WHILE IT IS DIFFICULT TO STATISTICALLY QUANTIFY THE SAFEST ELECTORAL SEATS IN CANADA,
THERE ARE PARTS OF THE COUNTRY WHERE THE DIFFERENT POLITICAL PARTIES KNOW THEY HAVE A SUREFIRE SHOT OF WINNING.
FRUSTRATION, APATHY ALL TOO COMMON IN CANADA’S SAFEST RIDINGS
For Jillian Lynn-Lawson, a constituent of the staunchly Conservative riding of Foothills in rural Alberta, voting is an exercise in futility.
“When you live somewhere like this, voting becomes meaningless … any Conservative logo on a hay bale would win! This year, I’m going to be out in B.C. on election day and I’m not even going to apply for an absentee ballot,” said Lynn-Lawson, over the phone from home near Waterton Lakes National Park, part of the Foothills electoral district in southwestern Alberta.
Foothills is typically one of the safest federal Tory seats in the country — the last time a left-leaning party had any semblance of political control over the area was back in 1911, when the Liberals held the seat and the Conservative Party was known as the Liberal-Conservative Party. According to pollster Philippe J. Fournier’s calculations, Foothills is the Conservatives’ fourth safest seat in the country, where the party has more than a 99 per cent chance of winning.
Lynn-Lawson lies left on the political spectrum and that’s part of the reason why she feels like her vote will simply not count in a riding that has rarely been represented by even a centre-left party. But her sentiment on the futility of it all is echoed even by Conservatives voters in the area, who feel like their safe seat status has made casting a vote simply irrelevant, a “pointless chore,” as one resident characterized it.
“I’m a Conservative, I love this province, but election day is Monday and I’m not really going to bother lining up to vote when I have plenty of other things to do. I know our (Conservative) candidate John Barlow is going to win, and he’s good, so I’m good,” said the longtime resident of the area, who declined to be named.
While it is difficult to statistically quantify the safest electoral seats in Canada, there are parts of the country where the different political parties know they have a surefire shot of winning, regardless of how much effort is put in to campaigning in those areas. For the Conservatives, that is almost all of rural Alberta and non-urban parts of the Prairies. For the Liberals — at least this time around — it is urban ridings in Quebec.
According to data crunched by Fournier, of the site 338canada.com, the top 10 safest seats for the Liberals in the upcoming elections are all ridings on the Island of Montreal, including Justin Trudeau’s home seat of Papineau and Liberal heavyweight Marc Garneau’s seat of Notre Dame De Grace—Westmount.
For the Conservatives, Fournier predicts they have an almost 100 per cent certainty of winning most seats in Alberta, with the exception of two seats in Edmonton and one seat in Calgary.
“If you look at most safe seats and the trend in those seats over the past few elections, it would take a huge tsunami or unforeseen event for that many voters to swing in a single term,” Fournier said.
This is Fournier’s first time polling a federal election but he closely observed Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, which the majority of forecasters got dead wrong. “I was pulling my hair out for the Democrats. I saw the red flags. You should campaign in places you think are safe, just to make sure those you think vote for you, will actually show up to vote,” he pointed out.
But with just over three weeks to go before Canadians vote, Lynn-Lawson says any kind of political atmosphere in Foothills is simply not apparent. “It definitely feels the same here. There are a couple of Conservative flags, a couple of lawn signs, but I haven’t had a candidate knock on my door yet. Maybe it’ll happen closer to voting day.”
“If I vote, I’ll probably vote for the Green Party, since they are the only choice on the left,” she added.
In the first week of the election campaign, both the NDP and the Liberals had not fielded a candidate in Foothills. The NDP has since put up a candidate to run against the Conservative incumbent and candidates from the Green Party and Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada.
Bridget Lacey, the Green Party candidate for Foothills says that she has been struggling financially to actually run a campaign in the riding, simply because there aren’t many people in the area willing to volunteer for her or donate to the Greens.
“I’m begging my friends on Facebook to help me out because we’re running a six person campaign right now and this riding is massive. It takes me four hours to go across the area,” she said.
