CanPol: May(?) 2011 Election. Vote today!

[Asher]

Haha, you're so lovely.

Large bridges are a federal jurisdiction;

Why?

Why the **** should I pay for your bridge?

There's no ****ing way a bridge as simple as that could cost $3B. Even if it is "huge".

It's more alarming that someone could **** up a simple design like that. It's only about 40 years old.

[Fake Boris]

The federal built it, you ****. Ask them.

[Flubber]

Throughout this supposed NDP resurgence in Quebec I often wondered as to the quality of their candidates and organization there. I have seen many ridings where the NDP (other parties do it too and take the best they can get) , thinking they really have no hope, will be grateful to have pretty much anyone put their name forward. Since I do not believe that even they could or would have predicted their poll numbers, I am wondering how many of their candidates are of this marginal type quality.

There are still reasonable proportions of voters that consider the candidate as the only factor or a major factor in their vote choice so I will be curious to see how this general love for Layton translates when the NDP candidate is some 22year old with no track record for anything

This NDP popularity is at unprecedented levels and I think no one really knows how this might play out

[Asher]

The federal built it, you ****. Ask them.

Quebec is its own nation!

Use Quebec's federal government to fund it, dickwads.

[Flubber]

The federal built it, you ****. Ask them.

****?? are you channelling KH or has this become a general insult of choice on the board??

[notyoueither]

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/981471--hebert-a-liberal-campaign-of-self-destruction

Hébert: A Liberal campaign of self-destruction
By Chantal Hébert National Columnist

To follow the 2011 Liberal election campaign has been like watching a plane crash in slow motion.

Even from the sidelines, it has become a stomach-churning experience.

One can only imagine how it feels to be sitting in the cockpit as every manoeuvre fails to at least put the campaign back on a level course.

“The end of the world” was how one shaken lifelong Liberal insider described his party’s slide to third place behind the NDP this week.

If that trend holds until voting day, it is certainly the end of the federal world as Canadians have known it.

Throughout its distinguished history, the Liberal Party of Canada has never been further from power than official opposition. When its leader was not the prime minister, he was the prime-minister-in-waiting.

Nothing in the culture of the federal Liberals has prepared them for life as a third party.

That culture may account for the blind spot that has brought the party to the edge of this abyss.

One of the most remarkable features of the current campaign is that the Liberal team brought this election upon itself.

Past failed leaders of the opposition such as Stockwell Day and Stéphane Dion had the rug pulled from under them by wily prime ministers who rushed them to an election for partisan advantage.

John Turner and Kim Campbell each inherited the mantle of prime minister at the tail end of five-year mandates.

But Michael Ignatieff and his strategists chose the timing of this battle as long as six months ago.

They did so with the pre-election wind squarely in their party’s face and in the absence of any tangible indication that it was about to turn in its favour.

Rather than focus on the tea leaves of the election to come, they looked into the entrails of the previous one and came away with the omen that Ignatieff could not possibly do worse than Dion in 2008.

A reduced Conservative minority government was their worst-case scenario.

In most ways, Ignatieff did do better. The Liberal leader has turned out to be at least twice the campaigner that his predecessor was. His campaign has been a model of discipline and relative grace under duress.

But the Liberal game plan overlooked the possibility that Jack Layton might also run a better campaign than last time.

It is not that the possibility was not in the air. Pre-election polls pegged Layton higher than Ignatieff in the leadership ratings. In Quebec he had become the most popular federalist leader on the ballot and his party was already on the move.

Liberal strategists did not factor a potentially surging NDP into their calculations because they presumed the Liberals were playing against the Conservatives in the major leagues and the NDP was not.

They approached the election with the mindset of a governing party but the physique of a third party.

When they plunged headlong in a spring campaign, the Liberals had been mired in the mid-twenties in the polls for an unprecedented length of time; they were at a historical low behind the NDP in Quebec and exhibiting little signs of life in the Prairies.

A base can only erode for so long — as the Liberal base has for decades — before it starts to disintegrate.

As dangerous as the past month has turned out to be, the next few days could be more perilous. For the Liberals, things could still get worse.

The so-called orange wave of the NDP could turn into a tsunami and sweep into Ontario. Or the sight of the NDP in the official opposition window with attending speculation that Monday’s vote could put Layton within reach of the Prime Minister’s Office could see the right flank of the Liberals collapse to the Conservatives.

On the highway to Montreal’s Trudeau airport — one of the rare landmarks of the past Liberal glory in Quebec — there is a big Ignatieff billboard. “Quebecers have the power to change things,” it proclaims.

That part of the Liberal message has obviously resonated.

[notyoueither]

The surge continues, and now Nanos is showing the beginnings of a Conservative slide in Ontario and the Maritimes.

Ignatieff is in the ditch. It seems there is very little the Liberals can do.

Does Harper have enough time to have his arguments stick vs Layton?

http://www.nanosresearch.com/election2011/20110427-BallotE.pdf

[notyoueither]

Somewhat dated info, but an interesting perspective.

http://www.economist.com/node/18620912?story_id=18620912

Stephen Harper and that elusive majority
A last-minute surge for the left might end up benefiting the right

Apr 28th 2011 | OTTAWA | from the print edition

THE hitherto sleepy campaign for Canada’s general election on May 2nd was jolted awake over the Easter weekend by a surprising surge by the New Democratic Party (NDP), a leftish amalgam of trade unionists and farmers. The NDP, which held only 36 of the 308 seats in the House of Commons when it was dissolved in March, was leading in French-speaking Quebec (which provides almost a quarter of the total seats) and has overhauled the Liberals in some national opinion polls to become the main challenger to the ruling Conservatives (see chart).

