Canada Catchup: Hilarious Panic

Are The Conservatives Making A Run At Government? (Spoiler: No)

The last time there was a Canadian election, two years ago, I was deeply invested in every poll, every update, every piece of data I could get my hands on. I had to be, given where I was and what that meant for me, and I remember one very specific EKOS poll from that summer, before the writ but in the period where I was strongly paying attention. Frank Graves had shown a Liberal lead in Ontario of I want to say 11% the Friday before, and then he showed a Conservative lead the next week, and everyone collectively lost their fucking minds. The fun part of that was I wrote a column whose basic thrust was “it’s probably wrong,” and it was. That column was an informal launching pad for me, and I remember it well, just over two years later.

The thing about that poll is I don’t remember the poll because the poll matters, I remember it because I remember the panic. I remember the freakout, the concern, the anxiety amongst my (let’s be very honest here) predominantly liberal and Liberal audience. People saw the risk of a Conservative government and had a fucking conniption. And we’re starting to see it again, with Graves once again creating a panic based on a poll with the Tories ahead in Ontario and people starting to believe the Liberals have fucked up so badly since calling the election that they might lose it. The problem is, it isn’t true.

The panic about the Liberals losing starts with the idea that they were in line for some big majority, and they never were. If you take EKOS at their word, the Tories have a serious and credible chance of forming the next government in Canada, but what about the rest of the polls? Abacus didn't really show anything too bad for the government, but they showed the government doing worse than they had in the best - but still, if that poll was strictly true, gaining seats off the Conservatives. What's happened is the Liberals had a big lead that a lot of people didn't really trust, the lead shrunk, and now people are surprised by this fact. I don't get why, but that's all that's happened.

In 2017, I bet Jordan Spieth to be the First Round Leader at the Open Championship that year, and he was. He came tied with 2 others, which meant that I didn't get paid the full profits of a winning bet, had he been the solo leader. Was I disappointed? Sure, of course I was. Was I also happy as hell that I won 9x my money? Obviously, because even though I had dreams of cashing the full ticket, I still won money, and that’s what matters at the end of the day. Here’s the fundamental truth – the Liberals are in fine shape to win the next election, and in a precarious spot vis-à-vis winning a majority, but that was always the case. Right now, LeanTossup has the Liberals and NDP combining for 200 seats, Fournier’s got them on 193. Those two parties last time won 181 seats, and the Liberals were never at any risk of losing control of the Parliament. They obviously won’t be happy about a 2019-redux result, but if your question is can the Conservatives win, little suggests they can right now.

Ah, but EKOS, I can already hear people saying, as if I’m supposed to rearrange my priors for a pollster whose data is jumpy, and whose final 2019 poll – as opposed to their projection in seats – was thoroughly mediocre. Remember when their final poll had a 10% lead for the Liberals in Quebec over the Bloc? Yeah, that would be not what happened, not at all what happened. None of this is to say he couldn’t be right, but he’s currently an outlier. The Liberals have had a bad week – between the evacuation efforts in Kabul and the lack of a good answer on why this election is happening, Trudeau has been off message more than he would want to be. That said, the campaign hasn’t started in earnest yet, and Canadians will not decide the next government on whether Trudeau has botched this week or not.

At the end of the day, if the Conservatives are going to win government, they’re going to need a serious and credible improvement in their chances in the socially liberal band of seats west of Toronto, and they’re not going to win anything in Brampton, and they might get lucky to win one Mississauga. You think this is some weird Liberal delusion? No, it’s the fact there isn’t a seat within a 20% margin in Brampton, and there’s one within 17% in Mississauga. They’re not winning Milton back, they’re not winning Burlington, probably not either of the Oakvilles, so they’re stuck, because without that, they’re running out of places to go win seats. Quebec? Probably not, but sure, you can maybe get a couple of coin flips to go your way. Nothing’s available in the Prairies or Alberta, and even as the Liberal polling declines in BC, the Tories are still a lot there since 2019, which will put a lot of their seats in Greater Vancouver in play. The path for the Conservatives doesn’t really exist, and it hasn’t since Andrew Scheer lost them the 2019 campaign.

I wrote in my election preview that the election was going to end in a Liberal government, and that the only question was majority or minority. After 10 days, I stand by it. There’s a lot of interesting stuff happening in this campaign, namely an NDP surge I’ll be writing about soon, but let’s not use that as an excuse to claim the Tories could win this. They still can’t, and pretending that this election is close because of a rogue poll is either mendacity of the highest order or analysis so incompetent as to be disqualifying. The Liberals will govern out of this election, nobody has any idea if it will be in majority or minority, and nothing, fundamentally, has changed since the election was called.