The Writ: The Weekly Writ

Weekly Writ 7/23: Carney, Trump and tariffs

Éric Grenier — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 10:02:48 GMT

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.

Weekly Writ 7/16: Could the Greens make a run at government in PEI?

Éric Grenier — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 10:06:08 GMT

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.

Weekly Writ 7/9: Martel's Senate appointment means high-stakes byelection to come

Éric Grenier — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 10:06:34 GMT

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.

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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.

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.

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.

Rodmond Roblin, c. 1910.

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

Weekly Writ 6/25: Has the Liberal polling pendulum swung back?

Éric Grenier — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:05:08 GMT

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.

Les chiffres : Le calme avant la tempête

Cette semaine au balado Les chiffres, Philippe et moi discutent de l’état des lieux des formations politiques en ce début de saison estivale au Québec. Nous décortiquons les derniers sondages Léger et Pallas Data, puis explorons les possibles stratégies des partis pour la précampagne.

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.

Weekly Writ 6/18: Who won the House sitting?

Éric Grenier — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:05:27 GMT

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.

Weekly Writ 6/11: Liberal softness, NDP lift and Conservative drift

Éric Grenier — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:06:27 GMT

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.

Weekly Writ 6/4: What to make of Liberal, NDP divergences in the polls

Éric Grenier — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:04:00 GMT

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.

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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.

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.

Weekly Writ 5/28: Can the Liberals hold Guilbeault's seat?

Éric Grenier — Thu, 28 May 2026 10:03:27 GMT

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.

Weekly Writ 5/21: Can Fréchette pull off a Carney?

Éric Grenier — Thu, 21 May 2026 10:04:53 GMT

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

Weekly Writ 5/14: With stability in Ottawa, the action is in the provinces now

Éric Grenier — Thu, 14 May 2026 10:07:11 GMT

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.

Weekly Writ 5/7: How the BC Conservative leadership could play out — and why it matters

Éric Grenier — Thu, 07 May 2026 10:03:07 GMT

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:

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.
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.

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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.

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).

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.

Screenshots from episodes of Webster! in May 1979.

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

Weekly Writ 4/30: Doug Ford is lucky he called an early election

Éric Grenier — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 10:07:50 GMT

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.

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.

Weekly Writ 4/23: Quebec is a horse race

Éric Grenier — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 10:04:07 GMT

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.

Weekly Writ 4/16: Why Conservatives should be worried about the byelections

Éric Grenier — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:04:38 GMT

Byelection results are easy to dismiss when they don’t go your way. They’re referendums on the government! They’re safe seats for the incumbent! Turnout is low! Local dynamics are at play!

There are some kernels of truth there. But that doesn’t mean the Conservatives shouldn’t be worried about the results of the byelections in Terrebonne, University—Rosedale and Scarborough Southwest, in which they put up their worst byelection performances in over a decade.

By now, you’ve probably already pored over the results in these three seats. (And if you didn’t, you can check out the hot takes from early Tuesday morning that Philippe and I shared on The Numbers).

The Liberals won a close fight in Terrebonne, taking 48.4% of the vote to the Bloc’s 46.8%. The Liberals haven’t had this much support in this part of Quebec since the 1980 federal election, when Pierre Trudeau won 74 of 75 seats in the province.

University—Rosedale and Scarborough Southwest were landslide Liberal wins, with the party increasing its vote share in both. In Scarborough Southwest, the Liberals’ 69.9% of the vote was their best result since at least the 1960s when a riding somewhat resembling today’s Scarborough Southwest was first created. The NDP managed to work its way to second place in University—Rosedale, though its respectable nine-point gain represented only half of the support the party lost here between 2021 and 2025.

The Conservatives, however, tanked. They dropped 11 points in University—Rosedale and 12 points in Scarborough Southwest, taking their smallest share of the vote in these seats ever. And in Terrebonne, the Conservatives absolutely collapsed by 15 points to just 3.3%. The only time the Conservatives have ever done worse than this in the area that is now Terrebonne was when the Liberals won by acclamation in 1917 and 1953 and there wasn’t a Conservative on the ballot.

In the context of these three ridings, these were worst-ever results for the Conservatives. But even more remarkable is that the losses the Conservatives suffered in these three byelections were the largest they’ve suffered in any byelection in over a decade.

Inspired by a social media post by Dan Arnold (credit where credit is due), I’ve compiled below the Conservatives’ performances in byelections since the 2015 election. Ranked from greatest losses to biggest gains, you can see that the top three worst performances for the Conservatives out of the 35 byelections held over the last 10 years all occurred on Monday night.

It’s not even that close. Before Monday, the Conservatives hadn’t lost more than 8.3 points in any byelection since 2015.

In fact, you have to go back to 2014 to find a byelection where the Conservatives lost more support. In the last years of Stephen Harper’s government, the Conservatives were routinely losing huge chunks of their vote share in byelections. It’s no coincidence that these big byelection losses were followed by Harper’s defeat in 2015.

If you look at the bottom of this list, you can see that five of the seven best performances took place in 2023 and 2024, when the Conservatives were riding high in the polls. Those byelections presaged what was supposed to happen in 2025 — the defeat of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals by Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. Those byelections were a reflection of the big swing that was taking place in public opinion.

This week’s byelections, then, might also be a reflection of what is happening in public opinion now. And they act as a corroboration of the Conservatives’ worst polling numbers, rather than of their best ones. Simply put, the Conservatives should not be dropping 11 to 15 points in these ridings if they are truly running only a few points behind the Liberals. Instead, these byelections suggest the double-digit leads we’ve seen in most polls just might be on to something.

One could counter-argue that, since the Conservatives were not in contention in any three of these ridings, it is natural that their voters didn’t bother to show up. Turnout was only around 33% in the Toronto ridings and was 51% in Terrebonne. But we’ve seen them show up in other ridings where Conservative chances were equally dim and where turnout was equally down.

In LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, the Conservatives had just 7.5% of the vote in the 2021 election. The byelection in 2024 was known to be a three-way race between the Liberals, Bloc and NDP (the Bloc won). But that didn’t stop Conservatives from going out to the polls. The party increased its vote share in this Montreal riding by four points to 11.5%. Similarly (and also in Montreal), the Conservative vote slid only marginally from 14.1% to 13.6% in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount in 2023.

One could then argue that these byelections occurred when Justin Trudeau’s government was unpopular and in a minority context, where an election could be around the corner and voters were engaged and motivated to send a message. But in the 2017 byelection in Ottawa—Vanier, when the Liberals were safely ensconced in majority territory and were still quite popular, the Conservatives only lost four points. On the same night in Saint-Laurent, where the Conservatives had zero chance of winning, their vote held unchanged at 19.5%.

If the Conservatives could manage to get their voters out and supporting them in these past byelections, why were they unable to do so on Monday?

Yes, the byelection in Terrebonne was polarized between the Liberals and the Bloc. The one-vote margin in 2025 might have hammered the point home to voters that they couldn’t waste their vote on a party that wasn’t contending to win. But that was not the case in either University—Rosedale or Scarborough Southwest. The polarization in Terrebonne might have further depressed the Conservative vote, but the results in the two Toronto ridings suggest that polarization was not the only factor at play. The Conservatives simply lost support, and to an extent that we last saw when the party was on its way out of power.

Of course, none of these ridings were particularly good ones for the Conservatives in the last election and would not be expected to be among those the Conservatives would win when forming government. The share of the vote the Conservatives received in the last election in Scarborough Southwest ranked the riding 246th out of the 342 ridings where the Conservatives ran candidates. University—Rosedale ranked 279th and Terrebonne ranked 311th. Even had Pierre Poilievre become prime minister last year, these three seats would have almost certainly been represented by opposition MPs.

But these byelection results, if they had occurred in the general election, would have ranked these ridings 311th, 337th and 342nd — dead last. The 3.3% the Conservatives obtained in Terrebonne would be the worst result the party had anywhere in Canada in April 2025. Their actual worst result, in Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, was a towering 6.9% by comparison.

These byelection results should set off alarm bells within Conservative Party HQ. The circumstances of the byelections might have exaggerated the negative trend for the party, but they strongly suggest that the Conservatives are not competitive at the moment and that the polls that indicate the Liberals could win 200+ seats today are indeed an accurate reflection of where things stand.

Dismissing these results would be like denying the reality the Conservatives find themselves in. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t recognize there is a problem to fix.