So is Canada about to go socialist? Although the Canadian dollar wobbled this week, the answer is almost certainly not. Indeed, by splitting the centre-left vote more evenly, the NDP’s rise—if sustained—may provide Stephen Harper, the Conservative leader, with the parliamentary majority that has eluded him ever since he became prime minister in 2006. In the ensuing years Canadian politics has become an unusually shrill, partisan and intransigent affair. Frequent elections—this is the fourth since 2004—have seen falling voter turnout, while polls show that public trust in politicians is also declining.

This cynicism seems to have helped Jack Layton, the NDP leader. He is seen as the cheerful underdog, who, despite suffering from prostate cancer and hip problems that require he walk with a cane, appears relaxed and smiling. Although based in Toronto, he grew up near Montreal. In colloquial French he claims that “winds of change” are sweeping his native province. His message of higher corporate taxes, more social spending, green measures, and an early withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan goes down well in Quebec, a traditionally pacifist, big-government kind of place. Mr Layton seems to be successfully wooing disillusioned supporters of the separatist Bloc Québécois.

The NDP is also profiting from the travails of Michael Ignatieff, the Liberal leader, who entered politics in 2006 after spending most of the three previous decades working as a journalist and academic in Britain and the United States. Although his campaign appearances have become more assured, he has failed to shake off the gibes of Conservative attack ads that he is an elitist from Harvard who is “just visiting” Canada in the hope of gaining power. Mr Ignatieff did not help himself by seeming to try to have it both ways on whether the Liberals might forge a post-electoral coalition with the NDP. In fact, that looks possible provided Mr Ignatieff ends up with more seats than Mr Layton.

Mr Ignatieff triggered the election by joining other opposition parties to bring down the government over its refusal to divulge how it arrived at implausibly low estimates of the cost of controversial new prisons and jet fighters. He seems frustrated that Canadians have not warmed to his attacks on Mr Harper for violating democratic principles. The prime minister shut down parliament in 2008 to avoid losing a vote of confidence, and withheld information from parliament on defence spending and the treatment of Afghan detainees by Canadian soldiers.

The biggest problem for the Liberals, a centrist, big-tent party, is that Canadian politics has become less European and consensual and more American and ideological. Mr Harper has been the main cause and beneficiary of that process. After five years, he has earned Canadians’ respect if not their love. He is an astute political tactician: he is the longest-serving prime minister of a minority government in Canadian history. But he comes over as a cold control-freak. A headline on the website of the Globe and Mail, a Liberal-leaning paper, summed up popular sentiment when it described the prime minister as “nasty, brutish—and competent”.

Mr Harper’s campaign pitch is that he needs a parliamentary majority in order to sustain the country’s recovery from recession. His message of low taxes, small government and tougher treatment of criminals has won him support everywhere except Quebec. In the past two elections the opposition successfully aroused fears that if Mr Harper won a majority he would subject a tolerant country to socially conservative policies—banning abortion and gay marriage and introducing capital punishment. With Mr Harper now a more familiar figure, that may not work this time.

“This cycle of election after election, minority after minority, is beginning to put some of the country’s interests in serious jeopardy,” Mr Harper warned in a debate among the party leaders, though he did not say what interests were at stake.

His problem is that he has no potential coalition partner. His Conservatives are further to the right than the former Progressive Conservative Party, which governed Canada on and off until its annihilation in 1993 and which was barely distinguishable from the Liberals.

Provided Mr Harper increases the 143 seats and 37.7% the Conservatives won in 2008, his hold on his job looks secure. Fall short, and the era in which majority single-party governments were the Canadian norm will unarguably have ended.

Until 1988, the two main parties shared more than 80% of the vote between them. In 2008 they managed slightly less than two-thirds. The choice facing Canadians may be between much more of Mr Harper, or the arrival of coalition politics from across the Atlantic.

[Asher]

[Garth Vader]

Wow, that's cool. I can't remember an election with this kind of swing before.

[Kontiki]

You have to like the Green's consistency, though. Steady leadership.

[Krill]

NDP are projected to get, what, 50 seats?

[Flubber]

You have to like the Green's consistency, though. Steady leadership.

LOL Their support seems very ideological but I do wonder how many Greens might jump to the NDP perhaps in the hope that their vote may actually count for something-- I actually expect the Green vote to be down a little for this reason

[notyoueither]

NDP are projected to get, what, 50 seats?

It is really hard to say. Their level of support could get them to 100 seats or a little more, depending on where and how the Liberal and Bloc vote collapse.

[Flubber]

It is really hard to say. Their level of support could get them to 100 seats or a little more, depending on where and how the Liberal and Bloc vote collapse.

Your math makes sense compared to what the Cons or Libs would get with their projected levels of support but there is a part of me that still thinks the candidate effect may blunt their numbers just a little . I know incumbency is a much larger advantage in the US scene but talking a hundred means a pickup of 63 seats.

It can happen I guess since this surge is unprecedented but I don't think there has been a defining thing causing voters to abandon the Liberals and Bloc so its tough to imagine their votes completely collapsing. You are getting down to die-hard life-long type people.

I don't know Quebec-- could they take 20 there? 30 ? Its just I look at Alberta (64.62% Conservative vote in 2008) and Saskatchewan (53.7%) and have a tough time seeing major inroads there-- I wonder how strong this wave actually is .

I will be very interested to see