By-elections this fall Part 3

oh yeah, gonna head out to help out the second i get free. 

if you montreal folks want to help out, especially those of us who speak the french, give a call over 514 995 2522.

despite an enormous run of good luck the left has been having in montreal here (amir, projet mtl, mulcair), this one should not be ndp winnable.  the only reason they have a shot is low turnout and the bad publicity of the bloc candidate.  really, every ndp vote is like a little handfull of gold, so folks really ought to get out if they can.  i think you can even phone in remotely, if you francophones out there feel like doing so from elsewhere in the world.

There was also an article recently about how of all the candidates running in all four ridings - not one single one is a lawyer!

OK, it seems the Conservatives are up to their usual tricks again, this time in Montmagny-L'Islet-Kamouraska-Rivière-du-Loup.

http://www.cyberpresse.ca/actualites/quebec-canada/politique-canadienne/200911/09/01-920009-le-bloc-soupconne-les-conservateurs-dutiliser-des-tactiques-perfides.php

Someone has set up a bunch of robo-calling in favour of the Bloc candidate, but it wasn't the Bloc that did it (they don't use that technology), and it is a very tentative woman's voice calling and asking people to vote for the Bloc, but then sending them to Christiane Gagnon's constituency office FAX number for further information.

The Conservatives have to be the prime suspects here, because they were also robo-calling in Hochelaga (although they weren't doing it very well there ... phoning the newspaper's office, for example); and this now makes them the leading suspect in my view for the suspicious robo-calling that went on in Saanich-Gulf Islands last time.

I suppose it's too much to ask people to behave ethically.

Since its now a repeat, resources really have to go into investigation and possible prosecution on this robo calling stuff.

Thank god for that law! If I knew the Bloc happened to be loosing in Montmagny-L'Islet-Kamouraska-Rivière-du-Loup I might change my vote from them, to NDP or something, in New Westminster-Coquitlam-Port Moody.

P.S. Elections Canada, this is not a posting of results. It's merely hypothetical, so don't sue anyone.

In this day and age with the internet and tweeting and smart phones etc... its totally absurd and anachronistic to still cling to this ridiculous rule about going to such extraordinary lengths to prevent any results from being publicized until all polls have closed.

Because of the way that polls effectively close at the same time in the whole country but gtwo hours earlier in Atlantic Canada, what difference would it really make to let people know how Atlantic Canada voted during the last hour that polls are open in the rest of the country. There are too few seats in Atlantic to be all that indicative anyways - and only the most hard core political junkies would go to great lengths to find out how the vote went.

I find it VERY hard to imagine that if the results from CCMV were allowed to trickle in while there was still a couple of hours left to vote in Quebec and BC, that there would be ANYONE in New Westminster who is going to say "Jeez, i just heard on the radio that the NDP is leading in that there byelection in Nova Scotia, now i feel so demoralized that I won't bother to go out and vote Conservative!!"

Well, to be fair, on a certain technical level its true that the Liberals are the only party with nothing to lose. The BQ has something to lose because they currently hold two of the seats. The NDP has something to lose because it currently has one of the seats and the Tories have something to lose because even though CCMV is kinda-sorta a non-Tory seat - it is regarded as a defacto Tory held seat since casey was a Tory and it has a long Tory history.

So, the Liberals have nothing to lose if they don't WIN any of these ridings - but they do have something to lose if they have a really poor showing in the popular vote and are third or fourth everywhere.

x

Lol. I was going to post that the CTV panel backed Stockholm's picks until I saw this excellent summary of the pundit calls. Seems like virtually all the pundits agree with Stockholm

CCMV polling stations are now closing. Heard turnout was pretty low.

Maybe some birdie will fly by here and mention what the air is like in Nova Scotia.

great  looking foward to indercenable hints :D

Is that a good thing ottawaobserver?  How come the NDP is getting so close with the sovereigntists?

So far Tories have won easily in CCMV with the NDP second and the Libs 3rd and the Green party locked in a tight race with the CHP for last place.

MIKR is very tight between the BQ and Tories and Hochelaga looks like an easy BQ win but with the NDP second.

I just started a thread in the Quebec/Ontario forum for by-elections results, but I guess they can be reported here too?

Anyway, it looks like the BQ is easily winning in Hochelaga and that the NDP is not close to the BQ at all.  Isn't that a surprise compared to recent expectations here of a close race?

