hopefully, more candidates that are running a distant third or fourth will drop out. it should help to minimize vote splitting.

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/cheryl-thomas-liberal-candidate-resigns-1.3251338

riding polls suggest that the ndp is likely to win one seat in edmonton, and the liberals might have a chance at one seat in calgary.

sorry: that is one seat on top of linda duncan's, for a total of two.

when riding model projections contradict riding polls, you want to take the riding polls, not the riding model projections. riding polls are direct measurement. riding model projections are really a kind of artistic expression.

if you'd like to publish some riding data, i'd be happy to see it. but, the data is as it is, and it simply does not point towards gains by the opposition parties in alberta at this time.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-change-in-the-air-alberta-1.3250557

(lost post)

that is not reliable riding data. that is a riding model projection, which is an artist's rendition of a possible election outcome.

you can access actual riding data here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_in_Canadian_constituencies,_42nd_Canadian_Election#Alberta

the riding projections take province-wide data and then try to guess where it is.

now, honestly? sure: it makes sense to think the increase in non-conservative votes would be centered in the cities. however, the riding data says that this is wrong. so, where is it, then?

well, i've been leaning towards the idea that there's a hidden force at play (chp. socred, libertarian; i'm guessing, it's not remotely clear) and that there really isn't an increase in the other parties' vote totals, it just looks like that due to the shrinking useable sample. but, i would need to see a boost in "other" in alberta and saskatchewan for that to be true, and it's not panning out.

the liberals are an almost solely urban party. the ndp really aren't. they've always done well in the rural areas of western canada. and, the ndp won some rural seats at the provincial level.

if that's the case, i wouldn't expect to see any seat changes

it makes a little direct sense, too.

who is more affected by tar sands pollution: a pothead university student in calgary, or a farmer halfway between lethbridge and medicine hat?

i have to agree with the dominant opinion expressed here. we've got all kinds of important things in front of us, and you're running stories on this? for ratings?

are you going to be proud of yourself if this becomes the ballot question? and, how does that make the country look to the rest of the world?

if this is honestly galvanizing your vote, please have the presence of mind to realize that you're not informed and stay home, instead.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/niqab-ban-zunera-ishaq-1.3249495

(lost post)

well, he wouldn't be able to do that if the media didn't help him along with it. we all know how harper works, and expect certain tactics from him. but, if this is the ballot question, the media will be squarely and unambiguously to blame for it.

(lost post)

a large percentage of people will allow the ballot question to be defined for them. it is the media that has insisted upon it, and will be responsible for it if it happens.

(lost post)

i do get your point. and i don't exactly want to call people brainless sheep; i don't think that i need to in order to get the point across about defining a *question*. there's a thousand things on the table. but, we tend to collectively pick an issue or two and then collectively vote in that context. if the media presents the election as a referendum on wearing a scarf at a ceremony, that's what the election will be in the minds of many people.

things are getting better with the internet, but we're still bottle-necked by the media as an information source. and, things are happening in real-time. there's not a library anybody can go to to get election information. we're reliant on the filter we're presented with. all of us.

well, this happened once before. in 2007, mario dumont in the adq got around 31% of the vote. but, the adq is a sovereigntist party, so that is an underestimation; federal conservative voters would often vote liberal at the provincial level. if you split the conservative numbers in half and add it to the bloc numbers, you're still barely approaching that 31% that the adq got. it's not clear if that's an actual ceiling, either.

but what that means is that the ndp must have attracted a significant number of adq voters, and also that the core of remaining bloc support right now is actually adq support - not pq support.

you also have to keep in mind that the ndp picked up at least 10% of the swing they got in 2011 from the liberals, and that this seems to have largely gone back to the liberals. they're consistently polling at or above where they were in 2008.

that means that, if they are pushed down to their core & bloc swing from 2011, it's around 30% - and that is not much higher than where the liberals are running, according to some polls. that would be with the bloc running where they were last election, the liberals running a bit above where they were in 2008 and more or less ignoring the conservatives [i'm taking that bump skeptically for now; let's see what the next batch of polls says].

it's easy to assign the bleed to the liberals on a general perception that the ndp is the new bloc, and it's easy to assign the swing back to the bloc as being soft votes that they picked up *after* the election defaulting back to where they were four years ago.