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

Brief news out of the CAQ and B.C. Conservative leadership races.
Polls show the status quo at the federal level, though a new trend might be developing in Atlantic Canada. Plus, we have new provincial polling numbers out of Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta.
#EveryElectionProject: An unexpected result in the 2000 Yukon election.
Upcoming milestone for Tony Wakeham.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Weekly Writ 4/9: More than majority at stake in upcoming byelections

Éric Grenier — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:07:04 GMT

The addition of yet another Conservative MP to the Liberal caucus has made a majority government all but assured for Prime Minister Mark Carney once Monday’s byelections are completed, but these contests will nevertheless matter more than most byelections do.

For one, they will act as mid-term barometers of support for each of the parties and a rough accuracy check for the polls — if a party is up or down in the polls, we should expect them to be up or down in the byelections, even when the differences don’t change who wins or loses.

But, more importantly, these three byelections will change the complexion of the House of Commons and the control that Mark Carney’s Liberals have over it.

With Gladu, the Liberals now have a majority in the House of Commons. There are currently 171 Liberals in the House, with one of them (Francis Scarpaleggia) acting as the Speaker. This gives the government 170 votes, with Scarpaleggia able to cast a tie-breaking vote when required. But since the Speaker is bound by convention to vote in certain ways, Scarpaleggia’s vote can’t always be counted upon to be in the government’s favour.

There are currently 169 opposition MPs in the House, meaning the government technically has a majority as of this moment (though the House isn’t sitting this week). This is where the three vacancies being filled on Monday come in.

If the Liberals fail to win any of these three byelections (which is unlikely, as we’ll see), the Liberals will once again be outnumbered in the House. If they win one of the three byelections, the government and opposition benches will be tied at 171 votes apiece, with that tie being broken by Scarpaleggia. As the Speaker votes to maintain the status quo, that means the government would be safe from defeat in the House (assuming every MP votes). But it would also mean that the government would not get to do something like re-constitute the membership of committees, where the Conservatives and Bloc Québécois hold majorities.

If the Liberals win two or all three byelections, they will have 172 or 173 votes to 170 or 169 for the opposition and the Speaker would have no ties to break. In this scenario the Liberals would not only be safe from defeat but should also be able to pass a motion to change the make-up of committees and pass any legislation they like that would not put the Speaker in an awkward position.

In other words, going two-for-three would be good enough for the Liberals, even if it means only winning the two seats that should be safe for them. Going three-for-three would be icing on the cake — and give something extra for the Liberals to brag about when the House returns next week.

Take a look at the results from the last election. Terrebonne was famously close — it was decided by a single vote, a margin so insignificant that the Supreme Court ruled to annul the results because of errors Elections Canada made with some mail-in ballots. But Scarborough Southwest and University—Rosedale were not close at all. The Liberals should win them, so going two-for-three is the least they should expect.

The margins in the two Toronto ridings were enormous in the last election and there is nothing in the polls to suggest they should be competitive today. Failure to win either of them would be a tremendous upset and blow to the Liberals, regardless of the implications for the House. The Liberals have held at least part of what currently makes up University—Rosedale since 1993 and, with the exception of the 2011 election, the Liberals have held Scarborough Southwest and its predecessor ridings since 1988. Losing them in the current context would be bizarre, especially since the party has put up two good candidates in high-profile physician Danielle Martin in University—Rosedale and former Ontario NDP MPP Doly Begum in Scarborough Southwest.

But Terrebonne was close last time and should still be close this time. My own projections classify Terrebonne as a toss that favours the Liberals by a single percentage point. That’s effectively unchanged from the overturned result of the general election. Monday will be a re-match between the Liberals’ Tatiana Auguste and the Bloc’s Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné, and if the result is anything other than a nail-biter it would reflect some local dynamics at play that swung it one way or the other.

(Because of the presence of the Longest Ballot Committee, who have put up more than 40 candidates in Terrebonne, voters will have a special ballot where they will be required to write-in the name of the candidate.)

A win for the Liberals in Terrebonne would signal that Carney’s appeal in Quebec has endured, and that voters in this particular riding did not bristle at the thought of handing the prime minister a majority government. It would give Liberals reason to hope that, if they went into an early election campaign, they could count on winning a lot of seats in Quebec once again.

A loss here, however, would put into question the security of ridings in Quebec that they won by narrow margins. While the polls look promising for the Liberals elsewhere, uncertainty about their holdings in Quebec would force the Liberals to make good in an election on some of the very high (and perhaps unsustainable) numbers they’ve been putting up in places like British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan. It would be folly for the Liberals to take for granted that they will gain a dozen seats or more between Vancouver and Winnipeg.

There are implications for the other parties as well. The Bloc’s standing as the main alternative and opposition to the Liberals in Quebec will be diminished if they don’t win back this former stronghold, especially in light of the help the party has gotten from the Parti Québécois as it prepares for an important provincial election in October.

Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives have just suffered another blow with the loss of their fourth MP. Plus, they need some sign of a comeback after months of bad polls. They are not competitive in any of these three ridings. But can they improve their vote share, put some doubt in the polling numbers and give a discouraged and disgruntled caucus some much-needed good news?

The New Democrats are even more uncompetitive in these ridings, having finished in third place in the two Toronto seats and taking just 2.6% of the vote in Terrebonne. But they have a new leader in Avi Lewis. It would be a good start for him if he could show at least some improvement over the abysmal 2025 results, especially in Toronto where his message should have more appeal.

These three ridings, however, are quite different from one another — which will make it a little tricky to draw conclusions about broader trends.

While 83% of the population of Terrebonne does not belong to a visible minority community as defined by Statistics Canada, 43% of the population of University—Rosedale and 63% in Scarborough Southwest does. University—Rosedale has a significant Chinese community (18%) and a sizable Jewish one (6%), while Scarborough Southwest has a large South Asian component (26%) and is 19% Muslim. About 10% of the population in Terrebonne and 13% in Scarborough Southwest is Black, while it’s just 4% in University—Rosedale.

The vast majority of residents in Terrebonne speak French at home. The vast majority of residents in the other two ridings, of course, do not. University—Rosedale is right downtown (it’s where Queen’s Park is located), while Scarborough Southwest is an inner suburb of Toronto and Terrebonne is an outer suburb of Montreal. One of the only things tying these three ridings together is that they aren’t rural.

But the variation in these three ridings will make the results all the more fascinating to dissect. So, join me and my podcast co-host Philippe J. Fournier for a livestream of the byelection results starting at 8:30 PM ET on Monday night. You’ll find the livestream right here 👇

Have any predictions for what the outcome of the three byelections will be? Let us know in the comments!

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

New Quebec premier, CAQ leader to be decided Sunday

This weekend, some 20,000 members of the Coalition Avenir Québec will choose the next leader of their party and the 33rd premier of Quebec. While the winner of the race between Christine Fréchette and Bernard Drainville will receive what is, on paper, a glittering prize, the reality is that the winner will also face a steep, uphill and perhaps insurmountable challenge when Quebec goes to the polls in October.

That being said, what does the data say about who is most likely to win?

Weekly Writ 4/2: Your riding's name could be changing

Éric Grenier — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 10:08:43 GMT

We’re going to dive directly into what’s on deck in this edition of the Weekly Writ. Here’s what’s on the docket for today:

News on the ridings that will see their names changed and other amendments the Liberals are making to the Canada Elections Act. Plus, a B.C. Conservative MLA is booted from caucus and two endorsements are made in the B.C. Conservative leadership race.
An update on the federal polls and a look at a new Léger poll that puts the PQ and Liberals neck-and-neck ahead of this year’s provincial election in Quebec. Plus, some new B.C. provincial polling numbers.
#EveryElectionProject: The Ontario CCF chooses its first leader.

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NEWS AND ANALYSIS

19 ridings to change names, Indigenous names to be dropped in three

Is your federal riding about to change its name? If you live in one of 19 ridings across the country, that could very well be the case. Some of the changes are arguably good, some are quite plainly bad, and some others raise some questions.

The name swaps were included in a package of changes to the Canada Elections Act being proposed by the Liberal government. The text of the bill can be found here.

The bill includes a series of amendments regarding misinformation, foreign interference and privacy protections. For example, the amendments would make it illegal to knowingly spread false or misleading information intending to impact an election (with exceptions for parody and satire) and adds the use of “deepfakes” that impersonate an electoral official or candidate to the list of prohibited acts.