Interesting how close the BQ and Conservatives are in Kamouraska-Riviere Du Loup though.

MIKR is an old bleu Social Creditiste seat (in one incarnation or another) and was partially Dumont's ADQ seat provincially. So I'm not surprised by the closeness of this race. We will have to wait and see if one of the candidates eventually breaks out. The Cons also seem to have candidacy in their favour.

I think 26% in CCMV is a strong second in what is the most rock-ribbed Tory seat in Nova Scotia. What i would like to know if how you explain the Liberals being a poor third in CCMV where the won in 1993 where they were the traditional second place party and the fact that the Liberals are a distant third in both Quebec seats. What ever happened to Iggy leading the Libs to being the "default federalist alternative" in Quebec???

First results in NWC and Fin is in the lead!

1993 is the only time the Liberals won CCMV, and I think you know why - that was the year the PC's were wiped out.  It was not a representative election.  They are actually doing better than expected in Nova Scotia tonight as they are only about 5 points behind the NDP who were expected to be the main challengers.

I think Hochelaga and Nova Scotia will be viewed as disappointments for the NDP by the media tomorrow.  The NDP was expected to be only 5 points behind the Cons in Nova Scotia and they are 20 points behind right now - same thing in Hochelaga.

Not a good night so far for the NDP, although obviously the Liberals have a lot of work to do themselves and Ignatieff needs a kick in the ass to get his head in order.

I hope he beats the Conservative.  Good luck to him.

He is also a handsome guy.

What have the Liberals lost tonight?

Comparing by-elections to generals are always problematic - however I think I should intrude with a little bit of realty.  As of the current standings the NDP has increased its share of the vote in Hochelaga by 6 % while the Liberals have dropped by slightly more than 7 %.

In CCMV it is even worse to compare but the NDP increased its vote by 13.5 per cent while the Liberals only increased by 12.85 in a riding where they were (prior to 2006) the default alternative.

You can spin it all you want that this is somehow bad for the NDP, but the real numbers show that is nothing but empty spin.

Any pretence that they are a government in waiting.

The NDP was expected to finish a strong 2nd in Cumberland-Colchester, and it finished 20 points behind.  The NDP was expected to finish a strong 2nd in Hochelaga and it is 30 points behind.  That is not a good result for the NDP considering the effort put into the by-elections.

Meanwhile, the Liberals have nearly tripled their popular vote in Cumberland-Colchester from 2008, and not finished far behind the NDP in Hochelaga despite not focusing on the riding the way the NDP did.

The big winner of the night could be the Conservatives, and the big loser could be the BQ if they don't hold Kamouraska-Riviere Du Loup.

What about all the articles portraying it as a close BQ-NDP race?  Or all the posts here with people claiming the BQ could lose the seat to the NDP because of the Daniel Paille controversy?

And I notice you didn't mention the NDP's sub-par results in Cumberland-Colchester where it was reported on CBC over the weekend that the NDP expected to finish within 5 points of the Cons, not 20.

Only 5 polls are in but its looking like an NDP blow-out in NWC!

I think it's a fairly good night for the NDP but sometimes I think NDP partisans do a great disservice with their fantasies that it was neck-in-neck in CCMV (see here and also on EPP) by making such absurd predictions (look how many NDP calls there were on EPP).

My feeling is no NDP strategist - as out to lunch as they often are - actually thought they had a chance in hell of winning of CCMV or Hochelaga.

And I only ever heard hopes -sort of wouldn't it be nice comments - not expectations for CCMV.

The Liberal spin attempts when they are so clearly also rans in all the by-elections when an opposition trying to bring down a government, or at least pretending to do so, should be knocking on the door is really quite funny and a sign of their true desperation.

12 polls are in in NWC and the NDP leads by almost 20% - this is looking very good!!

The media doesn't base their spin on what a few people post on babble or on EPP. In CCMV it was clear that the NDP had some wind in its sails from the provincial election and in Hochelaga, the NDP did make more of an effort than before and posted a lot of signs and aggressively attacked the BQ candidate. I'm sorry but i would never suggest to the NDP that they avoid putting up a good fight in a riding for fear that the media might notice and start building up expectations.

The BQ better pull ahead in the remaining 50 polls in Riviere Du Loup or the Conservatives will have a new Quebec seat!

