Weekly Writ 9/4: Will the long byelection ballot influence the result?
Weekly Writ 9/4: Will the long byelection ballot influence the result?
What Toronto–St. Paul's tells us about the impact of the long ballot on voters. Plus, who is benefiting from the demise of BC United?
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 Wednesday morning.
One of the two federal byelections taking place on September 16 will be plagued by the same problem as was Toronto–St. Paul’s: an absurdly large ballot that will cause a significant delay in reporting results.
There will be 91 candidates on the ballot in LaSalle–Émard–Verdun, marking another record set by the Longest Ballot Committee (LBC). This organization has nominated increasingly larger numbers of candidates in recent byelections as a form of protest against the Liberal government’s abandonment of electoral reform.
The large ballot in Toronto–St. Paul’s resulted in a painstakingly slow counting of the votes, as the unfolding and storing of the massive ballots increased the time required to go through them one-by-one. Our livestream for the byelection lasted over five hours, and even that wasn’t enough. Only 73% of the boxes had been counted by the time we have up, and it wasn’t until 4:30 AM that the count was finalized.
The ballot will be even longer this time and Elections Canada says it is trying to streamline the process, in part by hiring more workers and counting the advance poll ballots earlier. I wish them luck.
Whether or not this protest has jumped the shark, it is an open question whether it is having an impact on the actual results of the byelection itself — and not just the counting.
There’s some indication that the ballot did have an impact on some people’s votes.
Below, I’ve colour-coded the Toronto–St. Paul’s ballot by the number of votes the Independent and minor candidates (some ran separately from the LBC’s project, others were a part of it) received. I’ve also highlighted the five candidates running under the Liberal, Conservative, NDP, Green and PPC banners.
Dark red circles indicate a candidate receiving zero to nine votes, lighter red indicates 10 to 19 votes, yellow indicates 20 to 49 votes and green circles are for candidates who received 50 votes or more.
Is there an obvious pattern from this? Perhaps not. But Independent candidates in the bottom left half, where there were no major party candidates, did the worst, while those in the other three quadrants, and especially those closer to the major candidates, did better.
On average, each Independent and minor party candidate who was not positioned either above or below a major party candidate received 12.8 votes. Those who were positioned above or below a major party candidate averaged 20.6 votes.
It is impossible to know what was happening with voters’ choices. But this could suggest that some of the Independent and minor party candidates next to the major party candidates received accidental votes — that voters meant to vote for one of the major party candidates, but because of the confusion of the massive ballot mistakenly marked an X next to the wrong name. It’s notable that none of the major party candidates had Independent candidates who received fewer than 10 votes both above and below them on the ballot.
In the end, we aren’t talking about a lot of votes — perhaps a few dozen at most. Don Stewart won in Toronto–St. Paul’s by a 633-vote margin, so the LBC almost certainly didn’t play a significant role in his victory. The number of rejected ballots was 347, or 0.9% of all those cast. That is somewhat higher than the norm, but not abnormally high.
Nevertheless, one might argue that even a single ballot cast accidentally for the wrong candidate is one too many, even if it is unlikely to make the difference between winners and losers.
Will confusion play a role in LaSalle–Émard–Verdun? It certainly could, but perhaps not (entirely) due to the LBC. Two of the three front-runners, Craig Sauvé of the NDP and Louis-Philippe Sauvé of the Bloc Québécois, share a last name and will be right next to each other on the ballot. The other frontrunner, Laura Palestini of the Liberals, has a somewhat similarly-named Lanna Palsson, an LBC candidate, just below her.
At the very least, voters in the riding will have to have their wits (and their reading glasses) about them when they cast their ballot.
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News of the shake-up in B.C. politics, and word out of Quebec about one MP who isn’t running again, a cabinet minister who is resigning and two figures who announce their intentions regarding the Quebec Liberal leadership.
Polls on where things stand in British Columbia, plus new numbers federally as well as out of Ontario and Quebec.
