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Canada

A region-by-region guide to Canada’s election

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Former Toronto mayor Rob Ford, who declined to run for reelection last year, showed up at an Etobicoke rally for prime minister Stephen Harper last week. (CBC)
Former Toronto mayor Rob Ford, who declined to run for reelection last year, showed up at an Etobicoke rally for prime minister Stephen Harper last week. (CBC)

One of the reasons why it’s so hard to predict the results of tonight’s federal election in Canada is the diversity of political views across a country that contains 10 provinces and three territories across over 3.85 million square miles. Canada Flag Icon

By the time the last polls close at 7 p.m. Pacific time, we may already have a good idea of who will lead Canada’s next government. Or we may be waiting into the wee hours of the morning as results from several hotly contested British Columbia ridings.

With plenty of three-way races pitting the Conservative Party of prime minister Stephen Harper against both the Liberal Party of Justin Trudeau and the New Democratic Party (NDP) of opposition leader Thomas Mulcair, there’s room for plenty of fluidity on a riding-by-riding basis. The contest is even less predictable because it’s the first election to feature an expanded House of Commons that will grow from 308 to 338 seats.

All of this means that as returns come in, it’s important to know what to expect from each region of Canada, where political views vary widely.

The state of play after the last federal election in 2011. (Wikipedia)
The state of play after the last federal election in 2011. (Wikipedia)


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Ontario

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Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne hosted a large rally for Liberal leader Justin Trudeau in August. (Facebook)

The most important battleground of them all, governments are won and lost in the country’s most populous province. Since the 2011 election, Canada has added 30 seats to the House of Commons, and 15 of those new seats are in Ontario, giving the province 121 of the 338 ridings across the country.  Continue reading A region-by-region guide to Canada’s election →

Canada

In Canada’s election, Keystone’s not the only controversial pipeline

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Energy East

In a debate on foreign policy late last month, each of Canada’s would-be prime ministers parried over the Obama administration’s long-delayed decision not to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Both of prime minister Stephen Harper’s chief opponents targeted his approach to defending the Keystone XL project, and opposition leader Thomas Mulcair snapped at Harper’s tone altogether:Canada Flag Icon

“It’s an old saying that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” Mulcair said. “You are pouring vinegar all over the Americans.” Harper said that he has worked “productively, overall” with Obama and the U.S. during his reign as prime minister.

But Keystone XL isn’t the only pipeline matter that the next Canadian government will face. It’s possibly not even the most important pipeline or even the most important issue as Canada prepares to join a crucial global summit on climate change regulations in Paris in November.

But for all the accomplishments of prime minister Stephen Harper in the past nine years (lower taxes, attempts at budget surpluses, aggressive pursuit of free trade agreements, a more relaxed attitude to federalism), it might be surprising that such an energy-friendly government of an Albertan prime minister who comes from a Conservative Party with deep roots in the Canadian west hasn’t overseen the full completion of any major pipeline projects.

A National Geographic-designed map that lays out Canada's major proposed oil pipelines.(National Geographic)
A National Geographic-designed map that lays out Canada’s major proposed oil pipelines.(National Geographic)

But the next government will increasingly be faced with key decisions about whether to allow a handful of projects to proceed. Four major pipelines, in particular, have emerged in the campaign, some of which are more popular than others. While the Green Party is almost universally opposed to the projects and the Conservatives are almost universally supportive, each pipeline brings with it a bundle of environmental, economic and even cultural issues. In particular, the four pipelines have been an opportunity for the two center-left parties, Mulcair’s New Democratic Party (NDP) and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party to stake out contrasts against each other. Continue reading In Canada’s election, Keystone’s not the only controversial pipeline →

Canada

Liberals gain ground after Trudeau’s leftward shift

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Liberal leader Justin Trudeau campaigns in February with former prime minister Jean Chrétien. (Facebook)

Traditionally, the Liberal Party of Canada occupied the great center (and center-left) space of the country’s politics — and it was a recipe that gave the party control of Canada for nearly 70 years in aggregate during the 20th century.Canada Flag Icon

In the 21st century, however, the party has struggled to find its voice. In 2004, prime minister Paul Martin lost the party’s majority; in 2006, Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party wrested a minority government from Martin; in 2008, the Conservatives gained while Liberal leader Stéphane Dion lost 18 seats; and, of course, in the 2011 election, the Conservatives finally unlocked a majority government while Dion’s successor, academic Michael Ignatieff lost all but 34 seats in the House of Commons and ceded the official opposition, for the first time in Canadian history, to the traditionally progressive New Democratic Party.

