Apologies for my super-long posts.
I thought there was a poll a few pages back that said the NDP was leading in the Atlantic now?
There's been one poll showing that, from Forum. Every other poll has had the Liberals ahead by a healthy margin in Atlantic Canada.
Huh. I stand corrected. Not sure why I thought that they were doing so poorly in BC.
Also, Greens at 32 and rising on Vancouver Island? Between that, the Kinder Morgan pipeline hearings getting delayed over a conflict of interest, and May getting lots of facetime on Newsworld today about her stance on the economy, it feels like the Greens are getting a bit of momentum. It's all on a small scale -- I don't think they get more than a handful of seats -- but still...if they can grow from being a one-person party (with all apologies to Bruce Hyer) to a parliamentary rump, that would count as a win for them.
Huh? I don't think the polls have been anywhere near as variant as you're describing here. It's been ages since the CPC have been in the mid-30s in any poll (and maybe one poll ever has had them in the mid 20s, if at all), and other than Nanos' ridiculous new polling method the other polls have been pretty well aligned with each other for quite a while.)
From
Allan Gregg, the guy who basically invented Canadian political polling:
The dirty little secret of the polling business . . . is that our ability to yield results accurately from samples that reflect the total population has probably never been worse in the 30 to 35 years that the discipline has been active in Canada
Daniel Cohn, professor of Public Policy and Administration at York University:
"To do a decent public opinion poll that's going to be representative of public opinion because it's going to be as close to random as you can get, that's going to take you a couple of weeks," he said. "And in a four-week election campaign and a 24-7 media cycle, that's just not acceptable."
That Gregg link has several other similar quotes, too. I just don't think our system lends itself to public polling in the same way that the US one does (and even if it did, I don't know that there'd be the money to support it).
Surely we can talk about the election objectively without falling into your team vs my team nonsense?
Absolutely we can. But if you're going to handwave away anything that negatively affects the NDP as being not a real issue, insist that this is a two-party election, and say that you think the Liberals should just go away, that's hardly allowing for discussion, now is it?
Yeah but Mulcair has claimed that he wouldn't run a deficit. Which I'm sure polls well because Canadians have this pathological fear of deficits for some reason but is not a real policy because of tanking gas prices and new initiatives like 15$/day daycare.
I have this secret hope (well, not secret anymore) that the Conservative ads attacking Trudeau for refusing to rule out a deficit backfire, as people realize that anyone promising a balanced budget now is lying. I'm doubtful it'll happen -- since, as you said, people seem to fetishize balanced budgets now -- but at the same time, I'd like to think he deserves some points for honesty here.
Also, totally unrelated, but you're in Brampton, right? Did you see
this stuff about Parm Gill? Setting aside the fact he's just lying outright, it blows my mind that the CPC gets away with having visible minority MPs spout thinly-veiled racist nonsense. See also: having Tim Uppal be the one to argue against religious symbols. (If you're in Mississauga, apologies for mixing up your GTA suburb.)
And speaking of local politics...
Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson with the city's Green candidates!
Mayor Watson with the Liberal candidates!
NDP candidates: not yet, but confirmed for the next few days!
And
the Conservatives?
Jim Watson said:
Regrettably all 9 Conservative candidates for a municipal briefing either didn't respond to our invitation or cancelled their participation
Admittedly, that caused Poilievre to call him right away and say that all the CPC candidates would be meeting him at some point in the next two weeks, but how insane is it that they won't even sit down for a softball meeting with a mayor to spout platitudes about how much they love a city? Notwithstanding Watson's time as a provincial Liberal minister, he's pretty much the definition of non-partisan. It's not like he was going to embarrass them all by having them stand up behind him as he ripped into Harper. The paranoia runs far deeper than anyone could imagine.
