i'm not in a swing riding. or at least, i don't expect to be in one - we'll find out soon enough. i'll have to watch the polls. there's a lot of recent immigrants in this riding that are likely to lean conservative, so if a conservative swing rises up on their backs, i'll have to vote ndp to try and stop it. i'll otherwise probably vote green.

the conservatives will probably run a muslim candidate in an attempt to push for this. so, you're looking at a mostly muslim religious right v. the ndp union base in this riding. if there's a green surge, the liberals may end up in fourth; they're not going to be seriously competitive.

the liberal candidate i voted for in the last election in the neighbouring riding (frank schiller) was actually anti-nafta, and while i neither expected him to win nor to change the party's perspective (which was cautiously pro-trade....pro-trade in theory, if skeptical about the existing agreements), it was a kind of protest vote to actually hit the 'x'. i didn't like the ndp candidate (who is known locally for protesting against gmos...i'll never vote for somebody like that.....), but i wouldn't have voted for a pro-nafta, business-liberal type of candidate, either. if they had run that kind of candidate, and i had to choose between pro-business and anti-gmo, i would have probably voted green. the anti-nafta thing was in fact a very important consideration for me... 

the liberal party's position on trade in 2015 was an open question, in that they didn't talk much about it. their past position was confusing, in that they supported "free trade" in principle but tended to be critical of the actual agreements. chretien ran on dissolving nafta, then had to settle for some weasel words from clinton, which was widely criticized but actually largely consistent with the party's position: free trade, but not necessarily free trade. it was a kind of "freer trade" position. they just didn't publish how they'd tweak that, and it really wasn't an election issue, or at least not from their perspective. i think they thought this was settled. i'm not sure how to say this without being sardonic: the position that the party has taken over the last few years is not going to be very popular in his own voting base. it's no doubt a part of the reason that he's had falling poll numbers, already. liberals in canada have historically been apprehensive about trade, and slow to embrace the neo-liberal paradigm; it's kind of downright bizarre to have the son of a protectionist come in and embrace this global regime, now that it's crumbling all around him. he might claim the country is immune to this, but the actual truth is that he's probably losing voters in his own base over his position on it. i'm not going to sort through the resolutions presented at the last party convention, but i would expect them to say something rather different than what trudeau is demagoging on about.

mulcair badly flip-flopped on the tpp over the course of the election, and it might be one of the things that cost him voters, but you have to be careful how you analyze this sort of thing. i would suspect that something like "if the ndp are the same as the liberals anyways, i'd might as well vote for the liberals" might have sunk in, and it might have been a factor in the shift; the tpp would not be the only part of that, but it would be a segment of it. you get weird and counter-intuitive outcomes in a three-party system; you'll get things like people on the left of the ndp base voting for the liberals in protest at a centrist policy in the ndp platform. so, it might seem weird that ndp support started to shift to the liberals when mulcair indicated support for the tpp, to the point that he had to really aggressively backtrack on it, given that the liberals were at least no less in favour of it, but it's the nature of the way things work in our system. by the end of the election, it seemed like mulcair was running directly against the tpp, despite initially supporting it - and still managed to lose votes to a party that all evidence suggested was more in favour of it. at this point, it's not clear that it matters what jagmeet singh says about the topic, given that the ndp has lost so much credibility on the left around topics of the sort. i would expect an ndp government to be pretty pro-globalization, at this point, regardless of what the guy says on the trail.

the greens have never backtracked on their alter-globalization position, and should be the preferred choice for voters that are unhappy about the current trade regime, and actively want to change it. that doesn't mean it's clear how they'll govern, it just means that they are at least providing some hope for some kind of policy shift.

i suggested in 2015 that may and the greens should make trade a central issue. it's even more important to do that, now.