Election 2011 - The Aftermath for the Leaders

[The Bread Guy]

Bet the party poobahs end up changing the rules to let him run in the leadership convention also, if he does well as Interm leader.

I'd bet a loonie in that direction, too.

 

[ModlrMike]

Bet the party poobahs end up changing the rules to let him run in the leadership convention also, if he does well as Interm leader.

I'll take that bet too. The Torries should encourage this outcome at every opportunity. It will just about extinguish the Liberal party forever.

 

[The Bread Guy]

A bit more second-guessing from the Globe & Mail on MacKay's position:

The anticipated slash and burn of the public service by the newly-minted Conservative majority government could be starting at the Department of National Defence. Reports Thursday morning say 2,100 jobs will be cut over the next three years.

This as Defence Minister Peter MacKay attempts to defend what many see as his diminished role. In the cabinet swearing-in last week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed Julian Fantino, the former top cop in Ontario, as Mr. MacKay’s Associate Minister in charge of procurement, which comes with a huge budget that is between 14 and 16 per cent of the department’s $22-billion total.

And then Wednesday, the Prime Minister named up-and-coming rookie MP Chris Alexander, the former Canadian Ambassador to Afghanistan, as parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Defence.

This one-two combo of Mr. Fantino and Mr. Alexander will give Mr. MacKay fierce competition. While some pundits believe this could be a problem for Mr. MacKay –much of his power seems to be in Mr. Fantino’s hands now – others say the Defence Minister will be fine as he is held in high regard by the Tory caucus ....

 

[Good2Golf]

A bit more second-guessing from the Globe & Mail on MacKay's position:

Or it could be a succession plan, leaving MacKay clear for Deputy PM at some point...he is loyal and what I'd call a "plank holder" in the Caucus.

Regards
G2G

 

[Fishbone Jones]

Utter tripe from the Mop & Pail.

A reduction in 2,100 jobs, over three years, could almost be done simply by attrition.

 

[GAP]

Especially with Fantino (former Bureaucrat) and Alexander (although, I would have thought he was headed to Foreign Affairs) being brought up to speed...

I can see the Associate being solely in charge of Purchasing.....it must take a real load off the Minister, just not sure of the reporting chain.....

 

[Scott]

Well the MSM's first kick at trying to create contrversy didn't work - so try to do it again. Same old BS. recceguy nailed it.

 

[The Bread Guy]

Especially with Fantino (former Bureaucrat) and Alexander (although, I would have thought he was headed to Foreign Affairs) being brought up to speed...

I would have suspected Alexander would be tagged as PS for Foreign Affairs instead of the incumbent, who had this to say about Afghanistan in 2009:

This is not a war. We are providing a secure environment in a country in which there was a complete loss of security. Let us get it very clear so the NDP can understand what a secure environment is and what a war is. A war is between two nations; a war is between two parties. There are not two parties there. This is a different kind of war. We are facing a terrorist organization that does not respect any rules of engagement.

Well the MSM's first kick at trying to create contrversy didn't work - so try to do it again. Same old BS. recceguy nailed it.

Yup.

 

[dapaterson]

Especially with Fantino (former Bureaucrat) and Alexander (although, I would have thought he was headed to Foreign Affairs) being brought up to speed...

I can see the Associate being solely in charge of Purchasing.....it must take a real load off the Minister, just not sure of the reporting chain.....

MND still has to sign off requirements.  The Associate is also a sitting member of Treasury Board, though, which gives a voice in the room for the department besides the bureaucracy.

Procurement involves many players outside DND, so some skill in working the room is needed - you have to work with PWGSC & Industry Canada at the very least.

 

[dapaterson]

I would have suspected Alexander would be tagged as PS for Foreign Affairs instead of the incumbent, who had this to say about Afghanistan in 2009

If you want well-rounded ministers you get them some breadth of exposure and experience; it's also handy to give a former member of the bureaucracy some breathing room before sticking them back as minister for the department.

 

[The Bread Guy]

If you want well-rounded ministers you get them some breadth of exposure and experience[/b][/color]; it's also handy to give a former member of the bureaucracy some breathing room before sticking them back as minister for the department.

Seen - makes sense, then, to offer some Defence experience to someone who's been close to the AFG file.

