Weekly Writ for Mar. 6: What Durham tells us
How to make sense of the Durham byelection results, plus the latest seat estimates
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.
The importance of Monday’s federal byelection in Durham is not what the results revealed but rather what they confirmed — namely, that the Conservatives are in a position to win a strong majority government and that the Liberals, unless anything changes, are on track for defeat.
As expected, the Conservatives’ Jamil Jivani won the byelection in Durham, a riding in the eastern Greater Toronto Area that was previously held by Erin O’Toole and, before that, by Bev Oda and the Conservative Party since 2004. He took 57.4% of the vote, a significant jump of 11 points over O’Toole’s performance in the 2021 general election. It’s the Conservatives’ best result in this part of Ontario since the 1984 election, when the PCs under Brian Mulroney won their massive landslide.
Robert Rock and the Liberals took 22.5% of the vote, a drop of 7.4 points. It’s their worst result since they captured 17.3% of the vote in the 2012 byelection that first brought O’Toole to the House of Commons. Their result closely resembles the 23% the Liberals scored here in 2008, when Stéphane Dion’s Liberals were reduced to 77 seats across the country. This is perhaps the closer corollary to where the Liberals stand today than the 2011 election, when the party had just 17.9% support in Durham.
The NDP’s Chris Borgia took 10.4%, a drop of 7.1 points from the last election and the party’s worst result here since 2008. While the New Democrats’ drop in support is similar to the Liberals’, it represents a greater share of their 2021 vote. However, the decrease is in line with the NDP’s average 5.6-point drop in previous byelections held since the last general election.
The People’s Party’s vote held up well enough, with a drop of just 1.1 points for Patricia Conlin (who, along with Adam Smith of the Rhinoceros Party, was the only returning candidate from 2021). The Greens took just 2.2% of the vote, well below the 5.4% the party managed here the last time they had a candidate on the ballot in 2019.
That the Conservatives won Durham is no surprise — anything else would have been a tremendous upset. Even the scale of their victory is not much of a surprise. But that doesn’t diminish what it signifies.
In my look-ahead analysis from Monday, I set some benchmarks for each of the parties based on where their polling support stands in Ontario. These benchmarks were how we should expect the parties to have performed in Durham, based on how public opinion has shifted across the province. In other words, it’s a measure of whether the parties were beating, matching, or falling short of their polls.
Here’s how the results lined up against those benchmarks:
The Conservatives and Liberals beat their polls, though only by a small margin. The Conservatives were expected to hit between 50% and 57% support. Jivani managed 57.4%. The Liberals were expected to have between 17% and 20%, and Rock got 22.5%.
This is important because the results serve as a proof-point for the polls. The Conservatives have gained significantly in Ontario (and elsewhere) since the last election, and Jivani matched, and evenly slightly beat, his polling benchmark. This suggests that the polls showing the Conservatives with over 40% support in Ontario and across the country are reflecting something very real. The kind of score Jivani managed in Durham is what you’d expect a generic Conservative candidate to achieve in this riding in a general election that produces a big Conservative majority.
Rock’s over-performance isn’t really good news for the Liberals, since it still represents a big drop from the 2021 election. But it does argue in favour of the Liberal floor not yet falling out from under them. Things are already bad for the party without having to believe that things could be even worse.
Which brings us to the NDP. It’s harder to know what to read into Borgia’s score because of how poorly the New Democrats have fared in byelections over the last few years. That track record leads me to see less doom-and-gloom for the party than I would have had the Liberals under-performed to this extent, but it should act as a cautionary tale to any New Democrat who sees the party polling at 19% to 21% nationally and believes that they are poised to over-take the Liberals.
Turnout in the byelection was just 27.9%, which is on the lower-end of an already low bar for federal byelections these days. This might partially explain the NDP’s under-performance, with their supporters being even less motivated to come out and support their no-hope candidate than would normally be the case in a general election.
But the turnout figures don’t invalidate the overall results — because those results largely matched our expectations. With the sole exception of the NDP’s voter pool, this byelection serves as another example of how the people who vote in byelections are representative (at least in terms of political support) of the people who vote in general elections. Turnout can have an impact on results, of course, but broadly speaking the people who stayed home on Monday are unlikely to be all that different from the people who didn’t.
So, the results in Durham should provide little consolation for Liberals who doubt the national polls. Instead, they should act as a confirmation of what we already believed to be true: that Pierre Poilievre is the odds-on favourite to win the next election.
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Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News of an upcoming vacancy in the House of Commons in Ottawa and a new vacancy in the House of Assembly in St. John’s.