An update to the U.S. election projection.
Majorities for Doug Ford and Pierre Poilievre if the elections were held today, but a minority for Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, while David Eby would hold a one-seat edge in the B.C. legislature.
The 40th anniversary of Brian Mulroney’s landslide in the #EveryElectionProject.
A milestone for Blaine Higgs, his last before the next election.
IN THE NEWS
Scramble for nominations in B.C. after BCU withdrawal
Last Wednesday, Kevin Falcon shocked the B.C. political scene when he announced he was withdrawing B.C. United from the upcoming election and endorsing the B.C. Conservatives instead. As party leader, Falcon has the right to remove his party’s endorsement of already-nominated candidates and, as agreed with Conservative leader John Rustad, some of the BCU team will be incorporated into the Conservative slate. Falcon himself will not run again. He’ll remain party leader, though, because otherwise someone could step in and reverse his decision.
It took everyone in surprise — most of all his own caucus and candidates, some of whom first heard the news when journalists called them for reaction. A few Conservative candidates have been or will be dumped to make room for some former B.C. United candidates and MLAs, but it appears that the biggest sacrifice will be made by the dozens of candidates who opted to run for BCU and now find themselves cast adrift.
Already the game of musical chairs is underway. The Conservatives have announced BCU candidates like Scott McInnis and Michael Wu as their candidates where they already had Conservative candidates in place. There are reports of other Conservative candidates being moved to different ridings to make place for BCU nominees or dropped altogether.
BCU MLAs who intended to run for re-election, such as Jackie Tegart or Todd Stone, have announced they will not run after all, while others like Trevor Halford and Ian Paton will run under the Conservative banner. Still others, such as Mike Bernier, could run as Independent candidates. It might take a few more days for this to all be cleared up, but the repercussions will be far-reaching.
There will be hurt feelings — Conservatives pushed aside to make room for BCU folks and BCU folks who won’t see themselves as Conservatives. Many will sit on their hands in the upcoming campaign. Others might go work for the Greens or New Democrats. On the whole, the B.C. Conservatives might come out ahead with some reinforcements from a better-organized crew. But this is quite the shake-up just weeks before an election call.
Whether or not it will help the Conservatives in the polls remains to be seen. The early data is inconclusive (more on that below). But the fall of the once-mighty B.C. Liberal Party has been abrupt. The party was in government as recently as 2017. Over the last seven elections stretching back to 1996, the B.C. Liberals were only once beaten by the NDP in the popular vote — and that election just so happened to have been the last one to be contested under the Liberal banner.
This is not unusual in the context of British Columbia, however. The province once alternated between Liberal and Conservative rule until the two parties teamed up to keep the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation out of power. Their experience in Coalition government ended in failure in 1952 with the victory of Social Credit. The Liberals hobbled on from there for decades, but the Conservatives didn’t recover and remained a fringe party until recently. Then it was the turn of Social Credit, defeated in 1991 and virtually non-existent by the next election in 1996, replaced as the main centre-right alternative by the Liberals. Now the Conservatives will replace B.C. United.
Sunrise, sunset. But that probably doesn’t make the last week burn any less for those who now find themselves on the outs.
ELECTION NEWS BRIEFS
First-term Bloc MP Jean-Denis Garon will not be running for re-election in his riding of Mirabel, located in the suburbs north of Montreal. So far, he is the only Bloc MP not running again. The Bloc won this seat by a margin of 23 points over the Liberals, and should be able to hold it without Garon.
A third candidate has officially thrown his hat into the ring for the Quebec Liberal leadership. Marc Bélanger is not well-known to the broader public, but ran (unsuccessfully) as a federal Liberal candidate in 2000 and 2004. Taking his hat out of the ring is Antoine Tardif, the mayor of Victoriaville, who had been touted as a potential candidate. Only former Montreal mayor Denis Coderre and businessman Charles Milliard are officially in the running.
