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

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

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

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?

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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.

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.

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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

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.

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.

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Like a bolt from the blue, Canada was slapped with another round of tariffs from U.S. President Donald Trump this week.

The tariffs will only come into effect later in August and are on a limited number of goods (including hockey equipment, just to make the pettiness of it crystal clear). But it’s yet another reminder — if we really needed one — that there is little rhyme or reason or predictability when it comes to what Trump will do.

And, in a way, that seems to have numbed Canadians somewhat to his actions.

Prime Minister Mark Carney won the 2025 election in large part on the threats that Trump posed to Canada and the Canadian economy. In the face of that uncertainty, a serious, managerial and experienced figure like Carney appealed to voters more than did Pierre Poilievre, whose style of politics and messaging was extremely well-attuned to the throw-the-bums-out mood that prevailed in the last months of Justin Trudeau’s time in office, but was out of place when Canadians were looking for security and a steady hand.

Polling by the Environics Institute gives one indication of how the mood has shifted.

In early 2025, 43% of Canadians said they were “very worried” and 40% said they were “somewhat worried” about the impact of U.S. tariffs on the Canadian economy. In April 2026, Environics found that those who said they were “very worried” had dropped nine points to 34%, while those who said they were “not very worried” or “not at all worried” had increased from 14% to 19%.

It’s still a concern — but the intensity of that concern has lessened after a year of living under Trump’s tariff shadow. Why that is the case is up for interpretation. It could be that the impact hasn’t felt as bad as people feared, or it could be that Trump’s tendency to reverse himself has taken some of the bite out of his bark.

But it does mean that there is a little more leeway for Carney’s government on this file as Canadians get a little more numb to it.

That numbness, though, doesn’t mean complacency. Canadians are still hopping mad at the United States. They’re still taking their travel dollars elsewhere. They’re telling pollsters like Pew Research that they have more favourable views of China (44%) than they do the United States (33%). And that’s a new thing — Pew found that 57% of Canadians had a favourable view of the United States in 2023, with just 14% holding a favourable view of China. I’m not sure China has done very much over the last three years to deserve this increase in Canadians’ affection. Perhaps the Chinese just look better by comparison.

A new poll from Abacus Data shows that Canadians don’t want to back down, even if they increasingly roll their eyes at Trump’s sabre-rattling. In negotiating a new CUSMA deal, Abacus found that, given a choice between two options, 69% chose “Canada should hold firm on its positions, even if that means the uncertainty lasts longer”. Only 20% opted for “Canada should be willing to make compromises to reach an agreement sooner”. Canadians prefer a little more pain than to give in to Trump.

This gives Carney some leverage — if he chooses to use it. Canadians are still willing to be patient and give him the benefit of the doubt on his handling of Trump. Abacus recently found that, among the 31% of Canadians who list “Donald Trump and his administration” as one of their top three issues, the Liberals hold a whopping 48-point lead over the Conservatives on being the party who would do best on the issue (63% to 15%).

This also gives Carney and the Liberals a winning issue to carry them through the summer. The Liberals are still leading by a wide margin in the polls but their lead has been shrinking over the last few weeks. Another tangle with Trump could be what Carney needs to widen that gap again.

Of course, Canadians’ patience will not hold out forever. And, sooner or later, the Carney government will be judged on the longer term impact of its negotiating strategy. But, for the time being, Trump is the problem for Canadians and Carney remains the choice to handle him.

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

• News of another byelection win for Wab Kinew, plus the Ontario PCs face a major controversy, a recall petition fails, a new leader steps up to take over a minor party and we get clarity on where Naheed Nenshi will run in the next Alberta election.

• An update on the federal polls, plus Canadians’ views on Iran, pipelines, climate change, wildfires and submarines and new poll numbers on Alberta independence and the Ottawa mayoral race.

• #EveryElectionProject: Prince Edward Islanders opted not to “be in the swim” in the 1919 provincial election.

• Upcoming milestone for Danielle Smith.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Kinew’s NDP wins landslide in byelection

The Manitoba New Democrats easily held the seat of The Pas—Kameesak in Tuesday’s byelection, scoring another big win with increased vote share and sending another signal to the opposition Progressive Conservatives that next year’s scheduled provincial election could go very badly.

Read more

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Atlantic Canada’s party system is probably the most staid in the country.

Social Credit has governed in British Columbia and Alberta. The CCF held sway in Saskatchewan, the only province in which the forerunner to the NDP formed government under that brand. Manitoba has been run by Progressives and Alberta had some United Farmers in office once, as did Ontario. Quebec has been governed by federalists and sovereignists and those in between.

Each of these provinces have been governed by at least four distinct party brands and as many as six. But in Atlantic Canada, only once has a government that was neither Liberal red nor Tory blue has taken office, and that was when Darrell Dexter’s NDP won the 2009 Nova Scotia election. They were turfed (by the Liberals) in 2013.

Newfoundland and Labrador has only ever been Liberal or PC. The same goes for New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, with the transition from the Conservative to the PC brand in the 1940s was the only political innovation. It seems unlikely that the Liberal-Tory tradition will change anytime soon in three of the four Atlantic provinces, but Prince Edward Island could buck the trend — and do something that has never happened anywhere else in Canada before.

The Greens won a provincial byelection on Monday (more on that below). It’s not an earth-shattering event — they’ve won byelections before — but the victory came just days after a new poll was released that put the Greens in the lead in Prince Edward Island. The poll, which looked a little funny last week, doesn’t look so strange now.

This isn’t the first time that the Greens have been in this position. Heading into the 2019 provincial election, the Greens were leading some late-campaign polls. Those polls proved too enthusiastic for the Greens, who lost to the PCs but nevertheless formed the official opposition. At the time, there were a few Islanders who expressed some exasperation at the mainland’s over-excited attention to PEI’s politics. They knew better that the old ways would win out.

Maybe those old ways will still win the day — and maybe more Islanders will be peeved at yet another Central Canadian speculating about Canada’s first Green government (even though, out here in the Gaspé, I’m about as far east as some Islanders are!).

But it’s still an interesting development. And as the Greens implant themselves in more places and for longer periods of time on Prince Edward Island, perhaps the notion of breaking those old ways won’t seem so outlandish.

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

• News on that Green victory in Cornwall—Meadowbank, which has ended the career of the Liberal leader. Plus, the CAQ is rebranding, a familiar face enters the Mississauga mayoral race and the New Brunswick Greens settle on a leadership date.

• Last week, polls disagreed on where things stood in Nova Scotia. This week, they disagree again. Plus, an update on the federal numbers.

• #EveryElectionProject: When Manitobans elected a premier “decidedly picturesque in his expressions.”

• Upcoming milestone for Mark Carney that he can probably ignore.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Greens pull off upset win in PEI

Are the Greens set to cover Prince Edward Island like the morning dew?