 

[a_majoor]

Conrad Black on why the LPC will not be coming back:

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/05/07/conrad-black-the-full-measure-of-harper’s-triumph/

Conrad Black: The full measure of Harper’s triumph

Conrad Black  May 7, 2011 – 8:10 AM ET | Last Updated: May 6, 2011 1:20 PM ET

‘If he just serves out the term he has won, he will have been longer in office than all his predecessors except King, Macdonald, Trudeau and Laurier’

The two most evident consequences of last Monday’s federal election are the giant step toward a two-party system and the entry of Stephen Harper into the ranks of the important federal leaders of Canadian history.

Despite all the conventional wisdom in the media that he was not popular and could not get to the majority threshold, Mr. Harper’s party not only benefited from the fragmentation of the opposition; his Conservatives gained 632,000 votes from the previous election (admittedly just a third of the gain of the NDP), while the Liberals lost 850,000, the Bloc lost 490,000, and the Greens, although they elected their leader, lost 360,000, all in an electorate 886,000 larger than in 2008.

It is easy to forget, and most people who comment on these matters do, that just eight years ago, Stephen Harper was sitting somewhat forlornly as the head of what called itself the Canadian Alliance, ineffectually crooning “Wherefore art thou, Joe Clark?” to the immoveable recycled leader of the diminutive rump of the Progressive Conservatives. That party, a never-easy amalgam of its constituent names, had only governed for 15 years of its 60-year life to that time. The logic of a reunited centre-right opposition prevailed, and Stephen Harper managed to maintain party discipline on the old Reformers, push the Liberals into a minority, and then, exploiting the Adscam controversy, and the Chrétien-Martin division in the Liberals generally, won a minority mandate. He returned to the people before the economic strain of the 2008-2009 recession was far-advanced and gained an enhanced minority.

This year, he endured a contempt-of-Parliament vote against one of his ministers for disingenuous answers she gave to a Parliamentary committee on an issue that, to the extent anyone cared about it at all, redounded to the benefit of the government (stopping aid to KAIROS, an overseas development organization that had been outspokenly anti-Israeli). The Liberals and Bloc eagerly voted with the NDP to humble the government, carried the can for an election nobody except Harper really wanted, opened the trap-doors beneath them, oblivious to the nooses around their necks, and were hanged by their necks until they were politically dead.

Let no one doubt that the federal Liberal Party as we have known it, is dead. (The Bloc has already been cremated.) The Liberals had long since ceased to have any raison d’être except the detritus of the assumption that it was the natural party of government, as it had been from 1896 to 1984 (the rise of Laurier to the retirement of Trudeau). Under King and St. Laurent and even Pearson, it had been a creative party in policy terms, as well as the party that could make federalism work for Quebec and convince Ontario that it could keep Quebec in Canada. This vocation reached its apogee with Trudeau, the first independence referendum, and constitutional patriation. Mulroney shattered the Liberals in Quebec and Chrétien mishandled and almost lost the second independence referendum, (though his Clarity Act was a useful, if belated, initiative to frustrate the separatists’ penchant for trick referendum questions).

Without the tribal vote from Quebec, and the mystique of indispensability, and with no interesting policy ideas, it was a movement waiting to die, as redundant as the separatist Bloc in a federal Parliament. It is inconceivable that Harper did not detect at least some of this opportunity. The Liberals now have no purpose at all, and unless the NDP goes off the charts to the left, Harper will be too agile to leave them any policy or ideological space to make a comeback up the centre of Canadian politics that they long occupied.

Stephen Harper now faces an opposition almost as splintered as that which enabled Chrétien to remain 10 years in office, set unchallengeably at the head of his party (unlike Chrétien, who had the distinction of being the only elected prime minister in Canadian history to be flung out of that office by his own party), a party Harper constructed himself (another accomplishment unprecedented in the country’s history). He has steered his party to an improved showing in four consecutive elections, and has put in doubt the ancient truism since the Pearson years, that Canada is a left-of-centre country. He has made comparative fiscal responsibility and staged tax reductions good politics, and has reaped the reward for rapid economic growth. As I suggested in the early days of this column, Harper is as cunning a tactician as the ineffable Mackenzie King, and a much bolder (and more telegenic) leader.

If he just serves out the term he has won, he will have been longer in office than all his predecessors except King, Macdonald, Trudeau and Laurier. Those who now see the NDP as the wave of the future, inevitably seizing the commanding heights of the nation’s polity, should look again. Jack Layton deserves huge credit for increasing his party’s vote by 1.9-million, but there is no evidence of a real groundswell in English-speaking Canada, nor of his new avalanche of Quebec support being more than reaction to the tedium of the Bloc and the old parties and appreciation of le bon Jack.