Gilles Duceppe must be sweating in front of his t.v right now.

Not so bleu. Its MP for 17 years was Charles-Eugène Dionne:

...and the so-called greens!

I think the punditocracy will just ignore them.

Apparently some Tory strategist told Robert Fife that the NDP was set to win CCMV.  Looks like a lot of NDP partisans bought the spin.

But if the NDP cleans up in NW-C - as it seems to be doing - it'll be hard to portray it as a bad night for them.

The Liberal vote is down in every riding except CCMV where it was artificially low before because of the Casey factor. The Liberal vote is therefore lower than  in 2008 which was their lowest vote ever.

The NDP vote is up significantly in 3 seats and about the same as before in ML.

I wouldn't exactly call New Westminster, Coquitlam and Port Moody "the heart of Vancouver" but you nonetheless have a point.

No one likes Iggy.  He manages to repel left of centre voters while at the same time those ideologically rightwing enough to stomach him have a less patronizing and more down to earth option in Harper.  Outside of Toronto all of Canada seems to get this.

Interesting the Cons ahead iin the riding the BQ is alleging dirty tricks-- They may wish they did not win because the win might give this story more legs especially if there is proof of where the calls came from

http://www.cbc.ca/politics/insidepolitics/2009/11/byelection-twist-ident...

Look at the earliest reader post-- saying their voice mails were filled up on election day with auto dialled faxes.

If the cons are doing these sorts of things they will eventually get caught.

Let's hope the autodialler was not some incompetent BQ supporter but if it is found to be the Cons then this might be then begining of the end of this government- it will mean a lot if they did get caught and the tactic worked- the vote is close enough that it is hard to imagine it did not make the difference. This will be the story to watch over the next two weeks- forget the results in the other byelections.

Precisely right - if anybody had predicted on election night 2006 that the NDP would crack 20% in east-end Montreal and 25% in rural Nova Scotia in 3 years, people would have said they were insane - and even more insane if people said that Liberal spinners would try to portray those results as disappointments! 

The big winners tonight were obviously the Conservatives but the NDP was the only other party to achieve its strategic objectives - we held NWC decisively, we kept the Dexter surge going in NS with a big vote gain in a very poor NDP rural seat, we finished 2nd in Hochelaga and demonstrated that the NDP is the federalist alternative to the BQ in francophone Montreal.  The NDP won't be competitive in MIKL until we win government but we did run a strong candidate there nonetheless.

I'll post separately on my overall analysis of the results.

You're really grasping at straws when you try to paint getting 10% and beating the Green party in a typical middle class suburban seat in Vancouver as being in any way shape or form as "good News" for the Liberals. 2008 was supposed to be the absolute low point for the Liberals and they were supposed at the very least get a dead cat bounce from that instead the Liberal vote is even lower in in these byelections than it was in the last election in all of these ridings. CCMV is a bit of a special case since there wasn't really  a race there in the '08 election, but if you compare these results to 2006 - NDP support is up about 7% and Liberals support is down about the same amount.

Okay.  Fine with me.     I don't mind if you view it that way.  I'm just trying to argue what I think will be the main narrative from these by-elections in the coming week.  I don't think it provides much good news for the NDP to have finished so far behind in Hochelaga and CCMV when the news media portrayed them as being in contention in those 2 seats.

And the other main story will be how the Conservatives have managed to have some good news in Quebec for the first time this year and beat the BQ.

What fabulous election returns for the NPD in Quebec.  These results actually are exciting news.

Layton, when he was elected NPD Leader, said he had a 10 year plan for Quebec. I like people who have a vision and who think long term.

Go Jack Go!

Some thoughts on the implications of the by-election results for each party:

- Conservatives: A very good night for Harper - CCMV was expected despite the effective reverse psychology media spin of playing up the NDP's chances, but still the win was more decisive than many predicted.  MIKL is huge for several reasons - they won in Quebec despite the gun registry issue flaring up in the final week, and the old ADQ vote is definitely coming back to the Conservatives.  The Libs were nowhere in this riding and the NDP was off the map as well - setting up a 2-way Cons/BQ fight outside Montreal and the Outaouais - which is exactly what Harper wants. 