One of the most powerful cabinet ministers in Francois Legault’s Quebec government, Pierre Fitzgibbon, is resigning. This will spark a cabinet shuffle and, eventually, a byelection in Fitzgibbon’s riding of Terrebonne. Though the CAQ won Terrebonne handily in 2022, it is the kind of riding that could flip to the Parti Québécois. The byelection will act as a good test of the PQ and CAQ’s strength in Greater Montreal.
THIS WEEK’S POLLS
With BCU out, race now neck-and-neck
Two polls conducted in the wake of BCU’s withdrawal from the upcoming B.C. election suggest that things are all tied up. But they don’t agree on who has been the biggest beneficiary of the removal of BCU from the field.
The polls were conducted by the Angus Reid Institute and by Pallas Data. The ARI survey showed the Conservatives at 44%, the NDP at 43% and the Greens at 10%. Pallas put the NDP at 44%, the Conservatives at 43% and the Greens at 11%. For all intents and purposes, these polls are identical.
They also show broadly similar regional patterns, though ARI broke its numbers out in more detail than did Pallas. The NDP leads in Metro Vancouver in both surveys, with ARI showing that the Conservatives narrowly lead in the Richmond, Surrey, Delta and North Vancouver area, while the NDP is dominating in Vancouver and Burnaby and ahead by a comfortable margin in the Maple Ridge, Pitt Meadows, Langley and Coquitlam region.
Both polls agree the NDP also leads on Vancouver Island, while the Conservatives are ahead in the Interior.
The two polls do not agree, however, on who has made the biggest gain in recent months.
These two pollsters were last in the field in May, unfortunately a long time ago. Since then, ARI shows virtually no change for the NDP (+2) or Greens (-1), but has the Conservatives up 14 points. Pallas, on the other hand, shows the NDP (+7) and Conservatives (+5) up about the same amount.
ARI suggests the BCU vote has largely gone to the Conservatives, while Pallas suggests the BCU vote did not go to one party in much bigger numbers than the other.
It doesn’t help that in the spring Pallas, like other IVR firms, was showing stronger Conservative support than online firms like ARI. So, it isn’t clear if this dramatic movement toward the Conservatives in ARI’s polling is the same catching-up that we’ve seen other online firms do.
We’ll need to see some results from polling firms that were in the field just before the BCU-Conservative agreement to get a better idea of what the impact has really been. But, regardless of who benefits the most, it does seem clear enough that this race is now a nail-biter.
POLLING NEWS BRIEFS
Federal polling numbers from Léger/Postmedia put the Conservatives at 43%, followed by the Liberals at 25% and the NDP at 15%, an unusually low score for the party. The weekly update from Nanos Research does not show a slippage for the NDP, instead putting it at 20% and on the upswing. The Conservatives led with 39%, followed by the Liberals at 26%.
In Quebec, Léger/Québecor shows the Parti Québécois down three points from the spring to 29%, followed by the CAQ at 24%, the Liberals at 16%, Québec Solidaire at 15% and the Conservatives at 13%. The survey also included a detailed breakdown of federal voting intentions within the province, showing the Liberals ahead around Montreal, the Conservatives leading around Quebec City, and the Bloc in front in the rest of the province.
The Ontario PCs continue to lead, according to Liaison Strategies, with 40% support to 27% for the Liberals and 21% for the NDP. Abacus Data found similar numbers, with the PCs at 42% to 26% for the Liberals and 21% for the NDP.
The Weekly Writ’s U.S. Election Update
Things were stable in the polling in the United States, with Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by about four points, down a little from last week. She stands at 50% against 46% for Trump.
There were no significant changes from last week’s map. Harris is leading in states worth 236 electoral college votes, with Trump ahead in states worth 218 EVs. A total of 84 EVs are up for grabs in the toss-up states, with Harris narrowly ahead 276-262 when those toss-ups are assigned to the leading candidate.