Polls on provincial voting intentions in Atlantic Canada and national voting intentions across the country, plus some numbers on military spending.
The Conservatives would fall back down below 200 seats, the PQ would win a big minority and the New Brunswick Liberals would have a shot at power if the election were held today.
Another New Brunswick PC MLA opts out in this week’s riding profile.
The story of the 1971 Nova Scotia PC leadership contest in the #EveryElectionProject.
IN THE NEWS
Daniel Blaikie to resign at end of March
The list of vacancies in the House of Commons will grow to three by month’s end, as NDP MP Daniel Blaikie has announced he will resign his Manitoba seat of Elmwood–Transcona to take a job as senior adviser on intergovernmental affairs in Wab Kinew’s provincial government.
Blaikie was first elected in the 2015 federal election by a knife’s edge — he defeated Conservative MP Lawrence Toet by just 61 votes. He was re-elected in 2019 by a margin of eight percentage points, a margin that grew to 22 points in 2021. On paper, that might suggest that Elmwood–Transcona is a safe NDP seat.
And it might indeed be safe, but Toet wrestled this seat away from the New Democrats in 2011. It has voted Conservative in the past and the Blaikie name goes a long way in the area. The seat was held by Bill Blaikie, Daniel’s father, from 1979 to 2008. It could stay within the family, though, if Daniel’s sister Rebecca, who has served as president of the federal NDP, decides to take a run.
Regardless, the NDP can’t take the seat for granted, Blaikie or no Blaikie, especially considering the surge in support for the Conservatives across the country, including in Manitoba. When the byelection is held, it will be a test of both the extent of Pierre Poilievre’s rise and the importance of the Kinew honeymoon. Will there be any carry-over to the federal scene?
The two other vacancies yet to be filled are in Toronto–St. Paul’s and LaSalle–Émard–Verdun in Montreal. The Liberals will certainly hold the latter, but Toronto–St. Paul’s isn’t a sure bet. If the three vacancies are filled on the same byelection night that would make for a revealing (and potentially final) foretaste of the next general election.
(Byelections cannot be held within nine months of a scheduled general election and do not need to be called until six months after a vacancy occurs, which effectively means that any vacancy that happens after the end of July might remain vacant until the next federal vote.)
ELECTION NEWS BRIEFS
More byelections are coming up in Newfoundland and Labrador, as Liberal MHA Brian Warr announced his resignation last week. First elected in 2015 in the riding of Baie Verte-Green Bay, Warr won by a margin of only 171 votes (4.1 percentage points) in the last election. Fogo Island-Cape Freels became vacant in January following the death of Liberal MHA Derrick Bragg. A nomination race is scheduled for the weekend in that riding, suggesting a byelection call could be forthcoming.
THIS WEEK’S POLLS
Three safe incumbents, one in danger in Atlantic Canada
Quarterly polling from Narrative Research was released last week, giving us our nearly-only glimpse at the state of provincial politics in Atlantic Canada.
In New Brunswick, where an election is scheduled for October, Blaine Higgs and the governing Progressive Conservatives continue to trail the Liberals, who lead with 40% to the PCs’ 34%. This is consistent with the last three quarters of polling from Narrative, though the PCs have dropped a point in each of the last two quarters.
The Greens were in third with 15%, followed by the New Democrats at 8% and the People’s Alliance at 2%.
The samples are small in the Narrative polls, with only 283 decided respondents in New Brunswick (which carries a margin of error of nearly six percentage points). The Liberal lead is not statistically significant, though the fact that the Liberals have led by six points in two consecutive polls lends some credence to their advantage.
The regional sample sizes are even smaller, of course, but they suggest the Liberals are ahead in northern New Brunswick (as we’d expect) and are ahead or, at the very least, running even with the PCs in southern New Brunswick and in and around Moncton. If that holds in future (hopefully larger-sample) polls, that would be significant for the seat math — as you’ll see in the seat estimates below.
Susan Holt, leader of the Liberals, has a wider advantage over Blaine Higgs on preferred premier than her party does over the PCs, with the gap standing at nine points, a gap that is outside the margin of error. David Coon of the Greens is third with 17%, suggesting that he is more popular than his party and that the Greens might have some upside.
Let’s roll through the rest of the provinces:
In Nova Scotia, the governing PCs lead with 49% support against 25% for the Liberals, 20% for the NDP and 5% for the Greens. This is largely consistent with the previous two quarters, though the NDP has slipped in two consecutive polls. Tim Houston is the preferred premier of 35% of respondents, followed at length by the Liberals’ Zach Churchill at 17%.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, Premier Andrew Furey’s Liberals lead with 43%, followed by the PCs at 33% and the NDP at 23%. This is a relatively low score for the PCs, but the poll was in the field shortly after the PCs’ byelection loss in Conception Bay East-Bell Island, so their drop makes some sense.
