showed that Canadians want to stand up to Trump and that positive views of the United States and Americans have plummeted among Canadians. There’s little appetite for a conciliatory approach, and Trump’s ridiculous threats to “rename” Lake Ontario aren’t going to make Canadians want to go any easier on him.

(And, please, let’s not pretend that Trump can rename Lake Ontario. He can call it whatever he wants or direct his government departments to change the name on official documents, but it’ll still be Lake Ontario here and everywhere else in the world. No one outside of the United States, and few within it, have actually begun calling the Gulf of Mexico anything else.)

Another poll from the Angus Reid Institute suggests that Carney has a deep well of public support to call upon as well as some capital to spend. The poll found that 69% of Canadians think their premiers should take a Team Canada approach, with just 22% saying they should take a Province First approach instead. Even in Alberta, where Premier Danielle Smith has been softer in her backing of the federal government, just 32% of respondents think a Province First approach is the right idea. It’s even lower in Quebec at 18%, which puts Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon in a bit of a bind as he tries to undermine Carney’s (and, by extension, Premier Christine Fréchette’s) handling of this file. If Carney tries to get the premiers to fall in line behind him, he has the public’s backing.

Simply put, polling suggests Canadians are up for the fight and are surprisingly optimistic about it. While they overwhelmingly express concern about the impact on the Canadian economy, by a margin of 59% to 35% a majority feel that Canada can “weather the storm and adapt”, while 64% of Canadians say the country will emerge stronger as it is forced to reduce its dependence on the United States. Only 26% disagree. That is a big endorsement of Carney’s own framing of the path forward.

The “Elbows Up” rhetoric from the 2025 election was very effective for Carney, but he didn’t entirely keep those elbows up for most of the last 16 months. Now, the rhetoric is back and seems likely to be just as politically effective.

It further isolates Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. A survey by Pollara conducted a few weeks ago found Carney trusted over Poilievre on managing Canada-U.S. relations by a margin of 58% to 23%. Poilievre has little standing in public opinion on this issue, so it’ll be very challenging for him to try to tap into the current mood.

And he’s already facing some headwinds within his caucus and his party over his leadership. Monday’s byelection in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, which it seems the Conservatives are likely to lose (more on that below), is not going to help matters.

Those byelections, and the next few weeks of polls, will be worth watching to see what impact the recent tumult will have on public opinion. Are Mark Carney and the Liberals going to get another boost and pad their majority with some byelection wins? And, if there is a rally-round-the-flag effect on public opinion, what impact could that have on our domestic politics, including Quebec’s provincial election and the referendum on independence in Alberta?

We’ll have answers to that soon enough. For now, Carney is once again set to ride the wave of frustration and anger Canadians have with the U.S. president and his administration. We’ll see how far that can take Carney this time.

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

• What to watch in Monday’s three federal byelections, plus news on Quebec’s election, more caucus defections for the B.C. Conservatives and a byelection is scheduled in Alberta.

• Polls showed the Liberals enjoying a double-digit lead before this week’s events. Plus, new numbers out of Ontario and Quebec.

• #EveryElectionProject: “A bit of a rascal” goes down to defeat in Quebec.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

What to watch in Monday’s federal byelections

The trio of federal byelections being held on Monday in the ridings of Beaches—East York, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord and North Vancouver—Capilano will serve as an early gauge of voters’ mood as they face the reality of a renewed trade war with the United States. They will also be tests for all four major parties. Let’s take a look at what’s at stake for each of them.

Read more

The Numbers is back this week (and for the long haul!) to take a look at what the polls say about how Canadians are digesting the news, including in Ontario where Ford has appeared to have rebounded. Plus, with three federal byelections scheduled on Monday in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, Beaches—East York and North Vancouver—Capilano, we play our usual game of over/under. Can the Liberals (or Bloc) pick up Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, or will the Conservatives avoid losing their first seat in a byelection in nearly a decade?

Then, with Quebec’s election call expected on Thursday (hence our one-day-early episode), we break down the state of the race with just hours to go before its official launch.

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

Read more

This week on The Numbers, we break down the plethora of recent polls that have been published and what they say for Mark Carney and Avi Lewis, as well as the Conservative leader. We also discuss a trio of new polls out of Quebec that point to an unpredictable provincial election, as well as two new polls out of Ontario that have better news for Doug Ford ahead of three byelections. Then, we dive into the mailbag to answer some questions, including what odds we'd give an early election call.

The extended mailbag (about extra 25 minutes) is available for the podcast’s Patreon members and Apple subscribers. If you’d like to get the full mailbag, as well as early and ad-free episodes and other bonuses, you can watch or listen to the episode on our Patreon page.

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.

Two more MPs have been added to the list of those intending to resign in the coming weeks, increasing the total number of byelections Prime Minister Mark Carney will have to call within the first two years of his mandate to 13, the most called by any prime minister in such a short amount of time in more than 75 years.