IF THE ELECTION WERE HELD TODAY
The Conservatives hold at 210 seats, as the Liberals make some gains in Ontario and Quebec at the expense of the Bloc and NDP.
Despite Doug Ford’s overall lead and safe position, the Ontario NDP and Liberals both make up some ground, primarily in the Golden Horseshoe. In Quebec, the PQ’s loses in and around Montreal and the regions of the province, dropping to minority status as the CAQ and PLQ contend for official opposition.
The consolidation of the race between the NDP and Conservatives in B.C. puts the election on a razor’s edge, with 47 seats going to the New Democrats, 45 to the Conservatives and one to the Greens.
The seat estimates are derived from a swing model that is based on trends in recent polls as well as minor tweaks and adjustments. Rather than the product of a purely statistical model, these estimates are my best guess of what an election held today would produce. Changes are compared to last week. Parties are ordered according to their finish in the previous election (with some exceptions for minor parties)
BYELECTION CAMPAIGNS UNDER WAY
September 16 - Federal
September 19 - Ontario
Bay of Quinte (profile)
Yet to be scheduled
CA - Cloverdale–Langley City (to call by Nov. 30)
AB - Lethbridge West (to call by January)
ON THIS DAY in the #EveryElectionProject
The Mulroney Landslide
September 4, 1984
When John Turner finally fulfilled his lifelong dream to lead the Liberal Party and be Canada’s prime minister, he had an important decision to make.
When should he call the next election?
Turner was sworn-in as prime minister in June 1984, more than four years after Pierre Trudeau’s unlikely comeback win in the 1980 federal election. Time was running out for Turner to send Canadians to the polls, but he had some options. His more cautious advisors recommended he wait until the fall, or maybe even the next spring. After all, he wouldn’t want to interrupt visits to Canada by the Queen and the Pope. He could play the role of statesman for a few months, get Canadians used to the idea of a PM Turner and then call an election when the time was right.
His less cautious advisors, however, thought the time wasn’t going to get any better. The Liberal leadership race had given the party some momentum in the polls — Gallup had the Liberals ahead of the PCs by 11 points that June, a huge reversal from their 22-point deficit in March. Forecasts that the economy was going to take a severe downturn in the fall also worried Turner.
So, hoping to follow in the footsteps of Trudeau’s big victory in 1968 shortly after he had become leader, Turner decided to take the plunge. He visited the Queen in the U.K. and informed her that she would have to postpone her visit. He dissolved parliament and, nine days after becoming prime minister, sent the country to the polls.
It proved to be a serious mistake.
Party organization wasn’t a priority under Pierre Trudeau. It was something he left to his top advisors, and over the years the Liberals’ once formidable electoral machine had gotten rusty. Turner, too, had lost some of his political acumen during his time outside of politics. He replaced Trudeau’s seasoned veterans with his own out-of-practice team. Coming off a disorganized leadership campaign, Turner then embarked on a disorganized election campaign.
By comparison, the Progressive Conservatives under new leader Brian Mulroney were in terrific shape. The PC war chest was as full as that of the Liberals and New Democrats combined. Though their polling lead had disappeared during the Liberal leadership campaign, the party had led in the polls throughout 1982 and 1983 as Trudeau’s popularity plummeted. Whereas the Liberals were still getting their campaign team together and had just 40 candidates nominated, the PCs had more than 200 in place and were guided by Norm Atkins of Ontario’s Big Blue Machine.
The New Democrats had as many candidates nominated as the PCs, but they had lagged in the polls behind the other two parties, dropping to 11% in May and June. A party memo by Gerry Caplan put things in perspective:
A. Disadvantages
We are very low in all the national polls.
Everyone knows this.
Much of the media has lost interest in us and is writing us off.
Some say we are irrelevant to the present moment and there is no purpose in people voting for us.
The party was divided on strategy — pitch for government or for survival, take a left-wing or centrist approach on policy — but its leader, Ed Broadbent, was the only one with campaign experience and was respected by voters.