This convivial man is now head of a majority French Quebec caucus, having pledged to reopen the Constitution and apply Quebec’s oppressive language laws in federal government workplaces in Quebec. Again, Stephen Harper, who successfully tore down the reasonably estimable Michael Ignatieff (whose unfortunate exhortation, “Rise up, Canada!” made it sound as if he were Lenin in 1917) with imputations of elitism, snobbery, and opportunism, will not give the unfeasible NDP a free ride on its appeasement of Quebec nationalists, nor on such vintage pearls as the formal pledge of “the extension of the principle of social ownership,” especially in pursuit of “social justice” and a healthier environment. If those and similar time-bombs are not defused, they will blow the official opposition to shards.

It is not going to be like falling off a log for Jack Layton to protect the NDP base, reach out to the Liberals, and keep the ex-Blocistes happy, without being successfully portrayed by Stephen Harper, Canada’s greatest political hard-baller since Maurice Duplessis, as a schizophrenic charlatan. He will have to muzzle an unruly caucus (his deputy leader, the relatively experienced Thomas Mulcair, celebrated the election gains with vapid pontifications about Osama bin Laden).

The Liberals and New Democrats will have to merge eventually. Until they do, Harper is safer than Chrétien was in the days of four sizeable opposition parties. And when they do, Stephen Harper will certainly have enticements for many of the disconsolate Liberals, especially the backbone of that party that is only really interested in being in office, where Stephen Harper seems to have installed himself,  sine die. On his record, the country is in for an extended period of what the British call “the snap of firm government.”

***

Note: Thanks to reader Mark Goetz, who pointed out to me that most of Brian Mulroney’s Quebec caucus did not defect to the Bloc Québécois, as I appeared to suggest last week, but were replaced in the 1992 election by Bloc candidates.

National Post

 

[a_majoor]

Interesting idea. The only thing the author overlooks is the possibility that the NDP may release a "constitution" for public consumption and have a different one for internal use. This sort of thinking just leads to recursive loops:

http://inspiringyoutothink.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-to-defeat-ndp-demand-their.html

How To Defeat The NDP: Demand Their Constitution Be Made Public

How is a 'political opinion' established, then passed into law?
Is it based on 'what is right' and 'what is wrong'?
Is it based on 'popular majority, regardless of right and wrong'?
Is it based on a Deity saying something, and the people follow the code of the higher being(s)?

When the left strongly advocates for something, what presupposes their position? I.E, what under girds and makes it true, just or right?  The Conservative Constitution is public.

Is it, "this is what is right?"  If so, according to what or who?  Their opinion? Their hearts? The consensus of Canadian values?"

Perhaps we should discuss opinions on what is popular and not what is right or wrong.  If this sounds silly, then where is the NDP Constitution?

I find it striking that something by Mr. Layton can be said with such passion and conviction, but so little supporting core principles where others can learn just how his views are upheld.  I know his voter base are not anti-intellectuals and would appreciate seeing the constitution so they can base an argument on something besides raw hysteria, emotion or 'surface logic'.  Let's get the constitutions public.
I trust there is no hidden agenda, nor anything that will scare off millions of voters, uh...right?

The 'logic' the NDP are presenting to Canadians is "you can strongly and passionately advocate your views (at the Federal level) without defending/showing a core set of guiding principles".  From this, it follows, you don't need 'core principles' to have Mr. Layton's passion to argue positions (by default of him not apologizing for negligently not showing them).  If Mr. Layton does not need so show core principles, then it's not about 'what is right', rather its about what is popular.  Therefore, he cannot argue for his positions, or against others positions on axiomatic moral grounds (because they are not shared to argue from!).

When Mr. Layton attacks other party values, he is 'throwing stones at a glass house' until he presents his party Constitution.

My opinion on this matter is open and not firm.