Last week, Conservative MP Larry Brock announced he would be resigning his seat of Brantford—Brant South in September and return to practicing law, citing frustration with the limited ability that opposition members have to influence legislation. Earlier this week, Liberal MP Shaun Chen announced he would resign his seat of Scarborough North effective August 15 due to health problems he’s had since being involved in a car accident last year.

This means that within six months of Brock’s resignation, Carney will call his 13th byelection since the April 2025 general election. There could be even more if other MPs decide to step down between now and then.

First there was the byelection in Battle River—Crowfoot that was called in 2025 to provide Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre a seat. Three more byelections were held earlier this year in April to fill the vacancies left by the departures of Bill Blair and Chrystia Freeland, as well as to re-run the invalidated result in Terrebonne. Another three byelections are being held on August 31 in Beaches—East York, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord and North Vancouver—Capilano. That increases the total to seven.

Between now and next April, byelections will also have to be called to fill vacancies in Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton (already vacated), Laurier—Sainte-Marie, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie and Yorkton—Melville, in addition to the byelections in Brantford—Brant South and Scarborough North. That makes a baker’s dozen.

That feels like a lot of byelections. And, you know what? It is.

The chart below shows the number of byelections held by the number of days since the last general election going back to 1949. The thick dark red line shows the current pace Mark Carney’s government is on, with the future eighth to thirteenth byelections shown at the last possible date they can be called. (If you’re viewing this in your email inbox, clicking on the chart below and opening it in your browser will make it easier to read.)

By August 31, with seven byelections under his belt, Carney has already called the most byelections in the shortest amount of time since 1954, when prime minister Louis St-Laurent called his 10th byelection shortly after his 1953 election victory. But at some point between now and his 13th byelection call, Carney will surpass the 1953-1957 St-Laurent government for the most byelection calls within the first two years, making him the prime minister who has called the most byelections in that time frame since 1950.

(It’s unlikely, though, that he’ll surpass the previous St-Laurent government of 1949-53, which called 13 byelections within the first 12 months and upped that total to 21 byelections before the end of the following year. MPs died in office at an alarming rate back then, and when they didn’t die they were often given patronage appointments as judges or senators.)

Is it merely coincidence, or is there something behind this high number of calls? That’s hard to tease out.

Barring an early general election, the 13 byelections that Carney will call within his first two years will be more than all but a few past governments over the last 75 years have called within their full four- or five-year mandates.

The only past Parliaments to hold more byelections throughout their tenure — let alone over the first two years — since St-Laurent were those presided over by John Diefenbaker in his only majority government (1958-62), Pierre Trudeau (1974-79), Stephen Harper (2011-15) and Justin Trudeau (2015-19).

What those all have in common are that there were majority governments — which Carney has now secured — that were either at the tail end of a party’s time in office (Trudeau in 1974-79, Harper in 2011-15) or followed a change of government (Diefenbaker in 1958-62, which came shortly after the PCs’ upset 1957 victory, and Trudeau in 2015-19).

It might suggest that a large number of resignations occur either when a party appears on course for a defeat or when a new government has been installed and there might not be much appetite for those newly on the opposition benches or outside of cabinet to stay there for a full term.

But there is also an element of coincidence at play. Some of the 13 byelections are partly of Carney’s own design. Bill Blair and Jonathan Wilkinson were removed from cabinet and given cushy ambassadorial landings. Chrystia Freeland was effectively demoted and clearly was not part of Carney’s future plans. Richard Martel in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord was offered a Senate post.

Nate Erskine-Smith in Beaches—East York is a bit of a gray area, as he was excluded from cabinet but clearly also had his own intentions in mind with his (eventually aborted) attempt to run for the provincial leadership of the Ontario Liberals.

But most of these resignations were not Carney’s doing. Pierre Poilievre lost his seat and needed a new one. Two Conservative MPs have decided they want to retire from politics (Cathay Wagantall in Yorkton—Melville and Brock). Two other opposition MPs (Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay in Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton and Alexandre Boulerice in Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie) have opted to run in Quebec’s provincial election in October. The Terrebonne byelection was a court decision. Steven Guilbeault in Laurier—Sainte-Marie resigned from Carney’s cabinet on principle. And Chen’s resignation is due to health issues.

So, it’s a confluence of factors that have put Carney into this historically unusual position — and one of those factors is his own government’s machinations. But, regardless of the reasons, Mark Carney has been dropping more writs more quickly than anyone in over 75 years.

And he has a decent chance of doing something that St-Laurent did not manage to do despite his penchant for calling byelections: pick up a seat from the opposition.

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

• News on second quarter fundraising for the federal parties and in B.C., plus lots of updates on leadership races across the country and news on the calling of three provincial byelections in Ontario.

• Polls have some rough numbers for the Conservatives federally. Plus, the PQ leads a stable race in Quebec and we have new surveys out of Ontario, Toronto and Vancouver.