Also included are measures to protect the personal information gathered by parties and changes to the reporting requirements for fundraising events. For safety and privacy protections (the government’s claim), parties will no longer be required to give five-day advance notice of fundraising events or to post the exact address of the event. These requirements were put into place during the “cash-for-access” controversy during the Trudeau years.

Of particular note to readers of this newsletter (and anyone who tunes into our livestreams of byelection nights), a proposed change will limit constituents to signing the nomination papers of only one candidate, as well as requiring different official agents for each candidate in a riding. This is an attempt to head-off the Longest Ballot Committee. The imposition of unique agents will likely not have that much of an impact — the LBC did this for the Terrebonne byelection and still managed to recruit over 40 candidates — but the signature limits could make it much harder to ever get the list of candidates to the 200+ that we saw in Battle River–Crowfoot last year.

But the riding name changes caught my attention. In all, 19 ridings across the country will have their names changed when the bill passes. Some of the changes are good. Some of them are bad. And some of them are ugly.

First, some general comments on these changes.

We have an entire non-partisan process in place to name these ridings. The electoral boundaries commissions consult widely and go through a multi-stage process of proposing riding boundaries (and riding names), hearing feedback from constituents about the proposals, coming up with new proposals, hearing objections from MPs and then settling on the final map.

It seems against the spirit of this process for MPs to then decide to override the commissioners’ decisions and change the names of their ridings via an act of Parliament. Some of these changes might be good and might be the result of consultation with constituents, but it undermines the non-partisan process if, in the end, the elected MP can change the name of their own accord.

I also can’t help but lament that the net effect of these changes has been that these names got even longer. These 19 ridings contained 446 characters before and they contain 529 now. The changes in Quebec were responsible for most of the increase.

Lastly (and, yes, this is niche), the changes make working with riding data more cumbersome. Ridings are assigned an ID by Elections Canada after the redistribution and that ID never changes. The IDs of ridings are by alphabetical order within each province. Now, the riding names and IDs will no longer be in the same alphabetical order, which can get very annoying when you’re working with different datasets where some are ordered by the ID and others are ordered alphabetically. Won’t someone please think of the spreadsheets!

Alright, let’s get into some of these name changes.

The Good
- Cape Spear—Mount Pearl—Paradise
  - Cape Spear is a headland where no one lives, so it was a little odd to have the entire riding named after it, especially since the riding stretches from Cape Spear on the Atlantic coast to Conception Bay. Mount Pearl and Paradise are the two largest communities in the riding, so elongating the name to include them is fine by me.
- The Eastern Peninsulas
  - Shortened and the vague “The Peninsulas” removed. Any shortening of riding names is generally for the better.
- York—South Simcoe
  - There’s York—Durham and Simcoe North, so perhaps York—Simcoe South would have had greater symmetry, but I’m happy not to have to pronounce New Tecumseth—Gwillimbury.
- Saskatoon East
  - Reasonable people may disagree, but I prefer simple, geographically-understandable names. There’s a Saskatoon South and Saskatoon West, so a Saskatoon East makes more sense than did Saskatoon—University.
- Vallée-du-Haut-Saint-Laurent
  - Mercifully much shorter than its predecessor, describes the riding quite well and is a nice-sounding name (Upper St. Lawrence Valley in English).
- Longueuil—Greenfield Park
  - Greenfield Park is a defined area in this riding, while Charles-LeMoyne isn’t, even if lots of stuff in the riding is named after the founder of Longueuil, Charles Le Moyne. I prefer actual locations to riding names honouring historical figures, but your view may vary.
The Bad
- Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame
  - Was Central Newfoundland all that bad? It matched up pretty well with the Central region. Now we have the return of this long name. Though “Coast of Bays” has a Game of Thrones quality to it.
- Halifax West—Peggy’s Cove
  - One of the unfortunate attempts to seemingly make a riding’s name help with tourism. Only a few dozen people live in Peggy’s Cove.
- New Brunswick Southwest
  - Half of Saint John is in this riding, so including it in the name had some symmetry with Saint John–Kennebecasis. There is an argument to be made that St. Croix was not the right name to tack on to it, but New Brunswick Southwest is just so bland, and ignores that Saint John represents a big chunk of its population.
- Cariboo—Prince George—Omineca
  - This one is a bit of a puzzle to me. The Omineca River and Omineca Provincial Park aren’t in this riding, but the riding forms part of the Omineca Region of the B.C. Interior — as so do some other ridings. Why add it?
- Argenteuil—Papineau—Des Collines
  - The new additions refer to regional municipalities that make up the riding, so it isn’t an egregious change. But it’s a lot longer than it was and we already have a riding named Papineau which is in an entirely different location.
- Saint-Augustin—Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier
  - Points docked for lengthening the name of the riding that has had the same name for more than 20 years just to include a town that isn’t in the regional municipalities of Portneuf or Jacques-Cartier and has always been in the riding.
- Richmond—Arthabaska—Val-des-Sources
  - Another lengthening of the name of a long-standing riding to include a left-out town. At least this one won’t change the alphabetical order of the ridings like Saint-Augustin—Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier will.
The Ugly
- North York
  - Maybe it should initially have been North York Centre (though that’s weird) but the new riding of North York only includes a small portion of the old city of North York. It would be like calling one of the six Mississauga ridings “Mississauga” and letting you figure out which one it is.
- Jonquière—Hébertville—Pays-des-Bleuets
  - We had a lovely, short riding name in Jonquière and now we have this. Hébertville is a town of less than 7,000 and, as far as I can tell, most of the actual things named the Pays-des-Bleuets are located in the neighbouring Lac-Saint-Jean riding. Is this another attempt at tourism-through-riding-name?
- Rimouski-Neigette—Mitis—Matapédia—Les Basques
  - This part of the Bas-Saint-Laurent and Gaspésie has long been plagued by overly-long names that try to include as many different locations as possible in them. Rimouski—La Matapédia was an elegant solution, highlighting the two major features of the riding. Now we’re back to this 13-syllable monstrosity.

That leaves me with the three ridings of Brantford—Brant South, Hastings—Lennox and Addington and Sarnia—Lambton, which have been shortened by removing the Indigenous names of Six Nations, Tyendinaga and Bkejwanong, respectively.

The addition of Indigenous place names to a series of ridings was one of the new additions of the last redistribution. Some of them name Indigenous towns or reserves within the riding’s boundaries, some of them use historic names for a location and others include the name of an Indigenous nation. It seems to have largely been the brain-child of the commissioners in Ontario and Quebec as a way to honour Canada’s Indigenous people, and not something that originated from the Indigenous people in question, though their input was sought after the fact.

But I was surprised to see three ridings have their Indigenous place names removed. Not knowing the exact circumstances of all of the changes, however, I don’t want to be flippant about them.

On Tuesday, I reached out to the offices of the three Conservative MPs who represent these ridings (Larry Brock in Brantford—Brant South—Six Nations, Marilyn Gladu in Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong and Shelby Kramp-Neuman in Hastings—Lennox and Addington—Tyendinaga) as well as the First Nations in these ridings (Six Nations of the Grand River, Walpole Island First Nation and the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte, respectively).

As of writing, I have only heard back from Marilyn Gladu.

Gladu says that, during the redistribution process, she “consulted with the chiefs at that time from Walpole Island as well as the Aamjwinaang and Kettle and Stoney Point First Nations. Since the Aamjwinaang had been part of the riding for over 100 years, I thought they might want to choose a more inclusive or different name. However, they chose not to participate in the public input sessions and written inputs, and so the proposed name remained.”

Prior to the prorogation of Parliament and the calling of the 2025 election, Gladu says “there was a new chief elected for Walpole Island, and he had a huge problem with Bkejwanong being used, so I told him I would have it taken out” but she was unable to do so because of the election. She says that, since the election, there has “been a new chief elected at Walpole Island and when I updated her about the change she was not concerned.”

If I hear back from the other MPs and any of the three First Nations, I will update this in future newsletters.

Once the bill is passed by Parliament, the new names will come into effect after 90 days.

Round-by-round data from the NDP leadership

In case you missed it earlier this week, I was leaked some data from the NDP leadership vote showing how supporters of each candidate ranked the other candidates. The results show that Avi Lewis had broad support across the spectrum, but also that there was a divide between the Lewis camp (more closely aligned with Tanille Johnston and Tony McQuail) and the Heather McPherson camp (more closely aligned with Rob Ashton).