The results of Monday’s byelection suggest the PEI Greens might be the chief opposition to the governing Progressive Conservatives ahead of next year’s scheduled provincial election — and if they could repeat the results of that byelection across the province, the party would form its first government in Canada.

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.

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.

If you can’t get an MP to cross the floor, getting them to leave the floor entirely isn’t a bad consolation prize.

It came as a bit of a surprise on Tuesday when Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a list of his new Senate appointees that included Conservative MP Richard Martel. Partisan Senate appointees went (largely) out of style during Justin Trudeau’s years in office as he set up an independent nomination panel. But plucking an MP out of the House is a throw-back — the last Senate appointee to come directly from the House of Commons was Mac Harb, who Jean Chrétien appointed to the Senate in 2003.

But that was from his own caucus. Martel is the first sitting MP to be named to the Senate by a prime minister from a different party since Brian Mulroney appointed Liberal MP Marcel Prud’homme to the Senate in May 1993, just a few weeks before Mulroney was out of the prime minister’s office. This will be the first byelection caused by the appointment of an MP to the Senate by a prime minister from a different party since Claude Wagner was named to the Senate by Pierre Trudeau in 1978.

So, in short, this doesn’t happen very often.

It’s a little tricky to interpret this departure. If Martel was simply leaving politics, it would be a rather normal resignation. But he’s not leaving politics — he’s a Conservative moving to the Senate at the request (or the acquiescence) of the Liberal prime minister. He’s going to sit as an Independent in the Senate, at least for the time being, but this is somewhere between a floor-crossing and a simple resignation. It isn’t a huge blow to Pierre Poilievre’s leadership, but it’s also not an endorsement. Martel has decided that he’s done with being a Conservative MP, but not with politics entirely. He likes his future better as a Senator than as a member of Poilievre’s caucus.

For the Liberals, this is one fewer vote on the opposition benches. Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith also made his resignation official yesterday, so there are four vacancies in the House. The government has 171 votes (172 with the Liberal Speaker) against 167 opposition votes. When Steven Guilbeault, Cathay Wagantall and Alexandre Boulerice make their resignations official, the Liberals will be down to 170 votes (171 with the Speaker) against 165 opposition. That’s a decent cushion for their majority, so there isn’t necessarily a rush for the Liberals to fill those vacancies.

Unless, of course, they want to pad their majority even more. The Liberals are expected to win the byelections in North Vancouver—Capilano (Jonathan Wilkinson’s former seat), Beaches—East York (Erskine-Smith), and Laurier—Sainte-Marie (Guilbeault), which would bump them back up to 173 votes (174 with the Speaker). The Conservatives should hold Yorkton—Melville (Wagantall) and the Bloc Québécois should hold Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton (Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay), putting the opposition back up to 167.

But the Liberals have a decent shot in Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie (Boulerice) and, perhaps, an even better chance in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, the riding helpfully vacated by Martel. If the Liberals flip both of these, they will have 175 votes (176 with the Speaker) to just 167 for the opposition. That kind of majority is looking pretty solid.

As I pointed out on Tuesday, the model thinks the Liberals are the very narrow favourites in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord. But it looks like it could be a true toss-up. It was a three-way race in the April 2025 election, with Martel taking 34.1% of the vote to the Bloc’s 31.2% and the Liberals’ 31.1%. It will not take a big swing in support for either the Liberals or the Bloc to take this seat.

Martel was a draw for the Conservatives, at least when he first arrived. This part of Quebec in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region has been surprisingly swing-y, despite its nationalist reputation. The Bloc won Chicoutimi in its first election in 1993. But it went to the PCs’ André Harvey in 1997 and went to the Liberals when Harvey ran under that party’s banner in 2000. The Bloc won it back in 2004, but only managed between 39% and 45% of the vote in the 2004, 2006 and 2008 elections.

Like most of Quebec, the riding went to the New Democrats in 2011 as part of the Orange Wave as support for the Bloc (and Conservatives, and Liberals) dropped. But the Liberals were able to take the seat back in the 2015 election, beating out the NDP by a narrow 31.1% to 29.7% margin. The Liberals’ Denis Lemieux did not finish his term, however, and that set the stage for a byelection in 2018.

Richard Martel was a star candidate for the Conservatives. He coached the Chicoutimi Saguenéens of the QMJHL for most of the 2000s, winning coach of the year in 2005. He took 52.8% of the vote in the 2018 byelection, with most of his support coming from the Bloc when they were at a particularly low point shortly after Martine Ouellet’s ouster as leader. Martel held off the Bloc, now under Yves-François Blanchet, by small margins in 2019 and 2021.

His vote dropped in the 2025 election as the Liberals surged from just 18% in 2021 to 31% in 2025 in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord. Without Martel, the Conservatives might lose more of the vote. But that’s not a given, since Martel under-performed fellow Conservative candidates in neighbouring ridings. Regardless, the Conservatives could be hard-pressed to hold this seat as their support in the province has slipped since the last election — certainly enough to put a three-point margin of victory into doubt.

Much will depend on who the three contending parties can recruit as their candidates, as this is the type of riding that can swing more based on who is on the ballot. There is also the timing of the byelection to take into consideration. The Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean is expected to move pretty strongly to the Parti Québécois in October’s provincial election, but the results of provincial votes in Quebec do not seem to have much relation to federal results of late. The PQ easily won the provincial byelection in Terrebonne in March 2025 just a month before Mark Carney’s Liberals won the seat by a single vote, an outcome that was improved upon in the Terrebonne federal byelection held earlier this year.

We now have seven byelections slated to take place within the next six months or so (we’re still waiting on the resignations of Boulerice, Wagantall and Guilbeault, but all are expected to occur before the end of August). Chicoutimi—Le Fjord was decided by the smallest margin in the last election out of those seven seats and so it should be the most hotly-contested. Rarely do we see a true three-way race, with so much at stake for all three parties.

Can the Liberals pad their majority and demonstrate that Quebec is still a key part of their electoral coalition? Can the Bloc take advantage of the Conservatives’ slippage in the polls and win back a nationalist region of the province? And do the Conservatives still have what it takes to win a close race in Quebec? Whenever these byelections take place, this’ll be the one to watch.

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

• News on which parties ended 2025 with money in the bank, as well as a glimpse at the fundraising of minor parties. Plus, we have news of comings and goings in the Ontario Liberal leadership race, the slate of candidates in Quebec, the B.C. Legislative Assembly and the right-side of the political spectrum in Manitoba.

• Polls raise more questions than they answer in Atlantic Canada, plus we have new federal polls, views of British Columbians on the southern vs. northern pipeline routes and the state of the race in Toronto. Also, how many people can name the leader of the NDP?

• #EveryElectionProject: The Manitoba provincial election of 1914.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Which parties still have election debts to pay off?

The 2025 annual returns have begun to be filed and uploaded by Elections Canada, giving us a look at where each of the parties ended what was a rollicking election year.