A Conservative majority is now the most likely outcome in the next general election - Quebec was the last obstacle and now the Cons have cracked it.  For the governing party to gain 2 seats in by-elections during an economic recession, swine flu panic and very unpopular war is really amazing - they will have many more advantages in a general election campaign in terms of $$ and scrutiny of the opposition.  The federalist vote will coalesce around Harper outside of Montreal and Charest will lend the PLQ machine to the Conservatives as well.

BQ: Duceppe doesn't need to panic but he should worry - Hochelaga is a hard-core sovereigntist riding and the BQ win there means about as much as the NDP winning Vancouver East or the Conservatives winning Calgary Centre.  If the Conservatives can start peeling off the old Creditiste/ADQ vote in the regions, and the Lib vote starts bleeding to the Cons as well, that's when the BQ incumbents become vulnerable.  The BQ needs to forget Iggy and focus specifically on Harper - I predict they will fall back on their "vote BQ to prevent a Conservative majority" as a default position.

Liberals: A sign of how low the Libs have fallen is that nobody even expected them to be competitive in suburban Vancouver and a Montreal urban francophone riding, which means they have zero chance of winning even a minority government in the next election.  They couldn't crack 10% (!) in NWC and couldn't crack 15% in the Quebec ridings - that is a one-way ticket to political marginality for the forseeable future. The 20% Lib result in CCMV is the core Liberal Catholic vote, I suspect.  Iggy's hyper-partisan, no-substance strategy of ranting about phony cheques, HINI vaccine and now the Olympic torch relay route has proven to be an abysmal failure.  As Jean Charest once said, "No ideas, no votes!". 

NDP: As I posted earlier, a good night for the NDP where their limited strategic goals were attained.  Fin Donnelly will make an excellent NDP MP - and importantly, he is an avid environmentalist who has supported the carbon tax in previous statements.  Hopefully, he will help build bridges to the environmental movement in BC who are still furious over the BC NDP's "axe the tax" debacle, and position the fed NDP to pick up 5-6 more BC seats in the next federal election.

That being said, the NDP has a lot of work to do and they must learn from some serious mistakes in recent weeks.  Rocheleau will never win Hochelaga with 12 NDP MPs voting against the gun registry - a Harper trap that Jack and the caucus swallowed hook, line and sinker.  Layton needs to decide if he is serious about being a major player in Quebec politics or if he prefers to indulge the whims of his rural MPs - if we want to win 20-30 new seats in the next election or just worry about losing 1-2 rural seats.  Mulroney stood up to his rural caucus over bilingualism pre-1984; Harper stood up to the anti-choice elements in his caucus pre-2006 - and they both made major gains in Quebec in the following election.

There are tons of soft Lib, Green and BQ votes waiting to be had if the NDP presents a credible and compelling alternative and speaks to issues rather than scandals or sound-bites.  "Scrap the HST" will win us a by-election; a credible fair taxation policy with strong candidates will win us Official Opposition.  Fin Donnelly and his green-NDP vision are the future of the party and Jack Layton can win big next time if he has the courage to embrace it.

I spoke too soon

Looking at the data analysis the following was striking:

• 3 out of 4 races the NDP were considered the competitors
• NDP had the 2nd highest vote after the cons with an impressive rounded 24%
• our raw vote was almost 10,000 more than the libs
• If one was to eliminate the 2nd Quebec race were we didn't do well how % goes up by almost 3% (I think as I did it in my head) - that's about 26% of the vote! holy mackeral!!!!

2009 By Lib NDP Grn BQ Cons Rest

Vote
Pct
14.6%
(+0.5%)
23.9%
(+4.6%)
3.1%
(-0.6%)
21.4%
(-2.7%)
35.8%
(+13.1%)
1.3%
(-15.0%)

Seats
 
 
1
(--)
 
 
1
(-1)
2
(+2)
 
(-1)

2nds
 
(-1)
2
(+1)
 
 
1
(+1)
1
(-1)
 
 

Rebate
Eligib.
3
(--)
3
(--)
 
 
2
(--)
4
(+2)
 
(-1)

Raw
Vote
13,433
(-11,803)
22,077
(-12,612)
2,812
(-3,686)
19,709
(-23,505)
32,983
(-7,650)

1,204
(-27,987)

Well said.  This happened in the last election too with Duceppe taking the boots to Harper over his fetish for imprisoning children while the NDP dumped their own most eloquent candidates opposed to the Conservative agenda to imprison non-violent 'criminals' in massive numbers.  Which party proved the pundits wrong and prevented a Conservative majority and which barely hung on to their one seat?  If the NDP doesn't have the courage to do what it takes to really fight it out for the progressive vote in Quebec then they should stop wasting so many resources there.