Under Justin Trudeau, the scion of perhaps the most lionized Liberal prime minister of the 20th century, you might have expected the party’s fortunes restored as the natural force of Canadian government. That hasn’t happened, and the NDP, under Thomas Mulcair, is locked in a tight three-way race with Trudeau’s Liberals and Harper’s Conservatives (vying, in the midst of a fresh recession, for a fourth consecutive term).

For much of the spring and summer, Trudeau couldn’t seem to get a break. Conservative attacks about Trudeau’s relative inexperience (instinctively reinforced, fairly or not, by his youthful good looks) seemed to gain traction, and the NDP’s surprise win in the Albertan provincial election forced voters to consider Mulcair as a suitable alternative. By the end of August, the Liberals were trailing in third place. Trudeau’s support for the Harper government on Bill C-51 (the Anti-Terrorism Act) disappointed leftists as a knee-jerk attack on civil liberties.

But that’s changed over the course of the past three weeks and, for the first time since the campaign began, the Liberals have pushed (very, very narrowly) the NDP out of first place in the CBC aggregate poll tracker.

That change, however subtle, has coincided with Trudeau’s success in drawing a distinction between Liberal and NDP policy on deficits — a massive u-turn on Trudeau’s prior pledge to balance Canada’s budget if elected prime minister. It’s a gambit not without risk, opening Trudeau to charges of flip-flopping and reckless spending from both the Tories and the NDP. Notably, however, Ontario’s voters allowed former premier Dalton McGuinty to rack up deficit after deficit in the 2000s and rewarded him with three consecutive mandates.  Continue reading Liberals gain ground after Trudeau’s leftward shift →

Canada

In Depth: Canada’s general election

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toronto

With prime minister Stephen Harper’s decision to call an election last week, Canada has now launched into a 13-week campaign that ends on October 19, when voters will elect all 338 members of the House of Commons, the lower house of the Canadian parliament.Canada Flag Icon

By American standards, where Republican presidential candidates will gather for their first debate nearly six months before a single vote is cast (for the nomination contest, let alone the general election) a 13-week campaign is mercifully short. In Canada, however, it’s twice as long as the most recent campaigns and, indeed, longer than any official election campaign since the late 1800s. But the major party leaders have already engaged in one debate — on August 6.

Plenty of Harper’s critics suggest the long campaign is due to the fundraising advantage of his center-right Conservative Party. Harper, who came to power with minority governments after the 2006 and 2008 elections and who finally won a majority government in 2011, is vying for a fourth consecutive term. He’ll do so as the global decline in oil prices and slowing Chinese demand take their toll on the Canadian economy, which contracted (narrowly) for each of the last five months.

Energy policy and the future of various pipeline projects (such as Energy East, Kinder Morgan, Northern Gateway and the more well-known Keystone XL) will be top issues in British Columbia and Alberta. Economic growth and a new provincial pension program will be more important in Ontario. Sovereignty and independence will, as usual, play a role in Québec — though not, perhaps, as much as in recent years.

In reality, the battle lines of the current election have been being drawn since April 2013, when the struggling center-left Liberal Party, thrust into third place in the 2011 elections, chose Justin Trudeau — the son of former Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau of the 1970s and 1980s — as its fifth leader in a decade. Trudeau’s selection immediately pulled the Liberals back into first place in polls, as Liberals believed his pedigree, energy and sometimes bold positions (Trudeau backs the full legalization of marijuana use, for example) would restore their electoral fortunes.

