The road to a majority just gets rockier

For the front-runners, the month since the writs were drawn has been marked by mistakes, missed opportunities and — as advance voting begins — what must certainly be a growing unease. You have to wonder which songs are throbbing like drumbeats in the playlists of their minds. For Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer (the traditionalist), it might be the original version of Freddie Mercury and David Bowie’s Under Pressure. For Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau (the dramatist), perhaps it is Lindsey Buckingham’s Trouble.

Both men are, at least publicly, bullish about their prospects for winning a majority government. Scheer even promised one Thursday night after the French-language debate. The problem for both is that their respective paths to majority victory appear to be closing off, one by one.

For Trudeau, who in 2015 prevailed in the contests he needed to win (Ontario, Quebec) and some he didn’t (British Columbia), the latest polling numbers offer little comfort. Indeed, Quebec had been the only battleground where the Liberals were fighting from the high ground with an initially ample lead.

But data released Thursday by the Angus Reid Institute show the Bloc Québécois now challenges them for supremacy on that hill; the parties are statistically tied. In B.C., where four years ago Trudeau’s party won the popular vote, it now struggles for a tie in distant second place with the resurgent NDP, which is picking up momentum from Leader Jagmeet Singh’s strong debate performances.

Springtime in October for the Bloc doesn’t help Scheer either. And in Ontario and Atlantic Canada, the Conservatives and Liberals are locked in a fight with no sign yet that either will gain the upper hand.

Liberal volunteers knocking on doors and making calls for their candidates must wonder what might have been had Trudeau chosen to get ahead of the blackface scandal when they learned a report about it was in the works instead of waiting for it to come out during the campaign. They must have yelled at their screens Monday night as their leader, instead of bobbing and weaving like the boxer who beat Sen. Patrick Brazeau, stood impassive as his opponents rained blows on his head.

The political chattering classes like to say that candidates running for re-election win debates by not losing them. This is rubbish. Simply surviving was not an option. Trudeau had the most to lose by not winning. He missed a key opportunity to appeal directly to centre-left voters and find a way to pull the coalition that backed him in 2015 back together.

For Conservative strategists whose job it is to reach beyond the party’s well-established and fired-up base to swing voters, the misses have also been notable. Would Scheer really have lost votes by participating in the climate strikes last month? Indeed, it would have afforded him the chance to show he’s not afraid of the left and has at least something (albeit not a lot) to say on this key election issue.

And if he couldn’t bring himself to personally march in one of the many Pride parades across the country this summer, wouldn’t it have been smart to send caucus members who don’t have the same qualms? With speculation about his political survival postelection already in the open, Scheer and his team may rue the day they didn’t try harder to woo the centre.

On election night, the politician’s cliché is that he or she accepts the will of the electorate because Canadians are never wrong. It is telling, then, what they are saying now about their preferred outcome. About one in 10

(12 per cent) say they could live with a Conservative minority. On the strength of those fervent Conservative supporters, one-third (34 per cent) overall say they’d like to see a CPC majority. That, of course, is not enough to effect a CPC majority. Slightly fewer appear to have the stomach for a Liberal majority (27 per cent). The same number say they could live with a Liberal minority (28 per cent). If you felt like the enthusiasm in this campaign was underwhelming, the numbers bear it out. With an eye to Oct. 21, it may be the front-runners who bear the brunt.

Shachi Kurl is executive director of the Angus Reid Institute, a national, not-for-profit, non-partisan public opinion research foundation.