We already know how much money each of the major parties raised last year through their quarterly filings — $48 million by the Conservatives, $29 million by the Liberals, $6 million by the New Democrats and $2 million by the Bloc Québécois — but the filings go into more detail about how much money the parties still had in the bank at year’s end.

They also show how much of their election loans remain on the books.

According to the filings, the Conservatives took out a $30 million loan last year, of which $17.7 million was paid off by the end of 2025. That left just over $12 million to pay back at the beginning of 2026.

The Liberals took out $27 million in loans and have already paid off all but $4 million of them. The Greens, too, took out a loan worth $750,000 and have paid most of it off.

As the Greens did not obtain 2% of the vote in the last election, they haven’t had to file quarterly since Q2 2025. This means that their annual filings represent our first look at the Greens’ fundraising in a year. They show that the party raised $3,341,000 last year from 11,725 contributors.

The Greens reported fundraising of $1.9 million in their quarterly filings in the first half of last year, so this suggests the Greens raised another $1.4 million in the last half of the year. That matches their fundraising in the back half of 2024, so it isn’t a bad number. For the year as a whole, this was the most the Greens have raised since the last election year in 2021, when the party took in $3.5 million.

The Greens ended the year with $309,000 still in the bank. Their filings show they maintained salaries and benefits worth $1.2 million, so the poor election showing does not seem to have entirely gutted their offices.

Their offices, of course, pale in comparison to those of the other parties. The Conservatives spent $10.9 million on salaries and benefit last year, while the Liberals spent $9.1 million. The Conservatives had more expenses than revenues in 2025, but nevertheless ended the year with $8.2 million in cash on the balance sheet. The Liberals were also in the black at $2.2 million.

As of writing, the annual returns for the New Democrats had not yet been filed. (They are routinely tardy.)

The Greens weren’t the only smaller party that had their fundraising totals revealed in these annual filings. Last year was the first year that the Greens did not have to file quarterly, as they had always previously crossed the 2% threshold since the filing requirements were adopted over 20 years ago. But other small (smaller?) parties have long only had to file annually. These filings are our only glimpse at the finances of these minor parties.

Here is where fundraising stood for those that have had their returns posted:

• Christian Heritage Party

  • $469,368 raised from 1,032 donors

    • The CHP spent about $234,000 on salaries and benefits, indicating that the party, unlike some of the other small parties, has employees (and perhaps a salary for the party’s leader).

• Reforge Party (formerly the United Party)

  • $255,276 raised from 594 donors

    • Membership revenue suggests the party has between 400 and 500 members.

• Marxist-Leninist Party

  • $110,579 raised from 225 donors

    • The party’s biggest expense was $46,407 spent on office rent and equipment.

• Centrist Party

  • $16,095 raised from 53 donors

    • The party spent $400 on “polling and research” in 2025, the same amount as in 2024. I wonder what that bought.

• Marijuana Party

  • $0 raised

    • The Marijuana Party had $88.87 in the party’s bank account when it was deregistered in October.

ELECTION NEWS BRIEFS

CERJANEC OUT - The Ontario Liberal leadership field has decreased to four candidates after the withdrawal of Ajax MPP Rob Cerjanec. Fundraising data suggested that Cerjanec was not keeping pace with his rivals. As of earlier this week, Navdeep Bains was leading the way with $310,000 from donors who gave at least $200 to his campaign (Elections Ontario doesn’t post aggregate donations of less than $200 in its real-time disclosures). Lee Fairclough raised $210,000, Dylan Marando had raised $130,000 and Eric Lombardi had raised $120,000. Cerjanec had raised just $90,000, still putting him well below the $150,000 entry fee. Prospective candidates have until July 31 to get into the running, so it is possible that some other contestants could throw their hats into the ring. There has been chatter that Don Valley West MPP Stephanie Bowman, who had endorsed Cerjanec, could try to take his place.

MUSICAL CHAIRS IN QUEBEC - Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette has announced that she will be running in the riding of Trois-Rivières in the next election rather than in Sanguinet, where she was elected in 2022. Fréchette was born in Trois-Rivières and said she wanted to highlight the importance of Quebec’s regions with her candidacy. It’s debatable whether or not Trois-Rivières is more winnable for the CAQ than Sanguinet, which is located in the Montreal suburbs to the south of the island. Meanwhile, Pierre Dufour, first elected with the CAQ in Abitibi-Est in 2018, will be running for the Quebec Liberals. He was booted from the CAQ caucus after demanding he remain within François Legault’s cabinet in order to adequately represent the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region in northwestern Quebec. If the Liberals win the election, one suspects Dufour is banking on being in Charles Milliard’s cabinet if he holds the seat.

BOULTBEE BOLTS TO NDP - Amelia Boultbee, who was elected as a B.C. Conservative in the 2024 provincial election, has joined the governing B.C. New Democrats. Boultbee left the Conservative caucus, then under John Rustad’s leadership, over the expulsion of fellow-MLA Elenore Sturko in October 2025. With Boultbee, the New Democrats now have 48 MLAs in the 93-seat legislature, which gives the party a majority without making the Speaker (who is also a New Democrat) break ties.

DAUDRICH TO KEYSTONE - Wally Daudrich, who finished a close runner-up to Obby Khan in the Manitoba PC leadership race last year, has left the PCs entirely after he was disqualified from the nomination contest for the riding of Turtle Mountain, where the PC incumbent is not running for re-election. Daudrich has switched over to the right-wing Keystone Party and will be the party’s candidate in the upcoming byelection in The Pas—Kameesak.

POLLING HIGHLIGHTS

Some eyebrow-raising polls out of Atlantic Canada

We don’t often get polls out of Atlantic Canada. And maybe that’s a good thing, because when we do they can be a little odd.

This past week, we were treated to the return of voting intentions polling from Narrative Research, which last put out these kinds of numbers in 2024. We also got a new poll out of Nova Scotia from Abacus Data, which has been in the field more regularly.

We’ll start with the Nova Scotia numbers, since we have two sets of data. But there aren’t many similarities between them.

Narrative put the Nova Scotia NDP in the lead with 45% among decided voters (Narrative released numbers without the undecideds removed, so I’ve done it myself for comparison purposes for all of the Atlantic results). The governing PCs trailed with just 29%, while the Liberals were at 23%.

Those are some striking results, considering the NDP had half that support in the 2024 election. They were even more striking when Abacus came out with the PCs at 40%, the NDP at just 31% and the Liberals at 22%. These numbers were virtually unchanged from when Abacus was last in the field in May.

It’s hard to reconcile these two sets of numbers, even if the field dates were different (but not that different). That Abacus has found previous stability in the province suggests that Narrative might be the outlier. The results of the recent byelection in Chéticamp—Margarees—Pleasant Bay, in which the PC vote dropped a little but so did the NDP’s, would suggest that Abacus is probably closer to where things actually stand.