• #EveryElectionProject: The Conservatives aim to end an “orgy of extravagance” in New Brunswick.

• Lastly, a programming note. Barring a surprise, there will be no posts from me next week. I’ll be back with a projection update either on the 24th or 25th. Thanks for your understanding!

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Conservatives top fundraising, but are losing steam

The federal fundraising figures for the second quarter of 2026 show the Conservatives are still the fundraising kings, but their crown is looking a little tarnished as the Liberals have upped their money-making game under Carney.

The Conservatives raised $5.1 million during the months of April, May and June from just over 33,000 individual contributions. While that outpaced the other parties, this number marked the worst second quarter for the Conservatives since 2022, when donor dollars were being directed to the then-ongoing leadership contest that resulted in Poilievre’s victory.

The Liberals, meanwhile, put up their best second quarter outside of an election year since 2016. The party raised $4.4 million from just over 33,000 contributions. Over the course of the first six months of the year, the Liberals have raised $11.2 million, their best start to any year on record with the sole exception of 2025.

While the Conservatives are still raising the most money, they are no longer dominating the field. Poilievre’s average quarterly fundraising lead over Carney’s Liberals has been $1.3 million. His average quarterly lead over the Liberals when Justin Trudeau was leader was $6.5 million. That means that, on an annualized basis, the Conservatives are raising about $5.2 million more than the Liberals. That’s a lot of money, but that annualized lead was $26 million before Carney came along.

The New Democrats raised $1.2 million from nearly 15,000 contributions in the second quarter, which suggests that the fundraising prowess Avi Lewis demonstrated in the leadership contest has not yet had much bearing on the NDP’s ability to raise money. While his haul over his first three months as leader is within the norm for the party, this second quarter was nevertheless worse than six of the NDP’s last seven second quarters.

The Bloc Québécois raised just $221,000 from just over 1,000 contributions, their worst second quarter since the pandemic when donations dried up for all parties. However, with a provincial election on the calendar this year the Bloc might be having difficulty attracting donor dollars from the limited pool of sovereignists that is also being tapped by the Parti Québécois.

ELECTION NEWS BRIEFS

TWO CANDIDATES FOR GREEN LEADERSHIP - The federal Greens have their final slate of candidates for the party’s leadership, which will be determined on November 14. The apparent frontrunner is Mike Morrice, who was the MP for Kitchener Centre before he was narrowly defeated in the 2025 election. Against Morrice is Nira Dookeran, who has been active in the Ottawa area for the federal and Ontario Greens for years and has put her name forward as a candidate six times. She ran in Ottawa South in the last election, taking just under 1% of the vote.

TRIO OF ONTARIO BYELECTIONS - Premier Doug Ford has set September 3 as the date for three provincial byelections in Ontario in the ridings of Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, York—Simcoe and Scarborough Southwest. The first two ridings were won by the PCs in the last election, while Scarborough Southwest was won by the New Democrats’ Doly Begum, who has since been elected as a Liberal MP in the federal byelection held earlier this year. The closest race of these three in 2025 was in Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, where the PCs beat the Liberals by 10.5 points. But Scarborough Southwest is also expected to be competitive.

OLP SLATE FINALIZED - The final slate of candidates for the Ontario Liberal leadership has been finalized, with two-term Don Valley West MPP Stephanie Bowman throwing her hat into the ring. The race also had a brief candidacy from Vikram Handa, who dropped out about a week after announcing a bid. The contest pits two MPPs (Bowman and Lee Fairclough) against two previously unelected candidates (Dylan Marando and Eric Lombardi) and former MP and cabinet minister Navdeep Bains, who is widely considered the frontrunner.

BC CONS EDGE OUT NDP IN FUNDRAISING - The B.C. Conservatives narrowly edged out the B.C. New Democrats in fundraising for the second quarter. The Conservatives raised $1,146,000 to the NDP’s $1,115,000. The Greens came in third with $228,000 raised. Both the NDP and Conservatives raised significantly more than they did in the second quarter of 2025, when the NDP raised $701,000 to the Conservatives’ $350,000.

FORMER PC RUNS FOR NS LIB LEADERSHIP - The Nova Scotia Liberals will pick their next leader on November 21 from a slate of two candidates: Richmond County warden Amanda Mombourquette and Lunenburg West MLA Becky Druhan. First elected as a Progressive Conservative in 2021, Druhan left Premier Tim Houston’s caucus and cabinet in 2025 over “a difference of principles”. After sitting as an Independent, she crossed the floor to the Liberals earlier this year.

PEI LIBERALS QUICKLY SET DATE - Only a few weeks after past leader Robert Mitchell’s second byelection defeat and subsequent resignation, the PEI Liberals have already set the date to name his replacement. The party will choose its third (ostensibly) permanent leader in four years on October 25, with candidates having until September 4 to declare their intentions and until September 18 to pay the full $25,000 entry fee. The next provincial election is scheduled to be held in the fall of 2027.

