Toronto and Canada: One vs. the Others

The municipal race currently 'heating up' in Toronto, an election campaign that makes the American presidential race seem like a sprint, is an interesting paradox: it's by far the most partisan non-partisan electoral system I've ever seen. While there may tehnically be no parties on the bill, it still feels very much like a  party system. And furthermore, as superficially different as they might look on the outside, it reminds me most of our federal political landscape.

How? Well, post-Sarah Thomson there are now four major candidates. Similarly, federally we have four major candidates outside of Québec. Seemingly a healthy multipartisan democracy. But one which, after the battle lines are drawn, still seems quite polar. Still seems 'us vs. them', or rather 'us vs. him'.

Neither Toronto as a whole nor Canada as a whole is especially conservative. Within the '416', in fact, conservative viewpoints (small-c intentional but capital-C too) form a distinct minority of the public discourse. In both cases, the front-runner is a distinctly conservative candidate, but in both cases they are running at the front with far less than 50% of the vote.

Whenever people are talking about Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and claiming to like one while hating the other, I am baffled. "But they taste the same!", I call out, and people disagree vehemently. "Put it this way," I say, "Compare Coke to Pepsi and, say, a glass of milk. Don't they seem the same now?"

Municipally and federally, it seems like the same kind of thing. Looking merely at Joe Pantolone, George Smitherman and Rocco Rossi, there seem to be a million differences between them, and in fact those three names alone do roughly represent the left, centre and right of the spectrum. Yet introduce front-runner Rob Ford into the equation, and suddenly the first three seem like mirror images of each other. How is this? Well, Rob Ford and Stephen Harper are both highly polarising figures, and the influence we inevitably must tolerate that comes from south of the border in waves familiarises us with the politics of polarisation. For a large variety of reasons, Rob Ford and Stephen Harper represent American-style politics in a way that our other candidates don't. I think to a certain degree the inability of the other candidates to catch onto this new dynamic, or their unwillingness to respond to it, is a good part of the reason they lag behind. Let's take a second to look at current polls:

• Federally, averaged for the month of September by threehundredeight.blogspot.com:
• Stephen Harper and the CPC: 33.4%
• The Non-Stephen Harpers: 65.0% (LPC: 29.6%, NDP: 15.2%, GPC: 10.2, BQ: 10.0)
• Others: 1.6% (I won't be so Manichaean as to lump everyone into the non-Stephen Harper camp, since some of these other voices might well be conservative; my point is that the four I listed above are very specifically not Stephen Harper; in other words, they are Coke, Pepsi, RC and Cott next to Harper's milk)
• Municipally, I can't find anything more recent than the one from 28 September here:
• Rob Ford: 28%
• The Non-Rob Fords: 47% (Smitherman: 23%, Pantalone: 10%, Rossi: 7% and the ghost of Thomson: 7%)
• Undecided: a whopping 20%

Similarly, even though Rossi is a rightist, he seems to have more in common with Smitherman and Pantalone than with his wingmate. Muncipal debates give the impression of Ford on one side and everyone else on the other, just as, federally, the 2008 leadership debates seemed to pit Harper against a 'gang of four'. And importantly, the poll I referenced put Ford ahead but also claimed that if it were a two-person race between Smitherman and Ford, Smitherman would win. I have to imagine if it were a two-person race between Ignatieff and Harper as well, that Harper could win.

But it's not. Neither race is bipartisan, and both races run the risk of seeing a man elected who is disliked by a majority of the electors: not a great way to establish a mandate.

What is there to do about it? Well, every time the opposition appears united against them, Harper and the Conservatives like to paint the other parties as a 'coalition', a strategy that I think might backfire if it succeeds in making the public familiar with, and used to, the idea of a 'coalition'. The truth is, though, that federally we are sooner or later going to have to get used to post-election coalitions; our electoral landscape is too fragmented to ever again see majorities on the horizon, and our ability to tolerate minority rule is being tested, it would appear. It's really only possible to envision a Liberal-NDP coalition at the moment, and indeed it is that very possibility that is mentioned so often you'd be excused for thinking it already exists. But there might be any kind of coalition in the future. They will come; as a country we have no choice.

