A tale of two leadership races

The two largest opposition parties in Canada's two largest provinces will be choosing new leaders in May. The front runner in the campaign to replace Pauline Marois as leader of the Parti Québécois is clear, and all metrics agree on who it is. But the race to replace Tim Hudak as leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives should be a much easier call than what it is turning out to be.

I wrote about some other leaders today in my column for the CBC, breaking down the approval ratings of Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair, and Justin Trudeau. Check it out here.

There are three candidates in the PC leadership contest. Christine Elliot is an MPP in the GTA and a former leadership contestant, the best known of the three in part because she is the widow to the late Jim Flaherty. Patrick Brown is an MP from Barrie, and before this contest very few people had ever heard of him. The same goes for Monte McNaughton, an MPP from southwestern Ontario.

Since the beginning of the race, I have been tracking endorsements. It is a way to determine who is the favourite of the party establishment, and more often than not it tracks the outcome relatively closely. By this measure, Christine Elliott is the consensus choice.

She has garnered 81% of the endorsement points my system awards, giving her an insurmountable lead. Her list of endorsers includes former premier Bill Davis, two leadership candidates who dropped out of the race (Lisa MacLeod and Vic Fedeli), and long-time MPPs like Ted Arnott, Ernie Hardeman, Norm Miller, Julia Munro, and Laurie Scott. She also has some of the higher profile Ontario MPs on her side, including Chris Alexander, John Baird, Peter Kent, Kellie Leitch, Rob Nicholson, and Lisa Raitt.

Running second in the endorsement rankings is Brown, with 14% of available points. He has only a few caucus endorsements, the longest serving being Toby Barrett. He has some Ontario MPs on board, including Mark Adler, Paul Calandra, Rick Dykstra, and Bal Gosal. Jean Charest, former Quebec Premier and, more importantly in terms of the endorsement system, former leader of the federal Progressive Conservatives, has also endorsed him. Brown boasts the endorsements of some famous hockey players, including Wayne Gretzky, but the endorsement system does not take those into account, as they have no role within the party.

In third is Monte McNaughton, with 5% of the endorsement points. His list of endorsements is quite short, the only other caucus member being Bob Bailey. McNaughton also has the endorsement of former Toronto mayor Rob Ford, though again that is not one considered by the system.

It would seem to be a very cut-and-dry race, then. Elliott is the candidate the party wants to win, and normally we would expect the membership to follow suit. This was the case when Justin Trudeau won the federal leadership of the Liberals in 2013.

But this marks out Elliott as the establishment candidate, and Brown is explicitly running an anti-establishment campaign.

And it appears to be a very successful one. The period for signing up new members just recently came to a close, and the Brown campaign claims to have signed up 40,000 new members. That is a huge number, considering that at the start of the campaign the PCs had just 10,000 paid-up members.

Reports of the number of members signed up by Elliott and McNaughton differ. One source told the media that Elliott signed up just 13,000 new members, though the Elliott campaign denies this and claims that number represents less than half of the total.

(Just speculating, but 13 and 30 sound a lot alike. Perhaps the source merely misheard?)

McNaughton claimed some 20,000 new members, though that same source put the number instead at around 6,000.

What does this mean for the leadership? Quite a bit. Let's assume that Brown has signed up 40,000 members, Elliott has signed up 30,000, and McNaughton about 6,000. Add to that the 7,000 signed up by Fedeli and MacLeod, as I saw reported in one column, and the 10,000 original members. That puts us at about 93,000. Let's round that up to 100,000 for good measure, assuming that another 7,000 signed up on their own.

If all of those members vote (or at least all vote in the same proportions), and if the 17,000 original and non-aligned members vote according to the breakdown of the endorsement rankings, we would end up with Elliot at 51% on the first ballot (assuming Fedeli's and MacLeod's members go with her), Brown at 42%, and McNaughton with 7%.

While that would point to a win by Elliott, there are a lot of assumptions being made to give her that razor-thin victory. If she falls short of the 50% mark, she and Brown would be in a near tie. It follows that McNaughton's supporters would go to Brown, who appears to be campaign to the right of Elliott (and McNaughton to the right of both).