You can read the story and see all the data at the link above.

POLLING HIGHLIGHTS

Liberals lead in new holding pattern

As discussed in this week’s projection update, the federal parties appear to have hit a new holding pattern in national voting intentions.

New surveys were published this week by Abacus Data, Léger, Liaison Strategies, Nanos Research and Spark. They don’t show any big changes in support for either the Liberals or the Conservatives with four of the five pollsters giving the Liberals a double-digit lead.

The Liberals have between 44% and 48% support in these five polls, with the Conservatives at 30% to 37% and the NDP between 6% and 11%. That’s a pretty broad consensus of the current state of the race with some healthy variation between individual polls.

There aren’t many consistent trends between these five polls, which suggests stability for the Liberals and Conservatives. However, the NDP is up, if marginally, in four of these five polls.

Here are a few other highlights from these polls:

Abacus polled on Pierre Poilievre’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, finding that the Conservative leader’s performance was a net positive. The poll found that, among those familiar with Poilievre’s appearance, 39% had a positive reaction to it against 24% who had a negative one. Those under the age of 60 had an especially net positive reaction, while those over the age of 60 had a net negative reaction. On the whole, it seems like Poilievre going on the podcast won’t hurt him and will likely help a bit, though not among the electorate where he has the most ground to make up.
On the top three issues in Abacus’s polling, the Liberals are either tied with the Conservatives (rising cost of living), hold a small lead (economy) or have a huge advantage (Donald Trump and the U.S. administration). No other issue among those tested by Abacus registered as a top three issue for more than a third of Canadians.
Mark Carney’s positive or approval rating averaged 57% against 32% negative or disapproval in polls by Abacus, Liaison and Léger. Pierre Poilievre’s positive or favourable ratings averaged 38.5% in the Abacus and Liaison polls against 47.5% negative/unfavourable.
Nanos continues to give Carney a lead of 30+ points on the preferred prime minister question at 54.5% to 23%. Avi Lewis should be added to Nanos’s four-week rolling poll starting with next week’s release, but it will take a month before Don Davies is entirely cycled out of the sample.
Liaison found that 22% of respondents had a favourable impression of Lewis, while 17% had an unfavourable one. The majority of respondents were either unfamiliar with Lewis or did not have an opinion. Léger, meanwhile, found that only 32% of Canadians think that the NDP is relevant in Canada’s national political scene, while 43% said it was not.

Quebec’s election turning into nail-biter

A new poll from Léger amps up the potential drama that Quebec’s politics has in store as the next provincial election is just six months away.

The survey shows the Parti Québécois and Quebec Liberals in a tie at 33% apiece, the first time the Liberals have been tied for the lead in a poll in Quebec since 2018. The Liberals have gained 13 points since mid-December, nearly all of it coming at the expense of the CAQ, which now sits at just 9% support. That puts the governing party behind the Quebec Conservatives (15%) and tied with Québec Solidaire.

The PQ still has an advantage due to its 18-point lead among francophones, but the Liberals have been making themselves more competitive among francophones over the last few months. The party was at just 11% in Léger’s mid-December survey, but now stands at 23%. While that doesn’t put much pressure on the PQ in terms of winning the most seats, it does make a majority government less likely — regionally, the PQ is only decisively ahead outside of the Montreal and Quebec City regions.

The collapse of the CAQ is what has caused this tightening race. If you look at the long-term tracking chart from Léger, you can see how the CAQ’s decline first benefitted the PQ and is now benefitting the PLQ.

In other words, the CAQ first lost its nationalist vote to the PQ in 2023 and 2024 and then lost its federalist vote to the PLQ in 2025 and 2026. Throughout this time period, the Conservatives have hardly budged while QS has dropped a bit. It’s possible that QS has lost some of its federalist vote to the Liberals and some of its sovereignist vote to the PQ while the Conservatives have shaved off a bit of the CAQ’s more right-wing vote. But the biggest shifts have clearly been CAQ→PQ followed by the CAQ→PLQ that is happening now.

A second poll by Léger commissioned by Christine Fréchette’s campaign, reported by the Journal de Montréal, suggests that the CAQ’s ongoing leadership race could benefit the party once it is over. Fréchette, who is favoured over Bernard Drainville by a nearly three-to-one margin among CAQ voters in this survey, would boost the party to 16% — not nearly enough to save the party but enough to give the CAQ hope of surviving in some form after the campaign is over. Drainville would not boost the party, as under him it would be at 10%, virtually unchanged from its current standing.

Regardless of the outcome of this leadership contest, the march to a PQ victory and a Quebec independence referendum that seemed inevitable only a few months ago is no longer such a sure bet. This election will be important for both Quebec and Canada as a whole, but it’ll also be one to keep an eye on because it is up for grabs.

12-MONTH ELECTORAL CALENDAR

April 12: Coalition Avenir Québec leadership
- Candidates: Bernard Drainville, Christine Fréchette
April 13: Federal byelections in University–Rosedale, Scarborough Southwest and Terrebonne
May 11: Municipal elections in New Brunswick
May 30: British Columbia Conservative leadership
- Candidates: Iain Black, Caroline Elliott, Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Yuri Fulmer, Warren Hamm, 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
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)
- NS - Chéticamp–Margarees–Pleasant Bay (date TBD)
- CA - Beaches–East York (potential resignation pending)
- AB - Calgary Shaw (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

The Ontario CCF’s first leader

April 3, 1942

This was originally published on April 3, 2024.

As the Second World War raged across Europe, North Africa and the Pacific, Canadians sensed that things would not go back to where they were before the war had started — assuming the Allies could win, of course. The trauma of the Great Depression and the demands of the war demonstrated to Canadians that there was a need for a more activist central government, one that would ensure the well-being of everyone. If the government could mobilize massive resources to defeat enemies overseas, why couldn’t it do the same to guarantee a minimum standard of living at home?

This was the moment that the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation had been waiting for, and accordingly the CCF started to surge in some of the first political polls ever conducted in Canada.

Already established in Western Canada, the CCF was having difficulty breaking through in Ontario. But a byelection in the riding of York South provided an opportunity for the party.

The Conservatives had yet to recover from the defeat of R.B. Bennett’s government in 1935. His replacement as leader, Robert Manion, had no success in the 1940 election and the Conservatives went back to the drawing board. Rather than look forward, however, the Conservatives looked back and acclaimed Arthur Meighen, leader and briefly prime minister during the 1920s, as their party chief in 1941.

Assailed on his war record, Mackenzie King was desperate to see his old and hated foe go down to defeat. When a byelection was called in the riding of York South to get Meighen into the House of Commons, the Liberals opted not to run a candidate. To avoid splitting the vote, they left the field open to Joseph Noseworthy, the seemingly long-shot candidate of the CCF.

With a little help from the federal Liberals — though not the provincial Liberals, whose leader, Premier Mitchell Hepburn, backed Meighen — Noseworthy scored an upset victory in February 1942. It spelled the end of Meighen’s comeback attempt, but also created some positive momentum for the Ontario CCF.

The Ontario CCF wasn’t in the best of shape. In the last provincial election in 1937, the party had failed to elect a single candidate and took just 5% of the vote. But with support for the national party rising and fresh off the stunning win in York South, it was decided that the Ontario CCF needed to get better organized. To mark the 10th anniversary of its founding convention, the Ontario CCF decided they would finally name something they hadn’t yet had: a party leader.

A convention was set for April 1942, where the party would decide on platform policy and name its new leader. A total of 17 candidates were nominated for the post, including Noseworthy, future federal NDP leader David Lewis, then-sitting Ontario CCF president Sam Lawrence and Agnes Macphail, the first woman ever elected to the House of Commons.

In the end, all but two declined the nominations. One was Murray Cotterill, the 28-year-old secretary to the Toronto labour council and a stalwart of the CCF Youth Movement.

The other was Edward (Ted) Jolliffe, the vice-president of the provincial council of the CCF. “Tall and slender,” according to media reports, Jolliffe was born in China while his Christian missionary parents were in the country. Also young at just 33, Jolliffe nevertheless had an impressive resume. He had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford (where he had founded an Oxford branch of the CCF with David Lewis), a journalist and a lawyer, and had twice stood as a candidate for the federal CCF.

