If today’s Ipsos was strictly, perfectly accurate, the Liberals would project for 199 seats and the Conservatives would not only lose seats compared to the current average but would lose 5 seats compared to Erin O’Toole’s performance. It’s worth reiterating that that would actually be a 12 seat drop, because the combination of more seats in Alberta and some (entirely fair and non-partisan) boundary changes have led to a state where Erin O’Toole would have won 126 seats on the new lines. The Conservatives would win 114 seats.
And Darrell Bricker claims this has turned back into a race.
Do you think we’re fucking idiots?
Bricker is a hack of epic proportions, someone who clearly has Conservative tendencies and has written one of the worst books in modern Canadian politics. He is a man who had a Grand Unified Theory that has been completely invalidated, and is now trying to gaslight people into believing something that simply isn’t true.
If Bricker’s own poll was strictly literal this would be the second worst result for the unified right since 1968 (adjusting for the Parliament’s size). It would be a Liberal-Conservative seat gap equal to 2015, though in a slightly larger Parliament. I don’t say any of this as a belief it will happen - I have said before I don’t really think the Liberal majority will be this big, and I am still waiting for meaningful movement back! - but those are the facts.
And here’s another one - if y'all don’t get better at identifying who and what are good faith actors and who are shitstirrers, I’m going to have a mental breakdown.
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The thesis of The Big Shift, written in the aftermath of the 2011 election and the Conservative majority, was that in the way the Liberals were the Natural Governing Party of the 20th Century, the Conservatives were poised to be that in the future. “We believe that fortune favours the Harper government in the next election,” Bricker and coauthor John Ibbitson wrote, but it gets worse. I’m just going to quote this in full, because it’s so fucking funny.
“But we don't believe this is about the next election. We believe it is about the next decade, the next generation, and beyond. We believe that the Conservative Party will be to the twenty-first century what the Liberal party was to the twentieth: the perpetually dominant party, the Natural Governing Party.”
Their logic was two fold - the rising political influence (and population) of Alberta would deliver extra seats to the Conservatives, and that the Conservative wins in the 905 would hold because fear of the NDP would keep voters in the Conservative column. Hilariously, they predicted the state of the Ontario PCs well, but they entirely dismissed the (at time of publication highly likely to be) Trudeau-led Liberals. They said there might as well be a merger of the left, because the Liberals were so dead they might as well just merge.
Since Darrell Bricker wrote the book, the Conservatives have won 0 seats in Brampton in the 3 elections since, for a cumulative score of 0/15. They’re 0/18 in Mississauga, but actually 0/19 since there was a byelection in Lakeshore. They’re 0/9 on Burlington and Oakville, and only managed 1 win in Milton in 3 tries, including losing the literal fucking Deputy Leader in 2019. For those counting, that’s 1/46. Oh, and the CPC project to lose all 6 Bramptons, all 6 Mississaugas, and all 5 Haltons if his poll is accurate.
Expand your definition of the GTA and it doesn’t get any better. The CPC haven’t won a single seat in Etobicoke and Scarborough since he published this book. They’ve done eminently mediocre since 2013 in the northern Toronto suburbs like Markham and Vaughan and Richmond Hill and the like, they’ve never won back Ajax, Pickering, or the two Niagaras they don’t hold, and have even struggled to win back Whitby. Their main Ontario gains from 2015 have been Peterborough, Kenora, and Bay Of Quinte, as well as closing gaps in white working class seats like Windsor and London.
The white working class point here matters, because the reason Bricker and Ibbitson thought the Liberals were fucked was the abandonment of the Liberals by ethnic minority communities. The funny thing is they might end up being right in the longer term, if the Liberals’ looseness on crime and drug policy continues, but they completely got it wrong that those voters had become dyed in the wool Conservatives. They’ve been remarkably Liberal ever since.
The death of the Liberal Party stuff was also absurdist nonsense - blithely assuming that the Liberals and NDP would ever merge was Conservative arrogance that betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of who both these parties are. Failing to pass the basic intelligence test of that should have been disqualifying, but for some reason - our willingness to indulge the idea that the last thing we’ve seen will continue indefinitely - it was taken seriously. Now, I’ve absolutely fallen victim to that, but I didn’t write a book proclaiming to know the next decade of Canadian politics.
The state of the race right now remains the same as it’s been for weeks - the Liberals would need everything to go against them to lose the majority, and we’re not seeing any real or substantive movement. We have 12 national pollsters, and what’s happening is bouncing around. We focus on the ones that narrow and then ignore it when they expand again. Remember when every Conservative wanted to fuck Nanos? Now that the lead’s the other way Mainstreet’s the hot girl at the club. If they float back to a meaningful Liberal lead, I’m sure it’ll be someone else.
What's left in this campaign are three main events - tonight’s Poilievre and Carney appearances on Tout Le Monde En Parle and the two debates this week. The Conservatives need to run the table in these events before I’ll get scared. Every week of this campaign has seen the fundamentals stable and the amount of time to flip the race fall. If Carney does fine tonight, with all of the lowered expectations of how bad his French is, that’s another moment survived.
People have been predicting Carney’s imminent demise for weeks and it’s not fucking happening. David Coletto wrote a piece that said it was mostly pro-Carney sentiment, not anti-Poilievre sentiment, driving the polls. If that’s true, then the Conservatives need an attack on Carney that will land. Nothing is.
The vibes are getting carried away by stretch targets (Carleton! Jivani! 6 seats in Alberta! Atlantic sweep!) and ignoring the enduring strength the Liberals have in the traditional swing marginals in the 416, west GTA, and the SW, plus Quebec is delivering 5-15 gains and the NDP’s collapse giving us many votes and seats in BC. The projection hasn’t fallen below 180 this entire campaign. It’s up 13 seats in 3 weeks.
Darrell Bricker’s a hack, there is no race, and the fact that we let anybody so willing to just say whatever and who has written such a nonsensical, idiotic, and plainly disastrously wrong book still opine as an expert is fucking malpractice.
Can always count on an Evan Scrimshaw column to keep me grounded. Good point about a few major events left for the CPC to turn it around. Poilievre would need to reinvent himself as a gentleman statesman & make Canadians forget every vitriolic thing he’s ever said. Looking forward to his retirement. Go Fanjoy
Let’s not forget how women feel about Poilievre-his support for women’s issues is abysmal.