Nevertheless, polls suggest* that two years of sniping from Harper about Trudeau’s youth and inexperience have taken their toll. The race today is a three-way tie and, since the late spring, it’s the progressive New Democratic Party (NDP) that now claims the highest support, boosted from the NDP’s landslide upset in Alberta’s May provincial election. (*Éric Grenier, the self-styled Nate Silver of Canadian numbers-crunching, is running the CBC poll tracker in the 2015 election, but his ThreeHundredEight is an indispensable resource).

With the addition of 30 new ridings (raising the number of MPs in Ottawa from 308 to 338) and with the three parties so close in national polls, it’s hard to predict whether Canada will wake up on October 20 with another Tory government or a Liberal or NDP government. If no party wins a clear majority, Canada has far more experience with minority governments than with European-style coalition politics, and the Liberals and NDP have long resisted the temptation to unite.

Canadian government feels more British than American, in large part because its break with Great Britain was due more to evolution than revolution. Nevertheless, political campaigns have become more presidential-style in recent years, and the latest iteration of the Conservative Party (merged into existence in 2003) is imbued with a much more social conservative ethos than the older Progressive Conservative Party. The fact that polls are currently led by a left-of-center third party, the New Democratic Party (NDP), also demonstrates that the Canadian electorate, which benefits from a single-payer health care system, is willing to shift more leftward than typical American electorates.

Provincial politics do not often portend changes in federal politics, but the 2015 election is proving to be influenced by political developments in Alberta, Ontario, Québec, Manitoba and elsewhere, and many provincial leaders have not been shy about voicing their opinions about federal developments — most notably Ontario’s Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne.
Continue reading In Depth: Canada’s general election →

Canada

The narrative of federal spending in Canada ignores provincial debt

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flaherty

I don’t mean to single out any particular post at any particular think tank, but a post from Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute today gets to the heart of why I am so distrustful of think tanks that lean so clearly either to the right or to the left.Canada Flag IconUSflag

The Cato post comes after Conservative finance minister Jim Flaherty (pictured above) unveiled a budget on Tuesday that outlines further spending cuts designed to lower Canadian public debt more deeply, largely keeping to the same fiscal path that prime minister Stephen Harper’s government has set for years.  The post, however, argues that the gap between federal spending in Canada as a percentage of GDP, which is lower, and federal spending in the United States, which is higher, is growing:

In Canada, federal spending fell to just 15.1 percent of GDP in 2013 and the government projects that the ratio will decline steadily to 14.0 percent by 2019 (p. 268). Federal debt as a share of GDP fell to just 33 percent this year.

Then follows some fairly massive generalizations about the state of Canadian and US federal spending over the past two decades and contemporary politics in both countries:

On federal fiscal policy, Canada has had pragmatic centrist leadership for the last two decades, with voters keeping the loony left out of power. In the United States, we’ve had power divided between centrist Republicans and loony left Democrats in recent years….

Pundits often claim that the Republicans are controlled by radical Tea Party elements. I wish that were true, but in terms of policy results there is no evidence of it. Republican and Democratic leaders are apparently satisfied with federal spending, deficits, and debt far larger than acceptable to the centrists in Canada.

And there’s a chart that proves it! See!? Canada good, US bad.

edwards_canada_1

But there’s no indication that these numbers include spending at the provincial level, which is much more robust in Canada than corresponding spending at the US state and municipal level.  It’s trend that has accelerated in the past two decades, as well, following Canada’s narrow brush with Québec’s independence referendum in 1995.  That makes the chart essentially useless — it’s an apples-to-maple-leafs comparison.   Continue reading The narrative of federal spending in Canada ignores provincial debt →

British Columbia, Canada

How the British Columbia Liberals managed to pull off such a stunning upset victory over the NDP

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christyclark

The incumbent British Columbia Liberal Party, under the leadership of premier Christy Clark in her first provincial-wide election, has held on to power for a fourth consecutive government, despite the fact that the British Columbia New Democratic Party was heavily favored throughout the campaign to win the election.BC flagCanada Flag Icon

This was definitely a surprise, given that the BC NDP was leading by nearly 20 points two months ago, and even though polls showed a narrowing race in Canada’s third-largest province, forecasters still believed the BC NDP a heavy favorite just a day ago that showed a narrowing race in Canada’s third-largest province.  No poll showed the BC Liberals leading this race, though polls showed Clark narrowing the gap against BC NDP opposition leader Adrian Dix.

