Weekly Writ 9/18: Budget in November, a new record in December?
How a new record could be set if the budget doesn't pass. Plus, where things stand in the polls; and the writ is dropped in NL.
Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history that lands in your inbox every Thursday morning.
Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced this past week that budget day would be on November 4. That means the countdown clock until that confidence vote has begun ticking.
As I’ll get into below when looking at where the polls stand today, Mark Carney’s Liberals are in a decent bargaining position at the moment — they lead in the polls and there is no guarantee that any of the other parties would make gains in a new election. They could even risk handing Carney a majority government.
The budget vote could prove to be anticlimactic, as it often does. Or it could kick start the second election campaign in little more than six months.
If that happens, it would be the shortest delay between elections in Canadian history.
Assuming the House would be dissolved within a week of the presentation of the budget, that would set the country on course for an election likely on December 15 or December 22. That means either 231 or 238 days between federal elections.
That would be a new record. There were 323 days between the 1925 and 1926 elections, 294 days between the 1957 and 1958 elections, as well as between the 1962 and 1963 elections, and just 272 days between the 1979 and 1980 elections. This timeline would cut the record down by about a month.
None of these other examples are tidy precedents for our current situation. The 1925-26 example was in the context of the King-Byng Affair. John Diefenbaker was riding a wave of popularity in 1958 and it secured him a landslide victory, while his government was falling apart in 1963 and that election put his PCs out of their misery. The fall of the Clark government in 1979 was a mixture of miscalculation and over-confidence, which is perhaps the cocktail that could find itself back on the menu in 2025. But neither Joe Clark nor his PCs were very popular at the time — that isn’t so for today’s Liberals or for Mark Carney.
I’m not expecting that we’ll set a new record this year. But it’s interesting to game out the timeline. Two elections in one year? It would certainly be unprecedented. Then again, we do seem to be living in unprecedented times.
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News on the writ drop in Newfoundland and Labrador and the leadership change for the Ontario Liberals. Plus, the B.C. Greens are about to choose a leader and Chrystia Freeland bows out from cabinet.
Polls show the Liberals hold the advantage heading into what could be a tumultuous fall sitting. Plus, we have polling numbers from every province, including a new poll out of Quebec that continues to show bad news for François Legault.
#EveryElectionProject: Bernard Lord gambles on an early election in 2006.
Upcoming milestone for David Coon.
NEWS AND ANALYSIS
Writ dropped in Newfoundland and Labrador
As scheduled, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians will be heading to the polls on October 14. Premier John Hogan dropped the writ on Monday, setting the province on course for a 28-day election campaign. As of writing, the election is a bit of a black box as we’ve seen no voting intentions polls out of Newfoundland and Labrador since November 2024.