Between the two, it wasn’t much of a contest. The delegates gathered at the Carls-Rite Hotel in Toronto, more than 100 strong, and overwhelmingly selected Jolliffe as the first leader of the Ontario CCF. The detailed results were not announced, but “it was learned reliably, however, that the majority was so sweeping as to show almost complete endorsation by the 107 delegates” according to the Canadian Press.

(The Evening Citizen, Apr. 6, 1942)

In his victory speech, Jolliffe attacked the Hepburn government, both on the premier’s unpatriotic position on the war effort (he had dismissed the U.S. Navy and predicted that the Soviet Union would be defeated) and his unwillingness to create a social safety net for Ontarians.

“We believe the C.C.F. has the policy and the C.C.F. is the only hope in this province,” he said, citing a previous meeting he had with Hepburn where the fate of those on unemployment relief was discussed. “There was contempt and hatred in his tone of voice,” Jolliffe charged, “hatred and contempt for the unemployed.”

“The time has come, following C.C.F. successes in other provinces and in the federal field, to open a ‘second front’ here in Ontario. And with the help of the workers and the farmers we are going to do it.”

Jolliffe would deliver on his pledge. Before the convention, one of its organizers had confidently predicted that the Ontario CCF could elect 15 candidates in the next election. When it was finally called in 1943, the CCF won 34 seats and formed the official opposition. One of those seats was Ted Jolliffe’s. He ran, and won, in York South.

More from the #EveryElectionProject

Weekly Writ 3/26: What's the NDP's path back?

Éric Grenier — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 10:03:27 GMT

The New Democrats are choosing their next leader on Sunday and one of that leader’s top priorities will be to re-connect with the voters the NDP lost to the Conservatives in the last election.

Sure, there’s been a broad recognition that the New Democrats have lost a lot of progressive voters to the Liberals who also need to be recovered. But there’s been a great deal of focus on that lost connection with the blue-collar, working-class vote that Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives have assiduously wooed over the last few years.

But just how key to the NDP’s current woes are those voters?

Whoever the next leader of the NDP will be (fundraising metrics point to Avi Lewis being the overwhelming favourite, but the answer will only be revealed this weekend), they will have a lot of work to do to get the party back to relevancy. With just seven seats and 6.3% of the vote in the April 2025 election, the New Democrats had their worst-ever result. Not even the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation’s first election in 1935 went as badly as Jagmeet Singh’s campaign in 2025.

So, any voters the NDP can get back into the fold will be welcome for the party. But results from the last election suggest that the pool of voters the NDP needs to recover is far more red-tinged than blue-hued.

By a margin of roughly four-to-one, the NDP lost more of its 2021 voters to the Liberals than it did to the Conservatives, according to polling conducted at the end of the 2025 campaign.

Three pollsters (Research Co., Abacus Data and the Angus Reid Institute) included voting intentions results by past vote in their final polls of the campaign. If we average those three polls together, we find that the NDP only retained 39% of their 2021 voter base, with 45% deciding to vote for the Liberals and just 11% voting for the Conservatives.

There was some variation between the three polls, which is understandable considering the smaller sample size of NDP voters and the problems poll respondents frequently have with recalling past voting behaviour. But the results from the three polls were broadly the same — the NDP retained between 32% and 47% of their 2021 vote, while between 37% and 56% was lost to the Liberals and just 7% to 17% went to the Conservatives.

New polling from the Angus Reid Institute points to the same phenomenon, even when we pull back a little further. Among Canadians who voted for the NDP at least once since the 2015 election, the Liberals currently have nearly five times as much support as do the Conservatives. The Liberals also have more support at the moment among these past NDP voters than does the actual NDP.

(I have more analysis on new polls delving into the NDP leadership race and the future for the party below.)

It’s a pretty clear indication of how, when it comes to the sheer number of raw votes at stake, the New Democrats have more to recover from the Liberals than they do from the Conservatives. A successful strategy that is aimed at getting votes back from the Liberals would pay greater dividends than one that prioritizes getting votes back from the Conservatives.

But when it comes to the seat math, things are a little more complicated.

The NDP dropped from 25 to seven seats on election night for a loss of 18. (One of those 18 is hard to place on the map because Northern Ontario lost one seat in redistribution, but for the purposes of this analysis we’ll consider Sudbury East–Manitoulin–Nickel Belt as the successor riding to Algoma–Manitoulin).

In eight of those 18 lost seats, the Conservatives gained a greater share of the vote (even after considering the losses suffered by the People’s Party, which we can presume largely went to the Conservatives) than did the Liberals. While we can’t assume a one-to-one transfer of vote between parties, it is reasonable to conclude that, in those eight seats, the NDP was defeated primarily because it lost votes directly to the Conservatives.

Those eight seats were Burnaby Central and Skeena–Bulkley Valley in British Columbia, Edmonton Griesbach in Alberta, Elmwood–Transcona in Manitoba and Kapuskasing–Timmins–Mushkegowuk, London–Fanshawe, Sudbury East–Manitoulin–Nickel Belt and Windsor West in Ontario.

With the exception of Burnaby Central, which went to the Liberals, the Conservatives won these seats.

In the 10 other seats lost by the NDP, it was the Liberals who gained more than the Conservatives (again, after accounting for the PPC vote). In these 10 seats, we can reasonably conclude that the main reason the NDP was defeated was because of votes lost to the Liberals.

These were Cowichan–Malahat–Langford, Esquimalt–Saanich–Sooke, Nanaimo–Ladysmith, New Westminster–Burnaby–Maillardville, North Island–Powell River, Port Moody–Coquitlam, Similkameen–South Okanagan–West Kootenay and Victoria in British Columbia, Churchill–Keewatinook Aski in Manitoba and Hamilton Centre in Ontario.

It’s notable that so many of the NDP losses caused by Liberal gains were on Vancouver Island, with three of the five seats going to the Conservatives rather than the Liberals. It was a vote split that worked against the NDP that helped elect Conservatives in these ridings because the Liberals were working from too small of a base.

And while the Conservatives won seven of the eight formerly-NDP seats where Conservative gains were greater than that of the Liberals, the Liberals only won six of the 10 seats where their gains were greater than that of the Conservatives. Liberal gains from the NDP in the party’s lost seats were more likely to elect Conservatives than Liberals.

It’s a bit of multi-dimensional chess for the NDP. The NDP lost 11 seats to the Conservatives and seven to the Liberals, but the Liberal gain was greater than the Conservative gain in 10 seats against eight where the Conservative gain was greater. This means it isn’t necessarily the party-banner of the incumbent that should decide the NDP’s approach — more often, the NDP has more votes to get back from the Liberals in their lost seats, even in ones where winning means beating a Conservative.

It’s not cut-and-dry, however, so this argues for a multi-pronged approach from the New Democrats. As has been argued throughout the leadership contest, the NDP’s path back goes through both the Liberals and the Conservatives. But, it’s clear that the two parties don’t loom equally as large in the New Democrats’ comeback plans — for the NDP to return to relevancy, they need to take the Liberals down a peg most of all.

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

News on a change to the ballot in the Terrebonne byelection and a change of political allegiance in Quebec’s National Assembly.
An update on the federal polls, including some deeper looks at Manitoba and Atlantic Canada, and some insights on the challenges the NDP and its leadership contenders have ahead of them. Plus, provincial numbers out of Manitoba and Ontario.
#EveryElectionProject: The 1930 Alberta Liberal leadership race.

Weekly Writ 3/19: How much do you like (or not) your premier?

Éric Grenier — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:08:39 GMT

Manitoba’s Wab Kinew remains the most popular premier in the country, and only one of three premiers with a net positive approval rating.

But his remarkable string of popularity since coming to office in 2023 is all the more impressive when you consider that he is the only premier with a net positive approval rating among those who have the strongest opinions.

The Angus Reid Institute published its quarterly premiers’ approval ratings report yesterday, covering nine of Canada’s 10 provincial premiers. (Because of the small size of Prince Edward Island, the ARI does not have a panel that is large enough from which to adequately poll on a quarterly basis.) The report shows that Kinew is once again the most popular premier with a 61% approval rating, an increase of three points over the last quarter.

Two other premiers have majority approval: New Brunswick’s Susan Holt at 54% and Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe at 51%. Both of them saw their approval rating drop by an insignificant two points.

Alberta’s Danielle Smith ranked next with 46% (+2), followed by Newfoundland and Labrador’s Tony Wakeham at 42% (+1).