As of around 1:15 am EST on Wednesday morning, the BC Liberals have been elected to 45 seats and were leading in 51 seats, while the BC NDP had been elected to 27 seats and leading in just 32.  Andrew Weaver was set to become the province’s first Green Party legislator, with one independent rounding out the membership of the 85-seat provincial assembly.  Given that the BC Liberals held 45 seats going into the election and the BC NDP held 36 seats, the BC NDP may well have lost seats on Tuesday.

In particular, former Vancouver mayor from 2005 to 2008, Sam Sullivan, was handily elected to a seat in the Vancouver-False Creek riding for the BC Liberals.  Clark was leading, just slightly, in her own constituency in Vancouver Point Grey against a strong challenge from the BC NDP’s David Eby (NB: if Clark doesn’t win, it’s expected that a colleague will step down to allow Clark to win a speedy by-election).

It’s, of course, really bad news for Dix, whose leadership should almost certainly come to an end with Tuesday’s disastrous result.  It’s really bad news for Thomas Mulcair, the opposition leader of Canada and federal NDP leader, who had embraced Dix and the provincial NDP in a way that federal Liberals had not embraced Clark and the BC Liberals.

It’s the second upset in as many years in western Canada — in Alberta in April 2012, nearly every pollster showed that another longtime incumbent party was set to lose power.  But Alison Redford, the beleaguered incumbent premier, led her Progressive Conservative Party to victory against a challenge from Wildrose, a new party that had run both to the social and fiscal right of Redford.

So how did the BC Liberals do it?  Here are four reasons that explain what happened Tuesday in British Columbia. Continue reading How the British Columbia Liberals managed to pull off such a stunning upset victory over the NDP →

British Columbia, Bulgaria, Canada, Pakistan, Philippines

Four world elections in four days: Pakistan, Bulgaria, the Philippines, and British Columbia

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It’s an incredibly busy weekend for world elections, with four key elections on three continents coming in the next four days.

Pakistan

First up, on Saturday, May 11, are national elections in Pakistan, where voters will determine the composition of the 342-member National Assembly, of which 272 seats will be determined by direct election in single-member constituencies on a first-past-the-post basis.Pakistan Flag Icon

With 180 million people and with nearly 60% of them under the age of 30, the elections in Pakistan will by far have the most global impact by implicating South Asia’s economy and not only regional, but global security with U.S. interests keen to mark a stable transition, especially after a particularly violent campaign season marked with attacks by the Pakistani Taliban.

The incumbent government led by the leftist Pakistan People’s Party, the party of the late prime minister Benazir Bhutto and Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari, is expected to falter.  Their expense is likely to come at the gain of the more conservative Pakistan Muslim League (N), led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who is a slight favorite to once again become Pakistan’s prime minister on the strength of support in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province.  But the upstart nationalist, anti-corruption Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) is expected to make a strong challenge under the leadership of Imran Khan, the charismatic former cricket star.

Read all of Suffragio‘s coverage of Pakistan here.

Bulgaria

On Sunday, May 12, it’s Bulgaria’s turn, and voters will decide who controls the unicameral National Assembly .bulgaria flag

When the 2008 global financial crisis hit, the center-left Bulgarian Socialist Party was in office under prime minister Sergei Stanishev.  Voters promptly ejected Stanishev and the Socialists in the 2009 elections in exchange for a new conservative party, Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) under the wildly popular Boyko Borissov.  Since 2009, however, Borissov and GERB have become massively unpopular, and rising power costs and general economic malaise have made conditioned markedly worse.  The depressed economy and a wiretapping scandal have left the race essentially a tossup between the Socialists and GERB, though a number of small parties, including an far-right nationalist party and an ethnic Turkish party, are expected to win seats.

Of the 240 seats in the National Assembly, 209 will be determined by proportional representation (with a 4% threshold for entering parliament) and 31 will be determined in single-member districts.  With just 7.5 million people, Bulgaria is on the periphery of the European Union — if the result is close and no party wins a majority, it will cause some concern in Brussels, but because Bulgaria isn’t a member of the eurozone, that outcome wouldn’t necessarily cause any wider financial problems.

