Seismic shift to NDP.

Ekos Research poll

NDP SURGES MORE FIRMLY INTO 2ND PLACE, OFFICIAL OPPOSITION STATUS.

HARPER MAJORITY PROSPECTS ARE FADING. GRITS SLIPPING FROM SIGHT.

 EKOS SEAT PROJECTION: TORIES, 131; NDP, 100; GRITS, 62; BLOC, 14.

NDP COULD FORM GOVERNMENT WITHOUT BLOC SUPPORT.

As voting trends are now moving, the NDP is in a position to easily lead a minority government, even without Bloc support. More than half of NDP seats would be won in Quebec, although NDP surge is also evident in Ontario and Atlantic Provinces, while traditional NDP stronghold in the West is holding firm. Liberals, meanwhile, have slipped to last place in their former fortress Quebec, with just 13.1% support. NDP leads in Quebec, with 38.7%, trouncing Bloc, with 25.2% and Tories, at 14.7%.

 
 

Nationally, Ekos' latest voter survey shows Tories leading but down to 33.7% among decided and leaning voters; NDP gaining, to 28%; Liberals dropping to 23.7%; Green Party slipping to 7.2%; and Bloc Quebecois down to 6.2%.

If those numbers hold on May 2, that would be the best showing, by far, in NDP history. And it would be the worst performance for the Liberals in their history, seeing the party lose official opposition status for the first time when not forming a government.

 

NDP inroads in Quebec, mostly at Bloc expense, threaten to reduce the BQ, which has held the majority of Commons seats in Quebec since its inception, to a Commons rump of just 14 seats.

The NDP also leads as the 2nd choice of more voters than any party in the latest Ekos survey. Which means that despite record NDP popularity, the party still has room to grow if it can make stronger gains in battleground Ontario. NDP benefits from heathcare having eclipsed the economy, Stephen Harper's high card, as Canadians' No. 1 concern. And Ontario traditionally votes for the party it feels best able to unite the country. With its lead in Quebec, that party is the NDP for the first time, and no longer the 4th-place Liberals.

 
Despite record voter support, NDP remarkably has the most room to grow, measured by voters for whom the NDP is their second choice. 

The usual caveat: Popular vote notoriously does not translate into seats, given vote splits. That said, NDP are achieving close to the 29% needed to form official opposition, Tories are far short of the 39-41% needed for a majority; and Grits, if traditional popular-vote extrapolation is used, are headed for worst showing in party history.

 

Comments

[Wascally Wabbit]

Aside from the ramifications for the election itself - it will have ripple effects throughout the parties for the following period. Gilles Duceppe's leadership - even the raison d'etre of the Bloc - will be in question. The smug behind the Throne Liberal elite who have called the direction of Canada wrongly for a decade - will get the bum's rush from grassroots with a Howard Beale anger for change! A move leftward back to their traditional left of centre spectral position will flush the Red Tories wrapped in Liberal cloth out of the woodwork. Harper's My Way or the Highway style will finally be enough to cause a Palace coup such that the Progressives left within the CPC plus those defecting the Liberals will have a home again!
And Spring has finally sprung! All's right with the world!

[Darwin O'Connor]

In provinces where the NDP has become the alternative to the conservatives, the Liberals either barely exist (Manitoba), don't exist (Saskatchewan) or exist in name only (BC). The same thing could happen to the Liberals nationally.

[johnnyk]

Let's hope its not Flora MacD. again! Its clear the media like Jack much more than they like Iggy or Harpoon so I hope they aren't inflating things because they need a story.

[doc]

I'm still voting Liberal in my riding where we can oust the cons who have split the vote in a vicious battle between Leitch and Guergis. It still looks like NDP will
not supplant the Liberal chance here to take the trash out.

ABC

( p.s., jack is far from uninformed, impractical and he surely isnt antiCanadian like harpo ! -- jacks making a few promises he knows he cant keep, but thats a necessary evil for a guy is more stuff than fluff )

[Rob]

How is Mr. Harper anti-canadian?
(Please no left wing BS.)
Mr. Harper works for Canada everyday. He is a great patriot. He realizes we need a strong economy.
Jack will put us all in the poor house. He will tax us to death. And kill the recovery. See how it feels with 2 years of Jack.
The superior managment of Mr. Harper is needed now, more than ever.

[Rob Graham]

I never thought I'd live to see the day.

And Rob? What superior management? There was a surplus when Harper took over, and now there's a huge deficit. So drop the right wing BS.

[Rob]

The largest recession since the great depression.
Look where we are now and where we are going with the economy. NO BS.
Well managed Mr. Harper.

