Ignatieff and Kenney on what matters

By John Geddes - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 at 1:19 PM - 165 Comments

Beyond the inevitable and inescapable scrutiny of the supposed defining traits of the party leaders, what will the next federal election be about? In the wake of yesterday’s by-elections, here’s what a key Conservative cabinet minister and the official Opposition leader had to say on the matter.

In the foyer of the House, commenting to the media on the by-elections, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney: “The next election will be a fight between a stable Conservative government that can continue to focus on economic growth and a risky and unstable opposition coalition. That will be the choice. I can tell you we think job number one is continued economic growth. And Michael Ignatieff suffered a terrible loss last night; it may in part be because his party is concerned with everything but the economy.”

Down the street at the Chateau Laurier, answering questions at a meeting of the Association of Canadian Community Colleges, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff: “I don’t have 20 priorities. I’ve got to do something about health care; we just can’t sit here and not sustain, defend and improve our national health care system. I’ve got to do something about education and research. I’ve got to make sure we get pension security for Canadians. And I’ve got to do something about rebuilding our prestige on the world stage. That’s four, it’s not 26.”

The Facebook by-elections

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 19, 2010 at 10:07 AM - 12 Comments

Keeping in mind Facebook’s predictive powers, the current tallies show the Liberals ahead in Vaughan, the NDP up in Winnipeg-North and the NDP leading in Dauphin. That last one would likely count as a shock.

Those otherwise interested in this month’s contests are best directed to Pundits Guide’s comprehensive by-election headquarters.

Back to work

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 11:17 AM - 62 Comments

Michael Ignatieff’s official response to last night’s results.

“I want to congratulate all of the winners in yesterday’s by-elections.

“I also want to thank Ken Beck Lee, Robert David, Marcel Catellier and Jim Burrows for carrying the Liberal banner.

“The by-election results last night show that we have a lot of work ahead of us. Canadians want an alternative to the Harper Conservatives. Our job in the months ahead is to earn the confidence and support of Canadians.”

By-elections

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 7:55 AM - 74 Comments

It doesn’t help to parse these things too closely, although Brian Topp remains a champion on that front. By-elections could hardly be less of a fair real-world test of everyone’s fighting strength in a general. Local personalities, issues and tactics play a huge role. Still, the easiest thing in the world to do during one of these things is to vote against a government, to “send Harper a lesson.” Instead, the ridings that voted last night sent him reinforcements. Cumberland is essentially meaningless; a Tory riding returns a Tory, the Tory rebel having departed. The eastern Quebec riding, though, is a horse of a different colour.

While everyone debates The Meaning Of It All in the comments, I thought I’d see what the Green Party makes of all this. Uh-oh. (UPDATE: The Green website has come back to life! Here, Elizabeth May thanks her candidates, or will for as long as the site holds up.)

By-election brouhaha

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 9, 2009 at 9:05 PM - 78 Comments

Results to come at 10pm EST, comments closed until then. (Note: Results now in and updates below.)

In the meantime, there are allegations of shenanigans in Riviere-du-Loup.

And for the numerically inclined, here is how the parties fared in these four ridings combined the last time they were contested as they are tonight—using the 2008 results for three of the four, and the 2006 result for Cumberland.

Conservative 32.6%
Bloc Quebecois 23.6%
NDP 21.2%
Liberal 17.6%
Other 5.0%

That, if you’re particularly keen to make something of this, might be the most interesting benchmark to watch.

Update, 9:46pm. Several other people to keep an eye on tonight: the Star’s Susan Delacourt, our old friend Kady O’Malley at CBC, David Akin on Twitter, Alice Funke at Pundits’ Guide and Eric at ThreeHundredEight.com.

Update 10:00pm. First returns are in. Conservative Scott Armstrong takes Cumberland quite comfortably, though not quite by the same margin as his Bill Casey did three years ago. Hochelaga is a blowout. Montmagny is tight. Continue…

Let us now obsess over relatively minor events

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, November 8, 2009 at 10:49 PM - 32 Comments

Monday night will see the election of four new MPs to fill the vacancies left by Bill Casey, Dawn Black, Real Menard and Paul Crete. The results of these four races will no doubt be incredibly important and meaningful. At least for about 24 hours or so, after which everyone will move on to some other shiny object.

Wikipedia has past results for Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, Hochelaga, Montmagny—L’Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup and New Westminster—Coquitlam. Pundits’ Guide has that plus plenty of other stuff.

By-election results on Monday night will be available through Elections Canada beginning at 10pm EST.

Various other points of note.

Continue…

There are morals in politics?