The two polls do agree that the NDP’s Claudia Chender is in good shape. Narrative gave her a 14-point lead over Tim Houston on preferred premier, which might be a bit exaggerated. But Abacus found that Chender’s personal rating was a net +17 (34% positive, 17% negative) while Houston’s was a net -8 (31% positive to 39% negative). Not quite as dramatic, but it does suggest that the Nova Scotia NDP has an asset in its leader. At the very least, it seems fair to say that the New Democrats have made up some ground since the last election. But an outright lead of double-digits? Maybe not.

Some of these question marks extended to the rest of Narrative’s polling in Atlantic Canada.

In New Brunswick, where we recently saw a poll from Porter O’Brien which gave the Liberals a four-point lead over the PCs, Narrative puts the Liberals ahead by 11 points, 41% to 30%, with the Greens at 13%. This isn’t as much of discrepancy, but you have to wonder how Narrative managed to get 9% support for the Libertarian Party, including 19% (after the removal of undecideds) in northern New Brunswick.

Are the Libertarians surging in the province, perhaps replacing the defunct People’s Alliance? It’s a nice theory, except that the PA did extremely poorly in northern New Brunswick. More likely is that there might have been some sort of confusion between the Liberal Party and the Libertarian Party by people taking the poll.

In Newfoundland and Labrador, the governing PCs were two points up on the opposition Liberals, 38% to 36%, with the New Democrats in a strong third with 25%. While that’s a high number for the NDP (it got 8% of the vote in the last election), it’s not unusual for the party to poll better between elections.

Then we get to Prince Edward Island. The last Narrative poll in PEI was not publicly released but was reported by the media in March. It showed the Greens leading with 41%, followed by the Liberals and PCs at 26% and 25%, respectively. The newest poll follows the same trend line but in more dramatic fashion. The poll has the PEI Greens leading with 54% support, with the Liberals at 26% and the PCs at a woeful 18%.

The sample size (147) is small, and Narrative is conducting its polls online now. It used to use live-callers. An online panel in a small geography, like PEI’s, has to be well-calibrated. It’s rare to see online polling for municipalities, for instance, and the Angus Reid Institute never reports its PEI results because its panel is too small there.

We’ll get a test of Narrative’s PEI numbers on Monday when Islanders vote in the Cornwall—Meadowbank byelection. In the 2023 provincial election, the PCs won this seat outside of Charlottetown with 55% of the vote, followed by the Greens at 24% and the Liberals at 19%. Those results were actually quite close to the provincewide results (56% PC, 22% Green and 17% Liberal), so if this poll is picking up something real we should expect to see a big spike in Green support, the Liberals up a little and the PCs down a lot — and I mean a lot.

The next election in Prince Edward Island is scheduled for October 2027, so that isn’t a huge amount of time for Rob Lantz and the PCs to turn things around if their support has actually tanked this much. We can’t expect much other polling out of PEI (and not from anyone else but Narrative), so this byelection might serve as a useful barometer of what is actually happening in the province.

New federal polls show not much new

Just a quick update on the new federal polls published in the last week from Liaison Strategies, Nanos Research and Abacus Data. There’s not much new to report in them, with the Liberals scoring between 41% and 44%, the Conservatives between 32% and 36% and the New Democrats continuing to be a little puzzling with a low of 8%, according to Abacus, and a high of 15%, according to Nanos.

To give you an indication of the lack of movement in these polls, let’s calculate how things have shifted since they were all last in the field. The Liberals averaged 43%, the Conservatives 33% and the NDP 12% in these three polls last time. This time? The average is 43%, 34% and 12%, respectively. Steady as she goes, then.

POLLING NEWS BRIEFS

NEW LEADER, WHO DIS? - Pollara has returned with one of my all-time favourite polling exercises. Pollsters often test how well politicians are known by simply asking respondents if they’ve heard of X politician. Pollara took another approach, asking people to actually fill in the X. When asked who was the leader of the federal NDP, only 12% of Canadians polled could accurately (or semi-accurately) spell out the name “Avi Lewis”. (Pollara was generous, marking responses like “Davis Lewis” and “the husband of Naomi Klein” as correct.) Wrong answers included “Marit Singh” and “Jagneet?”.

The poll also found that only 57% of Canadians could identify Pierre Poilievre (or a close approximation of that name) as the leader of the Conservative Party. Interestingly, that 57% is the same score Poilievre managed in 2023. Marked as correct by Pollara included “Pierre Polisher”, “Poliver (if he’s still in charge?)” and, my favourite attempt at spelling, “Pierre Poulleveviere”. Incorrect responses included “Ford”, “Daniel Smith” and “I know his face”.

These polls are a good reminder that the general population does not pay as much attention to politics as, say, readers of The Writ. When we see polls on the personal ratings of party leaders, it is good to keep in mind that a chunk of respondents, if not most of them, may sometimes be expressing an opinion about a person they do not know much about at all.

B.C. PREFERS SOUTHERN PIPELINE ROUTE - The announcement by Prime Minister Mark Carney (in conjunction with B.C. Premier David Eby and given the thumbs up by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith) that an agreement has been reached that would have a new pipeline head to the west coast via a southern route with its terminus in Vancouver, rather than on the northern coast of B.C., is likely to be well-received by British Columbians according to polling by Pollara Strategic Insights. The survey found that 60% of British Columbians have a positive feeling about the southern pipeline route along the Trans Mountain corridor, with only 23% having negative views. By comparison, the divide was 52% positive to 30% negative for a northern route that would require lifting the tanker ban.

CHOW LEADS IN TORONTO - New polling by Liaison Strategies gives Olivia Chow the lead in Toronto’s mayor race. The incumbent had 49% support in the poll, with councilor Brad Bradford behind at 40% after the removal of undecideds (who numbered 20% of respondents). Since mid-May, Chow’s lead has dropped from 13 points to nine points.

12-MONTH ELECTORAL CALENDAR

• July 13: Cornwall–Meadowbank provincial byelection (Prince Edward Island)

• July 21: The Pas—Kameesak provincial byelection (Manitoba)

• October 5: Quebec provincial election

• October 17: New Brunswick Progressive Conservative leadership

  • Candidates: Daniel Allain, Don Monahan

• October 17: Municipal elections in British Columbia

• October 19: Alberta referendum

• October 26: Municipal elections in Ontario

• October 28: Municipal elections in Manitoba

• November 2: Municipal elections in Prince Edward Island

• November 9: Municipal elections in Saskatchewan

• November 14: Federal Green leadership

• November 21: Ontario Liberal leadership

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

• November 28: Nova Scotia Liberal leadership

  • Candidates: Amanda Mombourquette

• Byelections yet to be scheduled

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

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

  • CA - North Vancouver—Capilano and Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton (to be called by December)

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

  • CA - Beaches—East York and Chicoutimi—Le Fjord (to be called by January)

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

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

  • CA - Yorkton—Melville (resignation pending)

• Party leadership dates yet to be set

  • New Brunswick Greens (David Coon announced on June 4, 2026)

(ALMOST) ON THIS DAY in the #EveryElectionProject

Rodmond Roblin’s last ride

July 10, 1914

This was originally published on July 10, 2025.

