Weekly Writ for Dec. 6: When and where did the polls move?
Weekly Writ for Dec. 6: When and where did the polls move?
Looking at how federal polls have shifted in 2023, plus what's changed in Ontario politics in this last week.
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.
With the sole exception of a brief period during the pandemic when support for Justin Trudeau’s Liberals surged, the trend lines in the polls were rather flat between September 2019 and June 2023.
And then things escalated quickly.
The polls pointed to a re-elected Liberal minority government at the beginning of the year. Then they showed a toss-up between the Liberals and the Conservatives. And then a Conservative minority (assuming they could get the votes in the House of Commons, of course). And now a Conservative majority — with the Liberals in danger of losing half or more of their seats.
But when did most of the shift in public opinion take place — and where?
Over the last week, we’ve been treated with the release of a number of national polls, including from Léger (for the Canadian Press), Ipsos (for Global News), Research Co. and Abacus Data.
They don’t show results that are out of the ordinary from what we’ve seen over the last few weeks. But having a series of polls from different pollsters conducted around the same time allows us to cast back to earlier in the year when these very same pollsters were in the field, allowing us to compare apples to apples.
Below, I’ve averaged the four polls and shown the change in support between where things stand now and where things stood in mid-February to early March, when all four of these pollsters were again in the field at the same time.
The Conservatives now lead with an average of 40% support, up six points since February-March. The Liberals are down eight points to just 24%, while the NDP is up two points to 20%. The Bloc Québécois, Greens and People’s Party are largely unchanged.
Regionally, the Conservatives hold comfortable leads everywhere but Quebec, and have experienced gains of between four and six points throughout the country. The exception is Atlantic Canada, where the Conservatives are up 13 points — an enormous jump in support.
The Liberals have lost 10 points in Atlantic Canada, but are also down nine points in Ontario, eight points in B.C. and seven points in Quebec. That hurts the party greatly in the seat count.
The NDP’s biggest gain has come in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, where the election of Wab Kinew’s New Democrats have likely helped boost the party. Elsewhere, the party’s gains have been more modest. But it is clearly in second place throughout Western Canada and is closing in on the Liberals in Ontario.
That’s a lot of movement in only nine months. But it hasn’t been a uniform trend. Below, I’ve shown the average change in support between the February-March polls from these four pollsters and other surveys conducted in late August and early September. And then I’ve compared the late summer numbers to where things are today.
You can see that the Conservatives made most of their gains in the earlier six-month period, gaining four points nationwide and jumping 11 points in Atlantic Canada, along with gains of four to five points in Ontario and the Prairies. The Liberals suffered most of their losses in Quebec and Atlantic Canada in this period, while the NDP was flat.
But since the summer the Conservatives’ progress has slowed. They are up another two points, with the biggest gain coming in British Columbia. But they have not continued their forward momentum in Atlantic Canada or Ontario with the same intensity.
The Liberals have continued to slide over the fall, however, primarily in Ontario, the Prairies and British Columbia. This has benefited the New Democrats the most, as they have gained six points in Saskatchewan and Manitoba and four points in B.C., while also rising three points in Ontario and Alberta.
These numbers show how the Conservatives largely got themselves into their present position over the summer and have since been consolidating their gains. While they have continued to chip away at the Liberals over the fall, it’s instead the NDP that has been making the most gains at Trudeau’s expense since the return of Parliament in September.
If those trends continue, we could see a newly emboldened NDP that might not shy away from another election, even if it means sitting across from a Conservative majority government. Or, it’s possible that the Liberals have hit their floor, just as the Conservatives are hitting their ceiling. What’s clear is that Pierre Poilievre has taken what he needs from the Liberal base and might have limited prospects for further growth. The NDP has taken advantage of the Liberals’ weakness in Western Canada, but east of Manitoba has proven tougher for the New Democrats to crack. And, for now, that’s why the Liberals are still in second — if only just.
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News on Crombie’s OLP leadership win, the Greens’ big win in Kitchener Centre and who now leads The Writ’s Prediction Contest.
