Heavy Lies the Fed Who Wears the Crown
The Diary of a First Time Canadian Voter: Part 3 — the Road to Ottawa
Welcome to Part 3 of my mini-series on being a first time Canadian voter.
This article concludes my journey which started with learning how to make an informed decision, then watching and analysing the debates in early September. It will wrap up with an enthusiastic analysis of the drama and changes that occurred during the final week leading up to election day, a breakdown of what to look for on election night, and my final call as to who I think will win.
- If you missed Part 1: “An Informed Decision” — it took us through my enrolling experience, observations on leadership candidates, perusing my local electorate, and, explained my free ‘Election / Candidate Voter Tool’
- If you’re interested in additional context on what happened in the debates on September 8th and 9th, check out Part 2: “Words, Mots, Words”.
Part 3 — Heavy Lies the Fed Who Wears the Crown
A Week of Battlegrounds
Courtesy of the Maclean’s Politics Insider daily political email, I’ve selected a handful of key events to highlight that unfolded between September 10th-19th that I believe will most influence the final outcome of this election.
Monday the 13th showed the Liberals surging in the polls but it was still too close to call (according to Nanos, EKOS and 338Canada.com), Quebec was being pushed Right by Legault, the Conservatives dropped a Toronto candidate over anti-Muslim social media posts, and the NDP finally released their platform costing.
On Tuesday the14th the Conservative campaign was the focus of some heat from all sides, with the PPC stealing Conservatives votes, and the Bloc surging in Quebec due to the English debate fallout, threatening both Liberal and Conservative seats.
- The mud really started flying between O’Toole & Trudeau, with O’Toole getting personal, labelling the PM as “privileged, entitled and always looking out for number one”, continuing his criticism of calling a “selfish” election
- Trudeau responded by taking the high road — “I’m not impugning his character. I’m not saying he doesn’t love his kids… I’m going to let him and his proxies and the anti-vaxxer movement and the gun lobby and the anti-choice crowd … continue to attack me, fine. I’m going to stay focused on Canadians.”
Wednesday the 15th had Trudeau made subject to vile remarks from conservative protesters, spending most of his time fighting for seats in Vancouver, and gaining British Columbia Greens support for the Liberal’s climate plan.
O’Toole meanwhile was out in Quebec attempting to butter up to Premier Legault on child care while he continued to take criticism on their National Plan as “incoherent” when it came to lowering the budget deficit from Toronto Star columnist Heather Scoffield, all of this while the PPC racked up 6–7% of votes in polls (overtaking the Greens) on the back of far right anti-government and anti-vaccination sentiment
Thursday the 16th still showed a statistical tie between Liberals and Conservatives. O’Toole was slammed by CTV Atlantic over Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s backflip on vaccine passports after months of reckless measures, which Trudeau took advantage of by pointing out O’Toole’s recent praise of Kenney’s pandemic management, citing the CPC leader’s poor judgement.
Campaigns also began to draw some star power, where Olivia Chow joined Jagmeet Singh’s campaign, calling for people to vote for hope, not fear, and Trudeau was backed by former U.S. President Barack Obama.
By the weekend — O’Toole had made his final push in Ontario while staving off further questions about the more radical cohorts of his party, and the Globe reported that it is still neck and neck going into election day. Trudeau finished his campaign in Alberta, continuing his attacks on Kenney & O’Toole
The American endorsements continued with Bernie Sanders jumping on the Jagmeet Singh bandwagon who on Sunday stated that “taxing the rich” will be the deciding factor for him to make a minority government with either the Liberals or the CPC,.
To add a little bit of personal flare — drama ensued in my own local electoral district where Liberal candidate Kevin Vuong was dropped stone-cold by the party two days out from the election over sexual assault allegations.
Understanding the System
Watching election results roll in from around a country is probably one of my top 3 things to do in life. I like to think it’s because of my half ancient Athenian ‘Demokratia’ (Greek)/ half Roman Republic (Italian) family heritage, but I am not lying when I say I‘ve watched a lot of these since around 2007, ranging from U.S., Canadian or Australian federal elections to Canadian provincial or Australian state elections.
It’s first very important to understand how a government is elected and then formed before casting a vote. Without going too far into it, here is a brilliant explanation and infographic from the 2019 Election:
The second important thing to know is that Canada uses a ‘First Past the Post’ (FPTP) system of voting, where in each electoral district, the candidate that gets the most votes wins the seat in parliament.
I personally dislike this system as opposed to alternatives such as Proportional Representation or Preferential Voting (as is used in Australia) as I find it limits the functions of democracy too much, and, shoehorns an election down to a small percentage of electorates that matter.
This is similar to how ‘swing states’ work in the United States: red states almost always go Republican, blue states almost always go Democrat, so the 3 to 5 swing states end up deciding the election — to me this is not a true democratic representation of the constituents who elected officials to form government on their behalf. This is how Donald Trump got elected in 2016, despite Clinton winning the “popular vote” (more votes in total than Trump). A similar outcome secured Trudeau victory in 2019 where Conservative leader Andrew Scheer won the popular vote.
In a Canadian context, examples include the region of Hamilton in Ontario, where major parties had new candidates, all of which hoping they would pick up new and critical seats on top of their “normal” electoral districts. Another example is large areas of Quebec who tend to vote Bloc Quebecois, but can decide an election if swayed to the cause of another party (such as the Liberals, the NDP, or the Conservatives). The same applies to Vancouver.
Here is a great resource to help explain how FPTP works vs. other voting systems if you’re interested in learning more.
My Final Decision & Election Night
Once I had read each party’s platform, watched & reviewed the debates, observed the events of the final week on the campaign trail, and brushed up on understanding how the government could be formed — it was time to make my decision. Prior to mailing in my vote during the week, I took one final look at a number of resources to solidify my thought process including:
- This excellent summary from the CBC of each party’s platform at a snapshot
- My ‘Election / Candidate Voter Tool’ to make sure I had taken into account the most recent information in my calculations
- The appropriately popular CBC Vote Compass which further solidified my decision on who to vote for (note: I deliberately left this until last so that it didn’t skew my research or decision too early)
On Wednesday afternoon, I dropped my ballot into the mail box.
Going into election day, the consensus right across Canada was that no one had any idea what the next government would look like. Very helpful.
Before settling into the evening broadcasts, I took a stroll around my neighbourhood to get one last look at the electorate. The lines were getting long at around 4pm, and there was a lot of NDP presence on both the streets and people’s front lawns, no doubt due to the Liberal withdrawal in their stronghold riding just days before.
I tuned in to the special edition programme of CBC’s “Power & Politics” to hear from the political experts, but as one could expect, there was more speculation and not a lot of confidence. Thank goodness for data, which the CBC provided and ultimately presented four of the most likely outcomes:
- Liberal minority — 57% (same or weaker seat numbers)
- Conservative minority — 25%
- Liberal majority — 17%
- Conservative majority — 1%
Traditionally the party with most seats wins, but, in this scenario the leader of the party with the most seats would normally be forced to work with other parties to form a coalition, or at least a cross-bench agreement.
This can result in the days following an election to contain some juicy additional political drama in the form of shady backroom deals and backflips you thought you’d only see in Cirque du Soleil.
Make a Call Already!
Okay, FINE. With all these numbers and analysis, the time has come.
This is my bonafide prediction as of Monday, September 20th at 6:30pm.
We are in for a long night — because eventually: Justin Trudeau will win a weakened minority government with 139 seats, and will form a coalition agreement primarily with the NDP to form the 44th Canadian federal government.