There's the problem for Elliott. In a three-way race, she might have difficulty winning if she doesn't get to 50% on the first ballot, or at least very close. A lot depends on how effective Brown's campaign really is.

But numbers are not the only factor in this race. Members need to be distributed efficiently across the province, since each riding is awarded points according to how many members are in it. So, it all depends on how those members are spread out. It makes it a very difficult race to call.

That leaves us with the inevitable conclusion that the endorsement rankings system will not be a good reflection of the eventual outcome. All it can do, at this point, is give an indication of who the party establishment wants to win. If Brown pulls it off, he will have done so against the wishes of the party's elite.

A mercifully easier campaign to call in Quebec

The race in Quebec is much more straightforward.

There are five candidates in the PQ's contest. Topping the list is Pierre-Karl Péladeau, newly elected MNA in 2014 and a media mogul. Alexandre Cloutier, Bernard Drainville, and Martine Ouellet are all MNAs as well, and sat in Marois's short-lived cabinet. Pierre Céré is in the bottom tier. He ran for the PQ in the last election and was defeated.

In this race, the endorsement rankings follow nicely with the general perception of the campaign.

Péladeau leads with 56% of endorsement points. His list of endorsers includes caucus members like Claude Cousineau, Nicole Léger, Nicolas Marceau, and Pascal Bérubé. He has former premier Bernard Landry, as well as former MNAs like Daniel Turp, Serge Cardin, Diane De Courcy, and Scott McKay.

Second in the ranking is Cloutier with 22% of the endorsement points. His most important caucus support is François Gendron, who was first elected in 1976. Véronique Hivon, who was considered a potentially strong leadership candidate before the race started, is also with him. Well-known former MNAs like Louise Beaudoin, Léo Bureau-Blouin, and Louise Harel have endorsed Cloutier.

Not far behind with 17% is Drainville, who has a number of caucus members including Guy Leclair, Carole Poirier, and Mathieu Traversy.

Ouellet has 5% of the endorsement points, all coming from former MNAs. Céré has 1%, and all of his endorsers come from the Bloc Québécois.

But whereas the PC race's endorsements do not seem to reflect the reality on the ground, the rankings for the PQ contest do seem to be closer to the mark. Take, for example, fundraising.

Péladeau has so far raised about $114,000 (consider that fundraising rules in Quebec are far more restrictive than in Ontario, where Elliott apparently has raised over half-a-million dollars), roughly half of all of the money raised by the contestants still in the race.

Drainville and Cloutier form the second tier in fundraising with about $40,000 apiece, followed by Ouellet at $29,000 and Céré at $12,000.

If those totals represented votes, Péladeau would take about 49%, followed by Drainville and Cloutier at 17% each, Ouellet at 12%, and Céré at 5%. Those numbers are not too different from the current endorsement rankings, though it would suggest Ouellet is somewhat under-estimated.

There are still some two months left to go, but it would seem Péladeau will win. If he doesn't take more than 50% on the first ballot, he is likely to come close enough to get over the mark by the third ballot (Céré, dropping off first, would likely not have enough votes to get him over the mark on the second). That the party has not settled on the consensus alternative helps his case, but it could be a closer result than one would expect. Ouellet and Céré, campaigning on the left, are unlikely to see a lot of their supporters going to Péladeau, boosting either Drainville or (more likely) Cloutier. If Péladeau ends up with less than 45% on the first ballot, I could see it getting to a head-to-head finish.

In the end, the details of the outcome looks more like trivia. The real contest to watch will be in Ontario.

Close race also seen by Ipsos Reid

The polls have spoken. The Ipsos Reid survey published Wednesday afternoon by Global News put the gap between the Liberals and Conservatives at just one point, exactly the same margin as recorded by Abacus Data and EKOS Research. Even the support levels are very uniform: 32% to 35% for the Tories and 32% to 34% for the Liberals. For all intents and purposes, the national landscape is now a tie.

Ipsos was last in the field between Jan. 6 and 11. Since that poll, the Liberals picked up three points to move into the lead with 34%, while the Conservatives were down two points to 32%.

