Canada: Mainstreet Gives Tories A Mixed Bag

On A Quebec Poll And Election Timing

Has there ever been a poll with as much mixed news for a political party as the data released Thursday night by Mainstreet Research? From their most recent Quebec poll, they also asked a Federal vote intention question - which, given it is a substantially bigger sample than a normal Quebec subsample, is hugely valuable - and the results for the Conservatives were legitimately good! They were up to 22%, a 6% rise since 2019. The problem is, that poll replicated at an election would almost assuredly give Justin Trudeau a majority government.

The problem for the Tories is that the Liberals won Quebec by under 2% in 2019 over the Bloc, and all that the nascent Tory revival (which, uh, take with some caution - the Conservatives tend to underperform their mid-cycle polling in Quebec) is doing is stretching that lead out to 9%, which would put wide swathes of Bloc territory into play, from the south shore to the Gaspé. It would not deliver the 13 seats that Justin Trudeau needs for majority government on its own, and you would run the risk of Tories running down Liberal incumbents in the pair of vulnerable Quebec City seats - including cabinet minister Duclos. But, Trudeau would walk out of Quebec with some net gains, easily, and that makes the electoral math a lot easier.

The path to a Trudeau majority without Quebec gains is fairly hard - there's something like 20 seats that they could win without huge, radical changes to the map. A bunch in BC, a couple of urban seats in Alberta, a pair in Manitoba, and then a handful in Ontario, on the outskirts of the GTA. Throw in the chance at West Nova and maybe another New Brunswick seat flipping, and the seats are there - but it's a tough road, and a very narrow band the Liberals are working with. That also assumes they don't lose any seats, and while their list of plausible losses isn't long, losing a seat in Windsor to the NDP, or losing Toronto Centre to Green leader Annamie Paul, or losing any of the core downtown Toronto NDP targets - makes that tight path even harder.

Hop around the current LeanTossup projection, and you'll see that almost nothing is changing hands. The Liberals are currently projected for four gains in BC, two in Alberta, one in Manitoba, a gain in Nunavut, and a loss in Windsor to the NDP. The NDP are also projected to gain a seat off the Tories in Saskatchewan, and that appears to be all the changing seats currently projected. Polarization, and polls that don't look dissimilar from 2019, mean that as of now, almost nothing is happening. The Liberals would be confident of being returned to office if an election was tomorrow, but they'd probably not get a majority based on the polling averages and the excellent LeanTossup forecasts.

If you're the Conservatives, you need time - time you don't have, probably - to try and get out of this hole. They're probably fucked anyways, if I'm being honest, so I don't really care in some sense, but this Mainstreet poll is in some ways their worst nightmare. They need time, and the prospect of a declining Bloc might make Trudeau go for an election which the current polling average says is ill advised. The current limbo - Trudeau popular enough that the opposition don't want an election, but not popular enough that he's confident in calling an election - is perfect for the Tories, and despite the fact that they'd love 22% in Quebec, anything that makes the electoral map fill with projected Liberal gains is bad news.

I've said this whole time the logical time for an election is once MPs first elected in 2015 get their pension rights in October this year. A November general election is still the most likely outcome, in my view, but polls like this make the chances the Liberals go early go way up. And so, after a poll that looked almost too good to be true for the Tories, it turns out it was.