Canada Update: Tories Are Still Dead

A lot of sound and fury has been raised over the allegedly broken nature of Canada recently, all of it stupid, but we’ve had limited polling to show how the narrative was hilariously overblown. Finally, today, we got enough data to update the LeanTossup Canada Model, and contrary to so many assumptions about how the blockades and issues around resource extraction are hurting the Liberals, they’re actually up in seats. From 157 at the election, they’re now still in a minority, but a slightly improved position of 164 seats. Just under 40% of the time the government would be returned in majority, and the Tories are down seats since October. Despite all the sound and fury, the Liberals are on track for retaining office. Why?



It’s simple, really – using the two pollsters without a massively horrendous 2019 election result who released polls today, Nanos and Léger, you see a clear trend. The Liberals’ margin of victory is up in Ontario in both polls, and they’re catching the Conservatives in BC in both. In both polls, their lead in Atlantic Canada is up, and, on average, they’re a bit up on the Bloc in Quebec compared to the margin in October. The Liberals are just tanking in the Prairies, and specifically Alberta and Saskatchewan – two places where their seat total is a grand total of 0 already.



For the Liberals, they are making their vote even more efficient than it already was at the last election, by increasing their vote in the three most populous provinces, full of marginal seats and gettable targets, and shedding votes where the rigours, or stupidities, of first past the post make it politically sensible to do so. Put more bluntly, this government only has to care about the views of Saskatchewan and Alberta to the extent that the rest of the country will punish them for division. If the Liberals don’t face pressure from central Canada or BC on the issues that cause certain people to declare a unity crisis every other week, there’s no political crisis for the Liberals. And so far, there isn’t one.



The NDP and Bloc are mostly doing as they did last time, so they are uninteresting. The Conservatives, however, continue to have questions to answer about their position, if (as these polls show) they are leaking support in Ontario and BC. In Ontario, many people blame Doug Ford for the drag on the votes for the federal Conservatives, which may be fair, but Ford is the Premier through 2022. For the Conservatives, who claim to want an election before then, they need to get used to that drag and find a way to slash Liberal margins in the biggest province. As of now, they’re at 115 seats, down from October’s election and down 49 seats from a plurality of the seats in the Commons. The Conservatives don’t have a plan, they don’t have an answer for why voters who don’t hate Justin Trudeau should vote for them. They have no plan for well off suburbanites who want lower taxes but are also debating the right wedding gift for the gay couple next door. The Conservatives haven’t learned anything from October’s defeat, and aren’t going to make any progress towards winning until they realize the reasons they lost and how to fix it. They could start by reading any of the pieces on this site from the election predicting what would happen, because the analysis was correct, but given the way they act I doubt they care. So long as they don’t, my take that they’ve already lost the next election will look more and more correct. If they can’t make a dent in Trudeau after weeks of a supposed crisis, they’re never going to do it. It’s a shame, really – I’d love a more interesting column to write occasionally.