The New Democrats slipped one point to 23%, the Bloc Québécois was steady at 6%, and support for other parties (including the Greens, which Ipsos does not prompt for) was down one point to 3%.

Total undecideds numbered 13%, down four points.

None of these shifts were outside the margin of error of similarly sized probabilistic samples.

Ipsos's last poll was hinting at a Conservative surge. No other survey at the time was suggesting quite the same thing, so it appears that it was just the product of normal sampling error and this new poll is a reversion to the mean. Apart from the sharp decline in Liberal fortunes since the fall, there is no discernible trend in Ipsos's numbers over the last few months.

Indeed, the 'surge' may have been the product of an unusual result among women. That January poll put the Conservatives ahead among this demographic, something that no other poll was showing at the time or has shown since. But this new poll shows a reset of those numbers, with the Conservatives and Liberals swapping six points. The Liberals now lead again among women and the Conservatives among men, putting Ipsos back in agreement with every other poll.

Oddly, Ipsos showed a big uptick in support among the youngest Canadians for the Conservatives, putting them up seven points to 29%, just five points behind the Liberals and one point ahead of the NDP (which was down eight points). This might seem like a counter-intuitive result, but in fact the recent Abacus and EKOS polls have also shown improving numbers for the Tories among young voters. Why this might be, however, is beyond me, as is whether this is a real trend or an anomalous blip.

The regional results are fairly typical, with some small variations.

The Conservatives led in British Columbia with 39%, putting them ahead of the Liberals, who were at 34%. The six most recent polls had put the Liberals ahead, so this is a bit of a reversal. But that other polls were in such agreement in B.C. was, itself, unusual. Ipsos has recorded a drop in NDP support in the province, to 21%, as others have.

The Conservatives led in Alberta and the Prairies with 54% and 45%, respectively, but Ipsos puts the NDP in much better form in the Prairies than other polls at 27%, one point up on the Liberals.

The Liberals and Conservatives were in a tie in Ontario at 37%, which is almost identical to the current polling aggregate. The NDP at 23%, however, is a much better result than the party has seen in most polls in some time.

And Atlantic Canada is the usual, with the Liberals way ahead of the NDP and Tories with 47% to 26% and 24%, respectively.

But what about Quebec? It has been the wildcard in federal polling lately, and this survey is no exception.

As most other polls have it, the Liberals were ahead with 31% to 27% for the NDP. This represented a sizable, but just inside the margin of error, increase for the Liberals. The Bloc Québécois was in third with 26%, while the Conservatives were well behind at 15%.

We've discussed the standing of the Conservatives in Quebec quite a bit, and this Ipsos poll would seem to argue in favour of their gains having been wildly over-stated. I think there is something to that. But if we look at the trends from each of the pollsters that have been active so far in 2015, there is a pattern that emerges. Virtually all of them have had the Conservatives gaining in January and early February, compared to where they were in December. But now the polls seem to be showing those gains tailing back or plateauing. Ipsos is well in line with that, with a three point drop.

The debate, then, is more about the size of the gain and the amount of support the Conservatives really have. The trends seem clear enough, however.

Another notable result here is the 26% for the Bloc Québécois. Coupled with the EKOS poll that put the party in second place with 23% last week, some were saying that the new Quebec narrative should be about the Bloc's rebound. I think that is premature.

This Bloc result is the best the party has had in any poll in a year. But that it comes from Ipsos is significant. The Bloc is only up one point from Ipsos's early January poll, so the number is far from unusual.

In fact, Ipsos has tended to have better results for the Bloc than other pollsters lately. Polls conducted within a week of this most recent survey have averaged 18% for the Bloc, compared to the 26% here. In January, polls taken within a week of Ipsos's 25% result averaged 17%, while polls taken within a week of Ipsos's November poll, which put the Bloc at 21%, averaged 15%. The Bloc had 20% in the Ipsos poll from September, while other polls at the time were averaging 14%.

So, it would appear in this case that we should not get ahead of ourselves in predicting a comeback for the Bloc. As far as Ipsos is concerned, the party is in a better position now than it was in the summer and fall, but is otherwise holding steady. This is the consensus among most other polls as well. Quebec is a confusing place for federal polls, so let's focus on points of agreement when they exist.