POLLING HIGHLIGHTS

Multiple polls put Conservatives below 30%

As I wrote in my projection update earlier this week, the Conservatives have been hit with a bad run of polls. And a few more bad ones have been added to the tally.

A plethora of polls have been published over the last week or so. They come from Liaison Strategies, Abacus Data, Léger/Postmedia, Research Co., Nanos Research, EKOS Research and Spark. We also got a new federal Quebec-only poll from Synopsis Recherche for La Presse.

The polls generally have good news for the Liberals — though primarily because the news is so bad for the Conservatives. The Liberals have between 44% and 48% support in these seven national surveys for an average of 45.6%. The Conservative range, at between 27% and 38%, is very wide. But the average of 30.7% shows how the bulk of these surveys are on the lower end of that scale. Worse, four of these seven polls have the Conservatives below the psychological threshold of 30%.

If the Conservatives are looking for a silver lining of some kind, three of those four polls come from pollsters that don’t report all that often and which didn’t have them in a great position the last time they were in the field anyway. But one or two polls below the 30% mark might be a coincidence. Four is starting to look more like a trend — if not necessarily that the Conservatives are actually below 30%, then at least that the Conservatives are low enough in public support that, with the margin of error, scoring 30% in a survey is possible.

The New Democrats ranged between 8% and 17% in these polls, averaging just over 11%, which again argues for the party being at the lower end of its wide range.

The Synopsis poll in Quebec is yet another survey out of that province showing the Conservatives below 20%, suggesting that the broader negative trend we’ve seen for the Conservatives nationally is also taking place in Quebec. The poll puts the Liberals in the lead in all regions and four points ahead of the Bloc among francophones, which should auger well for their chances of flipping Chicoutimi—Le Fjord. But, it’s worth noting that the Liberals have slipped four points in Quebec since Synopsis was last in the field in June.

For the national trends, the Liberals were either holding or gaining in six of the seven polls, while the Conservatives were sliding in five of seven. The four-point drop for the Conservatives in the Liaison poll is statistically significant, as are the party’s drops in the EKOS, Spark and Research polls. However, those three were last in the field several months ago so we can’t say for certain that the drop is a new development.

Here are a few other things to note from these surveys:

• The Liberals retain a towering lead among the oldest cohort of voters surveyed in these polls. Abacus, Léger, and Liaison put the Liberal edge over the Conservatives at between 22 and 28 points among older voters, while Research and EKOS have the lead at over 40 points. With the exception of EKOS, which had the Liberals, NDP and Conservatives tied among those under the age of 35, the other polls give the Liberals a lead of between seven and 10 points over the Conservatives among young voters.

• Mark Carney has a lead over Pierre Poilievre on preferred prime minister ranging from 23 points in the Research Co. poll to 36 points in the Nanos survey.

• Carney’s approval/positive rating averaged 55% in the Research, Léger, Abacus and Liaison polls, with disapproval/negative impressions averaging 34%. Poilievre, meanwhile, averaged 36% positive/approval/favourable to 48% negative/disapproval/unfavourable in the same polls (minus Léger). Lewis stood at 26% and 32%, respectively, on these measures.

Stable race, PQ advantage in Quebec

With the election call in Quebec only a few weeks away, a trio of new polls show the summer hasn’t had much impact on voting intentions in the province — and that the PQ’s chances of winning a majority remain on a razor’s edge.

The polls come from Pallas Data for Qc125 and L’actualité, Léger for Le Journal de Montréal/Québec and TVA Nouvelles and Synopsis Recherche for La Presse. (As an aside, it looks like the three major pollsters we can expect to see publishing numbers throughout the campaign are all media-sponsored, which is increasingly a rarity elsewhere.)

They all show the Parti Québécois in the lead, followed by the Liberals, Coalition Avenir Québec, the Conservatives and Québec Solidaire — in that order. The PQ’s lead is not towering, but its advantage among francophones gives it an enormous seat advantage. The only question is if it is enough to get them to the 64 seats needed for a majority government.

The PQ scored either 30% or 31% in the three polls, with the Liberals registering between 24% and 27% and the CAQ either 19% or 20%. The Conservatives followed with 13% to 15%, while QS brought up the rear with between 9% and 11%.

The PQ’s support among francophones was between 34% and 37%, giving it a lead of between 11 and 15 points over the CAQ. That’s a big edge and an electorally-decisive one. The Liberals, with between 13% and 19% among francophones, are not yet competitive enough among this electorate to really compete for government. They need to be well over 20% to have a shot.

But that isn’t something new. In fact, these three polls do not show any consistent, significant trend in one direction or another for any of the parties. Compared with when these three pollsters were last in the field, the biggest shifts have been a one-point average gain for the Quebec Conservatives and a one-point average loss for the CAQ.