Nova Scotia’s Tim Houston had the biggest drop, as his approval ratings plummeted 11 points to just 39%. This comes in the wake of a provincial budget with cuts that the Houston government had to reverse when they were met with big protests.

Rounding out the list were B.C.’s David Eby at 37% (-3), Ontario’s Doug Ford at 31% (-3) and Quebec’s François Legault at 26% (+1), in what will be his last quarterly assessment by the Angus Reid Institute. Legault will be replaced in April when the CAQ chooses his successor.

While Houston’s slide was the only one of great significance compared to the ARI’s last quarterly assessment, the smaller shifts for some of the other premiers are part of an ongoing trend.

Eby has seen his approval rating drop over four consecutive quarters by a total of 16 points since March 2025. (Houston, too, has dropped over four consecutive quarters, but more than half of his total slide of 20 points has taken place in the last three months.)

With the exception of a small uptick last fall, Ford has also been sliding over the last year. But this is more of a regression to the mean — Ford jumped to 48% when he was taking on Donald Trump early last year, but throughout 2023 and 2024 his approval rating was usually in the 33% to 34% range.

At a net -31, Ford has the worst net approval rating among the premiers who aren’t on their way out (Legault, at -42, is at the very bottom). But most premiers have net negative ratings. Wakeham is -2, Smith is -6, Houston is -19 and Eby is -21. Only Moe (+6), Holt (+14) and Kinew (+26) have lower disapproval ratings than approval ratings.

But let’s look at this from another angle. A big chunk of respondents in all provinces say they either moderately approve or moderately disapprove of their premiers. In all but Alberta and Quebec nearly half or a majority of respondents have these mushy views. What if we strip them out and look only at those who strongly approve or disapprove of their premier?

When we do that, Kinew is the only premier that is still a net positive. The ARI finds that 27% of Manitobans strongly approve of their NDP premier, while just 19% strongly disapprove. Moe drops to a net -5 when focusing only on those who feel strongly, while Holt slides to -15 — the biggest shift of any premier.

Eby and Houston drop to -30 and -26, respectively, while Smith slides to a -17. Interestingly, Ford, Legault and Wakeham have identical numbers among all respondents and among only those with strongly-held views.

These numbers suggest which premiers might be facing deeper opposition within their provinces — but also that negative views tend to be more strongly held. Smith and Kinew have the highest strongly approve numbers at 27%. With the exception of Legault (at 46%), Smith also has the highest strongly disapprove numbers at 44%. Three other premiers (Eby, Ford and Houston) have strongly disapprove ratings at 35% or more.

There are fewer “gettable” voters for these premiers as a large proportion of their electorates have such strongly held views that they are unlikely to ever be brought over to their sides. It’s one of the reasons that Legault had to go — he had no path to re-election with such high levels of opposition (his successor also seems likely to find the way forward difficult).

Smith and Kinew face elections next year (or earlier, if they want). From this vantage point, it looks like Kinew will easily secure re-election, though Smith faces a more polarized electorate. For now, she’s on the winning side of that polarization. But, as Houston recently discovered, things can change quickly.

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

News on the CAQ and B.C. Conservative leadership races and a sad passing in Prince Edward Island.
Polls continue to show the Liberals with a double-digit lead. Plus, what Canadians think of the war in Iran and where things stand in B.C., Ontario, Alberta and one riding in Toronto.
#EveryElectionProject: Stephen Harper wins the 2002 Alliance leadership.
Upcoming milestone for Danielle Smith.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Weekly Writ 3/12: What a difference a year makes

Éric Grenier — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 10:06:43 GMT

A year ago this week, Mark Carney won the Liberal leadership and was sworn in as Canada’s 24th prime minister.

While he’s still prime minister today, a whole lot of other things have changed.

And that includes the standings in the House of Commons, which seems to be changing on any given day. Late on Tuesday night, NDP interim leader Don Davies announced that Nunavut MP Lori Idlout was crossing the floor from his party to the Liberals. More on that in a bit.

A year ago today, there were 153 Liberal, 120 Conservative, 33 Bloc, 24 NDP, two Green and three Independent MPs. Now, with Idlout’s crossing, there are 170 Liberals, 141 Conservatives, 22 Bloc, six New Democrats and one Green. With three vacancies in the House, the governing caucus is tied with the opposition caucus.

It seems likely that the Liberals will shortly secure their majority, thanks to the three byelections scheduled on April 13.

Another thing that has changed over the last year is the support for the Liberals — and that shift in support partially explains why there have now been four opposition MPs who have made the journey across the aisle.

Almost exactly one year ago, a poll by Léger taken around Mark Carney’s leadership victory awarded the Liberals 37% support, putting them in a tie with the Conservatives. The NDP trailed in third with 11%.

(Even that reflected a remarkable shift in support. Just two months earlier, Léger pegged the Conservative lead at 26 percentage points).

The most recent Léger poll now puts the Liberals at 49%, followed by the Conservatives at 35% and the NDP at just 5%. In one year, Léger has recorded a 12-point increase for the Liberals as the Conservatives have slid two points and the NDP has dropped six.

Satisfaction with Justin Trudeau’s government at the time of it being handed over to Mark Carney was 37%, with 57% dissatisfied. Now, Léger gives Carney’s government a 59% satisfaction rating, with just 33% dissatisfied.

Comparing these two Léger polls, we see that support for the Liberals has jumped dramatically across all regions and demographic groups.

The biggest increases have come among women (a gain of 18 points), those aged 18 to 34 (16 points) and people living in British Columbia (16 points). Smaller gains have occurred among people in the Prairies (seven points), men (eight points) and those aged 35-54 (nine points).

Léger records no big jump in Conservative support among any demographic. They have as much support today as they did in Léger’s poll a year ago among women, people under the age of 55 and those living in urban centres. But they are down four points among those over the age of 55 and are down five points in suburban areas — a big electoral problem for the Conservatives.

Perhaps the most problematic shift for the Conservatives, however, is in the head-to-head match up. Polling by Nanos Research has given Mark Carney a big lead over Pierre Poilievre on the preferred prime minister question since the election. But the gap has widened over the last few weeks.

The last iteration of Nanos’s four-week rolling poll now has Carney at 57% on preferred prime minister, the highest it has ever been and higher even than Trudeau managed in his post-2015 honeymoon. Poilievre has now dropped to 22%. The gap between them is 35 points, wider than it’s ever been and wider than the advantage Poilievre ever enjoyed over Trudeau.

A lot has changed in 12 months. A year ago, Carney presided over a minority government and faced an uncertain election ahead of him. Now, he might be days away from a majority — and years from needing to go back to the electorate.

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

News on the floor-crossing in the House and the stakes of the three byelections set for April 13. Plus, the Manitoba PCs lose an MLA.
Polls show a double-digit lead for the Liberals nationwide. Plus, new numbers on how Canadians perceive the Carney government, where things stand in Alberta and B.C. and whether anyone knows who is running for the leader of the B.C. Conservatives or Ontario Liberals.
#EveryElectionProject: Ralph Klein’s third win in Alberta.
Upcoming milestone for Mark Carney.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Floor-crossing, byelections put Carney on cusp of majority

The pieces that will push the Liberals to, and perhaps beyond, the threshold of 172 seats needed for a majority government were put into place this week with the calling of three byelections for April 13 and the crossing of Nunavut MP Lori Idlout from the New Democrats to the Liberals.

What does it mean for the next few weeks and months — and for the opposition parties?

Weekly Writ 3/5: Winning five consecutive elections is no easy feat

Éric Grenier — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 11:03:26 GMT

With the polls continuing to look good for Mark Carney and the Liberals, a snap election call is certainly a possibility this year. But floor-crossers and byelections might secure Carney his majority, too. Whether or not the next election is this year, in the next two years or occurs on schedule in 2029, Carney’s Liberals will be looking for their fifth consecutive election victory.

Easier said than done.

While more common at the provincial level, only five times has a federal party been in power long enough to try to win five consecutive elections. The next election will be the sixth attempt.

The first occurred in 1896. John A. Macdonald had returned to power in 1878 after a brief Liberal interregnum and won re-election in 1882, 1887 and 1891 (as detailed below in this week’s edition of the #EveryElectionProject). Macdonald died shortly after the 1891 victory and the country went through three more prime ministers before Charles Tupper led the Conservatives to defeat in the 1896 election.

