Weekly Writ for May 15: Battleground spotlight on B.C.
Weekly Writ for May 15: Battleground spotlight on B.C.
Poilievre's Conservatives on track for landslide in B.C., while the race is looking closer at the provincial level.
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.
British Columbia is an often over-looked battleground in federal elections, even if it has its fair share of close and hotly-contested races. The arithmetic simply doesn’t favour B.C. — by the time the polls close on the west coast, the winner of the election has usually already been decided. At most, B.C. decides whether it is a majority or minority government, but even then the way things are unfolding in the rest of the country usually make it clear enough what the final outcome will be in B.C., too.
Next time, B.C. might be over-looked again for a different reason: there might not be much of a race there at all.
Every so often in the Weekly Writ, I take a deep dive into one region of the country and how it is shaping up ahead of the next federal election, using my model from the If The Election Were Held Today section of the newsletter to classify seats as as likely, lean or toss-up. A riding that is projected to be a likely win for a party is one in which the party is projected to lead by 15 points or more. A ‘lean’ is a riding with a margin of between five and 15 points, while a toss-up is a riding with a margin of less than five points. In the chart below, the little boxes next to each riding denote which party won them in 2021.
I looked at the 905 a few weeks ago. This week, we’ll take a look at British Columbia, where Pierre Poilievre made an announcement and attended a party fundraiser on Tuesday. It’s also where the Conservatives have seen a huge surge in support in the polls.
In fact, there’s no region in Canada where the Conservatives have spiked more than in British Columbia.
In the last election, the party under Erin O’Toole captured 33% of the vote in B.C. In three of the last five polls out of B.C., however, the Conservatives have managed more than 50% support. In the other two, the Conservatives were at 43% and 44%. On average, this puts the Conservatives at about 52% support in British Columbia, followed by the NDP at around 21% and the Liberals at 17%.
This is a huge swing in favour of the Conservatives. Accordingly, a huge number of seats would likely swing over to them if these trends hold.
Right out of the gate, the Conservatives have 31 likely wins. That alone would be an all-time best result for the party.
They start out with the 15 seats they would have won on the new boundaries in the last election, and add to that 10 gains from the Liberals. These are all in the Lower Mainland, primarily in the suburban outskirts of Greater Vancouver. The Conservatives would also gain six seats from the NDP, two coming from the North and Interior and another three in the northern half of Vancouver Island.
The Conservatives don’t need to be as high as 50% of the vote to win these seats — these are all projected to swing to the Conservatives by margins of 15 points or more. But if the party does manage to match its polls, it could also win the “lean” seats in the list above. These have the Conservatives inching further south on Vancouver Island and flipping Cowichan–Malahat–Langford, while they also move into the Liberal-held urban centres in the Lower Mainland: Surrey Centre, Vancouver Centre and Vancouver Fraserview–South Burnaby.
Finally, if the Conservatives can match their very best polls, then they could start taking some of the last NDP strongholds in British Columbia. These include New Westminister–Burnaby–Maillardville and Esquimalt–Saanich–Sooke. Two party leaders could also be in danger if the Conservatives do as well as their polls in B.C., with both Jagmeet Singh in Burnaby Central and Elizabeth May in Saanich–Gulf Islands at risk.
Only in Surrey Newton are the Liberals favoured or even considered to be in close contention. The Conservative-leaning seats in Surrey and Vancouver would be next on the list in a Liberal recovery. By comparison, the NDP is fortunate to have Vancouver East and Vancouver Kingsway safely in their column, while they are also favoured in Victoria.
The big question is whether these polling numbers are sustainable for the Conservatives. Under Stephen Harper, they only cleared the bar of 40% in the 2008 and 2011 elections, and never before in modern times has a single federal conservative party taken more than 50% of the vote in British Columbia. Brian Mulroney’s PCs didn’t do it in their landslide 1984 victory, while John Diefenbaker in 1958 and Stockwell Day’s Canadian Alliance in 2000 came just a few tenths of a percentage point shy of half the vote.
(The Canadian Alliance and PCs combined for 57% of the vote in B.C. in the 2000 election, but this was in the context of a deeply unpopular B.C. NDP government that would be reduced to two seats in a provincial election held a few months later.)
With the significant swing in support taking place at the federal level, as well as the increasingly competitive race unfolding provincially (see below), British Columbia is most certainly a province to watch over the next few months — even if it becomes an afterthought on election night itself.
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News on the Alberta NDP leadership race.
A new poll clarifies the provincial race in British Columbia, and we get another update on the federal scene.
Pierre Poilievre and David Eby would win majorities if the elections were held today.
A microcosm of the broader fight in New Brunswick in this week’s riding profile.
A win for the Quebec Liberals over a century ago in the #EveryElectionProject.
A milestone for a beleaguered “leader”.