If I were slightly more cynical than I am, I might think that they hope the CPC doesn’t win, because if Trudeau is no longer PM, it takes away their best scapegoat for finding who to blame for their own failures. Can’t go railing on about how “Trudope and the LIE-berals” are killing Alberta because they hate Oil&Jesus, if it’s O’Toole in the hot seat.
If.
Today is the big day. I see we have one prediction already so I throw my hate in on that.
PPC: 0. However, they will end up with a respectable amount of the popular vote. Probably more than the polls are showing.
Green: 1
NDP: 36
BQ: 32
C: 121
L: 148
Reasoning: I think the NDP will do strongly. The leader is popular. The NDP supporters that voted for Trudeau to prevent the Conservatives are weakening in their support for strategic voting. They’re tired of him and want to vote their conscience. PPC are going to do better than the polls suggest. Enough to give a couple of Conservatives seats to the NDP in the west (and maybe even more than I’m expecting). O’Toole has floundered in the past few days. He’s flip flopped and avoided questions especially related to COVID. COVID is much like climate change. Most people want responsible action, except the (dumb side) conservative base that see it as whatever the right-wing media tells them to think, which is “But my freedoms!” or “It is a hoax!” or whatever. The COVID surge and recent actions by Kenney and Moe hurt the Conservatives and will cause a surge in PPC.
Am I right? Probably not, but it is how I see it. 
The poor handling by the Alberta and Saskatchewan conservative parties has knee capped O’Toole’s personal responsibility approach. That’s not going to do anything in those 2 provinces - the conservatives will sleepwalk into 50 odd seats out there - but I think it’s going to punish them in Ontario.
I’m curious how the Greens do. Annamie Paul seems to have come across well but the party is a disaster. I’d guess she wont win her seat but they keep one or two in BC. I think she’d be an excellent party leader if she’s given time but I’m not sure she’ll have it.
I don’t know. There seems to be a general sentiment, at least where I live, to either vote PPC or NDP. I think there may be enough of a draw to the PPC that the NDP squeak by in ridings that might have otherwise been solid C wins. Certainly where I live that seems to be the case. The NDP are hot on the heels of the C, and this is a pretty reliable C riding. Certainly, I’m voting NDP to try to oust my MP. Politics aside, of all the ridings in which I’ve lived, I can honestly say he’s the worst for engagement with the community and such. I would vote against him almost on those grounds.
If we’re doing predictions, I’ll make up some numbers:
Lib 160
Con 115
NDP 30
Bloc 31
Green 2
With the Liberals winning the popular vote by a few percent. Not really based on any actual analysis. 
If the PPs do well in the popular vote (we might need to define what “well” would mean) it will need a bit of digging to see if that vote is spread thinly across many ridings or is deep but restricted to a few ridings. The Bloc Québécois does “well” in the popular vote, but those votes are restricted to Quebec. My guess is PP support is limited to a few ridings, but the numbers in those ridings might be higher than we’d expect. But it’s just a guess.
I’d guess the exact opposite. There will certainly be some regional variation, with them getting a higher percentage of the overall vote in Alberta than in Ontario, but I expect their support will be largely uniform at the riding levels. Variations between rural and urban ridings will likely be far less pronounced than the Alberta vs. Ontario vote.
After all, their support pretty much comes from the ignorant Conspiracy Theorist demographic, and those guys are pretty much uniformly distributed over the country.
2019 was:
| Party | Leader | % | Seats | ± |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Liberal | Justin Trudeau | 33.1% | 157 | -20 |
| Conservative | Andrew Scheer | 34.3% | 121 | +26 |
| Bloc Québécois | Yves-François Blanchet | 7.6% | 32 | +22 |
| New Democratic | Jagmeet Singh | 16.0% | 24 | -15 |
| Green | Elizabeth May | 6.6% | 3 | +1 |
| People’s | Maxime Bernier | 1.6% | 0 | -1 |
My projection:
Liberal 155
Cons 124
BQ 32
NDP 26
Green 1
PPC 0
It does appear we will end up with pretty much the same Parliament, making this a ridiculous waste of time.