[Wascally Wabbit]

Kudos to Rob Graham.
Nailed you there Rob.
Are we talking the Harper who cut the GST 2 points just before the economy tanked. Did it bring growth? No! Did it make us more competitive? No. did it leave government with seriously reduced revenues that were further reduced by a recession for several quarters? Yes! Did that put us into a deficit before the recession hit? Yes. Did Flaherty screw seniors and savers with his Income Trust flip flop? Yes. did Harper use the infrastructure funds effectively - they should have had a multiplier effect? No! Did he waste a billiob or so on G-8 / G-20? Yes!
I could go on Rob - but you don't listen to these FACTS - they don't fit your talking points!

[Rob]

Canada's economy is the envy of the Western World.
Mr. Harper and Flaherty are to be thanked. Well done.

[dolive]

Hi everyone: I feel like an intruder here because you've covered the range of positions, and eloquently.
But, can't resist. First, Rob has to have a word with Tim Powers, who does a lovely but not forceful enough job of presenting the Tory view, as the Globe's designated Tory commenter. Rob, there's still time to tell Tim to bare his teeth a bit more. Then again, if you read Paul Wells' latest, the Tories are on their way to a slim majority, thanks only in part to vote splitting - their support hasn't wavered throughout the campaign. Hasn't gained a lot, region by region, but hasn't dipped much either, by region, as the BQ's has.
Rob Graham does indeed nail it. And I really appreciate the "no right wing, left wing BS." I hope none of us are engaged in BS, leave that for the lesser online commenters elsewhere.
So Rob X (as I'll call you to distinguish from Mr. Graham), it's true I was impressed that Harper promptly and powerfully adopted Keynesian pump priming to protect Canadians from the worst of the Great Recession. One just can't deny he's been a good economic steward in that specific, and huge, task.
Then again, WW's right that trimming the GST was all wrong, not for the obvious reason of weakening the treasury when, as never before, we needed to build up a rainy day fund (and recall that as late as the election of 2008, as the Great Recession was just getting underway, Flaherty and the PM were sanguine - indeed, Harper was telling us to go out and buy stocks, they were such a bargain! He said that as stocks were indeed cheap, but alas, about to become a whole lot cheaper as the equity markets took a 40% (forty) dump before the worst was over, an erasure of $8 trillion in N.A. retirement savings.
It's also true that everybody else re-discovered Keynes in a hurry - Obama, with the biggest stimulus in U.S. history; supposedly communist China with the first stimulus package of anyone, more than $600 billion (and just in time, as laid off workers in the port-city factories were beginning to riot); even Germany, whose memories of Weimar hyper-inflation make the world's fourth-largest economy the most averse to deficit financing.
So if Harper hadn't acted as he did, with an unnecessarily depleted treasury, he'd have gotten an earful from his world peers to get with the program. (Obama bent Merkel's ear for months to spend more on stimulus, and chose to ignore her insistence that German stimulus is automatically triggered by being tied to higher rates of joblessness, for instance, which raise EI payouts, daycare supplements, etc. Not good enough, said Obama - and Sarko and then UK PM Gordon Brown, and even Harper - so she opened the spigots more. Good thing, too, since Germany's now the healthiest economy in Europe, including the UK.
Yes Rob, no question we're doing best among the G8. But Russia's a basket case and has an economy a fraction the size of the others, so make that G7. The Germans, as noted, are doing extraordinarily well. UK is screwed mostly because its banks drank the Kool-Aid, as Wall Street did - it's not economic fundamentals. So our real points of comparison should be India and China, which have maintained spectacular double-digit GDP growth (we'll be lucky to squeeze 2% over the next several years), and especially Australia, as "mature" resource-rich economy like ours, a small population across a huge land mass like us. And a straight up comparison between ourselves and the economic strategists in Canberra has Australia outperforming us on several of the key measures. Norway, another "Western World" mature economy, is even further out front of us.
So thankfully, we've done well. But Harper did what his peers did, and what a Grit- or Dipper-led government would have done; and we're hardly alone in the world in coming through the debacle in good shape. We are doing unusually well, true, but we're conditioned to using the U.S. as our point of comparison, which in this episode makes us look very good indeed. But increasingly the U.S. is no longer the appropriate measure of first-in-class. Canada widely outperforms the U.S. on longevity, infant mortality and other key health measures, and wildly outperforms on literacy, numeracy and science student achivement, plus way lower drop-out rates. (Only 22% of U.S. blacks graduate, and that's 12% of the population; and only 32% of Hispanics graduate, and that's 13% of the population, heading for 20% by decade's end.)
If I was one of the world leaders, I'd be benchmarking ourselves against the highest achievers, and that's now South Korea, Singapore and HK on education, Scandinavia on healthcare (both keeping costs down and world's best health outcomes), and Australia on economic performance. (China, India and other emerging nations are doing even better on economy, but they're starting from much lower base, obviously, hence "mature.")
Layton is making promises he can't keep only to the extent he can't keep them inside one five-year mandate. The difference, as Darwin has noted here, is that the Grit promises all have been made before by the Grits. On the most socially progressive of those promises, the Tories aren't even there - the GST and corporate-tax cuts are indicative of Harper's lifelong goal of shrinking government, which makes him akin to Grover Norquist (shrink the government enough to be able someday to drown it in a bathtub). So I'll take Jack's promises, because, as WW said here earlier, if you don't dream big and set big goals - as the Chicago architect Daniel Burnham famously said a century ago - you've doomed yourself to mediocrity.
Finally, I'm disappointed doc that you'll not be voting NDP. You're obviously closer to conditions in the riding. And given the incredibly shoddy manner in which Harper has treated Guergis, that's a complicating factor.
But I was thinking long last night about strategic voting, wishing I'd noted in my post on that a couple of examples. It was vote-splitting in the absence of strategic voting that put Rae into power in 1990 (he was preparing to retire from politics after that campaign!). And the situations are rather stunningly similar. There was no recession in 1990 (that would come the following year, as Ontario had its worst downturn since the Dirty Thirties, something that never gets said about Rae's record, as noted, I'm proud to say, by a commenter on this site.) So the appeal of Rae was simply that Ontarians were dismayed with the high-handed arrogance of Peterson, real and perceived, and weren't yet willing to give bring back the Tories, having ousted them only five years earlier.
In the current contest, the economy's OK, which is why healthcare has eclipsed it as the #1 issue in the past two weeks. And both the Grits and Tories are perceived as arrogant, hence the untested Layton's #1 popularity, dating from last year, in polling on leadership, trust and likeability. This accounts for the Dipper breakthrough in Quebec (though who knows how many seats it will translate into), and indeed, as Paul Wells again notes, the NDP surge in every single region except Ontario, where NDP support hasn't budged. We can thank Rae legacy for that. Funny how Ontarians averse to Rae haven't noticed that turncoat Rae long ago signed on with, er, the Grits!
The other strategic voting episode I recall, more compelling, was 1988 when NDP voters did abandon their party and beliefs (they didn't in Rae's victory) in order to stop Mulroney's FTA. I must have had a dozen Dipper friends, died-in-the-wool socialists, tell me how grieved they were to have to vote Grit this time in order to stop Mulroney and the loss of Canadian sovereignty that would follow. (The language they used reminds me of you, Rob, when you talk of how the sky will collapse if the federal NDP somehow takes leadership of the nation.) Well, you know the outcome: Mulroney got his renewed majority anyway, the FTA was implemented on schedule Jan 1, 1989, trade between Canada and the U.S. boomed as anticipated by FTA advocates like myself (I voted Mulroney that year, as I had in 1984), and those Dippers who voted for the Grits, which they hate, hate, hated to do, wasted their ballots and ushered in a decade of near-death for the NDP has it went through two ineffective leaders and bottomed out in seat count at 13, I believe. (At latest dissolution, thanks to Layton, they were finally back up to something respectable, 36.)
So the most determined effort at strategic voting in Canadian history was a complete disaster for those who did it, and nearly destroyed the party closest to their hearts.
If Dippers vote their hearts rather than gimmickery this time, they might just make transformational Canadian history. AND be true to themselves.

