QUESTIONS THAT COULD DECIDE ELECTION
SPLIT VOTES, STRATEGIC SHIFTS AND THE MODERATOR THAT IGNITED A WILDFIRE
As the 2021 election enters its final days, it's a twohorse race — with the winner expected to cross the line by a nose.
While another minority government appears likely in either a Liberal or Conservative victory, the Liberals are increasingly favoured in public seat models, largely due to a growing lead in Ontario.
On the other hand, public polling sometimes undercounts the Conservative vote, and there are a huge amount of close races across the country. If the polling is off by just a couple percentage points, it could mean a large swing in seats.
One senior Conservative campaign source said the election will turn on who has the best ground game. “I honestly do not know who's going to win on Monday,” the source said. “It's going to come down to get-out-thevote and turnout.”
The Liberals and Conservatives have engaged in direct battle over the cost of living, gun control and pandemic management in the course of the campaign, but there are a few other crucial questions involving the smaller parties that may well decide the election. Here is what to watch for as the results start coming in on Monday.
WILL CONSERVATIVES SPLIT THEIR VOTE WITH THE PEOPLE'S PARTY OF CANADA?
A week ago, Conservative insiders and pollsters told the National Post they were monitoring the effect of the PPC on the Conservative vote, but didn't believe it would cost them any seats. A week later, these same sources have grown more concerned.
“In most places, we can absorb it,” said one Conservative source about the PPC using its hard-right populist message to draw away Conservative voters. In other words, the PPC is strongest in the regions where the Conservatives already run up massive margins of victory, such as rural prairie regions, and those seats aren't in danger of changing.
But there are ridings in southwestern Ontario, Atlantic Canada, B.C., and even some prairie cities where the Conservatives are in a close fight with the Liberals or NDP and could lose because of vote-splitting with the PPC.
Andrew Enns, executive vice-president with the polling firm Leger, said PPC support has grown steadily over the campaign, but he believes the impact will be largely felt in areas where Conservatives already dominate, citing his own province of Manitoba as an example.
“I did a provincial poll here and found that the PPC ballot was much, much stronger outside (Winnipeg), in southern rural Manitoba, than in the city,” he said.
As the election draws to a close, there has been an increasingly loud warning blasted to PPC voters that they may get Justin Trudeau re-elected. “Vote Bernier. Get Trudeau,” said the front-page headline on Friday's Toronto Sun. Nick Kouvalis, a longtime conservative pollster, released a report on Thursday titled: “A vote for the PPC instead of the CPC will give Trudeau a minority and potentially a majority.”
Much is still unknown about the PPC voter coalition, but Conservative party sources and some independent pollsters estimate that 30 to 50 per cent of it is made up of recent Conservative voters. The rest of the PPC is an eclectic mix of anti-establishment protest voters, anti-vaccine activists, protrump Canadians and disaffected Green Party voters. Predicting how much of the PPC vote will actually turn out at the ballot box is nearly impossible.
“It is a concern,” said one Conservative official about vote-splitting with the PPC. “But there are other variables that concern me more, such as the NDP cratering.”
WILL THE NDP VOTE HOLD, OR DEFECT TO THE LIBERALS AT THE LAST MINUTE?
It's the perennial question in Canadian politics: will NDP supporters strategically switch their vote to Liberal to block the Conservatives?
Currently, there's no indication that swaths of progressive voters are turning away from the NDP. The party has been holding steady throughout the election at around 20 per cent.
“It doesn't seem like their numbers are drifting over to the Liberals, at least at this stage,” said Éric Grenier, who runs CBC'S Poll Tracker and analyzes polling for his own website The Writ.
But the polls, even in the last days of the campaign, may not be able to predict a strategic voting shift. In the 2019 election, for instance, the NDP was at 18 to 19 per cent in the polls, but in the end only got 16 per cent of the popular vote, Grenier noted.
Strategic voting, Grenier said, is “a thing that you decide on at the very last moment rather than a week ahead of time because you might be waiting to see how things unfold.”
Mainstreet Research president Quito Maggi agreed it's usually a “day-of” decision. But he also said the NDP may be more likely to hold their numbers in this election, noting that “there's less desire to give Justin Trudeau the benefit of the doubt this time among progressive voters.”
Overall, Maggi said strategic voting could even out across different regions of the country. Some voters in the Atlantic region, Ontario and Quebec will follow the traditional pattern of switching to the Liberals. But because the NDP has been significantly stronger than the Liberals in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the NDP has a chance of capturing Conservative seats and so could benefit from strategic voting in those provinces by attracting the vote of Liberals.
Grenier noted voters who are considering both the Liberals and NDP make up the biggest sector of the electorate, and they “overwhelmingly” prefer a Liberal government to a Conservative one. But he said there are also factors that might lessen the pull of strategic voting: the likelihood that whatever government is elected, it will be a minority, and that Erin O'toole doesn't seem as threatening to progressives as Andrew Scheer was.
WILL THE BLOC SURGE IN QUEBEC KEEP THE LIBERALS DOWN?
Quebec has been the source of the strangest story of the election: the English-language debate saved the Bloc Québécois campaign.
The party had been sliding in the polls until it pounced on a question by debate moderator Shachi Kurl that described Quebec's bills 21 (the religious freedom law) and 96 (the French language law) as discriminatory.
“Every single outlet, every single provincial politician, every prominent Quebecer came out and condemned it, every federal leader,” said Maggi. “Blanchet was on the front page of every single paper, including the English daily.”
Maggi said it was “bizarre” that a question posed by a debate moderator essentially flipped 15 per cent of the vote in Quebec in two days. He said leading up to the vote, the Liberals had about a 12 to 13 per cent lead, and NDP support was in the mid-teens, and “all of that got wiped out by that question from the moderator, literally the next day.”
The question also halted momentum for the Conservative Party, which had just been tacitly endorsed by Quebec's popular premier François Legault before the debate.
“It may have actually forestalled something fairly dramatic, potentially,” Enns said about the debate's effect on Legault's endorsement. “It just gave the Bloc wind in their sails, and we basically came back to where we were (last election.)”
Overall, the electoral map is now looking much like 2019, when the Bloc won 32 seats. As of Friday, CBC'S Poll Tracker projected 29 seats for the Bloc, while the poll aggregator 338Canada had them at 31 seats.
Grenier said the Bloc's rebound could result in the party winning perhaps four or five more seats than they would have otherwise.
“But based on where everything else is going, if the Liberals have a good night, four or five seats could be the difference between a majority and a minority,” Grenier said. “And if they have a bad night, it could be the difference between the Conservatives finishing ahead of them or not.”
He said that's representative of the whole election. “Because it is so close in all these different places, just a couple of points here or there end up making a pretty big difference in the final outcome.”