By Philippe Gohier - Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 1 Comment

The PQ managed to keep François Legault’s old seat in a by-election in Rousseau last night. The Liberals haven’t made a dent there since Bourrassa was in power and Legault was nothing if not a party heavyweight, so the result shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone. And even though, as Chantal Hébert points out, the ADQ vote appeared to collapse in the Liberals’ direction rather than the PQ’s, the abysmal turnout should preclude anyone from reading too much into a result that was never really in doubt.

Still, despite not being under much of a threat from anyone in the riding, not losing has apparently become reason enough for the PQ to celebrate. Cue Pauline Marois, who delivered the best line of the night: “We’ve had enough of moral victories, so now we have a real victory!”

All those moral victories—they sure get exhausting, don’t they?

Megapundit: Rocky Mountain high, and the Ottawa crash

By selley - Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 1:17 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: James Travers on the incredibly unedifying election we are about to endure; Rosie DiManno, Margaret Wente and Andrew Cohen on the much more interesting election Americans are about to enjoy.

So lonely and sadly alone
The Canadian media have descended upon Denver en masse, but don’t worry—we’re holding down the fort.

The Globe and Mail‘s Margaret Wente thinks Michelle Obama is “tough, direct and disciplined,” and “a terrific asset” to her husband’s campaign. And even though she’s toned down her well-known stridency for the convention—”edited her image to suit the occasion,” in Wente’s words—her personality says a very good thing about Obama himself: namely, “that he desired an equal partnership with a strong, outspoken woman.” The voters must decide which of Barack and Michelle or John and Cindy are “the real elitists,” Wente concludes, but she finds it mighty tough to pick Michelle Obama over the “living cliché of an Arizona Republican’s wife.”

The Toronto Star‘s Rosie DiManno saw Michelle Obama’s speech last night as “connecting the tapestry of her parents’ working class virtues to the principles espoused by her husband,” and as a sort of Cole’s Notes version of the campaign’s main thrust “for those who maybe didn’t quite get it yet.” She’s a “steadfast daughter of Chicago’s South Side,” says DiManno, and unlike her husband has spent her entire life in the U.S. As such, DiManno suggests she might represent Obama’s “passport to that Middle America of big shoulders and hard work rewarded.” (Also, have you ever wanted to know why Mrs. Obama doesn’t wear pantyhose? Come on, sure you have. “Long legs,” DiManno explains. “Can’t get them to fit properly.”)

Continue…

Megapundit: The IOC's 'moral midgets'

By selley - Friday, August 15, 2008 at 1:47 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Rosie DiManno and Colby Cosh on Olympic politics; Janet Bagnall on PromArt; Marcus Gee on Georgia; Don Martin on that fall election you’re all dying to vote in.

Political steeplechase
In the wake of day seven of the Olympics, the commentary has gone all serious-like again.

“Who on Earth thinks that children aren’t treated like interchangeable parts all the time on Western TV programs” Colby Cosh asks, apparently unmoved (as are we, quite frankly) by the plight of seven-year-old Yang Peiyi. And who among us believes “that vocal performers singing anthems and other tricky numbers in open-air stadia don’t lip-sync as a matter of course?” Cosh detects the same whiff of hysteria that consumes Canadians whenever our athletes perform below expectations, noting that exactly none of the 15 potential medal-winners the National “We’re getting beaten by Togo” Post identified have yet had their chances to medal. “If we were as self-confident as we fancy ourselves,” he concludes, “we might at least consider making a collective decision to stop worrying quite so much about the Summer Games.”

We were on the fence for much of Rosie DiManno‘s argument that Saudi Arabia should either allow female athletes to compete in the Olympics or be banned, in view of the IOC’s core principle of gender equality, until she reminded us that “South Africa was rendered an Olympic pariah for three decades because of apartheid.” Not to say the two phenomenon are equal, but one IOC member recently rejected the comparison on highly suspect grounds, arguing apartheid can’t “be considered parallel to the effort to bring women into absolutely equal gender balance.” “Balancing the sexes is not even the issue, you hypocritical git,” DiManno quite rightly responds in the Toronto Star. “But spoken like a true moral midget.”

Continue…

UPDATED Outremont (et al) revisited: Buying the by-elections

By kadyomalley - Wednesday, July 30, 2008 at 12:03 PM - 0 Comments

UPDATED, FIXED, ETC – Never. Doing. Math. Again.

