Election preview: Canada

Canada goes to the polls tonight in an election that has unexpectedly become much more interesting than people thought at the beginning of the year.

Yesterday we noted that Peter Dutton has been going downhill badly in the polls. His Canadian counterpart, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, needs a similarly modest swing for victory, but he started with some significant advantages over Dutton. He was taking on not a first-term government but one that was stale and unpopular, having been in office since 2015. On all accounts Poilievre is considerably more competent and charismatic than Dutton, and he doesn’t have to contend with preferential voting allowing his opponents to pool their vote.

As a result, four months ago the Conservatives were in an apparently unassailable position, leading by around twenty points in the opinion polls, whereas Dutton’s Liberal-National coalition was never more than slightly ahead – and given the strength of the crossbench was probably never in a winning position.

But there’s one big difference that ran the other way and now seems to have overwhelmed the rest. Donald Trump’s America is very close to Canada and a long way from Australia. So while Trump’s first months in office have hurt both leaders, the impact on Poilievre was much greater, with a disastrous fall in the polls that coincided with the advent of a new prime minister, cleanskin Liberal leader Mark Carney.

The good news for Poilievre is that the Trump effect seems to have spent itself and the polls have narrowed again. There’s no sign of that yet in Australia, but with four days longer to run it may still happen. The Conservatives were already better placed in the betting market than the Coalition was, and now are considerably more so: Sportsbet this morning has them at about 11-4 against, compared to about 13-3 for the Coalition.

Nonetheless, the Liberals are going to be almost impossible to beat. At the last election, in 2021, they trailed the Conservatives by more than a percentage point, 32.6% to 33.7%, but they still won more seats: with adjustment for the subsequent redistribution, they won 157 to 126 out of a total 343. Support from the more left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) with its 24 seats (off 17.8%) kept them in power, and if need be they could also deal with the separatist Quebec Bloc (7.6% and 34 seats).

This time the polls put the Liberals in the lead by around four points, which should be enough for a majority or very close to it. As always happens when the electorate is polarised, it looks like being bad for the minor parties, and especially the NDP, which is consistently polling below 10% and may win only a handful of seats.

Canada sprawls across five and a half time zones, but polling hours are staggered so as to reduce the difference in polling times. Polls will therefore close tomorrow between 9am and midday, eastern Australian time, with the biggest provinces, Ontario and Quebec, closing at 11.30am. Pre-poll votes, of which there have been a lot, can be counted from two hours before the polls close, which may assist in getting results in a reasonable time.