Though the Liberals were the ones who called the election, they appeared to be the least prepared. Turner was exhausted from the leadership contest and barely campaigned over the first few weeks. The party had no platform to present, no political pamphlets or brochures to share. While the PCs and NDP ferried journalists across the country on chartered jets, Turner flew commercial and left the media to fend for themselves to keep up.
Things started badly for the Liberals. Before Trudeau resigned the prime minister’s office, he had left a list of patronage appointments for Turner to make. They were the usual fare — cushy landing spots in diplomatic posts and the Senate for loyal Liberals — and Turner was reluctant to go ahead with them. But he gave his word (in writing) that he would go ahead with the patronage appointments and followed through on that promise, adding a few of his own to the list. The story dominated the first week of the campaign, and ensured that the breath of fresh air that Turner was hoping to give his new Liberal government stunk just as bad as the last one.
The second week was dominated by another faux-pas. Television cameras captured Turner patting the behinds of women, not once, but twice. Again, it made Turner look old-fashioned rather than as an agent of change, and it didn’t help when he defended himself as a “tactile politician. I’m slapping people all over the place. That’s my style.”
Attention then turned to two debates, the first being held in French. This was an important opportunity for Mulroney and the PCs, who hoped to make serious inroads in Quebec.
Mulroney, who grew up in the small town of Baie-Comeau on Quebec’s Côte-Nord, opted to run in the riding of Manicouagan, taking on a Liberal MP who had previously won with huge majorities. The PCs had long struggled in Quebec, but Mulroney had spoken of his desire to get Quebec to sign the constitution and, if necessary, to work with the Parti Québécois government then in power to get it done.
This openness ensured that the PCs got some help from the PQ’s well-oiled organization in Quebec. They were also helped by René Lévesque’s belittling of attempts to create a federal sovereignist party.
The federal Liberals, meanwhile, had gotten so used to dominating the province (they won 74 of 75 seats in Quebec in 1980), that their own electoral readiness was lacking. Liberals were divided between those who supported Turner and those who backed Jean Chrétien in the leadership race. Robert Bourassa, leader of the provincial Liberals and someone who had a testy relationship with Trudeau when he was premier, officially stayed neutral. But, unofficially, the PLQ was also helping the PCs.
Mulroney performed well in the French language debate. He presented himself as a Quebecer and spoke French more naturally and comfortably than Turner, whose fluent French was nevertheless more stilted. (Broadbent lagged well behind the other two). Though there was no ‘knockout punch’ during the debate, it propelled the PCs forward in Quebec as voters in the province saw in Mulroney a ‘favourite son’.
The knockout punch would instead wait for the English language debate.
It came down to the issue of patronage. Turner went into the debate getting contradictory advice — stay out of the fray and look prime ministerial, or go on the attack against Mulroney. As the debate neared its end, Turner took the latter tack, with disastrous consequences.
Patronage was an issue of weakness for Turner, but he nevertheless went after Mulroney on it over a joke the PC leader had made about how, in a similar position, he would have “been in there with my nose in the public trough like the rest of them”.
Mulroney didn’t shy away from the opportunity. He noted how he had apologized for that crack, but Turner did not apologize for his patronage appointments. Turner meekly responded that he had no option.
“You had an option, sir,” Mulroney defiantly responded, “You could have said: ‘I’m not going to do it.’ … You could have done better.”
A Southam News poll conducted before the debate gave the Liberals a two-point lead over the PCs. The next poll conducted in the week after the debate put the PCs ahead by nine points.
Turner’s honeymoon was over. The party’s strong support in pre-campaign polls had been superficial — once Canadians had seen that Turner did not represent change from the unpopular Trudeau government, they reverted to their previous opinions. The Liberals were collapsing. And their campaign hadn’t even started in earnest, as it was only after the debates that the Liberals finally secured a chartered plane and began touring the country. The media dubbed Turner’s plane ‘DerriAir’.