Polls suggest that Crombie should boost the OLP, point to another strong result for the B.C. Conservatives and show us a glimpse of the provincial scenes in Atlantic Canada, plus we have some issue polling on immigration and conspiracy theories.
Conservatives would be on the cusp of 200 seats if the election were held today.
Will Kitchener Centre now become a safe Green seat? I look at past byelection breakthroughs for the Greens to find out in the ridings of the week.
A failed attempt to bring partisanship to the North in the #EveryElectionProject.
A new milestone for Pierre Poilievre.
IN THE NEWS
Crombie wins OLP leadership
Mississauga mayor Bonnie Crombie was widely seen as the front runner for the Ontario Liberal leadership and on Saturday she indeed won — though perhaps by a narrower margin than was expected.
On the first ballot, Crombie emerged on top with 43% of the points, putting her well ahead of Toronto MP Nate Erskine-Smith, who finished with 25.7%, and Ottawa MP Yasir Naqvi, who had 21.3%. Ted Hsu, Liberal MPP for Kingston and the Islands, had only 10% support and was eliminated from the running.
While it wasn’t a slam dunk, as I wrote last week Crombie’s first ballot score was in the zone needed to win on the final ballot. Hsu support’s was too low to make it likely it would be settled on the second, but Crombie was in a good position from the start.
According to the results posted by the party, both Erskine-Smith and Crombie received about 33% of Hsu’s votes, with Naqvi getting 23%. Another 10% of Hsu’s supporters ranked no one second. The result was that on the second ballot, Crombie was bumped up to 46.7% of the points, followed by Erskine-Smith at 29.3% and Naqvi at 24%.
On the third ballot, Crombie got about 22% of Naqvi’s vote, with Erskine-Smith getting about 64% and another 15% being exhausted. This shows that the deal struck between Erskine-Smith and Naqvi worked, but did not deliver enough of the vote to crown Erskine-Smith. Crombie had earned enough support on the first ballot and from Hsu on the second to keep the Erskine-Smith/Naqvi team at bay, ending with 53.4% of the points on the final ballot to Erskine-Smith’s 46.6%.
Crombie’s victory wasn’t decisive, but her 6.8-point margin on the final ballot was significantly wider than Doug Ford’s 1.2-point win over Christine Elliott in 2018.
The margin by vote (rather than points — recall that each riding was weighted equally) was a bit closer, with Crombie taking 52.4% of ballots cast to Erskine-Smith’s 47.6%.
Turnout in the race was embarrassingly low. The Liberals had been excited that the party’s membership rolls had grown to 103,206 ahead of the leadership vote. But the demands made on members to cast a ballot — in-person at a limited number of voting locations within a limited time frame — seems to have whittled out all but the most keen. Only 22,837 members cast a ballot, making for a turnout of just 22.1%. Even by Ontario’s poor standards, that’s bad.
The riding with the most ballots cast was Beaches–East York at 926. That is Erskine-Smith’s federal seat, and he accordingly won 81% of the vote there on the first ballot. The fewest votes were cast in the northern Ontario riding of Kiiwetinoong at just 11. That means each vote in Kiiwetinoong was worth 9.1 points. Each vote in Beaches–East York was worth 0.1 points. That didn’t really penalize Erskine-Smith all that much, however, as he won most of the ridings in places like northern Ontario where the number of ballots cast was low.
On the first ballot, Crombie won at least 50% of the vote in 43 ridings, compared to just six for Naqvi (only one of them in Ottawa), five for Erskine-Smith (three of them in Toronto) and just two for Hsu (both of them around Kingston). On the final ballot, Crombie was ahead in 74 ridings to Erskine-Smith’s 50. Crombie won the bulk of the ridings in Toronto and the GTA, along with southwestern Ontario and the Niagara Peninsula. Erskine-Smith won most of the ridings in northern and eastern Ontario, those won in the east largely thanks to the non-Crombie vote he rolled up from Naqvi and Hsu.
As we’ll see below, polls conducted just before the leadership result was announced suggest that the Ontario Liberals will get a boost from Crombie’s win — a bigger boost than they would have gotten from any other candidate. Whether that’ll hold through to the 2026 election is, of course, anyone’s guess.