New Westminster—Coquitlam

2008; 2009

NDP 20,787; 12,129

Con 19,299; 8,753

Lib 5,615; 2,514

Green 3,574; 1,046

Did Not Vote 30,898; 57,363

Opposition party status is a nice ornament for a party to wear on its lapel. But while the opposition parties scrap it out for 2nd place, Harper and his merry band of neo-cons will continue to remake Canada according to the blueprint drawn up by the likes of the Fraser Institute.

It's amazing how Harper and the neo-cons have gained political dominace of Canada by leveraging the support of a little more then 1/3 of Canadian voters which amounts to 1/6 of Canadian adults!

The CONS win when voting turnout is low. Harper is fully aware of this. That's why Harper's legacy to Canadian politics has been the art of personal destruction. Harper has spread so much negativity over the political process that people have tuned out.  The Republicans down south are masters at this. They've turned vote suppresion into an art.

The most amazing thing about Obama was how he gained the support of marginalized people who have never voted before. That's the path the NDP needs to take.  The NDP has to come out with policies that motivate those who have given up on the political process. Those people are now the majority.

The Lib vote didn't move much in NWC but you are absolutely right in Hochelaga - the Libs went down 6% and the NDP went up 6%.  If we can start eating in to the soft Lib vote in Montreal then seats like Jeanne Le-Ber and even possibly Westmount V-M or NDG-Lachine could come into play for the NDP. 

Meanwhile, Brian Topp has an interesting take on the by-election results:

The Conservative Party are the winners who are really losers.

They won the Nova Scotia riding of Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley -- a riding that has been Tory blue with only one break in the past 40 years. Somewhat more impressively, they picked up Montmagny-L'Islet-Kamouraska-Rivière-du-Loup, a rural Quebec riding that should be solidly bleu and decided it would be.

However, arguably the biggest news in the blue column was the fact the Conservatives bit the dust in fine style in the British Columbia riding of New Westminster-Coquitlam, a first taste of the message Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his friend and ally Premier Gordon Campbell are going to get from B.C. voters the next time they have a chance to vote.

The Conservative government relies on British Columbia for 22 seats. They can afford to lose none of them. Their vote in Coquitlam dropped by about 10 per cent compared to the 2008 general election.

The Tories are also going nowhere in Montreal. Not an encouraging sign for a rural-based government that needs to break through in some urban ridings.

It's tempting to buy into this analysis, but I can't agree with it. Hochelaga is one of the last ridings the Cons will expect to win - it's an urban core riding, low-income and a nationalist stronghold in Quebec. The target Qc ridings for the Cons are almost exclusively outside of Montreal and in the burbs.

In BC, Topp makes the same mistake that Stockholm and others have done when he argues the Cons vote is "plummeting." First of all, it's a by-election and under normal circumstances, that's when the folks who are angry come out to vote and the gov't supporters stay home. Governments almost always lose votes in by-elections.

2nd, the Conservatives have many, many really safe seats in BC that they win by huge margins - so if they go down 10% for example, it can often mean that Stockwell Day wins by 15,000 votes instead of 25,000 votes. The people who are really mad about the HST and who will vote on that issue alone are core Conservative voters. Again, please note that I'm talking about the people who VOTE only on the HST, not that other people aren't concerned about the issue.

Offhand, I'd say there are maybe 5 Conservative incumbent seats in BC that are competitive - and the key thing there is if the Lib vote continues to collapse, where does it go? In NWC, the tiny drop in Lib support went NDP but that may be an anomaly - in many other BC ridings, soft Lib voters go to the Conservatives. On the other hand, there are a good half-dozen NDP and Lib BC seats that are well within the Conservatives reach (Vancouver South, Esquimalt Juan-de-Fuca, Vancouver Quadra, Burnaby-Douglas, Newton North-Delta), esp if the Lib vote continues to collapse.

If you're going to ask NDPers to vote Liberal on the basis of who is best able to win, you're going to have to swallow hard and be willing to reciprocate. What's the sense in voting for the party with even less chance to win? Especially when the NDP candidate had the best environmental credentials.

I agree that the Conservatives have a lot to be pleased about- more than anyone else.