That the CAQ has either stagnated or lost a little ground over the summer is certainly bad news for Premier Christine Fréchette, who has to appear as a fresh, new face in order to shake off the baggage of the unpopular CAQ government. It’s no coincidence that the CAQ’s advertising and new logo emphasize Fréchette and have the words “Coalition” or “CAQ” nowhere to be found. She’s still within striking distance to put some pressure on Paul St-Pierre Plamondon and the PQ, but she will have to build up a new head of steam to do that. For now, she’s stuck.

As these three polls were all in the field at roughly the same time both in June and August, we can take a deeper look at the regional numbers to try to discern a trend. For the most part, there is little consistency in the regional and linguistic shifts across these three polls, which suggests stability. But a few things stand out:

• The Parti Québécois is up between one and five points in the Greater Montreal region, while the Liberals are down between one and six points. While that might be good news for the PQ in the suburbs around Montreal, the party is also down in all three polls in the regions of Quebec, dropping between one and six points. This could make achieving a majority more difficult.

• The CAQ has dropped significantly in the Quebec City region in the Synopsis and Pallas polls, but was up only a single point in the Léger poll. While that is not a consensus among the three polls, it does suggest that some weakening for the CAQ in and around the provincial capital has likely taken place.

• The PQ’s base among francophones appears rock solid. Both the Synopsis and Pallas polls put the PQ’s support among francophones exactly where it was in June, while Léger had it up only a single point.

Voters appear to see St-Pierre Plamondon and Fréchette as the two main contenders for the job of premier. All three polls show them first and second, respectively, on the preferred premier question with the Liberals’ Charles Milliard in third. On average, St-Pierre Plamondon scores 25% to Fréchette’s 19% and Milliard’s 14%. As those scores include “don’t knows” and “none of the aboves”, the comparison to voting intentions before the distribution of undecideds suggests that St-Pierre Plamondon is about as popular as his party, Milliard is much less and Fréchette is slightly more. She could help drag the CAQ up a few points.

These three polls all put the PQ somewhere around the majority threshold with lots of seats tough to call. So, it’s possible that if these numbers reflect the actual results on October 5 that the PQ could find themselves with a majority government despite having only 30% to 31% of the vote. The party is promising a referendum on independence, but that does not seem to be any more popular than the PQ. The three polls put support for independence at either 28% or 29% and opposition between 59% and 63%. That’s about as low as support for independence has ever been since the emergence of the PQ over 50 years ago.

No matter — in an electorate divided between five parties, each with a chance of winning seats thanks to their regional pockets of support, a majority government is a plausible outcome in Quebec even for a party that can’t garner one-third of the vote.

POLLING NEWS BRIEFS

ONTARIO PCs LEAD BY 8 - Late last month, a poll from Liaison Strategies showed the Ontario PCs trailing the Liberals by five points and Doug Ford’s approval ratings in the toilet. But, once again, a new Abacus Data poll suggests that things might not be so grim for the Ontario premier. The survey found the PCs leading with 40% to 32% for the Liberals, with the NDP trailing with 21%. Granted, that eight-point margin is down four points from when Abacus was last in the field. But it shows the PCs still comfortably in control. The approval ratings for Ford’s government are negative, at 35% approval to 43% disapproval, but do not approach the 70%+ disapproval registered in the Liaison survey. Another poll published yesterday afternoon, this time by Pallas Data for The Trillium, also puts the PCs ahead by eight points with 37% to 29% for the Liberals and 26% for the NDP. With a reduced lead over the Ontario Liberals compared with the 2025 election, the PCs are in a worse position than when they won their third consecutive majority government a year ago. But, they don’t yet seem to be at risk of losing the next election.

ALEXANDER HAS LITTLE IMPACT ON TORONTO RACE - Two new polls of the Toronto mayoral race suggest that the entry of former Conservative MP Chris Alexander into the contest has had little real impact. Liaison Strategies puts incumbent Olivia Chow in the lead with 47%, followed by centre-right challenger Brad Bradford at 40% and Alexander far in the rear at 10%. While both Chow and Bradford have dropped a little from Liaison’s last poll, Alexander’s support has largely come at the expense of the “other” candidates. Forum Research shows a wider lead for Chow at 47% to 32% for Bradford and 11% for Alexander, but there isn’t a previous poll from Forum with which to compare these results. Chris Alexander and Forum Research? Talk about a blast from the past.

SIM LEADS IN VANCOUVER - Though the electorate is divided, incumbent Vancouver mayor Ken Sim remains the frontrunner ahead of the city’s mayoral election this fall, according to a new poll by Research Co. The poll gives Sim (ABC) 22% support among the entire electorate, followed by Kareem Allam (Liberals) and Pete Fry (Greens) at 14% apiece and Colleen Hardwick (TEAM) at 10%. Another 14% are supporting other candidates, while 26% are undecided. After the removal of undecideds, Sim’s lead grows to 11 points over Allam and Fry.

