Poll Out for BC Only

The Mustel Group took a poll of people in BC and their federal voting intentions. They surveyed 750 people from September 2nd to 8th. The poll was released today - why this long after the survey, I have no idea.

• Conservatives - 39%
• NDP - 25%
• Liberals - 24%
• Greens - 12%

+- 3.6%

18% undecided, which means there are people that answered with a party that are not going to vote in the election.

This poll gives us a strong measure of BC overall at the start of the election, much better than most of the break outs of the national polls where the BC sample is only 100 to 150 people. Only Ekos gives us any results that comparable. Their tracking poll is getting about 455 BC voters. Actually, their September 11th poll had 1152 respondents in BC out of 4367 nationwide - I had not noticed this high spike in BC numbers. I need to account for this in my other polling analysis as this makes the poll more like a 3600 nationwide poll and not a 5000 as I had assumed.

Working with the Mustel numbers, discounted because they are getting stale, the recent Ekos numbers at full value and discounting their earlier, and other poll samples very much discounted because they are so small, the current level of support in BC of the political parties is:

• Conservatives - 39%
• NDP - 25%
• Liberals - 22%
• Greens - 14%

In seats this would indicate the following

• Conservatives - 26
• Liberals - 2 Vancouver Centre and Vancouver South
  
• NDP - 8

The only wildcard I see in this is Blair Wilson in West Vancouver - Sunshine Coast - Sea to Sky Country as a possible elected Green.

More on polls

I wonder why the Nanos numbers in the polls show the Liberals in the range of 30% - since the start of September they are the only company that has the Liberals at 30% or more. If one takes their numbers out, things look worse for the Liberals than most people are saying. Nanos seems to be about 3-4 percentage points than the others for the Liberals. Nanos looks like they have a systemic error in favour of the Liberals. Because of this seemingly systemic error, I will be reducing the weight I give Nanos polls by 30%.

Then there is Harris/Decima - their numbers look high for the Conservatives. They have had the Conservatives at over 40% twice. Only Segma's September 6th poll has the Conservatives at over 40%. Harris/Decima does not seem to have an ongoing systemic error in favour of the Conservatives, but at the same time their numbers have been more erratic. I will be assigning a 20% reduction in weight to their polls.

Now companies that crop up with polls, such as Segma, will be assigned a 50% reduction in weight until they have a track record.

To date the Ekos polling seems to be most consistent. They also have the largest polls and the only ones with decent regional break out numbers.

Using the latest Ekos numbers for BC, 38 CPC, 27 NDP, 20 Liberal and 14 Green, means that the Liberals will be reduced to one or two seats in BC. Vancouver South is their only seat they can count on and they may be able to hold onto Vancouver Centre.

The NDP has a decent chance to pick up Vancouver Kingsway and Esquimalt Juan de Fuca. The NDP may finally be able to pick off Vancouver Centre for the first time after putting in more than a generation of effort into the attempt.

The Greens are not out of the running in West Vancouver - Sunshine Coast - Sea to Sky Country. The party is running at 14% and has some benefit from Blair Wilson in the riding. Should the Greens maintain 14% at the polls, they will come third in some of the ridings in BC and push the Liberals into fourth.

The Conservatives should see an increase of five seats from BC.

The Economic Issue For the Federal Election

The biggest economic issue for the federal election is the Mountain Pine Beetle. The economic cost to Canada from this one pest is in the order of three billion cubic metres of wood. The value of this wood to the Canadian economy is about one trillion dollars.

This is is just from the lodgepole pine in BC, Canada's single most important forestry tree. If it does spread east, the economic damage to the country could be as much as 30% to 40% higher.

The impact is going to be felt over a long time and not in one year. We are looking at a loss of close to half of BC's annual allowable cut within the next ten years. That is 1/4 of the Canadian forestry industry.

The loss to the federal and provincial governments will be about $4 billion a year in revenues. The economy will have come up with an extra $12 billion in annual economic activity to make up for the lose of forestry.

Forestry is least goverment subsidised industry in this country and not surprisingly the most productive sector in our economy. Our dollar is dependent on the export earnings of forestry and engery. Knock out one large part of this, the least subsidised part, and there will be a long term negative impact on the value of the Canadian dollar. Without the roughly $40 billion in forestry exports Canada would have a trade deficit and more importantly a current account deficit - we would have more money flowing out of Canada than in.

The following communities will be dramatically reduced in size

• Quesnel
• Williams Lake
• 100 Mile House
• Vanderhoof
• Smithers
• Burns Lake
• Mackenzie
• Fort St James
• Clearwater
• Blue River
• McBride
• Valemount
• Fraser Lake
• Houston
• Merritt
• Princeton

These towns are likely to see more than 1/2 their populations leave by 2025. 50 000 to 80 000 people will leave these communities by that date. The schools will close, the hospitals will close, the stores will close, the houses will be empty.

Prince George and Kamloops will both stagnate.