(A note to people considering commenting: thank you for all the comments, even the ones that disagree with me.  This blog is not 'inspire you to agree', but inspire you to think.  So, if I make a point, try to find the problem with the logic and argue against it directly.  Not liking something and making a wild jump to an incredible conclusion based on nothing I said is permissible, but not advisable.  I would love for awesome debate, but please continue to develop and make it relevant to the flaws/problems with my said 'logic'.  I do not claim to be correct on all matters as I am open and willing to learn.  Thank you)

 

[a_majoor]

More on the NDP. Like all parties there are various groups or wings, but I wonder how well Jack Layton will be able to reconcile the various competing factions, particularly radical socialists and the Quebec wing of the party?

http://pragmatictory.blogspot.com/2011/06/ndp-socialist-caucus.html

The NDP "Socialist Caucus"

Now that the NDP have suddenly become the official opposition in Canadian Parliament, their party's self described "Socialist Caucus" is making demands. There aren't any surprises on the wish list, which includes shutting down the oil sands, nationalizing our banks, boycotting "Israeli apartheid", etc. These policies and positions have appeared in past and current NDP doctrine, the question is will the party turn right or left as it springs into the "mainstream"? How much is there left to win on the left? Clearly the only place to make significant electoral gains is to shift party policy towards the center, but somehow I doubt that Jack is going to do that. You don't become more mainstream by becoming more radical. We have seen in the past that Jack's idea of compromise is getting everything he wants.

What will happen next is the NDP convention when the left wing of the NDP will try and pass resolutions on these policy matters. Layton and the party leadership do have mechanisms to kill or at least mute these resolutions. We'll see what happens.

The bold line is probably referring to the opaque internal structure of the NDP. The mechanisms won't be on display for everyone (even party members) to see.

 

[a_majoor]

The Liberal Party president explains its core political philosophy. It seems the Liberals have not recognized either the contradiction inherent in the way this is formulated, nor the fact that Canadians have largely rejected this idea (over 70% of Canadians voted against the Liberals, after all  ):

http://www.barrelstrength.com/2011/06/14/the-liberals-are-still-looking-for-leviathan/

The Liberals are still looking for Leviathan
June 14, 2011 5:49 pm Dalwhinnie Canadian Politics, Political Correctness
The following is evidence that the Liberal party has learned nothing from its defeat, and may be incapable of learning from its defeat.

Alfred Apps is the President of Canada’s federal Liberal Party. Today in the National Post he wrote the following:

The Liberal Party of Canada’s core assumptions in politics are about power. We believe that the inexorable progress of mankind, the constant expansion of freedom, demands the ever more democratic disbursal of power. That the primary ongoing role of the state should be to transfer power from the powerful to the less powerful. And because we believe in the primacy of the individual, we think of that power being placed in the hands of individuals to the maximum extent possible.

After expressing the Liberal mission as the need to bring power to the marginalized, Apps continued:

As constitutionalists, our Liberal conception of political power is tightly linked to our concept of sovereignty — the authority to exercise power. And we know that the whole course of Western political development has been about the evolution of sovereignty or, more precisely, the devolution of sovereignty from the powerful to the powerless.

….In order to more properly empower Canadians, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms should be amended to include more positive rights for economic, cultural and social freedom.

Apps proclaims an appealing doctrine as long as you do not think too deeply about the means to achieve it. First, a “positive right” sounds great until you realize it is someone’s claim upon the state treasury, and therefore you, to money, respect, entitlement, or deference. Yet the error lies not just with the false doctrine of positive rights, but with the conception of the state that is needed to achieve them. For the state to devolve all this power onto the marginalized, it must first proclaim them as deserving, and must have large powers of equalization of outcomes to achieve its results.

The contradiction at the core of Liberal thought is that power cannot be placed in the hands of the individual – by the state of course – without cost. I am not talking about high taxes, though high taxes are essential to this social project.  The cost of having a social and political agency large enough, wise enough, and competent enough to spot the inequalities, to rule that some are more deserving of redress than others, and to uplift some at the expense of the generality of men, is Leviathan. That was Hobbes’ term for the state writ large. Statism is at the core of the Liberal project. The existence of a power so large and all-embracing would utterly negate the freedom that the Liberals claim they seek to devolve to the individual.



“The constant expansion of freedom” of which Apps talks cannot be achieved by the State he requires to disburse positive rights.  Either he understands this, which is likely, or he does not. If Apps understands that the constant expansion of human freedom cannot be bought through the omni-competent busybody state required by his doctrines, he is being cynical enough to be a Liberal. If he does not understand that his goal is incompatible with his objective – and this may well be the hidden fault of the Liberal mind - it remains for those skeptical of political power to point this out.

A positive right is a claim by someone upon the generality of citizens, enforced through the state. Your right to demand money from the state, or any other mark of deference, is ultimately your right to demand it of me, backed up by the compulsion of the state: police, human rights tribunals, welfare agencies. You cannot expand one person’s freedom (to make a claim) without diminishing the freedom of everyone else. So in the end the role of the state in Apps view is merely to pick the winners in the game of who gets to parasitize whom. Which looks like Liberalism as we came to know and hate it.