Agreed, but how long before O’Toole (or his successor) refuses to back the Liberals on a confidence motion?
The NDP will, as they have been for the last two years, so nothing will change in that regard either.
At the moment, CBC is calling:
| Party | % | Seats | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Liberal | 31.5% | 155 | 17%-ish percent chance of majority. |
| Conservative | 31.0% | 119 | 25% of them winning the most seats, 1% chance of majority. |
| Bloc Québécois | 6.8% | 31 | |
| New Democratic | 19.1% | 32 | |
| Green | 3.5% | 1 | |
| People’s | 7.0% | 0 | |
| Other | 1.1% | 0 |
So compared to last year, Liberals and Conservatives have lost (predictable) momentum, Greens have had their infighting, with PPC and NDP getting the most out of it.
I’m a trifle perturbed at how much of a potentail spoiler the PPC is. Though I’ll make no secret of my special and personal dislike of Bernier.
I don’t know Maxime Bernier personally but I despise populist movements like this. It’s proto-fascism. The populist always tries to gain power by being popular, and if they do, they feel they deserve to be in power because they SHOULD be popular.
Turnout will be low.
Well, maybe “personally” is a bit strong. But he managed to lose a secret document I had a hand in creating. He took secret papers home and lost them.
Whenever I see his face, I can only think of the guy who managed to lose secret documents at home. This is the guy who wants to be Prime Minister.
I was in a Facebook argument yesterday on a thread in a local Jewish group about which leader is best for the Jewish community. This woman was going on and on about how she’s voting PPC because there are so many immigrants in her neigbourhood “it doesn’t even look like Canada”. I called her out for being racist and that similar things were probably said about my family who arrived between 1905 and 1925.
She’s an immigrant from Israel. 
I am both happy and unhappy the PPC exists. On the one hand, the vote is split pretty badly between Liberals, NDP and Green. Having a counterbalance between the Conservatives and PPC is a good thing overall because then NDP voters may not feel as much pressure to vote Liberal to prevent a Conservative win. The more people vote their mind instead of strategy I think it is good.
It opens up the possibility of the crazies leaving the Conservative party as it gives them somewhere to go. Hence, this might allow the Conservative party to stop pandering to them. Maybe. Sadly, just like the Liberals try to capture some NDP vote by pandering to them, the Conservatives will try to capture the PPC vote going forward. Still I think it is better situation overall for the Conservative party since they may be able to recapture Liberal voters that left the party when it moved to the right (e.g., me).
Of course, the problem is the PPC are just so repugnant. I hate to see their viewpoints given a voice. They are pretty much everything that’s wrong with humanity. On the other hand, it is useful sometimes for people to self identify themselves as being everything that’s wrong with humanity.
Some would argue that every election is a ridiculous waste of time. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
True, but I think it is still important that we get to pick our boss as irrelevant as it might be. It is like the GD thread on democracy v tyranny. The very fact that we have a democracy at all keeps some of the worst that can happen in tyranny at bay.
Anti-science, Anti-immigration, Anti-gay rights, Anti-vaccine. They are the party of hateful stupid bigots, who are against pretty much everything in the social contract. They are the selfish, petty, nasty boils in our communities. As a horrible human being, Bernier is a perfect leader for them.
I think the Conservatives are lucky to be rid of them. Thank God they don’t have to pander to that scum.
The way I see it, their bump in popularity in this election is pretty much a one-time thing. They’re the one party coming out hard against all the pandemic measures, and they’re using the fringe idiots’ dislike of those measures to distract them from the more odious, and more permanent, parts of their positions, such as the racist anti-immigrant stuff.
After the debacle of this election, I think if Trudeau wins, he will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the next election, so unless there’s a major failure of confidence in Trudeau in the House, we’ll see close to a full term for this new government. If O’Toole wins, things might fall apart easier, but if that doesn’t happen, there’s no way he risks losing the government any sooner than he has to. So, 4 or 5 years down the line, the pandemic crap should be well behind us, and the PPC will be back to scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to convince Canadians that racism&anger are the ways to go.
So I expect they be back to their sub-2% support the next election.