What a difference a week makes. Last weekend, the poll aggregation was point towards a Liberal win, with a chance (albeit not a strong one) of a majority. Now, the likelihood of a Liberal majority has disappeared, and has been replaced with a possibility that the Conservatives could be the largest party in the House of Commons. So what’s going on?
Since last weekend, the Liberals have gone down enough in the polls to lose around 21 seats. Of those, the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois are set to pick up around eight each, with around four going to the NDP. This comes as the Liberals dropped around 2% in the popular vote nationally, to the benefit of the NDP and the Bloc, while the Conservatives remained flat.
But, as usual in Canadian elections, it’s a matter of different stories in different regions. We know, because it’s been mentioned time and time again during this campaign, that a swing against the Liberals in Ontario is far more damaging to them in terms of seats than the same swing in Alberta.
Unfortunately for the Liberals, their biggest losses from the past week come from Ontario, the province with the most battleground seats. While the NDP may have gained more of a popular vote share than the Conservatives in the province, there are a lot more Lib-Con marginal seats than there are Lib-NDP marginals. The change means the Conservatives are set to gain nine seats in Ontario as a result of the last week’s events, mostly around (but not in) Toronto. The NDP, on the other hand, are set to gain three.
The swing in Québéc, while larger in scale, does less damage to the Liberals’ seat prospects. Around six seats that were tipped to go Liberal last weekend are now in the Bloc column, as are two seats where the Conservatives were ahead. While the NDP are up in terms of the vote share compared to last week, they’ve still lost over half of their 2015 vote in the province (it’s perhaps worth mentioning that most of the seats that flipped from Liberal to Bloc in the last week had NDP MPs at dissolution).
It’s hard to say that the Conservatives have momentum going into the last week of the campaign, given their national vote share was flat over the past week. But under Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system, sometimes staying in place is all that’s needed to make progress. For the first time since the campaign started a month ago, we actually have some shifts starting to appear, and this critical final week may decide who gets to live in 24 Sussex for the next few years (or months).