I’m more interested in what happens in the shorter-term. Crombie doesn’t have a seat in the legislature, and musings that she might run in the upcoming Lambton–Kent–Middlesex byelection should be dismissed out of hand. The Liberals took 9.6% of the vote there in the last election, finishing 49 points behind the PCs. Crombie would have no chance of winning there. We’ll see if she can instead convince one of her MPPs to step aside or if a better riding becomes available before the next general election.
One vacancy that will come up will be for the mayor’s office in Mississauga. It’s the seventh-biggest municipality in Canada and a plumb post that could attract some interesting candidates. Perhaps someone like former federal Liberal cabinet minister Navdeep Bains or one of the six Liberal MPs from Mississauga. Omar Alghabra, recently dropped from cabinet, comes to mind. The six PC MPPs from the city might also give it some thought. Multiple byelections in Mississauga could be on the docket in 2024. The importance of the city in the next election can’t be over-estimated, so a byelection there would be one to watch.
Greens score big win in Kitchener Centre
On Thursday, the Ontario Greens made a big breakthrough in the southwestern Ontario riding of Kitchener Centre, winning a byelection by a significant margin over the incumbent New Democrats.
Aislinn Clancy, a Kitchener city councillor, took 48% of the vote, an increase of 35 points over the party’s performance in this riding in the 2022 general election. With just over 11,000 ballots, Clancy added 6,354 votes to her predecessor’s tally — a remarkable feat in a byelection where turnout dropped from a measly 46.2% in 2022 to an anemic 27.1% last week.
Debbie Chapman, another councillor, took just 26.7% of the vote, down nearly 14 points from Laura Mae Lindo’s winning score last year. The NDP lost almost 9,500 votes, some to turnout but unavoidably a lot to the Greens, too.
The PCs’ Rob Elliott, a parachute candidate who lives north of Toronto, took 13.2%, a loss of more than half of the party’s vote share from the last election. As the Ontario PCs apparently put little effort into this contest, the result is not as much of a rebuke for Doug Ford as it might appear at first glance. The PCs haven’t won Kitchener Centre since the 1999 election and have not been competitive here in over a decade.
The Liberals’ Kelly Steiss, the only returning candidate from the last election, also saw her vote share cut nearly in half, dropping to 7.7%. But, again, the Liberals haven’t been very competitive here since they last won it in 2014. It appears that much of the Liberal vote likely went to Clancy.
This is a huge win for the Greens, doubling their caucus at Queen’s Park and giving them what could be a second safe seat. Clancy’s hold on the riding is reinforced by the presence of Mike Morrice, who won Kitchener Centre for the federal Greens in 2021. Since Schreiner won his first seat in 2018, it has always been a bit of a question whether or not this party could expand beyond its long-time leader. We have an answer.
While the PCs and the Liberals should be able to brush this off easy enough, this is a serious loss for Marit Stiles and the NDP. The party had taken this seat with over 40% of the vote in each of the last two elections and it is a must-win if the NDP is ever going to form government. While it might not have been the main issue in this byelection campaign, the internal fighting within the NDP that led the Kitchener Centre riding association to call for the resignation of Stiles over her rejection of Hamilton Centre MPP Sarah Jama from caucus couldn’t have helped. If the local NDP organization wasn’t demoralized enough, voters in the riding might not have felt that this was a sign of a party with its act together.
The Writ is the perfect gift for the political junkie in your circle:
Now, the next election in Ontario is more than two years away and I don’t think this byelection means we can expect a Premier Schreiner in 2026. But it does change the calculations for the non-PC parties as they work to corral as much of the anti-Ford vote as possible. The Greens will be more of a factor in the next election than they’ve been before. And we’ll have to see how the Ontario NDP reacts to this defeat. As we’ve seen with François Legault’s CAQ in Quebec, over-reacting to a byelection loss has the real potential to make a mountain (or a spewing, volatile volcano) out of a molehill.