The polls got worse for the Liberals throughout August, as the PC lead grew to 15, 20 and sometimes 30 or more points. Turner had begun the campaign polling better on a personal level than Mulroney, who was seen as slick and inauthentic. By the end of the campaign, Mulroney was polling significantly higher than the incumbent prime minister.
Mulroney and the PCs kept the rest of the campaign on cruise control, hammering home the message of change and of “jobs, jobs, jobs”. The perception that the Liberal campaign was falling apart was not helped when Turner replaced his advisors with Trudeau-era figures.
A leaked internal memo from the NDP’s campaign admitted that the PCs were going to win a majority, “maybe even a huge majority”, and the party began to pitch for the need for some NDP representation to provide an opposition to the PC juggernaut. The New Democrats were bleeding support to the Tories in Western Canada, but they were also attracting disaffected Liberals. There was even hope among some of the more optimistic New Democrats that they could bound ahead of the Liberals into second place. The catastrophic Liberal campaign was opening up opportunities not only for the soaring PCs.
Mulroney and the PCs won a majority — and it was indeed a huge one.
The PCs secured 50% of the vote and 211 seats, the largest caucus ever elected in Canadian history (John Diefenbaker’s win in 1958 was a few seats short, but proportionately represented more of the seats then up for grabs).
The PCs made their most substantial gains in Quebec, where they won 58 seats, up from a single seat in 1980. They also gained 29 in Ontario, 12 in Atlantic Canada and nine in the West, sweeping every seat in Alberta and capturing a majority of the vote in Quebec and all four Atlantic provinces. The PCs took 47% of the vote in British Columbia and 48% in Ontario. It was a truly national victory, as the PCs found themselves with seats in both rural Canada and in every major city.
The Liberals were decimated. Support for the party fell 16 points to just 28%, up to then the worst result the Liberals had ever been dealt. Only 40 seats remained, 17 of them in Quebec, 14 in Ontario, where they suffered serious defeats in Toronto and the southwest, seven in Atlantic Canada and only two in the West — one in Winnipeg, the other Turner’s seat in Vancouver.
Shockingly, the New Democrats had survived the Tory onslaught. The NDP retained 30 seats, just two fewer than they had won in 1980. The party won 13 seats in Ontario, eight in British Columbia, five in Saskatchewan and four in Manitoba. They gained seats from the Liberals in Ontario where, in 1980, they had won only five. But they lost seats to the PCs in rural Manitoba and Saskatchewan, in the B.C. Interior and on Vancouver Island. It ensured that the NDP remained in third place across the country, even if they had more seats than the Liberals west of Quebec.
Would Brian Mulroney’s landslide kick-off a new PC dynasty? Would the Liberals’ catastrophe finally result in the inauguration of a left-right political system that pitted Tories vs. New Democrats?
The next few years would demonstrate that electing a huge caucus comes with its own problems. Brian Mulroney, John Turner and Ed Broadbent would all have one more election in them and the next decade would be among the most tumultuous in Canadian political history. But the re-alignment that seemed to be happening in 1984 didn’t hold. Another re-alignment would have to wait for a new set of leaders.
MILESTONE WATCH
Blaine Higgs cracks the Top 10
On Sunday, Blaine Higgs will surpass Walter Foster as the 10th longest serving premier of New Brunswick.
Foster, a Liberal, was premier from 1917 to 1923. It was the 1917 election that brought him to power and he was re-elected in 1920. He resigned the premiership in 1923, handing it over to Peter Veniot, the first Acadian premier of the province. Veniot went down to defeat in 1925.
Higgs faces a tough re-election campaign of his own in October, so whether he can continue to rise on the list will be decided in a matter of weeks. But, at the very least, Higgs has just inched into that Top 10 list, a worthy achievement of its own.
That’s it for the Weekly Writ this week. The next episode of The Numbers will be dropping on Friday. The episode will land in your inbox but you can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting apps. If you want to get it early on Thursday, become a Patron here!