And in Prince Edward Island, the governing PCs were ahead with 51%, followed by the Greens at 28%, the Liberals at 12% and the NDP at 9%. This is the highest level of support for the Greens recorded since before last year’s provincial election. This poll was also in the field just days after the Greens scored their upset byelection victory in Borden-Kinkora. So, either the results there influenced the poll or the poll is recording an uptick in Green support that the byelection reflected — or both.
Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador are slated to hold their next elections in 2025, though it is always possible (particularly in the case of N&L) that the call could come earlier. PEI won’t vote again until 2027.
POLLING NEWS BRIEFS
New national polls over the last week continue to show a big lead for the Conservatives. Léger put the Conservatives ahead with 41%, followed by the Liberals at 25% and the NDP at 18%. The poll got some attention for putting the Conservatives in second in Quebec with 29%, eight points ahead of the third-place Liberals. Meanwhile, this week’s update to the four-week rolling Nanos Research poll has the Conservatives at 43%, followed by the Liberals at 23% and the NDP at 21%.
According to the Angus Reid Institute, the proportion of Canadians who feel we should prioritize military preparedness and presence on the world stage is up 17 points since 2015 to 29%, while building trade links with other countries drops 14 points to 43%. “Being a leader in foreign aid and humanitarian causes” is largely unchanged as a foreign policy priority at 28%.
IF THE ELECTION WERE HELD TODAY
The Conservatives dip back below 200 seats, largely due to the stronger Liberal numbers in Atlantic Canada in the Léger poll.
In Quebec, a privately-commissioned Pallas Data survey boosts the CAQ to second place in the seat count as the Parti Québécois drops to the majority/minority threshold. The poll had good results for the PQ in the Montreal suburbs, but better numbers than we’ve seen for some time for the CAQ outside of the metropolis.
The Nova Scotia PCs slide a couple of seats due to some weaker numbers in Halifax and Cape Breton, but otherwise remain in (very) comfortable majority territory. There’s no change in Newfoundland and Labrador and the Greens pick up one seat in Prince Edward Island, while in New Brunswick the Liberals’ good polling in the south boosts them to a narrow minority government over the PCs.
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).
RIDING OF THE WEEK
Champdoré-Irishtown (New Brunswick)
With the New Brunswick election approaching, an increasing number of MLAs have announced they will not be running for re-election — particularly those of a Progressive Conservative persuasion.
It was Daniel Allain’s turn last week, along with New Maryland-Sunbury MLA Jeff Carr.
Elected for the first time in 2020 in Moncton East, Allain was a cabinet minister and rare francophone member of Blaine Higgs’s caucus. But he was shuffled out of cabinet after he voted against the PC government’s gender-identity Policy 713 and has since expressed his unease at the social conservative turn the party has taken in recent months.
The prospects for the PCs were already looking dire among New Brunswick’s Acadians. The resignation of Allain won’t help.
He had earlier said he was interested in running in the new riding of Champdoré-Irishtown, located north of Moncton. The riding boundaries are changing significantly in the area and Allain’s old riding of Moncton East no longer looked appealing.
Champdoré-Irishtown stretches from residential communities like Irishtown just outside of Moncton all the way out to Kent County, including the former town of Saint-Antoine, now part of Champdoré. Encompassing hotly-contested sections of Moncton East and far more Liberal-friendly polls in Kent South, the new riding of Champdoré-Irishtown is not a particularly good one for the PCs. But it’s better than the new Moncton East.
On the old boundaries, Allain won his seat by about 10 points over the Liberals. On the new boundaries, the PCs would be the underdogs in Moncton East by about five points. In Champdoré-Irishtown, it’s instead a toss-up that marginally leans Liberal — at least based on the results in 2020.
But public opinion has shifted since then. The latest Narrative Research poll puts the Liberals ahead of the PCs by two points in Moncton and the surrounding area, a region the PCs won in 2020 by three points. However, the sample size of decided voters (75) is so small that the margin of error is roughly 11 points. According to the poll, there has been a swing toward the Liberals worth about five points, more than enough to make Champdoré-Irishtown very winnable for the party. If we take into account the margin of error, however, the actual swing could range anywhere from a six-point movement to the PCs or a massive 16-point swing to the Liberals.