Read Suffragio‘s overview of the Bulgarian election here.

The Philippines

The action moves back to Asia on Monday, May 13, when the Philippines votes in midterm elections to determine one-half of the Senate’s 24 seats and all of the 222 seats in the Philippine House of Representatives.philippines

Although, with 94 million people, the Philippines has a population of just about half that of Pakistan, it’s a strategic country with an increasingly important economic, cultural and military alliance with the United States as U.S. policymakers ‘pivot’ to Asia.  It doesn’t hurt that the country’s economic growth rate in 2012 of 6.6% was the fastest in all of Asia, excepting the People’s Republic of China.

All of which means that the current president, Benigno ‘PNoy’ Aquino III, whose father was the opposition leader assassinated in 1983 and whose mother, Corazon Aquino, became Philippine president in 1986 after 21 years of rule by Ferdinand Marcos, is an incredibly popular head of state.  His electoral coalition, ‘Team PNoy,’ dominated by his own Liberal Party, is widely expected to make big gains, giving Aquino a little more help facing an unfriendly legislature.

Read all of Suffragio‘s coverage of The Philippines here.

British Columbia

Finally, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, voters in Canada’s third-most populous province, British Columbia, will vote for all 85 members of its legislative assembly on Tuesday, May 14.BC flagCanada Flag Icon

The British Columbia Liberal Party is seeking its fourth consecutive mandate since Gordon Campbell won elections in 2001, 2005 and 2009.  After stepping down in 2011, his successor Christy Clark finds herself waging an uphill battle to win over the hearts of an electorate jaded by scandal after scandal.  The frontrunner to become the next premier is Adrian Dix, the leader of the British Columbia New Democratic Party, though his opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline and a feisty campaign by the Liberals have whittled a 20-point lead two months ago to just single digits.

Though British Columbia is home to just 4.4 million people, the result will have important implications for Canada’s energy industry as well as potential implications for the NDP’s national future — a high-profile loss for Dix will only spell further trouble for the national party.

Read Suffragio‘s overview of the British Columbia election here.

Canada

Despite Trudeaumania, Joyce Murray personifies the future of Canada’s center-left

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joycemurray

It’s a safe prediction that Joyce Murray will not be the next leader of the Liberal Party.Canada Flag Icon

When the Liberal Party’s membership finishes voting and the winner is announced this Sunday, the winner is certainly going to be Justin Trudeau — and likely by a landslide margin.  His anticipated election is already pushing the Grits ahead in polls, and not only against the official opposition, the New Democratic Party under Thomas Mulcair, but into contention for first place against the Conservatives under Stephen Harper.

It seems equally likely that the Liberals will get an even larger boost in the polls in the ‘Trudeau honeymoon,’ as the presumptive Liberal leader ascends to lead a party that governed Canada during 69 years of the 20th century — and which has seen its share of the vote fall in each of the past five elections.

Murray, who served as minister of water, land and air protection in the Liberal government of British Columbia premier Gordon Campbell in the early 2000s, lost her provincial seat in 2005 and reemerged as a Liberal MP from Vancouver in the House of Commons in the 2008 election.  Since the withdrawal of MP Marc Garneau from the leadership race, however, Murray has been locked in a battle for second place with former Ontario MP Martha Hall Findlay.

The late momentum, however, lies with Murray, whose main campaign strategy has been a unite-the-left platform aimed at pulling together the Liberals, the New Democrats and the Greens together in an alliance for the next general election.  Murray certainly has raised more money than any of the non-Trudeau hopefuls.

The fundamental fact of Canadian politics is that the broad left — from the most moderate business-friendly Liberals to the most ardently progressive New Democrats — remains split between two credible alternatives to the Conservatives.  In many ways, it parallels the split between the old-guard Progressive Conservative Party and the upstart Reform Party / Canadian Alliance in the 1990s and early 2000s, which allowed Liberal prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin to govern without much of an opposition from 1993 to 2004.

