Why Pundits Are Already Wrong about 2015

There are two misleading memes about the next federal election that lurk just beneath the surface, barely acknowledged -- but confusing our understanding of what lies ahead.

The first is that the Conservatives, even though they are down in the polls, have a hidden strength: a lock on the 30 seats that will be added to the House of Commons in 2015 through redistribution.

The second is that the emergence of Justin Trudeau, and the surge his party has enjoyed in the polls, mean that the possibility of cooperation between the Liberals and the NDP is dead.

These two memes are contradictory to a degree, but since they're seldom acknowledged explicitly anyway, that doesn't seem to trouble anyone.

Let me take them each in turn.

New seats in the Tory bag? Hang on...

In 2015, the House of Commons will grow from its current 308 members to 338 to accommodate areas where the population is growing. Six of those seats are in Alberta, 15 in Ontario, six in British Columbia and three in Quebec.

If you follow federal politics, then you've heard this story about redistribution: Not only are the six new Alberta seats an undisputed gift to the Conservatives, but most of the rest actually appear in rapidly growing suburban areas where the party does well.

The Globe and Mail did its calculations and reported that "no matter how the parties are doing in the polls, Prime Minister Stephen Harper may be starting the next campaign with an electoral advantage."

According to the Globe, if Canadians voted in the same patterns in 2015 as they did in 2011, the Conservatives would pick up 22 of the 30 new seats.

Have you spotted the logic problem? The Globe tells us that the Conservatives likely would have an edge in the new seats no matter how the parties are doing in the polls. But it uses the 2011 election results for its projections.

As everyone knows, the Conservatives are not doing as well in the polls today as they did at the ballot box in 2011. Moreover, as we all should remember, our first-past-the-post electoral system tends to reward frontrunners with extra seats. That's how Stephen Harper won a majority with just 40 per cent of the vote. (Is this a bug or a feature of first-past-the-post? A question for another day.)

Bryan Breguet, a Ph.D. candidate at UBC, took the trouble to test the proposition that the Conservative redistribution bonus is sturdy even in the face of changing polls. Turns out it isn't.

He used two recent, fairly typical polls, one from EKOS and another from Abacus, showing the Liberals ahead nationally, followed by the Conservatives and the NDP fairly close behind. He then deployed a seat projection model.

Essentially, what the model found was that the Liberals were slight beneficiaries from redistribution at these levels of popular support, in part because many of the new seats are in areas of southern Ontario and the Lower Mainland of B.C. that currently seem ripe for a Liberal revival.

In this scenario, the Liberals would win 14 of the additional seats, and the Conservatives and NDP would each take eight.

His conclusion: "Who benefits from the increased number of seats is essentially a question of which party finishes first in terms of votes."

Well, there's a shockeroo.

Only fools rule out cooperation

The second meme strikes close to my preoccupations. I wrote a book a couple of years ago arguing for cooperation between the Liberals and the New Democrats.

The idea has waxed and waned, flourishing during the two parties' leadership campaigns and then being squelched once Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau won. It is plain enough -- and I completely accept this -- that both parties believe that 2015 could be a critical election for them and have no intention of cozying up with their rivals in the meantime.

But as the blogger tcnorris has pointed out, the surge in Liberal support since Trudeau became leader of his party seems to have obscured the fact that the NDP continues to perform better than it has at any time in its history -- other than in the 2011 election.

Although the Liberals usually have led in the polls since Trudeau's accession, they seldom have edged into majority government territory. Most seat projections based on current polling show them well short of a majority and, if anything, the range among the three leading parties seems to be tightening.

The fact that cooperation between the parties and their leaders is not imminent seems to have obscured the possibility -- the likelihood, even -- that there will be a minority government after 2015, as there was after three of the last four elections.

In that situation, the parties will have to choose with whom they cooperate and on what terms.

In the last election, Jack Layton was clear that he was open to cooperation after an election, presumably with the Liberals. Then-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff tried to waffle, avoided answering the question, then announced that the Liberal party would have no truck with the NDP.

That was a foolish position, and probably one that would not have been sustainable had there been another minority Parliament.

In other words, parties will probably have to cooperate after the 2015 election -- unless they want to see Canadian politics descend into the dysfunctional mess we've see south of the border and, at times, here at home in the first decade of this century.

Voters and the media should be pressing the parties hard to explain their approach to cooperation -- including who their preferred partners might be in the event we return to minority government in 2015.