Justin Trudeau concedes that his comments about Alberta might have had some impact on the Calgary Centre race.

“Look, I helped out by being there on the ground. I may have, I may have hindered a little bit, I apologized but in general I think the fact is whether or not we won or lost that byelection there was always going to be an awful lot of work to do in Calgary moving forward towards 2015,” Trudeau said.

There’s actually not a lot of evidence available to determine what effect, if any, Mr. Trudeau’s comments had on the race. The Liberals polled fairly consistently between October 28 and November 21: 28%, 30%, 30% and 32%. The last public poll was conducted over the two days immediately before Mr. Trudeau’s comments were reported. And when the votes were counted, Harvey Locke got 32.7%.