But municipally? The election for mayor is the closest we in Canada get to American-style politics, because it's voting for an individual, in a very strict winner-takes-all fashion. There is no opportunity for coalition here: the losers go home, out of a job. True "Anyone-but-Ford" believers might claim that tactical voting is even more essential municipally than it is at other levels, and certainly tactical voting must be what Smitherman dreams of when he crawls into bed at night.

An Alternate-Vote system is probably the answer for mayoral races. I don't love AV, but it's tough to see an alternative in a winner-takes-all scenario. I don't suggest that (a) this is useful merely to keep out Rob Ford or that (b) every supporter of Pantolone or Rossi would by default put Smitherman higher than Ford on the list. Though three of the post-amalgamation mayoral races have been cakewalks (in one case with over 80% of the vote), I think future elections will be less so. AV would be useful not just now but subsequently. If FPTP would, at the moment, produce a Ford victory but AV would produce a Smitherman victory, that clearly indicates that voter intentions are not reflecting reality.

Which I think is a contributing factor to voter malaise. One thing that has Ford running first at the moment is that, for better or for worse, he's the only candidate that inspires much of a reaction at all either way. Otherwise this campaign has largely been a disappointment, and it's difficult to be anything but disspirited about it.

Canada: Multipartisanship per province

Here's a quick-and-cheap way to consider the extent to which any given province is truly multipartisan. It works like this: for each province, for the federal government and for the Yukon, I'll look at the most recent election and add together the percentage of popular vote for each of the top two parties. I've been thinking about it, and it really is a simple but ultimately practical test of true multipartisanship.

• 94.3%: Prince Edward Island: Liberals and PC.
• 91.3%: Newfoundland and Labrador: PC and Liberals.
• 88.2%: Saskatchewan: SaskParty and NDP.
• 88.0%: British Columbia, Liberals and NDP.
• 85.9%: Manitoba: NDP and PC.
• 83.3%: New Brunswick, PC and Liberals.
• 79.2%: Alberta, PC and Liberals.
• 77.3%: Québec, Liberals and PQ.
• 75.3%: Yukon, Yukon Party and Liberals.
• 73.9%: Ontario, Liberals and PC.
• 72.4%: Nova Scotia, NDP and Liberals.
• 63.9%: Federal, Conservatives and Liberals.

It didn't surprise me, looking at that list, that PEI was most bipartisan and that Nova Scotia was least. I was, however, surprised by how multipartisan Ontario appears as of the last election (and current polls are showing it even moreso). I also wasn't expecting the Federal election scene to trump the rest by almost ten percent - no surprise, thinking about it, but still quite telling about the current political reality in Canada.

I was also surprised to find that Western provinces by and large are not more multipartisan than the rest of the country, though of course in the West it's right-vs.-left as opposed to right-vs.-centre, confused by the fact that the rightmost party in Saskatchewan and BC uses a different name. Also interesting how the traditionally one-party hegemony in Alberta is not the case, as it shows up quite multipartisan by these standards. At the moment, of course, Alberta is more multipartisan than it has ever been before, with its whole electoral system in flux. If an election were held today it would be incredibly fascinating, whereas it's usually pretty sleepy cakewalks for the PCs.

New Brunswick and Disproportionality

Lately I've become interested in 'disproportionality', the extent to which a general election can produce a seat count in the House whose percentages differ from the percentages of the popular vote that produced them. If in an election, 48% of voters voted for Party A, 39% voted for Party B and 13% voted for Party C, and if that wound up with a House of Commons where 52% of the seats were filled with Party A members, 40% of the seats were Party B and the remaining 8% were party C, what would generally be considered relatively proportionate. By and large, there would be little dispute about whether the makeup of the House reflected the voting intentions of the people.

In fact, though, such proportionality is rare, particularly in Canada with its First-Past-the-Post and multiparty systems. Calls for abolition of FPTP (or 'winner-takes-all') election systems are strongest in multiparty systems; in bipartisan political systems, the effect is more minimal.