Prediction Contest Update
It was a tall order in January 2023 to try to guess who would be the leader of the Ontario Liberals by year’s end, considering that we didn’t even know when the race was going to come to a close. Accordingly, many entrants chose John Fraser as the leader who would still be in place by the end of 2023. Most of the others chose Nate Erskine-Smith, one of the few candidates who had made his intentions clear that early in the running.
Only one insightful contestant, however, foresaw Bonnie Crombie’s victory. That was Philip Palmer, who gained five big points and jumped from third to first place. Here are the standings to date:
38 pts: Philip Palmer
35 pts: Richard Davies
33 pts: Joshua Lo
30 pts: Markus Meyer
29 pts: Ali, Anthony C.
28 pts: Murdoch Macleod
27 pts: Gerard Kennedy, Brian Lowry
24 pts: Larry Savage, Hannah, Hamish Gilleland, Kalenne H.
22 pts: Russ
21 pts: Rod Dickinson, Jason Young, Kate Butler
20 pts: Éric Grenier, Jonathon, Peter, Matt Ewing, David Fraser, John Orr, Brett Willemsen, Anthony Piscitelli, Cam Chamberlain, WilliamOC, Rod, Ryan Vienneau
19 pts: Morrey Ewing, Andy T, Adam Berkan
18 pts: Patrick Lachapelle, Felix, Alan Siaroff, Vivian Unger, Leonard Hetu, Bill Day
17 pts: Peter Ryan, Jon M, Tom McIntosh, Nicholas
16 pts: Adrian Wright, Jeff
15 pts: Scott, Rob DePetris
The contest isn’t over yet! Five more points will be awarded for correctly predicting who will be the Quebec Liberal leader by year’s end (those of you who chose Marc Tanguay are sitting pretty). Another 10 points will be awarded to those who predicted there would be no federal election in 2023. I haven’t awarded them yet because, though it is extremely unlikely, I’ll consider a writ drop in 2023 as a correct guess, and the year isn’t over yet! And finally as many as 10 points can still be awarded on the question of whether a federal party leader will resign before New Year’s Day, something we can’t rule out. (In 2019, Andrew Scheer resigned on December 12.)
That’s 25 points still up for grabs! Theoretically, anyone can win it. The winner will be revealed in early January — just in time for the 2024 Prediction Contest to begin!
THIS WEEK’S POLLS
Crombie should give the Ontario Liberals a boost
A few new polls suggest the Ontario Liberals should experience a boost now that Crombie has been installed as leader.
Pre-leadership surveys came from Abacus Data and Pluriel Research. A post-leadership survey was published last night by Mainstreet Research.
Taken about a week before the OLP leadership concluded on Saturday, the Abacus poll found that the Ontario PCs were leading with 42%, followed by the NDP at 24% and the Liberals at 23%. But with Bonnie Crombie’s name inserted into the poll (not included in detail in the Abacus report but mentioned in this article in the Toronto Star), the Liberals jumped to 31%, cutting the PCs down to 39% and the NDP down to 20%. The Greens dropped one point to 6%.
In the end, Ontarians might simply be waiting for a good alternative. Only 32% approve of Doug Ford and just 30% think that his government’s decisions have been about “what’s in the best interest” of Ontarians.
The Pluriel poll also showed a bigger boost from Crombie than any of the other candidates would have brought to the party, though the hypothetical ballot with Crombie put the gap (after excluding the big number of undecideds) at just three points between the PCs and Liberals, at about 32% to 29% (with the NDP at 28% and the Greens at 8%).
Mainstreet didn’t release any of the regionals publicly, but the toplines show the PCs at just 36%, followed by the now-Crombie-led Liberals at 34%. The NDP dropped to 19% in this poll. Mainstreet found that Doug Ford’s favourability stands at 37% against 55% unfavourable, while Crombie starts off with a 35% to 33% split.
B.C. Conservatives move solidly into second
Another new poll by Abacus Data shows that the B.C. New Democrats continue to lead in their province, but are now followed by the B.C. Conservatives rather than B.C. United, which actually forms the official opposition. While it isn’t the first poll to put BCU in third, it is the first to have such a wide gap between the Conservatives and BCU.