but, if you realize that there's no way to crunch the numbers without concluding that the ndp was getting adq support, you realize how fragile their lead really was. but, duceppe may be cutting off his nose, here. the bloc had to move left in the 90s for a reason. this may boost their numbers a little, but, in the end, it may end up recreating the same barrier to governance that the pq is seeing with the charter: it works to whip up certain kind of votes, but it makes them unelectable to far more people.

if the ndp and bloc split the sovereigntist vote, this will benefit the conservatives in some areas and the liberals in many more areas.

riding modelling is very difficult with three competitive parties. it's almost impossible with four competitive parties. popular vote totals start to become meaningless. if this stabilizes with the ndp around 30, the liberals around 25, the bloc around 25 and the conservatives around 20? the ndp could easily finish fourth in the seat count, as they lose riding after riding to the liberals and conservatives on the ndp-bloc split, and get beaten by the bloc in staunchly sovereigntist ridings.

as it is, i'm convinced that the models have been exaggerating the ndp seat totals by about ten seats, mostly at the expense of the liberals (because the models are already being generous to the conservatives). if the liberals keep that 10-15%, as small as a 5% swing back to the bloc over recent numbers (which would still be less than the bloc got in 2011) could absolutely destroy the ndp in the urban core up the st. lawerence, and create havoc up the ottawa, too. and, a 10% swing back to where the bloc were in 2011 could wipe them out - purely on the strength of federalist voters returning to the liberals.

as for the ad strategy? it's more right-wing strategizing. strong leaders. well, it's the corner he's painted himself into. he's at least probably right that he's fighting for conservative votes, be they "tim horton's socialists" or red tories. it's desperate; if it works in swinging conservatives to the ndp, it actually helps the liberals throughout most of ontario.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tom-mulcair-justin-trudeau-campaign-ndp-1.3248885

i agree that voters would likely respond well.

the problem is that mulcair doesn't agree with you.

rabble.ca/columnists/2015/09/waiting-elephant-to-be-mentioned-2015-election

there's something seriously wrong when you can make a general comment like this about all muslims with total impunity, but you're immediately thrown out when you make a specific comment like this about a specific sect of jews. you need to be careful when you're speaking on the topic. but, this is less offensive (and less wrong) than positions taken by romeo saganash and other quebec ndp candidates because it is specific rather than general.

i mean, if i said something like "isis militants are misogynists", nobody is going to argue with me. there are radical, violent and racist jewish sects - just as there are radical, violent and racist muslim and christian sects.

the whole point, here, is the need to isolate specific subpopulations, rather than generalize across entire faiths.

www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/09/24/stefan-jonasson-ndp_n_8193280.html

nobody in the toronto 18 planned to blow up anything. rather, undercover police officers created the entire plot from scratch, and then arrested a bunch of children for agreeing to take part in it, on the urging of those police officers.

www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/09/29/bill-c-24-trudeau-conservative-attack-ad-munk_n_8216700.html

i'm not going to argue with you directly; you made assumptions and came to reasonable conclusions from them. but, i'd argue it's more likely that a scheme such as this would create a groupthink shift of otherwise tory voters than a backlash of retreat to the conservatives. that is, if unhappy conservatives and red tory voters saw a unified force develop, i think they'd be likely to support it, and that could push the conservatives into the mid 20s. if you wanted to do this right as a probabilistic calculation, you'd have to integrate the possibility that it would take votes away from the tories into your calculations, as well. you're consequently working with an incomplete sample space, which is skewing your numbers - you're only considering a fraction of the possible outcomes.

www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/09/30/vote-splitting-mulcair-trudeau-harper_n_8220820.html

you know, i'm not really sure that people know what a citizenship ceremony is.

this is a citizenship ceremony:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfnr4JWrImE&lc

pretty boring, huh?

you sure this is important to you?

www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/09/29/mulcair-niqab-policy-ndp-quebec_n_8216898.html

it's the prime directive.

www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/whats-up-in-space-rovers-are-forbidden-from-visiting-parts-of-mars-heres-why/57977/

the canadian election in a nutshell:

i haven't regularly watched anything on network television since they cancelled the x-files. closest thing was the daily show, but it's not the same genre.

i've been pointing out for a while that modern pop music is on the same level of musical abstraction as a traditional nursery rhyme. this is one of the better examples.