12-MONTH ELECTORAL CALENDAR

• August 31: Federal byelections in Beaches—East York, North Vancouver—Capilano and Chicoutimi—Le Fjord

• September 3: Ontario provincial byelections in Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, York—Simcoe and Scarborough Southwest

• 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 25: PEI Liberal leadership

  • Candidates:

• 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 14: Federal Green leadership

  • Candidates: Nira Dookeran, Mike Morrice

• November 21: Ontario Liberal leadership

  • Candidates: Navdeep Bains, Stephanie Bowman, Lee Fairclough, Eric Lombardi, Dylan Marando

• November 21: Nova Scotia Liberal leadership

  • Candidates: Becky Druhan, Amanda Mombourquette

• December 5: New Brunswick Green leadership

  • Candidates:

• Byelections yet to be scheduled

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

  • CA - Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton (to be called by December)

  • CA - Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, Brantford—Brant South, Yorkton—Melville and Scarborough North (resignations pending)

ON THIS DAY in the #EveryElectionProject

The province’s first Acadian premier goes down to defeat

August 10, 1925

This was originally published on August 10, 2022.

New Brunswick’s economy was depressed, the government was indebted and unemployment in the province was high. But the previous election had been held five years ago. Like it or not, Premier Pierre-Jean Veniot had to send New Brunswickers to the polls in 1925.

Though parties weren’t officially recognized at the time, Veniot was a Liberal. He was also New Brunswick’s first Acadian premier, taking over from Walter Foster when he resigned in 1923.

On July 17, with the clock running out on the legislature, Veniot set the date for the next election: August 10, 1925.

The biggest issue in the campaign was the Liberal government’s huge hydro-electricity project at Grand Falls. Veniot had always intended on making this publicly-funded project the ballot box issue, stating in 1924 that “we feel the people should have a final voice in the matter before we undertake the real work of development.”

But Veniot grew impatient, and in 1925 his government got the ball rolling on the project, passing legislation that tripled New Brunswick’s borrowing power for the project to nearly $13 million — a huge sum for a province with an annual budget of just $4.1 million at the time.

The opposition cried foul on Veniot’s flip-flop. Shortly before the campaign began, the Conservatives chose John B.M. Baxter, federal MP for Saint John, to lead the party. He would, in the words of the Conservative-friendly Moncton Times, end “the orgy of extravagance” that had occurred under the Liberals.

Baxter charged that the Veniot government was not providing nearly enough details about the feasibility of the project, especially considering its gargantuan cost. The Liberals were rushing into it for no reason — why not wait until the election was over and the people had spoken?

“Are we going to stand,” wondered Conservative candidate Leonard P.D. Tilley, “for another $15,000,000 liability jumped upon us in the last moments of a dying Government? I think the people of this Province, both Liberal and Conservative, will cry, ‘Halt’.”

The Liberals countered that the Conservatives were in hock to the big interests of the lumber and paper industries that dominated New Brunswick. The depression had hit them hard and half of the province’s saw mills had closed. They wanted reduced power rates from the Grand Falls project, but the Liberals would not give them everything they wanted.

As the campaign unfolded, Liberal-leaning newspapers pushed the narrative that Veniot was fighting for the little guy against the heartless logger barons. On the stump, the premier deplored “the brazen attempts to steal away the people’s interest.”

A side issue in the Saint John area was the Liberal government’s introduction of the compulsory pasteurization of milk, a measure that would reduce deaths from tainted milk. The Conservatives, however, attacked the measure, wanting to make people free to purchase what they termed “pure milk” and pledging to “cut out all fads and fancies” in the Department of Health. The Liberals’ health minister defended the policy on the basis that it would save lives.

But something that might have had an even bigger impact on the results was the strain of anti-French bigotry in some quarters of anglophone New Brunswick. The Acadian, Catholic and French-speaking population in the province formed a big minority, but a minority nonetheless. The English Protestant majority in the south was not particularly receptive to the idea of an Acadian premier.

While Baxter himself didn’t attack Veniot’s heritage — he even attempted speaking French to audiences in the north — there was an undeniable “whispering campaign” that passed along the message that ‘a vote for Veniot is a vote for the Pope of Rome’. There were allegations that the Ku Klux Klan, which was an active player in Canadian elections in the 1920s, was involved in trying to influence voters as well.

As Arthur T. Doyle puts it:

“It was one of the great campaigns in New Brunswick’s stormy political history: the posters, the cartoons, the exhaustive canvassing, the countless meetings, the ginger ale and ice cream picnics, the rallies, the oratory, and the endless handshakings. The leaders took full advantage of the fashionable automobile and the modern highway network to criss-cross the province attending massive rallies. Probably no other two New Brunswick politicians had achieved so much exposure in a single campaign … In many small towns they attracted audiences of over 1,000, and in the cities, the crowds sometimes exceeded 2,000 … For the political parties, it was almost certainly the most expensive election ever. While the Liberals said the lumber companies financed the Conservative campaign, the Conservatives said the Grand Falls contractors financed the Liberals. They were probably both right.

