Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history. Reading this in your email inbox and having trouble viewing any of the charts? To optimize them for your device, click/tap the charts or view them on thewrit.ca.
There’s lots to get into this week at both the federal and provincial levels, but before that I want to go over some important changes that will be coming to The Writ.
The headline is that the Weekly Writ is going away. Sort of.
The first Weekly Writ was published nearly five years ago in November 2021. At the time, the impetus was to ensure I had a weekly newsletter to send out to subscribers that would update you on all the latest electoral news and political polls, as well as to provide a home for the #EveryElectionProject. I was trying to give myself a little more structure, give readers something they could build a habit around and provide myself a forum to write about news and events that might be of limited appeal to a broader audience (like a provincial byelection).
But as The Writ has evolved, the Weekly Writ has become, at times, somewhat redundant, often long and rarely timely. This was made plain to me over the last few weeks with the byelections that occurred in Ontario and Alberta.
The Ontario provincial byelections occurred on September 3, a Thursday. That meant that I only got around to analyzing the results of the byelections in the Weekly Writ on the following Thursday, on September 10. By then, most people had moved on. Then, earlier this week, the Alberta NDP scored a rather shocking byelection win in Calgary-Shaw (more on that below). But instead of writing about it on Tuesday, I opted instead to include it in this newsletter. Again, the newsiness of my analysis will have diminished, but this was an event that deserved a more timely reaction, but I couldn’t really get into it without displacing other scheduled items.
Plus, with the federal projection model now up and running, there’s some redundancy in taking a look at the federal polls in the newsletter every week, since the projection updates already do that to some extent and even there I’ve limited myself in those updates in order to save some analysis for the Weekly Writ. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.
And, with so much going on every week, the Weekly Writ can get very long — up to 5,000 words (like this one!). That’s taxing for readers and it’s taxing for me. When the newsletters get overly long, I often feel the need to abridge my own analysis so as to try to keep things short, and with so much to get to I’m not always able to delve very deeply, especially when I start running short on time.
So, for all these reasons I’d like to pilot a retirement of the Weekly Writ, starting next week. I will do two things in its place:
Publish analyses in an ad hoc manner on single topics, be it a preview of an upcoming byelection or an analysis of the results of byelections, a deep-dive into an interesting new poll or set of polls or a longer-form article on the latest development in Canadian politics.
Publish a new newsletter, called The Writ Drop, on Saturday mornings. This newsletter will be a quick round-up of whatever I might have missed as well as a summary of the work that was published in the preceding week, and include some elements of the Weekly Writ, such as the electoral calendar and new instalments of the #EveryElectionProject.
The idea is to make The Writ more nimble and responsive to news and less rigidly tied to a publishing schedule that doesn’t actually serve readers. The projection models will continue to be updated regularly and analyses of those projection updates will continue to be published. But instead of being published on a set day of the week, they’ll be published when there are many new polls or notable new trends. Again, it’s about prioritizing timeliness over an arbitrarily-set schedule.
With The Writ Drop, the goal is to keep you updated on everything else that is happening but that didn’t get a full analysis. It’ll be shorter and more to the point than the Weekly Writ, but will include more links to news items and poll reports, in addition to the #EveryElectionProject. My hope is that The Writ Drop will be a newsletter to consume over the weekend with a cup of coffee, a way to catch-up on what you might have missed throughout the week, as well as indulge in a little historical reading.
The Election Writ will also go the way of the dodo, but you likely won’t notice as I’ll continue to have ongoing coverage of the Quebec provincial election campaign. There will be no changes to the publishing schedule of episodes of The Numbers and The Writ Podcast (which will be back!).
This new approach will begin next week. I’m curious to see how it will fit into my workflow (on the one hand, having a publishing schedule was well-attuned to my personal preference for order and structure, but I don’t think it was conducive to creativity) and I’m especially curious to know what you think. So, let me know what your initial thoughts are and, please, keep providing me feedback as we pilot this new approach from The Writ.
Paid subscribers to The Writ will, of course, retain unfettered access to everything, including the seat and vote projection models (with more of them to come!). Most of what is published will remain exclusive to paid subscribers, but periodically some analyses and a portion of The Writ Drop will be available to free subscribers.
If you’d like to receive access to everything, you can upgrade your subscription right here:
Now that the housekeeping is out of the way, let’s get into what’s in this last instalment of the Weekly Writ:
Analysis of the NDP’s win in Calgary-Shaw, plus news on new parties in B.C. and Alberta and a new Independent in Newfoundland and Labrador.
The Liberals hold a wide lead in the polls, Canadians support closer ties with the European Union, and we have new numbers out of British Columbia, Alberta, Nova Scotia and Mississauga, along with an update to premiers’ approval ratings from coast to coast.
#EveryElectionProject: When Canada-U.S. relations were on the ballot in 1911.
Upcoming milestone for Danielle Smith.
NEWS AND ANALYSIS
Alberta NDP scores surprise win in Calgary-Shaw
Calgary-Shaw was supposed to be a safe seat for the United Conservatives. Tucked away in southern Calgary, in a federal riding won by the Conservatives with two-thirds of the vote and where the UCP’s Rebecca Schulz won by nearly 14 percentage points in the 2023 provincial election, the UCP should not have been in any danger of losing this seat.
But that’s what happened. And it’s hard not to see it as a rebuke of Premier Danielle Smith’s referendum.