Manitoba grew tremendously under the leadership of premier Rodmond Roblin. He took up the post in 1900 and, a year later, the census pegged Manitoba’s population at just over 255,000. After Roblin’s Conservatives had been re-elected a third time in 1910, the population of the province had nearly doubled to 461,000.

By 1914, however, Roblin’s grip on the province was growing weaker and the tolerance for the old ways of doing things was waning. Few governments of the day were squeaky clean and Roblin’s government was no exception. His Conservatives weren’t afraid to use public money and public servants for partisan purposes. And, of course, there was an expectation that hefty donations to party coffers would be made by those getting government contracts. Inflating invoices to cover those donations was common practice.

Increasingly, however, voters were tiring of this normalized corruption. They weren’t quite ready to back new parties — it would take the trauma of the First World War to shake voters out of their old habits for good — but they were starting to expect more from their leaders.

The opposition Liberals, reinvigorated under Tobias Norris, vigorously attacked the government’s corruption. A former auctioneer and compelling speaker, Norris had successfully gathered around him opposition elements in the 1910 election — prohibitionists, suffragettes and farmers — and, at a well-attended convention in early 1914, former leader Edward Brown predicted that a Liberal victory was just around the corner and that “the death-throes of the Roblin régime will be spectacular in the extreme”.

In June (in what would prove to be less than two weeks prior to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the event that would spark the outbreak of war in Europe), Roblin dropped the writ on the next provincial election, setting election day for July 10, 1914, nearly four years to the day since his last victory.

According to the Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs, “this contest, which had been going on in some degree for months, was not a satisfactory or pleasant one; as in the case of all Canadian Governments, when in power for many years, there were varied charges of corruption and bitter personalities. Sir Rodmond Roblin, who for 14 years had been Prime Minister was not, at the best, a conciliatory opponent or a courteous fighter; his party enemies accepted the guage [sic] with true Western heartiness and the conflict was almost picturesque in the vehemence displayed.”

The Liberals took aim at the Roblin government’s corruption and presented a few platform priorities of their own: “direct legislation” (referendums) to get the support of the influential Grain Growers’ Association, prohibition, English-language compulsory public schooling and a vote on giving women the vote.

“To me it seems that the most serious problem which our people must face and must decide on July 10th,” Norris wrote in his party’s manifesto, “is whether or not domination of public affairs by machine rule shall continue. The Roblin Government, by reason of its long term in office, has become surrounded by an organized gang of political workers who have grown bold in their manipulation of matters pertaining to elections and patronage. As electors I ask you the plain question. How long do you propose to stand for rule by this machine?”

Education, as ever the case in turn-of-the-century Manitoba politics, was a flashpoint in this campaign. Amendments brought in by education minister G.R. Coldwell, designed to make it easier for the government to takeover Catholic schools, were criticized as opening up the doors again to publicly-funded separate schools — a charge especially taken up by the Protestant Orange Order. The government denied this was the case, but the Liberals hammered away at the issue. Norris even claimed that Roblin had personally invited him to support a return of separate schools, which Roblin denied ever happened.

The Conservatives had to run on their record, and it wasn’t a bad one. The province’s infrastructure had been built up over the preceding years, a new Agricultural College (now part of the University of Manitoba) had been founded and Manitoba’s territory had been extended to Hudson’s Bay. The government had also begun construction on a new legislature building that “would be an honour and a credit to the Province”.

“We come with a policy,” he said, “we come with a record, we come with a faith and hope born of conviction that there is a great future for this Province.”

Roblin took his message across Manitoba and over 20 days made stops in Carman, Miami, Stonewall, Emerson, Dominion City, Transcona, Portage la Prairie, Reston, Souris, Brandon, Ste. Rose, Dauphin, Grand View, Swan River, Gladstone, Birtle, Morden and Roland. He wasn’t alone on the hustings, getting assistance from “Dominion” Conservatives, including the Manitoba caucus and future prime minister Arthur Meighen.

In Transcona, Roblin pilloried the “direct legislation” movement as counter to the British tradition and said “I am strongly opposed to the ‘Banish the Bar’ plank as well as Woman’s Suffrage as I look upon them as unworkable fads and not in accord with the best interests of the people.”

Liberal leader Norris also criss-crossed the province, with visits to Ste. Rose, Roblin, Russell, Roseburn, Minnedosa, Elkhorn, Transcona, Winnipeg, Macgregor, Carberry, St. Pierre, St. James, Oakville, Portage la Prairie, Selkirk, Brandon, Boissevain and Rivers.

These two men weren’t the only figures garnering attention on the campaign trail. Nellie McClung toured Manitoba as well, advocating for woman’s suffrage and prohibition and against the Roblin Conservatives. She closed her campaign by addressing a crowd of 5,000 in Winnipeg on the eve of election day.

“I could not sit down when there was a fight like this on in my Province,” she said at one of her events. “I could not be contented with just doing ordinary little things – punching holes in linen and then sewing them up again … Too many men have one set of virtues for private life and another for public use. That is one reason why I hope to see a rebuke administered to the Government.”

Charges of corruption and vote-buying were made by both the Conservatives and the Liberals against each other, but in the end the Roblin Machine managed one more victory.

(As voters in Winnipeg received two votes to elect two MLAs for each of the city’s three ridings, the chart above shows the ‘equalized’ vote share for each party, as calculated by Elections Manitoba, which counts each vote in Winnipeg as half of one vote.)

The Conservatives saw their majority reduced in an expanded legislature, but nevertheless won 28 seats and just under 48% of the vote. That was a drop in vote share from the previous election, but enough to hold on. The Liberals increased their holdings from 13 to 20 seats and scored 45% of the vote, while one Independent (Fred Dixon, endorsed by both the Liberals and Labour) was elected in Winnipeg.

There was a divide between Winnipeg and the rest of the province — outside of the capital, the Conservatives and Liberals nearly split the vote evenly, 50% to 48%. In Winnipeg, Independent (often Socialists) and Labour candidates managed around 21% of the vote, with the Conservatives winning the plurality with 43%.

Stung by his reduced majority, Roblin blamed the result on the Orange Order’s baseless fearmongering on separate schools. McClung, meanwhile, took a moral victory out of the result.

“We have fought a good fight and we will keep on fighting; nothing can stop us; no man, not even Sir Rodmond Roblin, can hold his foot against the door much longer,” she said. “The machine is broken, the people will rule, and when we say people we mean both men and women.”