Turnout was strong on election day. After the votes were all cast crowds of hundreds gathered outside newspaper offices to await the results. As the numbers rolled in, they were announced over megaphone and written on blackboards in the windows of the offices.

The result was a big victory for John Baxter and the Conservatives, who won 37 seats — an increase of 24 since the 1920 election. The Liberals dropped 13 seats, winning only 11. The United Farmers (who had burst onto the scene in 1920) were wiped out, including the three who ran as supporters of the Liberal government in Carleton county.

While the debate over the Grand Falls project might have dominated the campaign, the map hinted at the linguistic divide that might have been just as decisive.

The only seats the Liberals won came in the counties of Madawaska, Victoria, Gloucester and Kent — areas with big French-speaking Acadian populations. The Conservatives swept the southern anglophone ridings, defeating incumbent Liberal MLAs in places like Moncton, Fredericton and Saint John.

Veniot held on as leader only until 1926, when he made a successful jump to federal politics with Mackenzie King’s Liberals.

Baxter’s Conservatives, meanwhile, would be re-elected in 1930 and the Grand Falls project would be completed in 1931 — after it was sold to a private company.

But, like many Great Depression-era governments, the Conservatives would be turfed in the subsequent election in 1935 by the Liberals under Allison Dysart, a leader who would inspire the political career of Louis Robichaud who, in 1960, became New Brunswick’s first Acadian premier with an electoral mandate of his own.

More from the #EveryElectionProject

Since I last updated The Writ’s Federal Vote and Seat Projection two weeks ago, the Conservatives have slid 1.6 points in the vote projection to 33.3% support, the lowest they’ve been since the projection started calculating an average after the 2025 election. If we extend the average to the Poll Tracker I ran for the CBC prior to that election, the Conservatives haven’t hit this mark since May 2023 — and not consistently since before Pierre Poilievre became leader of the party.

Accordingly, the Conservatives are down six seats in the projection and now lead in only 87 ridings across the country. Taking into account the tendency for the polls to under-estimate the Conservatives, as well as the number of close contests in the model, boosts the Conservatives to only an average of 103.2 seats, a drop of five over the last two weeks. As a result of the Conservative slide, the Liberals have increased their vote projection to 45.1%, their best score since early June, and lead in 217 ridings, also their best result in about two months.

There’s been little change for either the Bloc Québécois or the New Democrats since the last update, with the Bloc leading in 21 seats (down one) and the NDP ahead in 16 with 10.3% of the vote (unchanged for the seats, down 0.1 for the vote). The Greens are up to 2.8% in the projection, their best post-election score, but still only top out at two seats in the projection’s high range.

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

What’s behind the Conservative tumble in the polls? It’s always a little tough to know if we’re looking at real trends when they develop over the summer, but the slide in the Conservatives’ projected support is not the result of simply one or two polls.

Read more

This week on The Numbers, we try to make some sense of differing poll numbers that aren’t all good news for Mark Carney (though they are mostly bad news for Pierre Poilievre). We also discuss the calling of three byelections in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, Beaches—East York and North Vancouver—Capilano. Plus, there’s a new poll out of Ontario that has Doug Ford frowning, and Philippe is back with The Quiz!

The podcast will be taking a break next week. We’ll be back in two weeks!

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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.

On Sunday, the Liberals set the date for three federal byelections that will fill three of the four vacancies currently in the House of Commons. As with all byelections, there’s lots at stake for every party — from winning the seats outright to putting up a respectable result.

But what’s not at stake is Mark Carney’s majority government.

This is a bit of a pedantic post but one that I felt compelled to write when a few media outlets reported that the Liberals needed to win one of three byelections in order to retain their majority, a claim that was picked up and repeated elsewhere.

With all the moving pieces involving current and upcoming vacancies, I can understand the confusion. We also talk so much about the “magic number” of 172 seats needed for a majority government that we might easily conclude that dropping below 172 means losing a majority.

But the magic number for a majority is not 172, it’s the simply half the number of total seats occupied in the House of Commons.

To have a majority in the House, the government needs to hold more seats than the opposition parties. When there are resignations and subsequent vacancies, the number of seats needed to retain a majority can change. At the moment, there are four vacancies. That drops the number of seats needed for a majority down to 170. When the vacancies are filled, the number will jump back up to 172.

Regardless of the number of current vacancies in the House, the Liberals already hold 172 seats. Granted, the Speaker (who is a Liberal MP) only votes to break ties, so the governing caucus only has 171 votes. But the opposition caucus numbers 167. And with three byelections at stake (in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, Beaches—East York and North Vancouver—Capilano), even if the Liberals lost all three they’d still have 171 MPs in the governing caucus against 170 MPs on the opposition benches.