Interestingly, Libertarians also are all for individuals exercising sovereign power, but do not feel the need for the State to arbitrarily bestow "positive freedoms" in order for this to happen; rather the State exists to enforce "negative freedoms", protect the territory from internal and external enemies police and military forces) and provide impartial arbitration to disputes (the Courts of Law).

 

[a_majoor]

And an NDP proposal. The primary aim of this might actually be to prevent the Quebec block of NDP members from splitting and reconstituting some sort of "BQ lite" caucus. I know of no examples of members crossing the floor to the NDP, nor any NDP members crossing to the Liberals or BQ (Imagining a member of the CPC caucus crossing to the NDP or an NDP member crossing to the CPC is an exercse in high fantasy, and would need J.R.R Tolkein himself to write the scenario...)

http://hatrockscave.blogspot.com/2011/06/ndp-mp-wants-to-ban-floor-crossing.html

NDP MP wants to ban floor crossing
I'm now convinced that the NDP have no concept of how our parliamentary democracy actually works in Canada.

They want to abolish the senate.  But they also want proportional representation to reflect the actual percentage of the popular vote to match the number of seats per party in the lower house.  I've already explained their contradiction in this, but essentially, where are the members for these extra seats going to come from, since the public isn't voting for them specifically, so they only represent a party and not a district, and so how are they held accountable?  Their argument is that they want a check against our first-past-the-post system, but an equal and elected senate would actually cover that and balance it out. (I'll save my further arguments against proportional representation in another post.)

And now NDP MP Peter Stoffer wants to abolish floor crossing.  Seriously, what planet is this guy living on?  He wants to prevent an elected representative of the public from switching caucuses in the House of Commons.  During new MP orientation, don't they give them an idea how the Westminster Parliamentary System works?  I guess not.

If the NDP won't accept floorcrossers then they can have their own policy and not accept the member until they run in a by-election or general election.  But it's typical NDP socialist thinking that their will should be the will of everyone, even upon the public.

Why do I say "public"?  I've discussed this before, but in the House of Commons, parties do not actually exist, but caucuses do.  Despite what some think or how people base their vote on, we elect people, not parties.  It's a person's name on the ballot along with their "political affiliation".  Sure the "political affiliation" gives us an idea of their political views and what caucus they're likely to sit with in the Commons, but if we just elected a party, then they should only show the party name on the ballot. But they don't, so really their argument is moot.

Not only that, our parliamentary history books are filled with records showing MPs switching caucuses or forming coalitions.  Coalitions.  Hmmm, you'd think the NDP would support that.  Coalitions are perfectly legal, but if a coalition government formed out of the opposition parties to take over from a minority government without first going to the public, like we recently almost had, then I think those parties should make it known that that is always their intention. We only had ambiguity from the Liberals on that one and I think the voting public deserves to know what the intention is.

Anyway, having MPs switch caucuses is congruent to a typical voter switching who they support at any time.  That dynamic is extremely important to our democracy and its will is organic in real-time.  There are many examples of where the MP simply states that he or she can no longer support the caucus of the party he or she represents due to policy and then he or she will sit as an independent or ask to join another caucus.  But it is their fundamental right to sit and be accepted into any caucus in the Commons.  Preventing that from happening instantaneously completely undermines our representative democracy.

Then at the next election, if the voters don't like it, let the voters decide.  (By the way, I'm also against recalling an MP.)

I just hope that there are less than 13 Conservative MPs who support this crazy idea or none at all.  I'm also shocked that this notion isn't also completely out of order in even making it to the floor.

 

[a_majoor]

And the aftermath of the pollsters. Perhaps the most jarring line in the entire article is highlighted " It raises worrying questions about the nature and future management of Canadian democracy." Who do these people think they are? "Managing" Democracy? Really? The preference of the voters is what pollsters report on to their clients, but Push polling, "oversampling" of districts known to be for or against particular parties and other statistical tricks (and using polling results as a means to drive the narrative) have pretty much changed the nature of polling from statistical reporting to attempting to manipulate voters on behalf of the clients.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/a-pollsters-painful-reckoning-how-could-i-have-screwed-up-so-badly/article2065573/print/

A pollster’s painful reckoning: ‘How could I have screwed up so badly?'
Michael Valpy
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Jun. 17, 2011 3:15PM EDT
Last updated Friday, Jun. 17, 2011 9:54PM EDT

On the night of Monday, May 2, Frank Graves, president of EKOS Research Associates, opened a bottle of Mer Soleil in his Ottawa home and settled in front of the television to watch the federal election results. He felt smug, very smug.