The poll awarded 44% support to the NDP, followed by the Conservatives at 26% and B.C. United at just 17%, representing exactly half the support the B.C. Liberals managed in the last election. The Greens placed fourth with 9%.
Abacus showed the NDP leading by very wide margins in both Metro Vancouver and on Vancouver Island, but put them neck-and-neck with the Conservatives in the Interior and North. That is something we haven’t seen before, and makes it very possible that the Conservatives could win lots of seats outside of the Lower Mainland.
At 39%, Premier David Eby has the highest positive rating of all the leaders. His 25% negative rating means he is a net +14, making him the only leader who is a net positive. Sonia Furstenau of the Greens is even, while BCU’s Kevin Falcon is -10. John Rustad, leader of the Conservatives, has 25% positive to 27% negative ratings — both scores that are better than Falcon’s.
It’s another poll on the pile that shows that BC United’s name change has completely failed. But Falcon’s poor personal approval ratings suggest the problem goes much deeper than just some bad branding.
Atlantic incumbents lead, except in New Brunswick
The quarterly polling numbers from Narrative Research are in for the four Atlantic provinces, and they show the incumbent governments in three of those provinces in good positions. The exception is the government of Blaine Higgs in New Brunswick.
The poll finds satisfaction with the Higgs government at just 35%, largely unchanged from August. The party has slipped a single (statistically insignificant) point to 35%, allowing the Liberals to move ahead with 41%, a gain of three points. The NDP sits on 13% of the vote (and would be lucky to get it), while the Greens have fallen six points to 10%. The People’s Alliance scores only 2%.
The Liberals hold a substantial lead in northern New Brunswick and are running neck-and-neck with the PCs in Moncton and the surrounding area. In southern New Brunswick, the PCs are only ahead by six points.
Higgs and Liberal leader Susan Holt are tied on preferred premier at 25% apiece, while Green leader David Coon out-performs his own party with 15% on this question.
New Brunswick’s next election is scheduled for the fall of 2024, but Higgs was very close to pulling the plug earlier this year. These numbers don’t suggest he is a lock for re-election, particularly with so much of the vote parked with the NDP. But the splits could still work in his favour.
In Nova Scotia, Tim Houston’s PCs lead with 52%, up five points since August. The NDP and Liberals are holding steady at 22% and 21%, respectively. The PCs lead in every part of the province and 37% of Nova Scotians prefer Houston as the choice for premier — more than double the 15% of the NDP’s Claudia Chender, who was in second.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, satisfaction with Andrew Furey’s Liberal government is down four points since August to 53%, while his party leads among decided voters with 44%, up four points. The PCs hardly budged with the arrival of Tony Wakeham at the helm, and were up one point to 38%. The NDP trailed in third with 16%, down seven points. The Liberals lead on the Avalon Peninsula but the PCs have the edge everywhere else.
In Prince Edward Island, government satisfaction has slid eight points but is still a very healthy 66%. Dennis King’s PCs lead with 56% support, followed by the Greens and Liberals at 18% and 17%. King is the preferred premier at 49%, followed by interim Green leader Karla Bernard at 11%.
POLLING NEWS BRIEFS
There were so many polls this past week, so here’s a few you might have missed:
Léger has some rather depressing figures about belief in conspiracy theories, particularly in the United States.
Both Léger and Abacus Data have some numbers out on immigration, suggesting Canadians want to see lower amounts of immigrants coming into the country.
Ipsos finds most Canadians want Justin Trudeau to resign, but that they are also lukewarm on his potential replacements. The Innovative Research Group also has a new report out with loads of federal numbers, including broken down by seat clusters. But the data dates from October.
Finally, the Angus Reid Institute has its quarterly premiers approval ratings, showing that François Legault has dropped 16 points — one of the biggest slides I can remember seeing in the ARI’s quarterly surveys. Everyone else was largely steady, with Doug Ford recovering from his Greenbelt-induced slump and Wab Kinew bursting onto the scene with the best numbers in the country.