That defeat kicked-off the next attempt to win five elections in a row. After becoming prime minister in 1896, Wilfrid Laurier was re-elected in 1900, 1904 and 1908. He tried to win his fifth election in 1911 but lost to Robert Borden’s Conservatives.

It wasn’t until mid-century that the next attempt to win five elections occurred. Mackenzie King was back in office in 1935 and won re-election in 1940 and 1945 before handing over the reins to Louis St-Laurent, who won in 1949. St-Laurent increased the Liberals’ winning streak to five in 1953, making the Liberal victory that year the first time any party won five elections in a row at the national level.

The last successful attempt to win five elections in a row was in 1974, when Pierre Trudeau brought the Liberals back to majority status. The streak began with Lester Pearson’s two minority wins in 1963 and 1965, followed by Trudeau’s majority victory in 1968 and his narrow minority win in 1972.

The last try for five came in 2006. Jean Chrétien won elections in 1993, 1997 and 2000 for the Liberals, with Paul Martin winning a fourth in 2004. His attempt to win a fifth went down to defeat in 2006.

The record at the federal level, as thin as it is, is not glowing, with three defeats and only two victories. And in both successful attempts, the party went down to defeat in the subsequent election. But because it is so difficult to win four elections, just being in a position to attempt a fifth means that, win or lose, Carney will still be in good company.

Perhaps because it is more difficult to hold together a coalition of voters at the national level than it is provincially, where there is less regional variation, there have been longer stretches of one-party dominance at the provincial level. In all, there have been 36 attempts by a party to win five provincial elections in a row but, unlike at the federal level, some of those were part of far longer stretches in office. No party has won six consecutive elections federally, but several parties have pulled off that feat (and even added to the winning streak) at the provincial level.

The winning record at the provincial level is respectable, with 21 re-elections and 15 defeats when parties have tried to win five elections in a row.

(This considers the Liberal-Conservative coalitions of the 1940s in British Columbia as a continuation of the Liberal government first elected in 1933, and it also considers John Bracken’s victories first as a Progressive and then as a Liberal-Progressive as part of the same streak of victories. The 2017 election in B.C. is also considered a “successful” attempt at a fifth consecutive election victory, as Christy Clark’s Liberals technically did win the most seats, even if they were toppled by the NDP and Greens after the election.)

While the winning record is slightly worse than the general re-election record of incumbent governments, it is still above .500. But many of them were in the first century or so of Canada’s existence. There have been only 12 attempts to win five elections in row over the last 50 years, with just four election victories (or three if we consider Clark’s 2017 campaign a defeat).

So, over the last half-century there have been only 13 attempts to win five elections in a row at either the provincial or federal levels and only four (or three) victories. That’s not such a great record. Canadians aren’t as keen to keep parties in office for prolonged periods of time as they once were.

Each case is unique, though. That it’s been hard for other parties to win five in a row doesn’t mean that it will be hard for the Liberals. But, if they pull it off, it’ll be quite the achievement — simply because it’s become so rare these days.

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

News on the slate of candidates in the B.C. Conservative leadership race, the deregistration of a minor federal party and the creation of a new Acadian riding in Nova Scotia.
Polls show the Liberal lead stabilizing, while in Quebec the provincial race is getting much tighter. Plus, Canadians’ views on the war in Iran, trade with India and the renegotiation of CUSMA, as well as the state of the race in B.C. post-provincial budget.
#EveryElectionProject: The 1891 Canadian election, when annexation by the U.S. was on the ballot (or so Sir John A. claimed).
Upcoming milestones for Mark Carney and Doug Ford.

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NEWS AND ANALYSIS

POLLING HIGHLIGHTS

Liberal lead stabilizing?

The gap between the Liberals and Conservatives appears to be holding as two new polls show stability, a third (lagging) poll catches up to the pack and a fourth we haven’t heard from in awhile returns.

Polls from Abacus Data and Liaison Strategies show the Liberals leading by six and 10 points, respectively. For Abacus, this is a reduction in the Liberal lead by a single point from its early-February poll, while Liaison’s two-week rolling poll has had the lead go from nine points two weeks ago to 12 points last week before settling at 10 points this week.

Nanos Research, meanwhile, has the Liberals enjoying a lead of nearly 11 points, a nine-point swing compared to where the four-week rolling poll was just two weeks ago. As the Nanos poll was one of the last to show the big swing to the Liberals, and because each weekly poll release has a lot of old data in it, it would seem that this recent swing is more about catching up to the other surveys than it is a sign that the Liberals are continuing to surge forward.

It’s also a bit difficult to discern any recent trends from a new Ipsos poll, which gives the Liberals a lead of eight points, 44% to 36%, over the Conservatives. The last poll from Ipsos was published in mid-December. That survey had the Liberals leading by three points, so this would again suggest another poll re-affirming the consensus view of where things stand, rather than a new indication of Liberal growth.

Last week, I highlighted an emerging trend in Alberta, where the Liberals were actually surging forward. Nanos doesn’t have any Alberta-specific results, but Liaison shows the trend it picked up holding. Last week, the Conservatives were leading in Alberta by a margin of 48% to 37%. This week, the margin is largely unchanged at 48% to 38%, indicating that Liaison’s finding wasn’t a one-off fluke.

Abacus showed a 35-point lead for the Conservatives in early February. This latest Abacus poll has the gap at 25 points, 57% to 32%. While it isn’t as tight as some other recent surveys, that is nevertheless a net 10-point swing between the poll ending on February 10 and the poll ending on February 23.

And Ipsos, new to the pack has the Conservatives leading in Alberta by just 13 points, 49% to 36%.

With these new polls out, the seat projection average has the Liberals leading with 205 seats, followed by the Conservatives at 102, the Bloc at 23 and the NDP at 11.

I’m moving closer and closer to the publication of The Writ’s official seat and vote projection model. I’m now at the stage of inputting old data to get some trend lines going back to the 2025 election. Stay tuned!

Quebec’s election looking closer

A new poll from Léger suggests the outcome of Quebec’s provincial election in October is becoming less certain as the gap between the Parti Québécois and the Quebec Liberals shrinks to just one point.

The PQ is effectively tied with the Liberals at 31% to 30%, the latter number representing a four-point gain for the Liberals since Léger’s previous poll conducted at the end of January, before Charles Milliard was acclaimed as the new leader of the PLQ.

There has been a significant shift in voting intentions over the last three months. In early December, the PQ was leading with 39% against just 21% for the Liberals, according to Léger. Since then, the PQ has dropped eight points and the Liberals have picked up nine.

The poll found the Quebec Conservatives in third place with 15%, followed by the governing Coalition Avenir Québec with 13%. This is the first time Léger has put the CAQ in fourth. Québec Solidaire brings up the rear with 9% support.

The PQ holds a 20-point lead over the Liberals among francophones, which is electorally decisive and potentially enough to keep the PQ in majority territory — despite being at just 31% across the province. But the Liberals appear to be making serious inroads in the Montreal region. If that isn’t all concentrated on the island of Montreal (which last week’s Pallas Data poll suggested wasn’t the case), then the PLQ could put some pressure on the PQ in the suburbs surrounding the island. It wouldn’t be enough pressure to put a PQ victory in doubt, but it could raise some questions about the PQ’s ability to secure a majority.

If the party does secure a majority, leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has promised to hold a referendum on Quebec independence in his first mandate. But support for sovereignty has hit a new low, with only 26% saying they would vote OUI in a new referendum against 65% who would vote NON. Removing the undecideds shows a 29% to 71% split, which has to rank among the lowest numbers ever recorded for Quebec independence in the last 50 years.

While the sovereignty issue has the potential to weigh down the PQ’s election chances, the ongoing CAQ leadership race looks unlikely to boost the governing party’s fortunes. Earlier polling found that front runner Christine Fréchette made her party far more competitive, but this survey finds that Fréchette would only boost the CAQ to 15%. Still, that’s better than the 8% that Bernard Drainville would get for the CAQ, putting the party dead last.

