very little of the polling since the beginning of september is reliable - the nanos polling will throw off the long weekend starting tomorrow. and i think we should get an ekos poll tomorrow, although i don't know if they polled over the weekend, and it may need to be taken carefully (although the larger sample size should balance it out).

the idea of a poll aggregate is good if all inputs are created equal. i know you're weighting them relative to various concerns. but, when you start taking good and bad polls and averaging them out, you're polluting the good polls rather than balancing out the bad ones.

that said, i think the trendline is clear. and, thankfully, the country is aligning into regions rather than splitting itself across the board. but, yeah - it's ontario. but, it's believable, given the recent provincial results and the seeming truth that the ontario liberal party is in the midst of a decades long dynastic rule, comparable to the previous red tory domination of the province. and, whatever you think of trudeau, he doesn't have the ideological liabilities of ignatieff [nor is the green party in a position, *this election*, to ruin trudeau like they ruined dion]. it used to be that things were kind of jumbled up regarding positions, and that ontarians wanted the parties to balance each other out at a provincial and federal level. but that dynamic seems to have receded, leaving ontarians with a smaller palette of options.

wherever you were approaching the situation from previously - red tories uneasy about harper's thatcherist bents, or the elusive literal centrist that thought it was worth a shot - has altered. harper has failed to appeal to anybody. and, it may have harris-like long term consequences in the province.

when ontario elected mike harris, a substantial number of [mostly older] voters had to think they were voting for the party of bill davis. but, they got something very different. and, as these voters have died over the last 20 years, their ideological descendants have grown up in a world where the right has never appealed to them. they may have been red tories in the 70s, but today they're simply liberals. that puts the ontario liberals in a very strong position for a very long time. and, there's little reason to think a similar reality *wouldn't* play out at the federal level, in reaction to a government that has ignored almost every issue that would be important to traditional tory voters, while pushing a number of things that make their skin crawl.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-grenier-polls-sep10-1.3222457

Love Karl Marx
Liberals today are not the Liberals of JT's father either. PET was a communist and I supported him completely and the Liberals under him. But, not any more. Neoliberalism is an evil ideology.

Jessica Murray
now, *this* is an interesting troll...

i think there's an argument that trudeau was somewhat of an anarchist, in the way that anarchism intersects with liberalism - he seemed to hold a lot of ideas that fall into that grey area. but, there's not a smidgeon of evidence that he ever supported workers taking control of their means of production. and, if you don't support worker-owned industry, then you're not a communist. sorry.

old man marx would have ripped the charter to pieces as a bourgeois document that exists to restrict people's rights. and, he may have been slightly correct in his denunciations, with a large list of caveats.