She wouldn’t have to wait long for the end of the Roblin government (or for women’s suffrage). Evidence of corruption in the awarding of contracts for the legislative buildings led to Roblin’s resignation less than a year later. In 1915, the Conservatives would finally go down to defeat at the hands of Norris’s Liberals. But that appetite for something different, for something unlike the politics of before, would take a bite out of the Liberals before long, too.

More from the #EveryElectionProject

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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There’s been some recent discussion — here and elsewhere — about whether we’ve seen signs of softening in support for the Liberals and Mark Carney.

It did seem like there had been a softening a few weeks ago. That softening, however, did not endure. Instead, it seemed more like the Liberals hit a new cruising altitude in the polls.

But are they now starting to bounce back as the pendulum swings again?

Over the last week, in addition to the two tracking polls from Nanos Research and Liaison Strategies, we had two new national polls from Abacus Data and Léger (for Postmedia), as well as a Manitoba-only poll from Probe Research (for the Winnipeg Free Press). The growing discrepancies in the polls we were seeing a few weeks ago don’t see so noticeable now.

The Liberals ranged between 43% and 48% in these four national surveys, a far more reasonable spread than the 40% to 50% scores we were seeing when Léger was last in the field. Léger is, again, the high Liberal score, but a five-point divergence in results is well within the margins of error of these surveys. Similarly, the Conservatives are consistently between 32% and 37%. Only the NDP remains a bit of an enigma.

Léger continues to put the NDP at just 6% support, matching the party’s result in the 2025 election. Liaison has the NDP at 14%, meaning there’s an eight-point gap between these two polls for this party. That is less explainable with simple sampling error. The other two polls, however, don’t argue for one side or the other. Abacus has the NDP three points higher than Léger does at 9%, while Nanos has the NDP three points lower than Liaison does at 11%. It’s an almost perfect spread — let’s split the difference and say the New Democrats are at 10%.

In Quebec, the Bloc Québécois managed between 24% and 26% in the Léger, Liaison and Abacus polls. (Nanos paywalls its regional results.)

What’s interesting about these polls is that we see some pretty consistent, if marginal, trends toward the mean. Léger has the Liberals coming down two points from the high of 50% in its last survey, while Liaison and Nanos have the Liberals gaining two or three points from where they put the Liberals two and four weeks ago, respectively. Abacus, which was closer to the two tracking polls last time, has the Liberals moving up one point and toward the Léger number.

What this says to me is that, in the end, perhaps not much has really changed in Liberal support when we look at the bigger picture. The tracking polls, which had the Liberals drifting to the low-40s, have the Liberals moving back toward the mid-40s. And Léger, which had the Liberals hitting the psychological threshold of 50%, has the Liberals moving back toward the mid-40s, too.

If it’s a reversion to the mean, it does appear that the mean might have shifted a little. If you look at polls in April and May, sub-45 scores for the Liberals were the rarity. Somewhere around 44-45% might be the new mean for the Liberals, when a few months ago it was more around 46-47%. But, as softening goes, that’s pretty modest.

Other indicators in the Léger, Abacus and Liaison surveys also point toward a reversion to the mean. Léger has the Liberal Party down two points since its last survey, but has government satisfaction back up three points to 57% after showing a dip last time. Abacus also shows government approval up three points to 55%.

Liaison, meanwhile, has Mark Carney’s approval rating up two points over the last two weeks to 57%, with disapproval down three points to 36%. Again, in isolation these are not significant movements, but in the context of other movements it looks like a return to “normal”, even if that normal is a little new.

If the pendulum is moving in the positive direction for the Liberals, it seems to be moving in the negative one for the New Democrats. Nanos and Liaison both have the NDP down slightly from their previous independent samples, as does Abacus. The shifts are not statistically significant, but in the broader context of the NDP having scored highs of 14% and 16% in the Nanos and Liaison polls, the party might be coming back down to earth as the Liberals move back up.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, are immobile. That inertia has been steady throughout the last few months.

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

• News of a PC victory in Nova Scotia that might be a relief to Tim Houston, and the setting of a date for a provincial byelection in Manitoba.

• Polls galore, with new numbers on Alberta’s ties to Canada and Canadians’ trust in media, as well as polls out of Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, New Brunswick and Ottawa.

• #EveryElectionProject: Booze on the ballot in P.E.I.’s 1927 provincial election.

• Upcoming milestones for Claudia Chender, Carla Beck and Doug Ford.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

PCs take seat in Nova Scotia byelection

It’s been a challenging year for Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston, as polls show support for his party slipping and his own approval ratings down to just 34% in the latest Angus Reid Institute poll, the lowest its been since he took office. But the results of a provincial byelection in the riding of Chéticamp-Margarees-Pleasant Bay should give the PCs some hope that things might not be going so poorly after all.

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.

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The House of Commons will adjourn this week, sending MPs back to their constituencies for the summer. As of this moment, they are scheduled to return on September 21.

This sitting of the House began on January 26, when the House returned from a six-week holiday break. The spring sitting has traditionally been the more important one, since that is when the federal budget has normally been tabled. But now that the budget has moved to the fall, the fall sitting will presumably take centre stage going forward. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t an important sitting.

And, with the help of the polls, we can get an assessment of which party won or lost the sitting — at least in terms of how the last five months have impacted public opinion.

When the House returned from its holiday break, The Writ’s Vote and Seat Projection (which wasn’t yet in operation, but historical data was input into the model to get some tracking) awarded the Liberals a relatively narrow lead over the Conservatives: 42.4% to 37.9%. The Liberals were projected to win a small majority of 178 seats, with 124 going to the Conservatives. The NDP and Bloc Québécois trailed with 8.5% and 6.9%, respectively.

Things shifted in February when the Liberals took off in the polls. They’ve since come down a little (more on that below), but remain above where they were when the House first sat in 2026.

With 44.3% in the projection, the Liberals are up 1.9 points over where they were in January. The New Democrats, too, are up by 2.1 points. That would seem to make both the Liberals and the New Democrats the “winners” of the sitting, though the contexts are significantly different.

The Liberals have seen their seat projection balloon from 178 in January to 211 today — a huge majority and a gain of 33 seats in the projection. By comparison, the NDP has not seen the same bump out of a similar two-point gain. The New Democrats are projected to be leading in 15 seats, only three more than they were projected to be winning in January.

The Conservatives have not made good use of the last five months. With 34.5%, they are down 3.4 points since the House returned in January. Those losses have come in all of the worst places for electoral success — the party is down about three points in Ontario, four points in Atlantic Canada (and Saskatchewan) and five points in Alberta and British Columbia. The Conservative slide has been more broad-based than the Liberal uptick, as Mark Carney’s party is up only marginally in B.C. and is holding steady in Atlantic Canada, Ontario and the Prairies. It’s in Quebec and Alberta, with gains of four and five points, respectively, since January, where the Liberals have made significant gains over the last few months.

(The Bloc has also had a rough few months, down 3.8 points in Quebec. This is largely why the Liberals are up in the province.)

