Fair Vote Canada Dumps Direct Democracy

Fair Vote Canada appears to be changing its tactics. After embarrassing referendum defeats in PEI, Ontario and British Columbia, the organization dedicated to changing Canada's electoral system appears to be abandoning its drive for a national referendum. Instead FVC is now calling for a "public consultation" followed by a quickie amendment to the elections act. Of course that amendment would be passed by a House of Commons that is, to their minds, illegitimate but never you mind. The ends justify the means for these people. I guess that silent majority FVC dreams is out there is just too silent.

Projection Update: Olympic Edition

With the glow of the Olympic torch obscuring even the brightest of Canada's political flames, it is perhaps unsurprising that my seat projection is virtually unchanged. One lonely seat in Ontario goes from the Liberals to the Tories in the wake of last few Tory leaning polls. This projection can effectively be considered a decent baseline to measure any sort of Olympic bump. The numbers as always:

National Picture

CPC 118
LPC 106
BQ 52
NDP 32

Province by Province:
BC: CPC 18, NDP 11, LPC 7
AB: CPC 28
SK: CPC 13, LPC 1
MB: CPC 7, LPC 4, NDP 3
NORTH: CPC 1, LPC 1, NDP 1
ON: LPC 54, CPC 39, NDP 13
QC: BQ 52, LPC 17, CPC 6
NB: LPC 6, CPC 3, NDP 1
NS: LPC 6, CPC 3, NDP 2
PE: LPC 4
NL: LPC 6, NDP 1

Some Persepctive

I'll try to get a projection update out sometime soon. I just wanted to point out that while this probably constitutes a national crisis in Canada, other parts of the world are not nearly so lucky. We are truly blessed.

When Will We Learn...

Not to print exit polls with no substantive backing in a close election. This is Ukraine. This is Viktor Yanukovitch who I believe won the last election based on exit polls. He may or may not have won this one. Can we wait for you know real results and maybe, some confirmation that this thing wasn't rigged before we jump to any conclusions? Particularly, when a run-off election between two candidates ends up with a tally of 49-45 or just 94% of the vote. Six percent spoiled ballots would be a huge and frankly, contestable number.

Projection Update: Plenty of Polls Edition

I do my polling aggregate based on all polls in the last thirty days. There have been 11 polls in the last thirty days surveying more than 21,000 people. While the stats people will tell you that you only need so many for a representative sample, I like large samples. Call it a weakness. At any rate, there's lots of different polls taken into this projection, hopefully leading to a more accurate projection, especially considering that I use regionals in my projection. I'll give you the popular vote percentages for the parties in brackets (no regional percentages for the North). I give you percentages to two decimal places not because it's accurate to two decimal places, but because that's what the projections are based off of. If the implied accuracy bothers you, round up and forget about it. Without further ado the numbers:

National Picture:

CPC 117 (31.76%)
LPC 107 (30.73%)
BQ 52 (9.26)
NDP 32 (15.77)
GPC 0 (10.37)

Province by Province:

BC: CPC 18 (33.15%), NDP 11 (23.98%), LPC 7 (26.27%), GPC 0 (14.07%)
AB: CPC 28 (52.88%), LPC 0 (19.18%), GPC 0 (12.41%), NDP 0 (10.71%)
SK: CPC 13 (47.44%), LPC 1 (18.48%), NDP 0 (24.43%), GPC 0 (6.45%)
MB: CPC 7 (42.85%), LPC 4 (22.44%), NDP 3 (24.48%), GPC 0 (8.97%)
NORTH: CPC 1, LPC 1, NDP 1, GPC 0
ON: LPC 55 (38.45%), CPC 38 (33.65%), NDP 13 (14.82%), GPC 0 (11.16%)
QC: BQ 52 (37.42%), LPC 17 (26.56%), CPC 6 (16.01%), NDP 0 (10.39%), GPC 0 (7.92%)
NB: LPC 6 (35.8%), CPC 3 (35.42%), NDP 1 (20.81%), GPC 0 (7.35%)
NS: LPC 6 (32.87%), CPC 3 (27.99%), NDP 2 (28.17%), GPC 0 (8.62%)
PE: LPC 4 (47.02%), CPC 0 (33.37%), NDP 0 (10.28%), GPC 0 (7.98%)
NL: LPC 6 (42.19%), NDP 1 (20.45%), CPC 0 (31.17%), GPC 0 (2.56%)

Riding by Riding:

Projection Update - February 4th

Tories Channel Charles Barkley

I'm sorry, I nearly fell out of my chair laughing when I saw this quote in Jane Taber's latest on the Conservatives canceling a couple of scheduled breaks in the upcoming parliamentary session :

“We take it for granted that they will agree,” a senior government official told The Globe. “Anything less would be uncivilized.”

For those of you who didn't immediately think of deodorant:



Of slighly less humorous interest is that the plan includes canceling the Easter break which is strange coming from a government chock full of fairly religious Christians.