12-MONTH ELECTORAL CALENDAR

March 29: Federal NDP leadership
- Candidates: Rob Ashton, Tanille Johnston, Avi Lewis, Heather McPherson, Tony McQuail
April 12: Coalition Avenir Québec leadership
- Candidates: Bernard Drainville, Christine Fréchette
May 11: Municipal elections in New Brunswick
May 30: British Columbia Conservative leadership
- Candidates: Bruce Banman, Harman Bhangu, Iain Black, Caroline Elliott, Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Yuri Fulmer, Warren Hamm, Darrell Jones, 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
November 28: Nova Scotia Liberal leadership
Byelections yet to be scheduled
- CA - University–Rosedale (to by called by July)
- CA - Scarborough Southwest (to be called by August)
- ON - Scarborough Southwest (to be called by August)
- CA - Terrebonne (to be called by August)
- NS - Chéticamp–Margarees–Pleasant Bay (date TBD)
- CA - Beaches–East York (potential resignation pending)
- AB - Calgary Shaw (resignation pending)
Party leadership dates yet to be set
- Federal Greens (Elizabeth May announced on August 19, 2025)

ON THIS DAY in the #EveryElectionProject

Should Canada become the 45th state?

March 5, 1891

Canadian fears of annexation by the United States are nothing new. Indeed, they were one of the contributing factors that led to Confederation in 1867. Elections won or lost over Canada’s relationship with the United States are also nothing new.

But the issue was perhaps never more front and centre — or more contentious — than in the federal election of 1891.

As the Dominion of Canada approached the 20th century, its prime minister was still a figure who was very much of the 19th. John A. Macdonald was Canada’s first prime minister and by 1891 had served in that role for all but five years since the country’s foundation. Since returning to office after the 1878 election, Macdonald had led his Conservatives (also known as Liberal-Conservatives) to victories in 1882 and 1887, defeating the Liberals under Edward Blake.

But things were beginning to change in Canadian politics. Macdonald was 76 years old and in ill-health as his years of heavy drinking were catching up to him. He knew that he likely only had one more campaign in him and it would be against a new opponent who represented a major shift all on his own.

Wilfrid Laurier had taken over as leader of the Liberals after the 1887 defeat, the first time a French Canadian led a national party. It was an open question whether the age-old divides between English and French, Protestant and Catholic would prevent Laurier from even being given a hearing outside of his home province of Quebec.

The Liberals needed a bold new policy to take to voters to grab their attention. The country’s economy was flagging and the Liberals eyed a potential solution south of the border.

Since 1878, Macdonald had boasted the benefits of his “National Policy”, which essentially amounted to protective tariffs. The National Policy assured that Canada’s manufacturing industry could grow and prosper, safe from competition from the far more dynamic economy of the United States. It also ensured that the agricultural sector wouldn’t be swamped by American goods. For Macdonald, the National Policy was the cause of Canada’s prosperity when things were going well and the solution to its problems when they weren’t.

Ahead of the 1891 election, the Liberals decided to go in another direction: “unrestricted reciprocity”, or free trade with the Americans. Not only would this open up America’s huge market to Canadian products, it would lower costs for farmers who were forced to buy more expensive tools and equipment produced by tariff-protected Canadian manufacturers. It would be the jolt that Canada’s economy needed to get out of the doldrums.

It would also have the benefit of protecting Canada from the increasingly protectionist United States, which had just recently adopted the McKinley Tariffs.

But if the Liberals thought this was the policy that could bring them to power, Macdonald spied an election-winning wedge issue. Reciprocity was not the solution to Canada’s economic malaise. Instead, it was simply the first step toward economic and then full political union with the United States.

The United States was an expansionist power in the 19th century. Through deal-making and war-making, the country had grown from one that was penned in along the eastern seaboard to one that stretched from sea to sea. In 1890, Idaho and Wyoming had been made the 43rd and 44th states.

By the 1890s, fewer American eyes were being cast on the vast Canadian territories as before. But there was still much discussion about annexation and there were advocates on both sides of the border who voiced their support of a continental union. Could Canada become the 45th state?

It was easy to cast the Liberal project as the stepping stone to eventual union — which meant breaking ties with the British Empire. Those old ties with the old country were still strong in large parts of the Dominion, and Macdonald knew how to play on that emotional connection.

“A British subject I was born — a British subject I will die,” he said in a campaign speech in Toronto. “With my utmost effort, with my latest breath, I oppose the veiled treason which attempts by sordid means and mercenary profit to lure our people from their allegiance.”

This “veiled treason” involved allegations Macdonald levied against the Liberals, and in particular Richard Cartwright, the foremost Liberal in Ontario, who he said was conspiring with American annexationists. Macdonald would have none of it.

“During my long public service of nearly half a century,” he went on, “I have been true to my country and its best interests, and I appeal with equal confidence to the men who have trusted me in the past, and to the young hope of the future, with whom rests its destinies for the future, to give me their united and strenuous aid in this, my last effort, for the unity of the Empire and the preservation of our commercial and political freedom.”

There was a lot of nostalgia in Macdonald’s appeal — not only to the old colonial connections to Great Britain but to Macdonald himself. He knew, as did Canadians, that he didn’t have long for this world. He was asking Canadians to stick by him one more time. The Conservatives leaned hard into these appeals to nostalgia, most famously in a campaign poster bearing the slogan “The Old Flag, The Old Policy, The Old Leader.”

Conservative campaign poster, 1891.

The old flag was, of course, the Union Jack (or the Red Ensign, in this case). The old policy was the National Policy. And the old leader was him. To hammer the poster’s point home, Macdonald was held aloft on the shoulders of a farmer and an industrial worker — in other words, rural and urban male voters (women did not have the franchise) — as he flew the flag one last time.

Macdonald was an old warhorse of a campaigner. This was his seventh campaign as national leader of the party, in addition to his pre-Confederation campaigns. Despite his advanced age (and the cold February winter), Macdonald was touring southern Ontario holding two rallies per day.

Wilfrid Laurier, on the other hand, kept quiet in the first week of the campaign, holed up in his headquarters in Montreal. He let Richard Cartwright in Ontario and Premier Honoré Mercier in Quebec lead the charge in the early days.

When he did finally venture out, he met Macdonald’s charges of disloyalty in a speech in Quebec City, where he was running as a candidate. But he didn’t have the tubthumping, populist style of his wily old opponent.

“No, gentlemen; as of yore we are still true and loyal to our Sovereign Lady the Queen,” he said. “But if our interests were in opposition to those of England, we would stick to ours by all means. We are Canadians and we will watch Canada’s welfare before all.”

This was the contrast between the two parties and the two men. Macdonald’s view of Canadian success was an economy protected from American competition and which maintained its close ties with the British Empire. Laurier’s view was of a Canada more self-confident, ready to take on competition with the Americans and willing to chart its own course, independent of Great Britain (and the United States). It was the old vs. the new.

At 49 years old at the time of the election, Laurier was not exactly a very young man. But Macdonald was more than 25 years his senior. And both men took ill with the pressures of the campaign. But while Laurier would recover, Macdonald never would.

Before long, Macdonald had to reduce his schedule to one rally per day. But in the final stretch of the campaign, he was induced to hold two rallies one day in eastern Ontario, riding in an open carriage in the late February air on both occasions. His strength collapsed and his secretary, Joseph Pope, had to cancel all further events for the rest of the campaign. Macdonald wouldn’t hit the hustings again, heading to bed on election night without knowing whether had had won or not.

But his appeal to Canadians’ loyalty to the old connection prevailed — if only just. The Conservatives won 117 seats and 48% of the vote, enough to secure another majority in the House of Commons. The Conservatives swept all of B.C.’s six seats and the four seats in the Northwest Territories (which then included what is now Alberta and Saskatchewan). They dropped seats in Ontario and Quebec, but gained six in the Maritimes.

Overall, however, the Conservatives had lost six seats from the 1887 election and their majority had been reduced. The Liberals took 45% of the vote, putting them just behind the Conservatives, and won 33 of Quebec’s 65 seats. While it wasn’t much of a surprise that Quebecers had embraced a native son, the Liberals’ breakthrough in Ontario with a gain of seven seats, putting them nearly even with the Conservatives, was significant — and a sign that English-speaking Protestants could indeed vote for a French Canadian Catholic. It bode well for Laurier’s future.

But the Conservatives paid a steep price for one more election victory. Pope believed that Macdonald never fully recovered from the “chill” he suffered that cold day on the campaign trail. In May, Macdonald suffered a series of strokes. He passed away on June 6, 1891, nearly three months to the day after his last election win.

The Conservatives wouldn’t fully recover from the loss of Macdonald. After cycling through four successors, the Conservatives would finally go down to defeat in 1896 when Laurier, who had dropped his policy of unrestricted reciprocity, had learned not to test Canadians’ appetite for closer ties with the United States.

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