That’s not a comfortable majority by any means, but it is a majority. That’s because there is a fourth vacancy that will not be filled on August 31. The Liberals opted not to call a byelection for the riding of Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton, which was vacated by the Bloc’s Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay on June 19 (the same day Jonathan Wilkinson resigned his North Vancouver—Capilano seat). If the Liberals had called that fourth byelection, then theoretically if the opposition had won all four seats they would move back into a tie with the governing caucus at 171 votes apiece, with the Speaker required to break that tie. That tie-breaking vote would prevent the government from being defeated and dissolved, but it wouldn’t pass new legislation, as Speakers are bound by convention to support the status quo.

I was on Power & Politics on Tuesday to discuss the byelections. You can watch my appearance below:

But there will be more vacancies between now and August 31. Cathay Wagantall, the Conservative MP for Yorkton—Melville, has said she will resign on August 31. Alexandre Boulerice, the formerly-NDP MP for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, will resign to run for Québec Solidaire in Quebec’s provincial election, which will officially kick-off a few days before the federal byelections. And Liberal MP Steven Guilbeault has said he’ll resign his Laurier—Sainte-Marie seat in August as well.

That means that when voters go to the polls on August 31, the Liberals will be down to 171 seats (including the speaker) and the opposition will be down to 165 seats. So, in the unlikely scenario that the Liberals lose all three byelections on August 31 they will still outnumber the opposition 171 to 168.

When the House finally returns in September, the Liberals will have their majority intact, even if the trio of byelections goes against them. In the more likely scenario that they retain their two seats of Beaches—East York and North Vancouver—Capilano, they will have 173 seats against 166 for the opposition. That will give them a quite comfortable majority for the subsequent months as they (presumably) wait for the end of the Quebec provincial election and, possibly, the municipal elections in Saskatchewan before holding the quartet of byelections in November or December. And if those four go against the Liberals, they’d still have a majority going into 2027. (If the Liberals win Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, their majority will be padded even further.)

The only way the Liberals’ majority would be lost as a result of all of these byelections would be if they lost all seven of them. (If they lost six of seven, they’d have to rely on the Speaker to break ties.) It seems unlikely that, with three of the seven contests being in very safe Liberal ridings and at least two of the remaining four being winnable for the Liberals, Carney is in any real danger of dropping back into minority territory in 2026. But if the odds are slim of that happening by year’s end, they are zero that it’ll happen on August 31.

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

• A deep, deep dive into the three byelections and what is actually at stake in them.

• Federal polls disagree on the toplines, but not the trends. Also, where things stand in Ontario and in Toronto’s mayoral race.

• #EveryElectionProject: The “quietest Provincial election campaign in the history of Nova Scotia”.

THE NUMBERS: When politics and the stars align

We did something a little unusual on The Numbers this week. Philippe is always quizzing me on political history, so it was my turn to put him through his paces on one of his passions: astronomy! (With, of course, a dash of politics.)

We did this episode for members of our Patreon, so if you’d like to view it and support our joint project, you can join here.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Three byelections to test all four parties

As long-time readers of The Writ know, I am a big believer in byelections. They’re easy to dismiss (as they often are by partisan pundits in full spin mode) as localized, low-turnout affairs that are not reflective of broader trends.

In reality, byelections tend to follow those broader trends relatively closely. The people who vote in byelections are a smaller subset of people who vote in general byelections, but there is no real indication that those people vote all that differently than the general voting population. If that were the case, byelections would routinely produce surprising results that contradict broader polling trends. That rarely happens.

In the end, these are real votes by real voters and the results can’t be dismissed. And, as discussed above, with the House of Commons as divided as it is each of these contests can have big implications — if not in the short-term, then potentially in the longer term.

So, while these byelections will not change the standings in the House of Commons this fall, the four major parties do all have something at stake in these contests. For three of the parties, it’s about winning and losing. And, for all four, its about demonstrating their strength.

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With only the two trackers (Liaison Strategies and Nanos Research) publishing their latest findings over the last week — and it’s been over a month since we’ve seen a poll from any other pollster, with the sole exception of Abacus Data — the projection is largely swinging around at the margins based on what those trackers are finding.

That being said, the latest update puts the Liberals back ahead by 10 points, with 44.8% (+0.6 since last week) to the Conservatives’ 34.9% (-0.6). The NDP trails in third with 10.4%, largely unchanged from last week. These numbers put the Liberals ahead in 210 seats across the country, a gain of seven over last week, while the Conservatives are down six to 93 seats. The Bloc is down one seat to 22, while the NDP and Greens are unchanged at 16 and two, respectively.

Taking into account the historical tendency of polls to over- and under-estimate support for certain parties, and the number of close contests involving each party, the model has the Liberals winning an average of 202.4 seats, their best showing since the June 30 update. The Conservatives win 108.2 seats, so even with the assumption that the Conservatives beat their polls the party is still looking at more than 30 seat losses.

On average, the Bloc wins 18.8 seats and the NDP takes 12.7, just over the threshold for recognized party status.

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

What does the model say about the three byelections in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, Beaches—East York and North Vancouver—Capilano? Let’s take a quick look.

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