Theoretically, that keeps Champdoré-Irishtown in play. But, on balance, the numbers favour the Liberals. Now that Daniel Allain won’t be flying the PC banner, the Liberals can be favoured even more.
ON THIS DAY in the #EveryElectionProject
Nova Scotia Tories turn to the right
March 6, 1971
After a long period of stability, the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservatives experienced a few whirlwind years of change between 1967 and 1971.
Robert Stanfield took over the leadership of the Nova Scotia PC Party in 1948, only a few years after a disastrous 1945 campaign that saw it shutout of the legislature. Stanfield rebuilt the provincial party, growing its vote share and caucus until finally returning it to power in 1956. For the next decade, he continued the PCs’ upward trajectory until he decamped to Ottawa to take on the national PC Party. His replacement, G.I. Smith, took his place unopposed.
But then the PCs were dealt a narrow defeat in the October 1970 election, and two weeks later Smith suffered a heart attack while on vacation in Bermuda. Advised by his doctors to quit politics, Smith resigned the PC leadership. The search was on for another leader — and yet another new direction.
The names bandied about at the leadership contest’s outset didn’t materialize: former finance minister Tom McKeough, PC MP Pat Nowlan and well-known broadcaster and businessman Finlay MacDonald all decided not to run.
The three candidates who stepped into the vacuum were all under 40 and each proposed new directions for the party.
Gerald Doucet, the youngest of the three at 33 years old, was first elected as an MLA in Cape Breton in 1963. An Acadian, he served as minister of education and represented the progressive wing of the Progressive Conservative Party.
John Buchanan, the oldest at 39, represented a riding in Halifax that he won in 1967. After the dust settled following the 1970 campaign, he was the only PC MLA left standing in the city. Last serving as fisheries minister and, like Doucet, originally from Cape Breton, Buchanan was the first to announce his candidacy. He was seen to represent the conservative wing of the Progressive Conservative Party.
What both Doucet and Buchanan had against them, however, was their record as part of the Smith government that had just been defeated. That was not the case for Roland (Rollie) Thornhill, the 35-year-old mayor of Dartmouth. Originally from Newfoundland, Thornhill was seen as a potential contender from the start, in part because he didn’t carry any of the baggage of the previous government. He was also a compromise candidate, neither on the left or right wings of the party.
While the divisions between left and right might have created a dynamic campaign full of ideas and ideological clashes, instead it was a quiet, amicable affair needing “considerably more zest if it [was] to catch sizeable public attention”, according to Lyndon Watkins writing in the Globe and Mail.
Just under 3,000 delegates and observers attended the convention on March 5-6, 1971, which was addressed by Stanfield on the Friday before the voting.
Doucet’s speech to the delegates on Saturday didn’t land well. According to Watkins, “his speech contained more memorable phrases, but he delivered it in too forceful a manner. There was not sufficient modulation in this tone. ‘He sounded almost like Hitler to me,’ one delegate remarked.”
In contrast, Buchanan delivered a “low-key address”, pledging to make the Nova Scotia PCs “a people’s party to meet the challenge of the ‘70s.”
On the first ballot, Doucet emerged as the leader with 38% of the vote. But that proved not to be enough — Buchanan was second at 33% and Thornhill finished a strong third with 29%.
(There is a 10-vote discrepancy in reports from the Canadian Press and the Globe and Mail. I have used CP’s reported tally in the chart above.)
As soon as the results were announced, Thornhill walked over to Buchanan’s side of the hall. Most of his supporters followed him, voting for Buchanan over Doucet on the second ballot by a margin of nearly two-to-one.
Buchanan’s victory on that second ballot, with 53% to Doucet’s 47%, was interpreted as the members in the Halifax-Dartmouth area flexing their muscle. It also suggests that had Thornhill finished in second, he probably would have been able to roll-up Buchanan’s vote and beat Doucet.
In his victory speech, Buchanan promised to bring economic prosperity to Nova Scotia and so halt the flow of young people leaving the province.
“We must continue to have confidence in ourselves and in our capacity to shape our own destiny,” he said. “We must not become so dependent upon the central government that we become merely a colony of Ottawa, administered by the bureaucracy of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Jean Marchand [one of Trudeau’s Quebec ministers].”
By the end of the decade, Buchanan would return the PCs to power, where they would remain until the early 1990s. When it was Buchanan’s turn to step aside, Thornhill (still relatively young 20 years later) ran for the leadership again. And, again, it was a near-run thing. Out of nearly 2,300 votes cast, Thornhill fell just 143 votes short of beating Donald Cameron and becoming premier.
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!