Granted, the Liberals have lost two points since April when they hit their high in the projection at just over 46%, so if we were comparing that peak with where they were in January we’d be seeing big jumps in Ontario and B.C. And things would be looking worse for the Conservatives if we were doing this comparison a few weeks ago, when the party hit its lowest point at 33.5%.

But, the sitting didn’t end in April or in early June. As MPs head back home to their ridings to see their constituents (and take some much-needed time off), it’s the Liberal caucus that can be most pleased with how the last few months have gone. For the Conservatives, they might just be happy to get a chance to regroup and hope for better results in the fall.

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

• News on the federal Green leadership race that has just been kicked off and an upcoming federal resignation that will increase the number of vacancies in the House to six by summer’s end. Plus, a byelection campaign has begun in Prince Edward Island and another is coming to a close in Nova Scotia.

• Polls show stability at new cruising altitudes for the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP, plus we have new provincial polling out of Quebec and British Columbia.

• #EveryElectionProject: When John Diefenbaker resigned his party’s leadership for the first time.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Greens call leadership race to replace Elizabeth May

Green Party leader Elizabeth May announced last summer that she would not lead her party into another election, but there were many questions remaining about when the leadership contest to name her replacement would actually occur.

Those questions were answered last week when the Green Party announced that her successor will be named on November 14 when her second stint as party leader will come to an end.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

NB Green leader David Coon resigns

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

Read more

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

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

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

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

Then came Léger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• #EveryElectionProject: The 1993 Manitoba Liberal leadership.

• Upcoming milestone for PEI Green leader Matt MacFarlane.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Savard-Tremblay resignation ups byelection tally to five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

B.C. Conservatives choose Kerry-Lynne Findlay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ELECTION NEWS BRIEFS

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

12-MONTH ELECTORAL CALENDAR

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

• October 5: Quebec provincial election

• October 17: New Brunswick Progressive Conservative leadership

  • Candidates: Daniel Allain, Don Monahan

• October 17: Municipal elections in British Columbia

• October 19: Alberta referendum

• October 26: Municipal elections in Ontario

• October 28: Municipal elections in Manitoba

• November 2: Municipal elections in Prince Edward Island

• November 9: Municipal elections in Saskatchewan

• November 21: Ontario Liberal leadership

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

• November 28: Nova Scotia Liberal leadership

• Byelections yet to be scheduled

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

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

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

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

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

  • CA - Beaches—East York (resignation pending)

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

  • CA - North Vancouver—Capilano (resignation pending)

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

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

• Party leadership dates yet to be set

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

(ALMOST) ON THIS DAY in the #EveryElectionProject

Liberals choose Edwards, but Lamoureux endures

June 5, 1993

This was originally published on June 5, 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More from the #EveryElectionProject

MILESTONE WATCH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Question on independence added to Alberta referendum

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Elliott vs. Black

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

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

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

2. Elliott vs. Findlay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Party fundraising remains high one year after election

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jonathan Wilkinson to vacate seat this summer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ELECTION NEWS BRIEFS

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

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

POLLING HIGHLIGHTS

Federal polling update

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

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

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

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

POLLING NEWS BRIEFS

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

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

12-MONTH ELECTORAL CALENDAR

• May 11: Municipal elections in New Brunswick

• May 30: British Columbia Conservative leadership

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

• October 5: Quebec provincial election

• October 17: New Brunswick Progressive Conservative leadership

  • Candidates: Daniel Allain, Don Monahan

• October 17: Municipal elections in British Columbia

• October 19: Alberta referendum

• October 26: Municipal elections in Ontario

• October 28: Municipal elections in Manitoba

• November 2: Municipal elections in Prince Edward Island

• November 9: Municipal elections in Saskatchewan

• November 21: Ontario Liberal leadership

  • Candidates: Dylan Marando

• November 28: Nova Scotia Liberal leadership

• Byelections yet to be scheduled

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

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

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

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

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

  • AB - Calgary Shaw (resignation pending)

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

  • CA - North Vancouver—Capilano (resignation pending)

• Party leadership dates yet to be set

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

(ALMOST) ON THIS DAY in the #EveryElectionProject

B.C.’s politics polarizes even more

May 10, 1979

This was originally published on May 10, 2023.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More from the #EveryElectionProject

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.

Doug Ford has to be happy he called an election a year early in February 2025. Had he followed the schedule in the fixed election date law that was in force at the time, he’d be just about now dropping the writ for the 2026 provincial election in Ontario.

And, based on the latest numbers, he might’ve lost that election.

While the Ford PCs have been showing some weaker numbers than usual over the last few months, things appear to have worsened significantly just in the last few weeks. The catalyst might have been the purchase of a new government jet, a decision that was quickly reversed after a public outcry over the outlay of some $30 million for the airplane.

Whatever caused the drop, three new polls have suggested the Ontario PCs are no longer leading a divided opposition but are instead in a neck-and-neck race with the Ontario Liberals.

The polls come from Abacus Data, Pallas Data and Liaison Strategies. Abacus, the oldest of the three, puts the PCs at 37%, followed by the Liberals at 36% and the NDP at 17%. Pallas, conducted just a few days after the Abacus poll, put the PCs at 37%, the Liberals at 32% and the NDP at 24%. Liaison Strategies, the most recent poll, has the Liberals leading with 38% to 36% for the PCs and 20% for the NDP.

On average, that gives the PCs around 37%, followed closely by the Liberals at 35% and with the NDP in third with 20%.

The biggest problem for the PCs is not necessarily the current state of affairs, as they could still win the most seats with these kinds of numbers. Instead, it’s the trend line.

All three pollsters have been showing a slow and steady decline in PC support since last year. Since August, Abacus has the PCs losing 16 percentage points. Liaison has the PCs down 11 points since October. Pallas has the PCs down eight points since November. On average, the Liberals and New Democrats have roughly split the gains from the PCs’ losses between them.

Since this drop in support has been drawn out over time, it is hard to pinpoint a particular reason for the drop. But it’s clear that something has pushed the PC numbers down even more in just the last few weeks. Both Abacus and Pallas were in the field in early April, just before the ‘Gravy Plane’ story came out, and Liaison was in the field in late March. Compared to those previous polls, the PCs have dropped two points according to Abacus and three points according to both Liaison and Pallas. Combined with the Liberal uptick, the total average swing in just a few weeks between these two parties has been just over five points.

That alone would wipe out nearly half of the PCs’ margin of victory over the Liberals in the last election. The losses the PCs were suffering last fall and over the winter have been responsible for the rest.

This doesn’t mean that the PCs wouldn’t win another election if one were held today. There isn’t a tremendous amount of regional consistency across these three polls, but generally the numbers suggest the PCs lead in southwestern Ontario and are effectively tied with the Liberals in eastern Ontario and in the Greater Toronto Area. Since the Liberals don’t have a definitive lead in any region except in Toronto, this suggests that the PCs’ seat advantage would probably hold with these numbers.

