#ScrimshawSix, Ontario: Kanata And Scarborough Edition
Byelections!
The Department For Finding Vaguely Coherent Ways To Come Up With Motifs is off right now sweating out a Women’s World Cup bet (update: fuck off, couldn’t have gotten me a second goal, England?), so let’s just break out the good ol’ Scrimshaw Six for six thoughts about Ontario politics after the release of Abacus’ Ontario poll and the byelections in Scarborough and Kanata.
Scarborough’s Not A Shock …
I guess I was out of the loop on the expectations game in Scarborough, because when I saw all these Queen’s Park reporters saying that the expectation was a Tory victory in Guildwood, can’t say I understood why that was. Mitzie Hunter clearly had some personal vote, sure, but the Liberals won it by a lot in 2022, unlike in 2018 when it was genuinely a three way race.
The Liberal vote wasn’t actually that strong – a sizeable bit of it fell away to the NDP, but fortunately, Ford’s PCs didn’t make any ground up, and the Liberals held on. The fact that so many are spinning the result as good for the Liberals is mostly a function of the OLP playing good expectations politics, clearly – losing the seat would have been a disaster. Thank God they didn’t.
(Also vindicated last night – Mainstreet Research, funnily enough. The narrative that some have come with after the Toronto Mayoral Byelection is that Mainstreet got lucky – they were too high on Ana Bailao the whole time, and so instead of jumping from 2nd to a closer 2nd, she really rose 20% on the back of John Tory’s endorsement. Given the weak power of Tory’s endorsement in Guildwood, can we maybe just accept that Mainstreet was probably right about Bailao the whole time?)
But Kanata Sure As Hell Was
I get that Karen McCrimmon is a good candidate. I get that she’s a former MP and all that, and that it’s a left trending suburban seat, and that the Kanata bit of Kanata Carleton probably had more relative turnout than the Carleton bit and so its left trending suburban-y DNA was even more on display, I get all of it. This is still a shock result.
Both Mainstreet and Abacus have shown Ontario as a fairly status quo place right now, with limited slippage in Ford’s numbers and certainly no consolidation of the opposition. Nothing about that suggests that Kanata – won by 19% just under 14 months ago – should be competitive. Has Ford fucked over Ottawa? Yeah, sure – but not any more than the baseline of 2022! It’s not like waittimes at the Queensway Carleton were good in 2021 or the first half of 2022 and are now terrible, they’ve been shit for 3 years now.
Local factors clearly helped, and if not for Karen running, the Liberals are likely third here, not first. But this isn’t just about a former MP running – this is a wider problem for the Ford government.
The NDP Had A Great Night, Kind Of
The NDP got fucked by First Past The Post, but a double digit increase in their vote in Scarborough and a 5.5% increase in their vote in Kanata is meaningful advancement from a party that’s been oft-criticized by me and others as stagnating. There’s no ribbons for losing closely in our voting system, but this is some evidence that Marit Stiles has some cutthrough with the Ontario electorate.
That said, it wasn’t unambiguous good news, since the best thing that can happen to the ONDP is the death of the Liberals, and, well …
The OLP Still Has Some Fight Left In It
Let’s use this opportunity to have some honest talk about the state of this OLP leadership race: Every New Democrat wants Bonnie Crombie to win it and they’re scared shitless of Nate. Every single one, for a single reason – she will gift the NDP the left lane all to themselves and essentially guarantee them 30-ish seats. Whatever you think of Crombie’s suburban appeal, she will essentially cede the city of Toronto to the NDP and the OLP-NDP battleground will stay Orange. Elect Nate leader? The NDP’s fucked.
It's a weird spot for the NDP to be in, where they’re essentially just hoping the Liberals choose the path of self-imposed obsolescence, and that might still come. But a night where the narrative coming out of it is Liberals Are Back and the NDP aren’t even in the frame cannot be that good of a night for them, regardless of the swings.
So, Uh, Polls And Votes Still Wonky?
I have exactly no idea what to do at this point. I’ve made the federal byelections versus polls point too many times now, and now we have a set of byelections that points to the Ontario NDP flirting with, if not outright breaking, 30%, while they’re polling no different than 2022.
Man, what I’d give for a coherent data set these days.
Clearly The Liberals Don’t Need To Become Conservatives To Beat Them
Karen McCrimmon is a Trudeau Liberal through and through – a class of 2015 MP with the voting record to prove it. She is the first Liberal MPP in Kanata ever. If your pitch to get the Liberals back to winning ways, to winning seats that won the Federal Liberals majority government in 2015 is we have to become a lot more right wing, Thursday night completely destroyed the basic proposition. Sign up to fight back against a more polite conservatism, because the Liberals can win without compromising their basic liberalism. And a properly liberal and Liberal government is what we need, not just another coat of paint on the HMCS Smaller Government.
Interesting analysis but for living in Ottawa it isn’t surprising that conservatives have lost their seat. They have been ignoring and fucking over Ottawa since they have been elected. The only reason why that Furlleton was re-elected is that she was sitting in cabinet.
For what it is worth, I noticed a big difference in the social media game for Kanata-Carleton race. I am not quite in this riding, but I did get the various Liberal tweet or Facebook post. Nothing, nada, zip from the Conservatives or the NDP. Had it not been for the Liberal social media posts I had not known that there was a by election next door.