[Wascally Wabbit]

A pretty feisty synopsis David.
I do have a few challenges though.
First, Keynesian pump priming vs. Friedmanist trickle-down - floating curency.
As far as I can see - even though he hasn't actually practiced economics - Harper is a Friedmanist - a theory that has pretty well been discredited - which is why he had to throw principle and theory overboard and prime the pumps with his Infrastructure program.
Trouble is - now the economic recovery is weakly happening - he's focused upon slaying the deficit - while most sound economists - like Paul Krugman - who you and I follow - would insist that ore infrastructure pump priming is in order - and Canada's municipalities continue to warn that we still have a $120 billion infrastructure deficit!
At $1-2 billion per year from the Feds - we are never going to catch that up unless the de facto download forces provinces and municipalities to raise the funding to accelerate the catchup.
I just posted a sampling of overnight tweets on my Facebook account - and the way things are looking - Paul Wells is already shuffling his feet on his projections - Eric Grenier of threehundredeight.com is supporting the NDP gains and NANOS is increasingly being looked at as the outlier of the major polling firms.
As to a reversal of any trends by Harper's campaign team - they seem to be in disarray - flubbing some dubious distribution of misinformation, upsetting Pierre-Karl Peladeau and finding the wheels falling off their bus (well plane) when it couldn't land at the city Harper had on his schedule - and whe he got their the sound system and his autoprompter failed! I'm sure he kicked a few desks last night!
Seemingly, Duceppe cemented the NDP gains from the Bloc by misreading what the presence of Jacques Parizeau on the campaign trail would do for his fortunes. Seems to be a direct link between the announcement of Parizeau coming out and the big NDP surge in PQ!

[Darwin O'Connor]

"How is Mr. Harper anti-canadian?"

He obsesses about the economy and taxes. While those are important to Canadians, they aren't the only thing.

Also this: http://glenpearson.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/get-em-while-theyre-young/