IF THE ELECTION WERE HELD TODAY
The Liberals drop seats in British Columbia and Atlantic Canada, falling to just 70 in the estimates as the Conservatives jump up five to 197. Both the Bloc and NDP are also in slightly better positions than last week.
In Ontario, the arrival of Bonnie Crombie at the helm of the Liberals boosts them into a seat-tie with the New Democrats, as Doug Ford’s PCs fall to within spitting distance of a minority government.
The B.C. NDP remains dominant on the west coast, but the Conservatives have now surpassed B.C. United as the favourite to form the official opposition.
On the east coast, the incumbent PC governments in Nova Scotia and P.E.I. pad their majorities, as does the incumbent Liberal government in Newfoundland and Labrador. In New Brunswick, Higgs’ majority cushion is down to two seats.
The following seat estimates are derived from a uniform swing model that is based on trends in recent polls as well as minor tweaks and adjustments. Rather than the product of a statistical model, these estimates are my best guess of what an election held today would produce, based both on the data and my own experience observing dozens of elections since 2008.
Changes are compared to last week. Parties are ordered according to their finish in the previous election (with some exceptions for minor parties).
RIDINGS OF THE WEEK
Charlottetown-Belvedere & Nanaimo–Ladysmith (P.E.I. & Federal - B.C.)
The Ontario Greens’ victory in Kitchener Centre in last week’s byelection raises an interesting question. Is this a one-off byelection breakthrough, or have the Greens found themselves a new safe seat?
To try to get an answer to that, let’s look at the only other two examples we have of the Greens winning a byelection.
The first byelection win for the Greens came in Prince Edward Island in 2017 in the riding of Charlottetown-Parkdale. The party had put up a decent performance in the 2015 provincial election, taking 19.2% of the vote. They expanded on that in a 2017 byelection, as Hannah Bell won the seat with 35.3%. It foreshadowed the P.E.I. Greens’ gains in the 2019 provincial election.
The second byelection win was in 2019 in the B.C. federal riding of Nanaimo–Ladysmith. Located next to Elizabeth May’s seat of Saanich–Gulf Islands, the Greens had good prospects here and took 19.8% of the vote in the 2015 federal election. When a byelection was called for early 2019, Paul Manly won the seat for the party with 37.3%. Again, it foreshadowed what would be the Greens’ best election later that year.
So, once established, did these Green beachheads hold? They did — at least at first.
Bell was re-elected in the 2019 P.E.I. election, taking 40.4% in the new riding of Charlottetown-Belvedere, which shared most of the same territory as the old Charlottetown-Parkdale riding.
Manly was also re-elected in the 2019 federal election, taking 34.6% of the vote. That represented a drop in support, but was nevertheless enough to keep the Greens ahead of the NDP.
In the next election, though, the Greens lost both seats. Bell didn’t run again, and the Greens lost Charlottetown-Belvedere in the May 2023 election. The party’s candidate took just 23% of the vote.
Manly ran for re-election in 2021 but was unsuccessful, dropping to 25.7% of the vote as the New Democrats recaptured the seat.
There are three conclusions to draw from these examples that could apply to Aislinn Clancy in Kitchener Centre. First, she has a very good chance of holding the seat in the next general election. Second, she can’t assume that this is now a Green seat indefinitely.
But third, once established, the Green brand has some staying power. Despite the party’s losses in Nanaimo–Ladysmith in 2021 and Charlottetown-Belvedere in 2023, Green candidates in those elections still took more of the vote than they did in the 2015 provincial and federal campaigns that preceded the initial byelection wins.
The Ontario Greens probably have a good shot of winning Kitchener Centre again in 2026 (and Clancy’s vote-share was significantly higher than either Bell’s in 2017 or Manly’s in 2019, improving her odds). But win or lose in the election after that, Kitchener Centre will probably be a Green-er seat than it used to be before last week’s breakthrough.
ON THIS DAY in the #EveryElectionProject
When partisan politics tried to invade the North
December 6, 1999
When the Northwest Territories went to the polls in December 1999, there were a lot of big issues at stake.
