MONTREAL—Canada’s two main parties may be tied in voting intentions at the national level, but the pre-election season has so far been kinder to Justin Trudeau’s Liberals than to Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives.

The subtext of the national polls is that the first are doing better than the numbers suggest while the second are running in place.

Much of the credit for the restoring of a modest Liberal edge is owed not so much to the strategic genius of the incumbents as to some chronic weaknesses of their main rivals.

The concentration of Conservative party support in the Prairies is a big part of that party’s problem. It masks a less-than-optimal performance in the larger voting markets of central Canada. But other factors are also in play.

The competition for government remains a two-way battle between the Liberals and the Conservatives.

In the past, a strong NDP has tended to be a winning condition for the Conservatives. It was a key element in the majority victories of Brian Mulroney in 1988 and Stephen Harper in 2011.

In the reverse, the NDP was at low ebb for much of the Jean Chrétien decade.

Short of a dramatic shift in New Democrat fortunes Scheer will not be able to count on Jagmeet Singh to bleed the Liberals on his behalf in October.

In B.C. where the NDP elected its second-largest provincial contingent in 2015, the Green party is breathing down its neck.

In Quebec where the party under Thomas Mulcair and Jack Layton elected its largest contingent of MPs in the last two elections, the NDP is polling in single digits, and fighting for fourth place against the Greens.

Now that the Bloc Québécois has gotten its act together, non-Liberal Quebec voters are more likely to rediscover the sovereigntist party than to give Singh a second look.

The Liberals remain the dominant force in Quebec. Two recent polls — Abacus and Léger Marketing — pegged Trudeau’s lead in his home-province at more than 10 points.

At the same time, potential clouds on the Quebec/Ottawa horizon as a result of the arrival of a less Liberal-friendly provincial government have failed to materialize.

By all indications, Coalition Avenir Quebec’s François Legault is not poised to rain on the Liberals’ election parade and Trudeau is not going out of his way to give his Quebec counterpart a reason to do so.

The battle over the CAQ’s contentious securalism law seems destined to play out in the courts for the foreseeable future.

A potential federal-provincial showdown over immigration policy has at least for now been averted. Under pressure from the Quebec business community, Legault has to juggle his promise to reduce the province’s immigration intake with increasingly widespread labour shortages.

This summer saw the first test of the process put in place last spring to give the Quebec government input in the filling of Quebec vacancies on the Supreme Court.

Sources in both capitals say the prime minister’s choice of justice Nicholas Kasirer reflected the premier’s preference.

Legault may be a small-c conservative but as the premier of a province where the issue of climate change is top-of-mind he has little to gain from associating with a pro-pipeline anti-carbon tax Conservative party. The last thing the Quebec premier wants is to have to manage a pipeline backlash on the first watch in government of his party.

He has instructed his MNAs to stay out of the federal fray.

There are some bright spots in the Conservative party Quebec picture. At 24 per cent in the Léger and Abacus polls, the party’s score is eight points higher than its last election result. And the Conservatives have a fighting chance to take out their right-wing nemesis Maxime Bernier in his Beauce riding.

Harper and Chrétien secured majority governments with minimal Quebec support. But that was back in the days when a plurality of Quebecers voted for parties like the BQ or the NDP that kept the province on the sidelines of the battle between the Conservatives and the Liberals.

For the first time since the eighties Trudeau’s party is poised to enter a federal election with a solid edge on the competition in Quebec.

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And if it has been possible to form a federal government without winning Quebec in the past, doing so while also losing Ontario is essentially a non-starter.

In Canada’s largest province, Scheer remains overshadowed by his cumbersome Queen’s Park ally Doug Ford. The latter’s association with the federal Conservatives is not only toxic for the former in Ontario. For worse rather than for better, Ford’s profile nationally is higher than that of the federal leader.

None of the above is meant to suggest that the Liberals have a second victory in the bag — far from it. But with the official launch of the campaign a little more than a month away the election — on balance — is again theirs to lose.

Chantal Hébert is a columnist based in Ottawa covering politics. Follow her on Twitter: @ChantalHbert

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