But I also agree that its looking like BC is a problem for them. A game killer if it stays that way.

Problem is that Liberals won't vote NDP and vice-versa and there's no way to convince folks on either side to jump to the other ship. We're going to be locked splitting the centre left vote here under the oppressive reign of the evil Conservative robot that is Scott Armstrong for a long time.

Perhaps Green isn't the answer - but some sort of coalition independent maybe? That might swing some of the more moderate Tories who won't vote Liberal or NDP because they are Liberal and NDP.

Somebody's got to get the Liberal and NDP riding association executives together for a heart to heart because realistically the votes aren't out there for both parties as much as we want to delude ourselves that we can build our bases at the Tories' expense, we can't.

Ideally, the NDP can play a double game where in ridings like gatineau that are BQ held they appeal to Liberals to vote NDP as a way to get rid of the BQ, but in a place like Outremont, you say to BQ voters vote NDP to stop the Liberals.

Regarding NWC - a couple of after-thoughts. The NDP had a dream or 'star' candidate in Fin Donnelly - high name recognition, positive attributes, etc. He's sort of a Nelson Riis able to garner votes from non-NDP voters. Had the NDP selected one of the other two candidates at the nomination meeting I'd wager that the race would have been alot closer.

I also had an inkling Fin would win by a wider margin last night after watching the local Global BC 6 pm news when a reporter asked people on the street "how they would vote" and the responses were all "based upon the candidate".

The Con candidate had nowhere near the drawing power of Fin and the negative press about her being "the Invisible Candidate" was much more profound than the Con Deborah Meredeth in Vancouver Quadra. The Con 'elephant in the room' never materialized.

Based upon the foregoing it appears as if many Con/Lib voters also stayed home with the 30% turnout. That said, NWC is now an NDP lock in the next election. 

Not going to happen - let's be realistic.  The NDP should focus on seats it can actually win and where it has nearly won in the past.

Sean, realistically I don't think much is going to come of those accusations unless there is a lot of evidence to support them.  It comes across as sour grapes if a party alleges dirty tricks without being able to back it up.  Besides, Duceppe seems to accept the Conservative win as a message from voters.  I posted a new article with today's comments from Duceppe.

BTW, the BQ alleged yesterday that the NDP was playing dirty in Hochelaga.

It is a combination of illegal, slightly illegal and simply unethical moves that can win. Would not take many illegal tricks to go over the top-- and the chance of getting caught is low. We know that the Cons are doing half of these as it is (the legal half). We know that the US -- both parties-- do this routinely and that the Republicans have raised it to an art form there. We know that this is where the Cons get their advice-- why do you think this is far-fetched?

I'll add one more to the list:

Muddy the waters by accusing the other parties of being just as dirty to insulate this from having much effect on the voters who will, if anything, get discouraged and vote less. Discredit the system knowing that those who are more likely to support you, the winners in society will be more likely to vote than those who are disadvantaged as it is.

Since it can work-- you only need a conscience not to do it.

This riding will never elect a non-Conservative barring a complete meltdown by the CPC although there are enough votes between the Liberals and the NDP to do it. The two parties here share enough core values to field one candidate together that would end the vote splitting and reflect the values of the majority of people here.

What's more important - the party banner and pride - or defending health care, workers and equality.

A few comments:

Fin has starpower. Watch him rise.

Conservatives need to worry about BC because our economy is tanking. People here quickly turn on governments at times like this. They also wasted Dilworth. She had potential but is now tainted.

What happened to the East Asian vote? Its the core of the Liberal vote here. Why didn't they come out for Lee? And what was with all those Liberal signs in West Coquitam? (poll-by-poll results will show Fin cleaned up in former Conservative/Liberal polls in Coquitlam)

Greens? HUH. Why did they even bother?

Is nobody concerned about this?

I am. I think this is exactly how Harper will win his majority. It's slick. Like him. Like his Conservative party ads in the mail and his brand on the infrastructure projects. He'll win on election day, like you said, riding by riding.

I'm concerned about the dirty tricks, but to stop them you need proof.  Meantime, to fight back against them, you need an issue, a message, and a strategy.  That's what our folks in BC had, and any dirty tricks that might have picked off a percentage point or two would not have been effective.

You're right Sean.  I hadn't seen your other post, but I'll go and take a look at it.