The territory was facing a big debt burden. The resource sector was booming, but being a mere territory any industry-related revenues went south to Ottawa. And, with the creation of Nunavut only a few months earlier, this election was the first to be held since the territory’s size and population had been dramatically reduced.
Lots to mull over for the Northwest Territories’ 21,000 voters, spread out over 19 ridings.
But one of the issues that caught the most attention was an attempt to change the way politics in the territory worked.
N.W.T. used a consensus model of government, where MLAs were elected as Independent candidates. Once sent to the legislature, they would then choose a premier and cabinet minister from amongst themselves. Parties didn’t exist.
The Western Arctic New Democrats wanted to change that.
Though still listed as Independents, the NDP tried to put together a partisan slate running on a joint platform — a novelty in the territory. Six candidates ran as New Democrats, five of them in Yellowknife and one in Inuvik. To add a little southern glamour to their offering, NDP MP Svend Robinson swung by to campaign alongside the N.W.T. NDP.
None of the candidates, however, were incumbents. They were insurgents, trying to overthrow the old system.
Those who had come up through the ranks of that old system dismissed the attempt to bring partisan politics to the North.
"The people who are pushing party politics are people who have moved up here from the south,” Jim Antoine, the incumbent premier, told the National Post. “Up here, people vote for people they know who will do a good job representing them on the issues.”
But according to Steve Petersen, one of the candidates running under the NDP banner, "the problem is we don't have a consensus government, we have cronyism and an old boy's club. There's no opposition whatsoever.”
This had become a glaring problem in the last legislature. Don Morin, then premier, resigned over a conflict of interest scandal. If the legislature had an opposition to hold the government to account, this wouldn’t happen. This, at least, was the message of people like Mary Beth Levan, the highest-profile of the NDP’s candidates. She had run for the federal NDP in the last election in 1997, taking 19.4% of the vote and finishing second to the Liberal candidate.
But Northwesterners liked their consensus-style of government, considering it well-suited for a sparsely-populated, diverse and enormous territory.
"[Partisan politics] could take away the flexibility the people always have to find common ground," incumbent MLA Stephen Kakfwi told the Toronto Star.
In the end, the skeptics were right. All six of the NDP’s candidates were defeated, all but one of them finishing last. Levan managed 20.4% of the vote in Yellowknife South. But Petersen managed just 9.4% in Kam Lake. Bill Schram, another New Democrat on the ballot, also finished with under 10% of the vote.
Instead, voters stuck with what they knew. Eight of 10 incumbent candidates were re-elected, including Antoine and cabinet ministers like Charles Dent (finance), Floyd Roland (health) and Michael Miltenberger (education). Of the two incumbents defeated, one was the speaker of the legislature, Samuel Gargan.
The slate of elected candidates included two future premiers (Roland and Joe Handley) as well as Michael McLeod, who was elected as the Liberal MP in 2015.
As always in the Northwest Territories, though, the election results didn’t indicate who would form the next government. Over the holidays, Antoine mulled his future and decided not to stand again for premier. Instead, the job went to Stephen Kakfwi, a former president of the Dene Nation and the dean of the legislature who had held multiple cabinet portfolios in his previous 13 years in office.
Partisan politics weren’t established in the Northwest Territories in 1999. Nearly a quarter of a century later, partisan politics remain a southern concept.
MILESTONE WATCH
Poilievre passes Day
On Monday, Pierre Poilievre will surpass Stockwell Day as the 30th longest serving leader of the official opposition.
Day, leader of the Canadian Alliance, was in the opposition role for only a short time — he became leader of the party in the summer of 2000, was defeated by Jean Chrétien’s Liberals that fall, and finally stepped aside after months of internal divisions. He lost to Stephen Harper in a leadership contest in early 2002.
Poilievre’s tenure in the same role hasn’t been nearly as rocky, to say the least.
That’s it for the Weekly Writ this week. The next episode of The Writ Podcast will be dropping on Friday. As always, the episode will land in your inbox but you can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting apps. And don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube Channel, where I post videos, livestreams and interviews from the podcast!