But the PCs are now in minority territory — or, at least, potential minority territory. If an election were held today, the Ford PCs would have a good chance of losing their majority. It seems unlikely they could find a willing partner in Queen’s Park to prop them up in such a scenario, which means they’d risk losing their government.

Calling the last election a year early proved prescient. It gives Ford and the PCs another three years or so to arrest and reverse this decline in public support. And, if they do it, it wouldn’t be the first time. The PCs lost their polling lead several times during their first term and there were polls during their second term that suggested their lead was dwindling to single-digits. Ford’s approval rating has also gone up and down over the last eight years.

And Ford’s greatest advantage remains the weakness of his opposition. Abacus, for instance, awarded the PCs a mere one-point lead in voting intentions. But that same poll awarded Ford a 21-point lead on preferred premier over NDP leader Marit Stiles. This suggests that much of the Liberals’ support in the Abacus poll — and presumably the other two as well — is a hypothetical support that assumes an ideal (or at least acceptable) Liberal leader in place. It’s likely no accident that Mark Carney’s Liberals are very popular in Ontario at the moment. Undoubtedly, some respondents to these polls are imagining an Ontario Liberal Party that is a lot like Carney’s federal Liberal Party.

So, the OLP’s newfound support might prove ephemeral. But this does mean that the next leader of the OLP will be taking over a viable alternative to the Ford PCs, at least in the eyes of public opinion. It will be up to whoever that leader is to not squander the opportunity.

And, perhaps most challenging of all, keep themselves a viable alternative all the way to 2029 — or whenever there will next be a provincial election in Ontario.

CANADA-US PODCAST CROSS-OVER! - On Monday, Philippe J. Fournier and I joined Galen Druke of the GD Politics podcast to chat about the state of Canadian politics one year after Mark Carney’s election victory and how Canadians view their relationship with the United States. Listen to the pod here.

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

• News on Alexandre Boulerice’s upcoming resignation and jump to provincial politics, plus some familiar faces will be on New Brunswick’s municipal ballot next month.

• Polls show little movement at the federal level, while the UCP remains in front in Alberta.

• #EveryElectionProject: The 1878 Quebec election, one of the closest in provincial history.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Boulerice’s delayed jump to provincial politics could help Lewis

As widely expected (and reported at the end of last week), Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie MP Alexandre Boulerice has announced he is seeking the Québec Solidaire nomination for the riding of Gouin and will resign his federal seat. The surprise, though, is that Boulerice is not resigning until the Quebec election and will continue to sit as an Independent in the interim.

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.

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.

The next election in Quebec is still the Parti Québécois’s to lose, but that has become increasingly likely the closer the province gets to the October 5 vote.

Two new polls over the last week showed the PQ and the Quebec Liberals neck-and-neck, with newly-installed premier and CAQ leader Christine Fréchette giving her party only the smallest of bumps (if any).

The polls come from Léger for Québecor and Pallas Data for Qc125. I wrote a little about the Pallas poll last week but want to delve into it a bit more deeply today.

Pallas, which was done immediately after Fréchette’s victory, gave the Liberals a three-point lead (31.8% to 28.5%, rounded off to 31% to 29%) with the CAQ still stuck at 14%. The Léger poll, conducted a few days later, put the PQ at 31%, followed by the Liberals at 28% and the CAQ at 17%.

Since the beginning of the year, Pallas has the Liberals up eight points, with the PQ down five points and the CAQ down two points. Léger, meanwhile, has less movement — the PQ down one point and the Liberals up two, with the CAQ unchanged. The more recent trend for Léger has shown the Liberals catching up, and then taking a hit following the arrival of Fréchette at the helm of the CAQ. But until we see a sustained trend, it’s perhaps safer to say that the PQ and Liberals have moved into a tie.

A tie benefits the PQ, as shown by the party’s support among francophones above. The Liberals dominate among non-francophones, but these voters are concentrated in a limited number of ridings. It’s unlikely the PLQ can really compete for government without being closer to at least 23% or 25% among this part of the electorate. While they are currently below that mark, they are a lot closer to it then they were just a few months ago.

The potential for a PQ minority or a Liberal win changes the game not only in Quebec but in the rest of the country, as the former would likely put a referendum on Quebec independence on hold (and, of course, the latter would take it off the table entirely).

But the polls continue to show that a referendum would likely not go the PQ’s way. Pallas finds support for independence at just 31%, the lowest it’s been in Pallas’s tracking, while opposition is at 63%, the highest it’s been. The poll also found that 70% of Quebecers do not want to see a referendum held in the PQ’s first mandate, which means there are some Quebecers who would vote YES in a referendum but would prefer not to have to make the choice.

It does put PQ leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon in a bind, as his promise to hold a referendum in a first mandate puts a low ceiling on his party’s support. It might not be low enough to prevent the PQ from forming a government, but it might put a majority out of reach. Léger found that the promise to hold a referendum is indeed the obstacle to a clear PQ election win. When respondents were asked how they would vote if the PQ promised not to hold a referendum, the PQ’s narrow three-point lead ballooned to a 14-point stomping, 39% to 25%.

St-Pierre Plamondon has already ruled out backing down on his pledge, but that is an easier thing to do while he is still ahead than it might be if he falls behind. The Liberals’ Charles Milliard might have lost a step according to the latest Léger poll, but if that’s just a blip and this election remains a horse race, the next few months could have some surprises in store.

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

• News on how First Nations feel about the removal of Indigenous names from three ridings. Plus, a new candidate joins the Ontario Liberal leadership race, rejected ballots played little role in Terrebonne byelection and the Supreme Court makes a ruling that will impact the next provincial election in Quebec.

• Polls show the status quo federally, but not so status quo within Conservative ranks when it comes to Pierre Poilievre’s leadership. Plus, some polling numbers out of Ontario before the ‘Gravy Plane’ took flight.

• #EveryElectionProject: PCs hope for a PEI harbinger in 1979.

• Upcoming milestone for Obby Khan.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Indigenous riding name changes opposed in two of three cases

Earlier this month, I wrote about the name changes coming to 19 federal ridings across the country, including the removal of newly-added Indigenous names from three ridings: Brantford—Brant South—Six Nations, Hastings—Lennox and Addington—Tyendinaga and Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong. At the time, I reached out to the three MPs who proposed the name changes to their own ridings, as well as the three First Nations whose names were being removed.

Of my six inquiries, I only got two responses: one from Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong MP Marilyn Gladu and the other from the Six Nations of the Grand River. The latter said they approved of the removal of ‘Six Nations’ from the riding as they had never approved of its addition in the first place. Gladu said the First Nations in her riding were fine with the removal.

Thanks to some further inquiries from The Hill Times, it turns out that, while the Six Nations repeated to The Hill Times what they said to me, the story in Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong does not seem to align with what I was told.

Read more