He had every reason to believe that he had surveyed as accurately throughout the 2011 campaign as he had in 2008, when he forecast that election's almost exact outcome.

He had been exceptionally careful with his methodology and analysis. His numbers had been stable for three days. To avoid being caught by last-minute voter shifts, he had surveyed as late as Sunday, later than in any previous campaign.

He pleasurably imagined incoming kudos from his clients. Instead …

The moment he started seeing results from the Atlantic, he knew something had gone wrong and that his projections – another minority Conservative government with a vote tally that turned out to be nearly six percentage points below the party's actual level of support – were way off.

“I thought, ‘Oh my god, this hasn't happened before.' I had this frankly sick feeling … somewhere between having people forget your birthday and being buried alive. How could I have screwed up so badly?”

The answer is that he tripped over Canada's unique demographics: its peculiar mix of politically hot oldsters and tepid, disengaged young. From having been the most accurate in 2008, he had gone to being the farthest off-base in 2011. It was particularly painful for a social researcher accused periodically of anti-Conservative bias, although he was still within margin-of-error range of Canada's half-dozen other major pollsters, who had all low-called the Conservative vote.

Election polling is like the Olympics for people in Mr. Graves's line of work. It's where they publicize their names, bolster their reputations. For the widely respected public-opinion researcher who so often has taken the lead in survey methodology, what happened to him in Election 2011 was akin to the president of one of Canada's Big Five banks discovering he had advised his most valued customers to invest in a Ponzi scheme.

Mr. Graves apologized the next morning on the EKOS website, publicly conceding that he didn't know what had gone wrong. He vowed to ferret out his error.

This week, he produced a 4,000-word analysis with the unexciting title Accurate Polling, Flawed Forecast.

It's a polling wonk's great read.

In addition to explaining how EKOS got its numbers wrong, it shines a light on Canada's political and demographic culture. It raises worrying questions about the nature and future management of Canadian democracy. It illuminates generational differences in telephone use and offers a thoughtful commentary on polling responsibility.

And it points out that the EKOS president had the evidence in front of him all along that his polling forecast was flawed, but he chose not to believe it.

The report is pure Frank Graves, fitting the thinking of a man who is fascinated by the behaviour of his fellow citizens. He founded his now-multimillion-dollar company 30 years ago with $5,000 borrowed from his father when he was still in his 20s and decided to quit doctoral studies in sociology at Carleton University.

Since then, Mr. Graves has made a practice of going beyond other pollsters to tell the country's story, tracking Canadians' values, attitudes, generational conflicts and thoughts on everything from nationalism and the state to the role of emotion in politics, and class and age dispositions toward knowledge and morality.

The danger of polling cellphones

In a nutshell, what went wrong is that Mr. Graves created state-of-the-art methodology to effectively random survey the entire voting-age population. In doing so, he drew in a big segment of potential voters who use cellphones only – 15 per cent of the total, double the percentage in 2008. This segment of the voting-age population has been either excluded or underrepresented in conventional polling methodology. They tend to be younger and to belong to the more than 50 per cent of the electorate under the age of 45 who don't vote.

Thus his nose count was accurate. But his forecast was off, because someone who says he will vote Liberal but doesn't vote can't be assigned the same weight as someone who says she will vote Conservative and does, indeed, vote Conservative.

So by solving one problem, Mr. Graves opened the door on another: the growing gap between the world of the voter and the world of the non-voter, two worlds with boundaries etched increasingly by telephone usage and, most important, age. Election 2011 revealed a voting fault line delineated by a generation gap.

On one side of the gap: Canadians over 45 enthusiastically favouring the Conservatives, with a likelihood of voting starting at about 60 per cent and rising with age to more than 80 per cent.

On the other side: younger Canadians generally disliking the Conservatives, but with a voting likelihood of at most 40 per cent, decreasing to about 30 per cent for the youngest electoral cohort, those under the age of 25.

The proportion of Canadians who vote has always increased with age, but the differential has never been as great as it is now. In addition, the values gulf between young and old probably has never been greater. And the demographic skewing of the population – proportionately so many older people – is almost certainly unprecedented.

