I disagree with this, Haggis. Splitting the vote is not even possible for this next round of elections. The battleground for the next government is almost all Ontario and East. In the West, there will not be enough Maverick candidates to cause any National problem. The NDP is now full blown Liberal closet votes. Max's party will not have enough traction because the Mainstream Media has it in for them.
I don't know about impossible, although I agree doubtful. It's true that the PPC will get little to no traction ... MSM indeed despises them, plus Scheer did a pretty good job of slandering them with the "racist" smear campaign during the 2019 election and this seems to have stuck. The fact that Max couldn't even hold his seat rendered the PPC DOA as any sort of serious threat.
However, that said, I think that there could be vote splitting in some very closely contested ridings where the margin between CPC and LPC is very tight. Disaffected traditionally CPC voters in places like Kitchener-Conestoga were the different in 2019 and could be the difference again. I live in that riding and I know that a large number of my "circle" of friends and people of similar political persuasion are not happy with what they perceive as a war on social conservatives and the nonexistent response to C-21 to name two examples that have people I know "fired up". I know this is anecdotal, but in a riding that was decided by fewer than 300 votes last time around, a further group of even 100 or so fed-up CPC supporters who decide to vote PPC as a protest vote could be the difference again.
Agreed that the West is largely settled and PPC won't gain traction out there. The LPC has successfully outmanoeuvred the NDP and are now to the left of that party. Really not sure what the point of the NDP is anymore and I suspect that they will bleed even more votes to the LPC next election and that will make much more of a difference than the small trickle of votes to the PPC.
P.S. - I recognize that the PPC isn't exactly social conservatives, they appear to be more libertarians, but my impression is that SoCons would rather be equally tolerated in a liberty-for-all "libertarian" environment than being considered "the enemy within" in the CPC. It seems that many CPC people who are not SoCons may be just as happy to see SoCons go but that will spell doom for the CPC ... in my view tolerance is the smarter approach.