This is the biggest demographic economic re-location in Canada since the depression.

This is a bigger problem than all the fishery problems we have seen. This is a national economic disaster and no one is making it the number one issue in Ottawa.

The Decline of the Federal Liberals

In a Canadian election it is important to be either first or second because you gain a lot in those slots from strategic voting. From 1993 to 2004 the Federal Liberals benefited from strategic voting like no one else has ever managed to in Canadian history.

In the five last elections, there is only one province in the country where the Liberals were not consistently first or second and that was in Saskatchewan. In 1997 the Liberals came a close third in Nova Scotia but were shut out of the seats. 28.4% of the vote and 0 of 11 seats.

In 2008 the Liberals go into the election as acknowledged third place party in BC, Saskatchewan and Quebec. They go into the election being the ones having to fight against strategic voting in those provinces. Over 40% of Canadians live in the provinces where the Liberals are not a top tier party.

This is new territory for the Liberals as they have to do as the NDP has always had to do, justify why you should vote Liberal when this will only help elect more Conservatives. They have to campaign in a very different way and they do not even realize it. If they miss the boat on this, as it looks like they will, they will see their vote drop further close to October 14th. Polling behind the NDP nationally is much more likely at this point than becoming any sort of a threat to Stephen Harper.

Weighting of Polls

I was asked how I weight the polls. To give you an example, here is how I weighted the last few days.

Adjusting for size:

• Ekos x 5.0
• Harris x 2.0
  
• Nanos x 2.0
  
• Angus Reid x 1.15
• Ipsos x 1.0

I give five times the weight to the Ekos results because theirs was a poll of 5000 people. I aggregate the Nanos and Harris/Decima daily tracking polls and give them a weight as if they were one poll each of 2000 people. For Ipsos and Angus Reid, the weighting reflects the number of respondents in their one poll.

Doing this gives the following results:

• Conservatives - 37.4%
• Liberals - 26.8%
• NDP - 17.1%
• Bloc - 7.9%
• Greens - 10.2%

It is important to do this because Harris/Decima has a new tracking result everyday and seems to have the Conservatives higher than the rest and Nanos has a new result each day but with the Liberals higher than the rest. Neither company asked as many people as Ekos did and therefore should not hold as much weight in the averaging.

The above results show the Greens as the big winners and the Liberals and Bloc both suffering.

If we look at the CTV/Globe Battleground ridings and average out the results over a week, which they are not doing I think should be, we see some clear trends.

In BC the Conservatives have gained only marginally on 2006, just over two percentage points. But their gain is more than matched by a fall for the NDP and Liberals.

The NDP is down marginally but the Liberals are down more than a 1/4 of their vote. This is a huge problem for them as they hold six of the ten BC Battleground ridings.

In Ontario the Conservatives have a much bigger gain in the vote, they are up almost six percentage points on 2006.

The Liberals have lost 1/4 of their vote in Ontario as they have done in BC.

The NDP is also down from their 2006 support.

In Quebec Conservatives are up more than either BC or Ontario and very close to the levels of Bloc support. The Bloc has seen their vote fall by 20%.

The Liberals once again are down a 1/4 of their vote in Quebec.

These trends in the battleground ridings are very bad news for Stephane Dion. If this were to extrapolate to the rest of the country, 22.5% support for the federal Liberals is realistic.

Second Election Sign Stolen

I have never had this problem before, but I have now had two Jack McClintock signs stolen from in front of my house. The second one lasted about 48 hours. I replaced it today as I was gone for the weekend.

I know that I live in a very pro NDP neighbourhood and that supporting a Conservative is going to bug some people, but I had not expected to lose signs this fast. In the 2006 election my sign made it through the whole election.

What this says to me is that there are politically aware people out there on the left that are worried the Conservatives could win in Victoria.

Views from a Weekend Trip to Salmon Arm

I had to go up to Salmon Arm this weekend. The trip gave me a chance to see how the sign war was going through various parts of BC. What I saw surprised me.

In very few ridings that I passed through were there many signs up. I did not see much evidence of the election on the ground in the areas that I passed through. The party that had the most signs up, and the only ones in front of private homes that I saw, were the Conservatives. I saw at last some for each Conservative candidate in the ridings I passed through.

For the Greens I saw a few small signs in Salmon Arm and some large Andrew Lewis ones along highway 17 here in town.

For the Liberals I saw a few large Briony Penn signs next to Andrew Lewis's signs, some for Suhk Dahliwal in Newton-North Delta, and some for whomever was running against Nina Grewal.

For the NDP I saw some in the Salmon Arm area, in the riding were Nina Grewal is and some in Kamloops. Where I did not see them was in Saanich and the Gulf Islands, a riding where the NDP came second last time and has had Julian West nominated as their candidate for months now, if not longer. With the NDP doing better than the Liberals in BC, it is surprising I do not see them plastering every inch of BC with their signs right now.