PoliticsCanada: Election: Forecast, while we await today's election results

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Pie-graph (below) by Autostraddle (May2,2k11), a Lesbian cultural blog furiously declaring that haters/critiquers of Prime Minister Stephen Harper include "all Canadian women."  Hopefully the remark is only tongue-in-cheek, as the "Girls-on-Girls" faction (as they characterize themselves) is at least astute enuff to show how Globe & Mail has endorsed Mr Harper for a third term (along with National Post, and UK's Economist); while Toronto Star has shifted from the Liberals to the most-socialist party, Jack Layton's New Democrats, skipping over the most-enviro radical party, Greens.

The Bloc Quebecois have been endorsed by Le Devoir. They currently have 5.8% support, which is down from 10.1% at the beginning of the campaign period. The Bloc really only happens in Quebec, and with a lot of that support shifting towards the NDP, this drop isn’t really a surprise.

Bloc support is rather exclusively found in Québec, the only province where this Federal separatist party is on the ballot.  The quoted "10.1%" nationally translates into 38.1% of the vote in Québec.  "...[V]oters have flocked to the NDP, principally at the cost of the Liberals and Bloc Québécois," says G&M:

“The separatist BQ on Monday will be dealt a resounding rebuke from Quebeckers registering their worst showing in BQ history,” pollster Nik Nanos predicted.

The precedent of 2008 suggests that, while Mr. Harper will win a strong minority government, he will not obtain the majority of seats without which, he has repeatedly warned, his government will be unseated by the other parties in a matter of weeks.

But Mr. Nanos observed that in 1997, “with similar results, Jean Chrétien [a previous          Liberal Prime Minister of Canada] did manage to form a majority government.”

He did it by sweeping ridings across Ontario thanks to a divide on the right between the Reform and Progressive Conservative parties.

Whether the NDP surge in this election splits the votes on the left, allowing the Conservatives to capture a clutch of ridings in Ontario and win their majority, is unknowable.

“It all boils down to the distribution of support,” Mr. Nanos observed. 

I'll be up late, I guess, watching these fascinating results of an election campaign that started slow and gathered steam as the NDP sucked up Green, Bloc, and Liberal votes (other Lib votes have drained off to the Conservs).  Meantime, the Conservatives have been moving from a minority-only govt to an increased number of parliamentary seats (still however in a minority status) with Harper begging voters for a majority .... and he just may get it in today's vote.  


Nevertheless, there remains the possiblity that, tho coming in only 2nd and 3rd, the socialists and Liberal rump will nevertheless unite to bring down Harper's third-term winners (short of a majority), by means of another no-confidence vote "in a matter of weeks." The two parties, once vying for second place, had promised each other they woud never form a coalition to govern Canada together.  But they had already formed a negative coalition, along with the Bloc, to bring down the Harper Conservative govt, necessitating the present election before completion of a full-term.  


Again, the Bloc's role is ironic in that now they are again playing the language card with considerable vehemence:

“We will fight right to the last minute to get out the vote,” Mr. Duceppe said in a speech that branded the New Democrats as contemptuous of Quebec. He dwelled on the fact that some NDP candidates in Quebec struggle in French and have barely set foot in the ridings where they are running. “This nation [Québec] has a language, the language is French, and we are proud of it,” he said. “How can we accept that people who don’t even speak our language are asking for our confidence?  It is contempt.” (National Post)

And it is a humiliation to Duceppe and the separatist Bloc in the Federal Parliament, because so many francophones have shifted away from the BQ to the English-language based NDP.


-- Politicarp


Seat projections made on April 30 as published in Globe & Mail, Toronto, on May 1:

Politics: Canada: Quebec shaken by Mario's ADQ gains

Quebec's electorate kicked out the provincial Liberal Party leader; he retained his pants but he lost his seat in the National Assembly (as Quebec's provincial parliament calls itself, eschewing the French-originated word "parliament" but hot instead for the semiotically- and emotionally-laden French term "national"). Not only did Lib leader Jean Charest get tossed in his own riding, his party floundered along with him. Quebec's Libs remain the party with the most votes and will form the new government (a minority govt, of course), having lost 24 seats out of 125 total, descending from 72 to only 48 seats. There are many holes in the pants of the prov Lib body politics in la belle province.

Where did these votes go? Largely, they flocked to the shepherd of a unique r+twing party, Action democratique de Quebec (ADQ), led by Mario Dumont who, in this his third campaign saw the party he founded rise from only 5 seats now to 41. That's a 36-seat gain. "Officially, Jean Charest is still premier. But starting today, the real boss is Mario Dumont," wrote columnist Vincent Marissal in the La Presse daily (via Reuters Canada), saying the ADQ's inexperienced team of legislators would have time to learn the ropes before the next election. Minority governments in Canada usually last about 18 months."

In this sudden and breath-taking rise, Mario (as he's called--only two other Quebec political leaders were referred to by their first names, Rene (Levesque) and Lucien (Bouchard), both of them separatists. Mario on the other hand, is no separatist, but neverthrless a strong "autonomist" both for Quebec firmly within Canada, and for the regions within Quebec, as in town-and-country areas citizens don't want to be ruled by the political elite that has held Quebec City, nor by the cultural elite that rules the flow of ideas in the French-language, from Montreal.

Reuters Canada reports on Dumont's achievement, short-changing it by calling it a mere "protest vote," but actually it is a basic reorientation of Quebec and particularly its francophone voters across the province.

Dumont and the ADQ tapped into growing public dissatisfaction with old-style politics, which for the last 30 years has seen power [merely] switch from the centrist Liberals to the left-leaning separatist Parti Quebecois (PQ), and back.

"Faced with two parties, each as crippled as the other, he will be the master," wrote Michel David in the daily Le Devoir.

Dumont has promised to cut taxes, reduce the province's C$122 billion in debt and trim government bureaucracy.

Liberal legislators who had won their seats by several thousand votes in the 2003 election were brushed aside by the ADQ, which came very close to taking power.

The PQ, the separatist provincial party, also lost votes to Dumont. It's results were saw its number of seats drastically trimmed, dropping the PQ to "third place with only 36 seats (previously 46) and just 28 percent of the vote ... its worst showing since 1973." The PQ defeat was engineered by its leader Andre Boisclair. A homo, he tried to make this a political asset, flaunting rather than proving himself fastidiously circumspect in all other regards. Many homos took their votes elsewhere, humiliated by Boisclair's antics. Among those were the revelation that while a Minister of a previous PQ govt, Boisclair had indulged in cocaining. His ultra-avantgarde in the PQ imposed a glam boy on the hapless broader stretches of separatists loyalists; these people took just about as much as they could bear. Both the PQ's Boisclar and the Lib's Charest should resign.