The shock departure of a Canadian cabinet heavyweight has fueled talk about how long Prime Minister Stephen Harper will stay in power, with some in his party predicting he is unlikely to serve a full term if he wins re-election this October.CHRIS WATTIE/Reuters
Paul Fairie is a political scientist at the University of Calgary, where he studies voter behaviour.
After several years of polls suggesting that the next federal vote would be a two-party race between the Conservatives and Liberals, surveys taken since the second week in May have measured vote intention as a three-way dead heat nationwide, with the Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats repeatedly polling within a hair of 30 per cent.
Was the federal NDP given a boost by its provincial cousin's victory in Alberta? First, let's look at what a three-way tie actually means.
In tight three-way races, the number of seats a party will win can be hard to predict from polls of national support. One reason is vote efficiency, or the ability of parties to translate votes into seats.
The 1993 federal election was a textbook example of how important efficiency is, when the Progressive Conservative and Reform Party won a similar vote share, but a wildly different number of seats.
PC support was spread thinly across the country – and not enough in most ridings to actually win a seat in our first-past-the-post system – whereas Reform votes were concentrated in one region.
One way to estimate how vote efficiency might play out in the fall is to look back at the 2011 results, and see what might have happened had the three parties run even in the vote.
To do this, we can make a calculation assuming what political scientists call uniform national swing and adjust every party to 30 per cent support nationwide.
For example, the Conservatives won 39.6 per cent of the vote in 2011; for this exercise we can simply subtract 9.6 percentage points from each constituency's Conservative vote share (and perform a similar calculation for each of the other two leading parties), making it so that each party received 30 per cent.
If we perform these adjustments and count up the winners, the Conservatives would have won 120 seats, the NDP would have received 104 and the Liberals would have returned 81 MPs. While using this simple assumption doesn't generate a prediction, it does suggest that in a dead-even three-way race, the Conservatives are in a better position to still end up with more seats, and the opposition parties will need to expend extra effort in fighting to win every marginal riding.
Is there an Alberta bump?
It's tempting to credit the NDP's increase in the polls to a newfound socialist impulse in Alberta, but this doesn't appear to be the case. Comparing polls released at the end of May to those released by those same polling firms at the end of April, before Alberta elected an NDP government, reveal very little change in overall NDP support.
For instance, Forum Research's end-of-April poll put the NDP at 30 per cent in Alberta, and just 31 per cent a month later. On the more optimistic side, Abacus Data's pre-Alberta election poll had the federal NDP at 18 per cent in the province, increasing by six points after the provincial vote. The numbers from EKOS for a similar time period had the federal New Democrats holding steady at 25.
As much as having a provincial NDP government is a new experience for Alberta, it hasn't yet translated into a palpable bonus for the federal party. Part of this may be because the federal Liberal Party is still holding its vote somewhere in the high teens in Alberta, whereas the Liberal vote collapsed to 4 per cent in the recent provincial election.
Orange Crush is back
If not Alberta, then where has the NDP gained to make this a competitive three-way race? The pollsters all differ on the details of this increase, except that they all agree on one thing: the New Democrats have made considerable gains in Quebec. Looking just at decided voters, Abacus Data has the NDP up there by eight points, while both EKOS and Forum Research measure the increase at 12 points.
The NDP's return to first in Quebec will come as a relief to the party, which has long-risked losing most of the fizz from the Orange Crush that flowed freely through the province last election. Celebrations should remain muted, though, as this only returns the New Democrats to a position similar to their 2011 performance, when the party swept Quebec, and won just over 30 per cent of the vote across the country.