Well, if you want some good news, V.Jara, it seems that Jean-Claude Rocheleau will be back for another run to keep building the party in Québec.  I'm delighted.

The Conservative win in Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup needs to be seen in geographic context.

It's just east of Lévis--Bellechasse which the Conservative Steven Blaney won with 46% of the vote, against 25.5% for the Bloc.

The next question is, will this spread down-river? In 2008 the Conservative got 30.6% in Montmagny--L'Islet--Kamouraska--Rivière-du-Loup. And got only 18.3% next door in Rimouski-Neigette--Témiscouata--Les Basques, where the Bloc got 44.7%. A bigger hurdle. 

Does that not indicate that the NDP campaign to try and energize new voters in Hochelaga and get them to come out seems to have been unsuccessful?

"Does that not indicate that the NDP campaign to try and energize new voters in Hochelaga and get them to come out seems to have been unsuccessful?"

No, it tells me that the Liberal campaign to try and energize new voters in Hochelaga and get them to come out and vote was not only unsuccessful, but they can't even count anymore on the 80 year olds women who go to church every day - which is about all that's left of the Liberal base in francophone Quebec.

Its clear that the municipal elections and the lack of any national federal campaign made people in Hochelaga unmotivated to vote - for anyone.

Debater, you can keep trying to grasp at straws all you want about Hochelega - but the way the media and pundits are interpreting it is that the NDP triumphed by coming in second and that it was a total humiliation for your Liberal friends. The more the psychology seeps out that the Liberals are "off the map" in Quebec - the better. The story in Hochelaga is that the Liberals are DEAD there and it is seen as a symbol of how dead they are in francophone Quebec. The trend is clear in Quebec, election after election after election, the Liberal vote continues to melt while the NDP vote keeps rising - maybe not as quickly as we'd like - but the direction is good.

We'd probably need to break it down a bit more by region to get a clearer picture.

For the regional breakdown of NPD trends in support, there is some information on the punditsguide.ca site. See below:

Since I have regional spreadsheets, here you are:

2006; 2008

Montreal/Laval 21

BQ 328,777 (33.3%); 272,244 (28.6%)

Lib 367,900 (37.2%); 358,770 (37.7%)

Con 150,867 (15.3%); 141,074 (14.8%)

NDP 90,336 (9.1%); 130,886 (13.8%)

Green 45,120 (4.6%); 41,309 (4.3%)

Montérégie 11

BQ 297,566 (50.0%); 269,899 (45.1%)

Lib 105,056 (17.7%); 121,813 (20.4%)

Con 124,365 (20.9%); 106,227 (17.8%)

NDP 42,638 (7.2%); 78,316 (13.1%)

Green 24,206 (4.1%); 21,290 (3.6%)

Laurentides--Lanaudière -- W & N Que. 14

BQ 355,675 (50.5%); 315,950 (44.5%)

Lib 112,275 (15.9%); 144,779 (20.4%)

Con 150,775 (21.4%); 121,890 (17.2%)

NDP 56,928 (8.08%); 99,979 (14.1%)

Green 28,263 (4.01%); 26,117 (3.7%)

Estrie-Centre-du-Québec-Mauricie 10

BQ 234,020 (46.9%); 221,139 (44.5%)

Lib 79,255 (15.9%); 99,141 (20.0%)

Con 132,098 (26.5%); 107,645 (21.7%)

NDP 31,417 (6.3%); 52,804 (10.6%)

Green 19,702 (3.9%); 14,608 (2.9%)

Quebec City and East Quebec 19

BQ 337,163 (37.2%); 300,759 (34.7%)

Lib 101,742 (11.2%); 135,946 (15.7%)

Con 349,867 (38.6%); 307,887 (35.6%)

NDP 55,082 (6.1%); 79,386 (9.2%)

Green 29,285 (3.2%); 22,481 (2.6%)

Fairly consistent?

They come out in about 90 days, although we may get some preliminary ones ... which Elections Canada tried to do fairly soon after the last general election.

It hit around 20.8% in 2006 (down from 33.9%), then went up to 23.8% in 2008.

I would give Stephane Dion some credit. He did the best of the federalist leaders in the French TV debates and I think in general he helped contribute to that mild improvement in Québec. As far as "native son" bounces go, however, the 2006 results were very poor. That being said, I agree with Stockholm. Polls indicate that Liberal support is currently lower in Québec than it was in 2006.

Yes.