Rachelle F.
I am staying with the NDP until the very end. Trudeau is basically the same thing as Harper, especially after it came to light that his manager was in bed with big oil.
As for the strategic voting, nobody will tell me how to vote. I am a woman who knows her mind, and there is not a chance that I will compromise my principles and vote for a leader who also supports Bill C-51, oil companies, TPP and Keyston XL Pipeline (Justin Trudeau).
The media is no longer giving Tom any airtime, they are clearly in support of Trudeau.
Vote NDP for real change.
deathtokoalas
i’m not sure this is the right place for this, but if you’re voting against oil you might want to consider voting for the greens. the unions are very invested in the east-west pipeline. and the ndp platform is built around the idea of taxing oil to pay for services.
i wish the liberals were a bit less gung-ho on the tar sands. but, they seem to have their head around the idea of transition a little bit better. the ndp aren’t talking about putting billions down on transition infrastructure.
in the end, we’re going to be talking in theoreticals because only one party can govern. but the reality is that neither party is going to bite the oil industry. and, in that context, i’d rather put my vote towards building infrastructure that can replace the carbon economy, and then worry about shutting down the export market once we have that in place.
but, we’re going to have to fight the pipelines in court. all three parties support one pipeline or the other.
it’s just that you don’t tax oil to pay for services if you’re serious about reducing carbon. that puts you in a fiscal position where you’re reliant on oil revenue. which is the situation we’re in now. it’s just this huge contradiction. and, if you watched the debates, the argument from both the liberals and ndp is that the conservatives weren’t building the pipeline fast enough – and how they would both do more to build the pipelines faster. it’s cynical, but it may be the case that an environmentalist might want to vote conservative, because at least we can count on them mismanaging the whole thing to the point that nothing gets accomplished.
there’s not a good option here. there’s the greens. but, i mean, look at where they’re polling.
and, it’s kind of the same thing with the tpp. at least we all expect the liberals to support the tpp – they support most trade agreements. but, then we had the ndp initially come out in support of it, and then flip on it in ways that allow them to flip back. i mean, they’re arguing about supply management. the supply management part really doesn’t seem that bad. i wouldn’t expect mulcair to reject the deal on a 3% market access to dairy products, and i think he’s asking a lot from people to believe him on that point. there was a time when the ndp would argue against the chapter 11 style clauses – the investor rights agreements. that was the basis of opposition to it for decades. but, you won’t hear mulcair criticize this. and, the sum of it makes me skeptical about whether he’s actually opposed to it. i would expect the ndp to support the tpp. i see every reason to think the greens are legitimately opposed to it. but, again – look at the polls.
it’s something that seems like it should be an issue, but the ndp is not taking the positions you would expect them to take. and it’s maybe not such a good idea to vote for them on phantom projections that they’re not actually articulating.
and, this is the problem they’ve created with so many people on the left. i’m to the left of both the liberals and the ndp. i’m to the left of the greens, even. but, in an attempt to park themselves in the centre, they’ve negated all the reasons i may have seen them as preferable to the liberals. nor have the liberals really steered that far away from where they normally are; there’s nothing in their platform that i wouldn’t have expected from a dion or even a martin government. but, in comparison, it just seems a lot more progressive in comparison – without really being particularly progressive.
people are going to look back at what mulcair has done here as a textbook case of what not to do. but, it’s ironic. because he’s following what people would claim is conventional wisdom – position yourself in the centre.
what we’re learning is that the centre isn’t where the pundits have placed it. it’s somewhere well to the left.
i do hope the ndp right themselves. but, they’re going to need a change of leadership that is willing to abide by their own conventions before i’m willing to again take them seriously as a more progressive alternative to the liberals.
the truth is trudeau’s got a gift here. and i hope he doesn’t blow the opportunity.
www.ekospolitics.com/index.php/2015/10/marginally-significant-narrowing-of-liberal-lead/
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Cre47
EKOS has to be the most inconsistent pollster so far this campaign (or maybe tied with Mainstreet). Everybody follows the same trend meaning the gap increases, but EKOS goes with those wild fluctuations. I’m starting to wonder if the IVR method is garbage. All the IVR pollsters have those wild fluctuations throughout the campaign, while the online and telephone pollsters have been more consistent especially Ipsos, Nanos and Leger.
deathtokoalas
what i’ve noticed is that the only thing that seriously correlates with the conservatives is the undecideds. when undecideds go up, the sample size decreases and the conservatives go up. when the undecideds go down, the sample size increases and the conservatives go down. what that means is that a lot of the fluctuations you’re seeing in a lot of the results is misleading – the conservatives have been pretty much flat at 30 (+/- a reasonable error) for months, whereas undecideds have been wavering all over the place between the ndp and the liberals, and increasingly choosing the liberals the last few weeks. when you see that conservatives at 35 over ivr, what that almost always really means is they’re around 30 amongst decideds, but the undecideds are at like 15 or something.
i do think that the ivr has something to do with that, in the sense that i think it’s more accurate at determining undecideds (because you don’t have agents pushing for an answer), but less clear about soft votes. so, you get this different kind of measurement.
you’re not really seeing much of a difference here with nanos, outside the margins. and, a 33-33 national tie really isn’t a close race, if the liberals are at 45% in ontario. but, i think it’s the answer to the volatility.
the correction i would suggest would be for ivr pollsters to be explicit about undecideds. mainstreet does this, and it’s usually pretty illuminating. translating, ekos would have:
liberals: 30.8
conservatives: 30.0
ndp: 21.0
undecideds: 8.1
and, while that may seem to be even less consistent, what it’s suggesting is simply something we already know: the conservatives are basically flat at 30, and the swing on the left is pretty weak in terms of party loyalty. of course, keeping in mind caveats about small sample sizes, large regional margins and the volatility of daily polling due to it.
it may seem weird that i’m not doing that with the phones, but what i’m saying is that what this method seems to do is really understand real undecideds as a distinct category, rather than as something to distribute proportional to the decideds, the way that phones tend to. it’s the difference between an agent prodding and not. although, ekos doesn’t have the high undecideds the way mainstreet does (although i still don’t know what “invalid response” means, and the two sum roughly to what mainstreet gets in the undecideds.). maybe it’s the blended sample, i don’t know. i just know it’s the only thing that really seems correlated with conservative numbers.