Canada is an interesting country, in that at the federal level and across each province, a number of parties vie for office. Federally, for example, we currently have five that can be called 'major'. Yet ultimately, federally and in most provinces it ultimately comes down to two parties with a realistic chance of governing and a group of others with, at best, a chance of holding sway in minority governments. The Atlantic provinces are an interesting case in point, ranging from PEI, the most truly bipartisan part of Canada, to Nova Scotia, which is perhaps the only legitimately multipartisan area of Canada at the moment. Somewhere in the middle lies New Brunswick.

For most of New Brunswick's history, it's been genuinely bipartisan: in recent years the NDP has at best been able to get one seat - the leader's - in the Legislative Assembly. Apart from that, and with one major exception (which I'll get to), the trend has been that in a provincial election the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals will combine for about 90% of the vote. In other words, the vast majority of people in New Brunswick see their elections on a strictly binary basis.

When this is the case, disproportionality changes in importance: when one party squeaks above fifty percent, disproportionality either doesn't really matter (is there a real difference between, say, 60% of the legislature or 70%?) or is of terrible importance (if the elections return a simple majority of votes for Party A but a simple majority of seats for Part B). While looking blandly bipartisan on the surface, New Brunswick actually has had quite an interesting electoral history:

• In both 1970 and 1974, the Progressive Conservatives got parliamentary majorities despite getting fewer votes than the Liberals, making fully eight years of majority government of questionable legitimacy.
• In 1987, a landslide 60.4% of the vote (compared to 28.6% for the PCs and 10.6% for the NDP) returned every single seat in the Assembly to the Liberal Party, leading to four years of unopposed government.
• The very next election in 1991 led to what appeared to be a complete restructuring of the electoral scene, as the Liberals got a second majority, but the upstart Confederation of Regions Party got eight seats, 21.2% of the vote and the status of Official Opposition, and both the PCs and the NDP has representation in a four-part parliament. Yet by the next election, the Liberals and the PCs were back to a combined vote of 82.5%.

One of the major talking points this time around was a return to multipartisanship. Theoretically, a rejuvenated NDP would become a major electoral presence, while the Green Party and the upstart People's Alliance would also be on hand to contest. At the outset of the campaign, it appeared that anything could happen. And the results? Well, that's a bit more difficult to gauge. A combined total of 16.7% of the vote for the three parties and independents looks like a victory for multipartisanship. And in fact it is - especially when the non-Liberal/PC numbers for the last election were 5.3%. Yet that 16.7% translated to no seats whatsoever - and New Brunswick is left again with a bipartisan Assembly, with only the PCs forming the government and only the Liberals in opposition.

I've become interested in the Gallagher Index, a tool to measure disproportionality. It gives a particular number, based on some fancy math resulting from the difference between percent of popular vote and percent of seats in the Legislative Assembly for each party.

I calculated it last night based on the numbers then posted on the CBC's website. It seems they have shifted a little bit, but at the moment I don't feel like recalculating the numbers. In any case:

• The PCs got 48.92% of the vote and 76.36% of the seats, a difference of 27.44 points.
• The Liberals got 34.45% of the vote and 23.64% of the seats, a difference of -10.81 points.
• The NDP got 10.29% of the vote and no seats, a difference of -10.29 points.
• The Greens got 4.54% of the vote and no seats, a difference of -4.54 points.
• The People's Alliance got 1.18% of the vote and no seats, a difference of -1.18 points.
• Independents got 0.62% of the vote and no seats, a difference of -0.62 points.

A little bit of number crunching gets, based on those mostly-accurate CBC numbers, a Gallagher Index of 22.34, which is remarkably high. Over the coming days I want to look at the Gallagher Index a bit more and compare results across provinces and across eras. At the moment, though, I'll finish up by calling attention to the fact that while the PCs did get a grossly overinflated percentage of seats, by and large it's tough to see the legitimacy being questioned: 48.92% (or 48.87% at the moment) is more than 14% above the Liberals and a hair's-breadth from being a simple majority. The lack of minor-party representation is problematic, and the Liberals' underperformance in number of seats cause for concern, but David Alward's mandate is not. He won the election, fair and square, and the parliamentary makeup shows that.