First of all, apologies for the delay in posting the promised graphic — it turns out that my spreadsheet skillz are somewhat less mad than I realized, and it took for-bleeding-ever to figure out how to make Google Docs do my math homework. Then WordPress was unwilling to accept the code to embed the data in a blog post, at which point the HTML export function stubbornly refused to preserve my meticulously-crafted colour scheme, which meant converting it into JPG format, and … yeah. I’ll spare y’all the rest of the gory details and give you the final version of the Election Financing Graph That Ate My Brain:

Continue…

Megapundit: From the depths of Barack Obama's cosmopolitan soul

By selley - Monday, July 28, 2008 at 2:03 PM - 0 Comments

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

Must-reads: Scott Taylor on Walter Natynczyk; Dan Gardner and Rex Murphy on Barack Obama.

Same old Ottawa
Stand by for overhyped by-elections, laboured comparisons and impenetrable prose. Jeffrey Simpson’s in a good mood, at least.

Lorne Gunter, writing in the Edmonton Journal, says Stephen Harper has nothing to lose in the Sept. 8 by-elections and Stéphane Dion has everything, first and foremost his job. “Should the NDP win Westmount, as it did the previously safe Liberal seat of Outremont last fall, Dion will have trouble keeping his job,” he opines, but he goes way out on a limb and says he “suspect[s]” Westmount will stay red. He also suggests the Tories play off the “timidity” of Ontario voters in Guelph by paining the Green Shift as a “radical threat to the status quo.”

“By-elections are often overanalyzed, overblown, overrated. In the grand scheme, they shouldn’t toll heavily,” says The Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin. “But they do.” The Canadian Alliance’s “humiliation” in Perth-Middlesex in 2003 convinced Harper to pursue a merger with the Progressive Conservatives; Deb Grey’s victory in Beaver River in 1989 constituted Reform’s “breakthrough”; and last year’s NDP win in Outremont buried Stéphane Dion in an “avalanche of derision.” This is all true. But those outcomes strike us less as evidence that by-elections matter than evidence of just how overanalyzed, overblown and overrated they really are.

Continue…

Gentlepundits, start your prognosticating!

By kadyomalley - Friday, July 25, 2008 at 10:38 AM - 0 Comments

And they’re off:

Release

Date: July 25, 2008

Release: Immediate

PRIME MINISTER HARPER ANNOUNCES BY-ELECTIONS FOR SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

Ottawa – Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced today that by-elections will be held on Monday, September 8, 2008 in the ridings of Guelph (Ontario), Westmount-Ville Marie (Quebec) and Saint Lambert (Quebec).

Now the only question is whether he’ll throw in Don Valley West as a bonus when John Godfrey officially resigns his seat on August 1.

Been down so long it looks like Rivière du Loup

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 9:56 AM - 0 Comments

So my weak and lame attempt to live-blog the Quebec by-election results last night — WordPress permits BlackBerry BlogGing (what’s with all these capiTal letters in the midDle of wordS?) (but I digress), but it doesn’t encourage it — actually produced an insight.

Wait. That sentence is entirely incomprehensible. We begin again.

Something occurred to me while the other parties were keelhauling Mario Dumont last night, and it’s this: If, hypothetically, the Dion Liberals get results even 10 points better than the ADQ did in ridings like the ones where the by-elections were held last night, it’ll be seen as proof that the Liberals don’t “get” the “real” Quebec, that the party is a slave to the Anglo oppressor, blah-de-frickin-blah.

So what, Mario Dumont — son of the wolfy river, the loamy soil of le Québec profond caked on the very soles of his shoes — doesn’t get Quebec either? Continue…

Instant live big by-election update!

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, May 12, 2008 at 10:41 PM - 0 Comments

The status quo reigned tonight, with the PQ winning in two of the three by-elections, as predicted. Charest’s Liberals won in Hull. The ADQ was shut out completely, garnering nary a second place finish – despite two star candidates and a patented ‘blame the immigrants’ campaign in Bourget. “The ADQ drifts toward marginality,” reads the headline on canoe.ca.

As they say in these parts, ‘ayoye.’

BTC: Tough night for the Rhinos

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 12:38 AM - 0 Comments

For those reading in Alberta and so interested, this writer will be on the Dave Rutherford Show around 11:30am (EST) Tuesday to discuss tonight’s by-elections.

Until then, some terribly relevant instant analysis:

The Rhinos have to be disappointed that former prime minister John Turner wasn’t able to garner more than 83 votes (as of this writing) in Vancouver Quadra.

The Greens have to be satisifed with being the only party to see its percentages in all four ridings grow compared with the results in 2006.

Other than that? Bit of a wash.

Weekend Notes (Vol. 1, No. 10)

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, March 16, 2008 at 10:05 PM - 0 Comments