Lacey also detailed how she was turned down by a few venues in her riding because she was told that too few people would show up. “This is a Tory blue riding, and sure, only two people could show up. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have an opportunity to share my voice with the constituents.”
According to Lynn-Lawson, the NDP candidate for her provincial riding of Livingstone— Macleod, Cam Gardner, faced similar challenges on the campaign trail this past April.
“It was like pulling teeth to even get him taken seriously as a candidate because he simply didn’t have money. So that meant very few signs, very few posters. He also struggled to organize events in towns in our riding, towns just 20 miles from where he lived,” Lynn-Lawson said.
Gardner did not respond to a request from the Post.
Lynn-Lawson also said that when she was at a provincial election rally this past spring, she got “heavily booed” for asking a question about climate change. “We have to be careful about not using environmentalist language here.”
For Conservative incumbent John Barlow, however, campaigning in a safe seat is just as hard as campaigning in a battleground riding. Barlow has been a member of Parliament for Foothills since the summer of 2014, when a byelection thrust him into power, replacing Conservative stalwart Ted Menzies.
“My team and myself are working like this is a regular campaign. I’d say that this time around, I’ve noticed way more volunteers and way more engagement in this riding because of the frustration of what’s been happening with Alberta,” Barlow told the Post.
Despite it being a safe seat, voter turnout in Foothills was above average in the 2015 federal election. The riding has income per capita of almost $100,000, much above the provincial and national average — its constituents, by and large, are employed by the oil and gas sector or work in agriculture.
When asked if he felt he would return to Ottawa as an MP representing Foothills, Barlow was careful with his wording, saying only that it was “odd” that the Liberals had not yet fielded a candidate. “I’ve always run against a full slate of opponents. I campaign like I’m behind, regardless of who my opponents are and it is not my responsibility to have the Liberals put forward a candidate.”
As of Day 15 of the campaign, the Liberals had still not fielded a candidate in nine Alberta ridings, all of which are considered Tory strongholds. But the party said that they were planning to before the Elections Canada deadline of Oct 1.
On the other side of the country, longtime Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia is preparing for his sixth election — he was elected to the Montreal riding of Lac-St. Louis in 2004, and has held his seat ever since. Fournier’s polling numbers show that Lac-St. Louis is the safest Liberal seat in the country, safer than Justin Trudeau’s own Papineau seat.
“I won a competitive nomination back in 2004 and so I take nothing for granted. We run very hard, we run like we’re behind,” said Scarpaleggia over the phone from his home in Montreal. The core of his campaign strategy is door-knocking and phone calls. “I go into the odd classroom and talk about the kinds of issues I’m working on, but most of my time, I spend talking to my constituents.”
Scarpaleggia believes the key to his continued success in the riding is as much the Liberal brand as it is the effort and constant presence he has in the community to build “trust and name recognition.” Unlike Foothills, however, party leaders do stop by in Lac-St. Louis during most elections, perhaps because it is an urban riding in Canada’s second-largest city.
“It is always vibrant during election season,” a constituent of the riding said. “Maybe I’m a political person and I care about these issues, but all the parties campaign here, not just the Liberals.”
Safe seats, however, do swing. In the 2019 Quebec elections, the Coalition Avenir Québec won the riding of Gatineau by 12 points. It was widely considered a safe provincial Liberal seat, given that the Liberals had won by a 45-point margin in the previous provincial election. “Gatineau is usually a safe Liberal area because it’s very bilingual, it’s near the capital. But then I saw the voter turnout, it was in the low 40s (per cent) so clearly lots of Liberal voters just didn’t bother coming out to vote,” said Fournier.
There are also safe seats that perhaps don’t swing, but where incumbents don’t win by a massive margin, relegating those seats into the “toss up” category. Fournier said he had forecasted the provincial riding of Banff to be safely PC in the most recent Alberta elections, but the NDP ended up doing remarkably well even though they still lost.
“Turns out that Banff has a significant left-leaning community of yoga enthusiasts and nature lovers,” he said.
“It’s more progressive than my model predicted. I just did not pick up that.”
IT WOULD TAKE A HUGE TSUNAMI ... FOR THAT MANY VOTERS TO SWING.