When Mr. Graves retraced his steps, he found that if under-45 Canadians had voted in the same proportion as over-45 Canadians, there would have been no Conservative majority but more likely an NDP-led coalition.

He found there was no 11th-hour bolt of NDP-fearing Liberals to the Conservatives (if anything, there was the reverse: Liberals going to the NDP). When he separated the two worlds of voters and non-voters, he found that nearly 60 per cent of voters had their minds made up before the campaign began, and were favouring the Conservatives because they were tired of minority government and wanted stable economic management.

Mr. Graves had actually designed a voter-commitment index to identify non-voting members of the electorate in his surveys, but he had never used it before, was nervous about the results it produced – the correct results, as it turned out – and so decided to discount it.

The differential voter turnout concerns Frank Graves, as it should all Canadians.

The fact that more than half of the under-45 population doesn't vote can be labelled their problem, Mr. Graves says. They can be ignored by political parties and policy-makers and be treated as a nuisance, which will further alienate them and suppress their vote.

But all that, he says, ignores the bigger issues: the fact that Canada has a unique and difficult demographic structure, proportionately the largest baby-boom population in the world next to Australia's, and a federal government more rooted in older Canadians than any previous government in Canada's history.

In 1967, the year of Canada's centennial, the median age was 26. It's now 42. Today's typical voter is in his or her early 60s.

Rather than have the grace and wisdom of age being balanced by the enthusiasm and imagination of youth, Mr. Graves said, Canadians risk having a democracy where younger voters are in the process of disengaging from politics, with the voices of the youngest adults already missing.

Harper is no Obama

There's no one reason why the young are disengaged. Young voters across the border were attracted to Barack Obama's presidential campaign because he talked about the politics of hope and aspiration. But young Canadians find little to interest them in Stephen Harper's agenda of strengthening the military, prisons and border guards, but otherwise trimming government social policy and engagement in the lives of citizens.

Rob Ford swept into the Toronto mayor's office on the strength of older voter support. Ontario Conservative Leader Tim Hudak is probably hoping the same generational fault line will work to his advantage in the October election, Mr. Graves said.

And pollsters today, he said, have the responsibility and the technology to keep young Canadians in the national conversation, to let their voices to be heard on policy issues not co-joined with political issues, to explore using technology that was unimaginable five years ago to establish things like citizens' juries and other forms of interactive panels that may well make greater contributions to democracy than polling.

The president of EKOS has come a distance from the smug night of May 2.

Michael Valpy is a freelance writer based in Toronto

Second interpolation: EKOS did not have the most accurate polling result in 2008 either, Angus Ried has that honour: http://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/poll-results.html

Self promotion works better when you tell the truth.

 

[Bird_Gunner45]

And the aftermath of the pollsters. Perhaps the most jarring line in the entire article is highlighted " It raises worrying questions about the nature and future management of Canadian democracy." Who do these people think they are? "Managing" Democracy? Really? The preference of the voters is what pollsters report on to their clients, but Push polling, "oversampling" of districts known to be for or against particular parties and other statistical tricks (and using polling results as a means to drive the narrative) have pretty much changed the nature of polling from statistical reporting to attempting to manipulate voters on behalf of the clients.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/a-pollsters-painful-reckoning-how-could-i-have-screwed-up-so-badly/article2065573/print/

Second interpolation: EKOS did not have the most accurate polling result in 2008 either, Angus Ried has that honour: http://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/poll-results.html

Self promotion works better when you tell the truth.

The most interesting thing about this article is Mr. Graves' assertion that the statistical errors came from an over-representation of the youth vote and them not voting, as the youth are more likely to vote for the left wing parties.  I remember reading an article in MacLeans that states research that showed that all 3 major parties shared the same percentage of the youth vote (around 26%). 

 

[The Bread Guy]

.... when they need this long to choose a new leader:

Shattered Liberals will wait up to two years to choose a new leader, hoping the delay will give them a fighting chance against rival parties bent on wiping them off Canada's federal political map.

Some 2,000 delegates to a special "virtual convention" voted Saturday to postpone a leadership vote until sometime between March 1 and June 30, 2013.

That's an even greater delay than proposed by party brass, who had wanted 18 to 22 months to rebuild before choosing a permanent replacement for Michael Ignatieff.

Ignatieff resigned after leading the self-styled "natural governing party" to its worst defeat in history in the May 2 election. The Liberals were reduced to a third party rump with only 34 MPs; Ignatieff lost his own seat.

