Is this country in for a political shakeup the likes of which we haven’t seen in years?
It’s certainly easy to get that feeling. The “unthinkable” happened in Alberta, and one has to wonder if that was a seismic tremor that is signaling a larger earthquake to come.
The winds of change seem to be in the air, and I don’t envy an incumbent government having to test the voters right now, but that task falls first to Prime Minister Stephen Harper this October.
While political polls must be taken with a large grain of salt, federal Conservative strategists have to be alarmed at what four polls of individual ridings in B.C. uncovered last week.
The polling done in B.C. by Insights West, on behalf of the environmental organization the Dogwood Initiative, revealed something more startling: an apparent collapse of support for the Conservative party right across the board.
In four coastal ridings newly created by redistribution, the Conservative vote appears to be cut in half from what it was in the 2011 election. Even if we attach some healthy skepticism to polls, a loss of this proportion may signal that the electorate is exhibiting some extreme volatility, which is not good news for a sitting government.
Before you dismiss all political polling, consider this: this polling by Insights West was done the old-fashioned way, using methods employed back when polling was generally very accurate, time and again.
The pollster, Mario Canseco, used telephones to reach a random sample of 301 voters in each riding and ensured his sample had a strong base of older voters (since they vote in much greater numbers than younger voters).
If these riding polls showed a tight race between the parties, it would be hard to know what to read of them. That’s because if you take the 2011 voting results and “transpose” them over the new riding boundaries, it would show four tight races between the Conservatives and the NDP.
The Conservatives would be the incumbent in two ridings (Courtney-Alberni and Burnaby North-Seymour) while the NDP would be the incumbent in the other two (Cowichan-Malahat-Langford and Esquimalt-Saanich-Sooke).
The Conservatives insist they will remain competitive because the other two options – the Liberals and the NDP – will split the vote in enough ridings for them to win with about 40 per cent of the vote.
But another scenario may be developing: the Conservatives’ support begins dropping to the point where that split on the other side doesn’t matter any longer.
Keith Baldrey is chief political reporter for Global B.C.