In the same way, the logic that propelled the conservative merger in 2003 augurs for a similar center-left alliance in 2013.

And the logic is tantalizing — in a country where MPs are determined in 308 first-past-the-post single member ridings, the Tories won a majority government in 2011 with less than 40% of the vote.  A recent Léger poll shows the Conservatives with 31%, the Liberals ascending to 30%, the NDP with 24% and the Greens with 7%.  Taken together, Murray’s dream coalition would trounce the Tories on a vote of 61% to 31%.

The problem is that unlike the PCs, which never won more than 15 seats in the House of Commons after their decimation following the 1980s governments of Brian Mulroney, and unlike Reform/Alliance, which never managed to extend its reach beyond western Canada, both the NDP and the Trudeau-era Liberals are national parties with long, proud histories in Canada that stretch back far into the prior century.

Trudeau himself has argued to the incompatibility of the Liberal and NDP traditions:

But this debate is less about electoral calculations than about Trudeau’s assessment of congenital incompatibilities on the left of the Canadian political spectrum. In an interview last year with Maclean’s, he contrasted the unification of the right, as accomplished by Harper in 2003, and the notion of symmetrical coming together of Canadian progressives.

“The right didn’t unite so much as reunite,” Trudeau said. “I mean, Reform was very much a western movement breaking away from Brian Mulroney. But they broke away, then they came back together. The NDP and the Liberals come from very, very, very different traditions.”

But that overstates the case — keep in mind that the most successful leader the Liberals have had in the past decade, the current interim leader Bob Rae, is the former NDP premier of Ontario.  Mulcair, the current NDP leader, was a member of the Québec Liberal Party during his career in provincial politics.  Though it’s important to keep in mind that provincial parties aren’t affiliated with national parties, it’s fair to say that there’s a significant amount of cross-pollination between the two traditions.

Even beyond her controversial support for a broad center-left alliance, however, the center of gravity in Canada is moving in two directions — both westward in the geographic sense and toward a more globalized, diverse, immigrant-rich Canada in a demographic sense — and British Columbia (and Vancouver) is obviously at the heart of both of those trends.  Continue reading Despite Trudeaumania, Joyce Murray personifies the future of Canada’s center-left →

British Columbia, Canada

BC NDP holds overwhelming lead in advance of British Columbia elections

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vancouver

With a month and a half before voters in Canada’s largest western province go to the polls, the New Democratic Party of British Columbia under opposition leader Adrian Dix seems set to take control of the provincial government after over a decade of rule by the British Columbia Liberal Party, though the official campaign has yet to begin.BC flagCanada Flag Icon

British Columbia is, in many ways, the future of Canada — oriented toward the Asia-Pacific rim, not toward the United Kingdom and the Atlantic.  The province’s welcoming approach to immigration, including a large wave of Cantonese-speaking Chinese from Hong Kong in advance of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong control from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China, was a prologue to what’s now happening all over Canada.  As of a decade ago, while 75% of British Columbians spoke English only, just around 2% were exclusive French speakers, and nearly 25% spoke a number of languages other than English or French, and the province’s diversity has only grown in the past decade.

Nearly 10% of British Columbia’s population today is Chinese in origin, nearly 6% is Indian in origin.

The reality of British Columbia — and increasingly, the reality of Canada nationwide — is making nonsense of the eastern bilingual French/English divide that underlined the constitutional fights of the late 20th century.

With over 4.5 million people (around 13% of Canada’s population), it’s still less populous than Ontario or Québec, but it’s growing at a faster rate than either, with an economy split between a traditional dominance on forestry and tourism and the growing importance of mining — much like its neighbor to the east, Alberta.

Polls for the past year have shown a wide lead for the BC NDP in the elections scheduled for May 14 — a recent mid-March Angus Reid poll gives the BC NDP 48% support to just 28% support for the BC Liberals, and 11% each for the British Columbia Green Party and the British Columbia Conservative Party — the BC Conservatives take 17% in the province’s interior, while the Greens win 18% on Vancouver Island: Continue reading BC NDP holds overwhelming lead in advance of British Columbia elections →