Toronto MP Bob Rae was named interim leader last month and will continue to hold down the fort until a permanent successor is chosen.

In a speech at the start of the teleconference convention, which was streamed live on the Liberal party's website, Rae said both Stephen Harper's Conservatives and Jack Layton's NDP would like to "destroy the Liberal party" for good, leaving a polarized choice between parties of the right and left.

Liberals, he said, have to fight back by rebuilding the party, root and branch, and that will take time. While he did not express a preference for any precise date, Rae urged delegates to defer a leadership vote and give the party time pull itself up off the mat ....

Source:  Canadian Press

Or is it a chance for Rae to build up his position as the boss?

 

[GAP]

Nik on the Numbers

The Conservatives enjoy a comfortable 14 point lead over the New Democrats. At 42% support nationally, this is among the highest levels of support that Nanos has tracked for the Conservatives and could be considered akin to a honeymoon effect. The Conservatives have a comfortable lead west of the Ottawa River.

The NDP still holds a commanding 16 point lead in the province of Quebec where the BQ is at 14% (still much lower than their support during the last federal election).

On the leadership front, Harper is ahead of Jack Layton with the Prime Minister's advantage largely driven by positive competence scores. Bob Rae has been added to the leadership Index and he noticeably trails both Harper and Layton on all the measures currently.

Healthcare and jobs/the economy are statistically tied for the top spot in terms of the national unprompted issue of concern.

The detailed tables and methodology are posted on our website where you can also register to receive automatic polling updates.

  Methodology
Between June 16th and 19th, 2011 Nanos Research conducted a random telephone survey of 1,211 Canadians 18 years of age and older. A random telephone survey of 1,211 Canadians is accurate plus or minus 2.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. For 983 committed voters, it is accurate plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.


  National Ballot Question: For those parties you would consider voting for federally, could you please rank your top two current local preferences? (Committed voters only - First Preference)

The numbers in parentheses denote the change from the last Nanos national omnibus survey completed between May 24th and 29th, 2011. (n=981)

*Undecided represents respondents who are not committed voters (n=1,211).

Canada (n=983 committed voters)
Conservative 41.8% (+2.1)
NDP 28.0% (-1.9)
Liberal 22.3% (+0.8)
Green 3.7% (-1.1)
Bloc Quebecois 3.4 (+0.7)

*Undecided 18.8% (+0.2)

Leadership Index Questions: As you may know, [Rotate] Bob Rae is the interim leader of the federal Liberal Party, Stephen Harper is the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Jack Layton is the leader of the federal NDP and Elizabeth May is the leader of the federal Green Party. Which of the federal leaders would you best describe as: (n=1,211)

The numbers in parentheses denote the change from the last Nanos national omnibus survey completed between May 24th and 29th, 2011. (n=1,205)

Readers should note that Gilles Duceppe has been dropped from the Leadership Index tracking.

Leadership Index Score
Stephen Harper 104.5 (-1.4)
Jack Layton 81.9 (-15.5)
Bob Rae 27.3 (N/A)
Elizabeth May 12.4 (-4.1)

The Most trustworthy Leader (n=1,211)
Stephen Harper 32.3% (-0.4)
Jack Layton 29.4% (-5.8)
Bob Rae 8.4% (N/A)
Elizabeth May 5.6% (-1.3)
None 13.0% (+0.6)
Unsure 11.3% (-1.4)

The Most Competent Leader (n=1,211)
Stephen Harper 38.5% (-1.4)
Jack Layton 24.1% (-5.0)
Bob Rae 10.4% (N/A)
Elizabeth May 2.3% (-1.3)
None 9.9% (-0.3)
Unsure 14.7% (-2.5)

The Leader with the Best Vision for Canada's Future (n=1,211)
Stephen Harper 33.7% (+0.4)
Jack Layton 28.4% (-4.7)
Bob Rae: 8.5% (N/A)
Elizabeth May 4.5% (-1.5)
None 10.3% (-0.3)
Unsure 14.7% (-2.4)

Top Issue Question: What is your most important NATIONAL issue of concern? [Unprompted]

The numbers in parentheses denote the change from the last Nanos national omnibus survey completed between May 24th and 29th, 2011. (n=1,205)

Healthcare 25.7% (-2.3)
Jobs/economy 23.9% (+0.7)
Education 8.9% (+2.3)
The environment 8.6% (+1.4)
High taxes 5.6% (+0.1)
Unsure 5.5% (-4.1)