Québec: Who Supports the NDP in Québec?

So back to Québec. Leger Marketing / Le Devoir have a new poll out. Le Devoir's polls are cool because they're so comprehensive. They focus in great detail on a single province, and they poll federal and provincial intentions at the same time. They split the province into three, Greater Montréal, Greater Québec City and the rest of the province, and they divide results into Francophone and 'non-Francophone' (a three-way Franco, Anglo, Allo would be nice but the sample size would presumably be too small to be useful anyway). I'd love to see similarly detailed polling results for the rest of the country.

One thing that's interesting about the poll is the extent to which the appearance of near-hegemony federally by the BQ is not at all reflected provincially. Québec would stand to benefit from a more proportional method of representation at least as much as any other part of the country would. While they poll 36% province-wide, fourteen percentage points above their nearest rival, they have made little inroads mong non-Francos, who support them at 6% compared to 46% for the Liberals. They trail the Conservatives in and around Québec City, where Harper's party is polling a remarkable 37%. And yet the party polling first in one of Québec's two metropolises is polling fourth in the other. Averaging them out, the Conservatives are, bizarrely, at second province-wide and are currently the highest-polling federalist party. Incidentally, replace "BQ" with "PQ", "Conservatives" with "ADQ", and "Liberals" with, er, "Liberals", and you have rough provincial numbers too.

So Québec's all over the shop. Parties' support depends on region or on language. Yes, but with one very interesting exception. Let's look at the NDP's support in Québec:

• Province-wide: 17% (of decideds)
• Among Francophones: 17%
• Among Anglophones and Allophones: 14%
• In Greater Montréal: 18%
• In Greater Québec City: 15%
• In the rest of the province: 15%

Remarkable, isn't it? Looking at each of those six stats gives the BQ a range from 6% to 43%, the Liberals from 17% to 46% and the Conservatives from 16% to 37%. And yet province-wide in all of the above stats, the NDP's lowest is 14% and highest is 18%, a difference of four percentage points that itself undoubtedly falls within the margin of error.

It's an interesting statistic, one that further confounds the question of who exactly NDP supporters in Québec are. The answer appears to be 'everyone, in almost equal measure'.

By some standards, this is a bad poll for the NDP. Undoubtedly because of the long-gun registry issue, the NDP drop nationwide is certainly mirrored in Québec. The NDP remains fourth province-wide, which is no cause for celebration. When you're only polling in the high teens, even distribution of support is a terrible thing. It's tough, based on these polls, to see how the NDP can have any breakthroughs at all in Québec.

But the silver lining for them is this: it proves that the NDP are not merely a Montréal flirtation. It shows that their rather Anglo image seems to be dissipating within Québec, where their support among Francos is now higher than their support among Anglos: I saw a pro-Bill 101 poster recently and looked at the list of official sponsors and was pleased to note the "NPD" logo alone amongst federalist parties there, alongside the BQ, the PQ, QS and the ADQ. Their logo included the only maple leaf on the whole page. "Rest of Québec" is too monolithically large to be sure, but they seem to cross the urban/rural divide in Québec, while in the rest of Canada that very question is pulling at the heart of the party.

Most importantly, it means Québecois NDP seats, if they come at all, will not come one at a time in various parts of the province. If the NDP can see their fortunes rise in Québec, they might start to see seats being filled from all over the province. It's not a realistic idea at all at the moment, but one day? Well, stranger things have happened.

Canada: Polling houses and provinces

So this week, Ipsos Reid, Environics and Ekos have all released polls. They don't have the same sample sizes and they don't cover exactly the same dates. The three houses have slightly different methodologies and tend to produce differing results. Yet despite all of this, they have pretty close numbers at the moment nationwide. For example, Ipsos Reid puts the Conservatives at 34% nationwide, Environics has them at 35% and Ekos, which typically gives the lowest Tory numbers, has them at 32.4%. All well within the margin of error. Ipsos Reid and Environics have the exact same numbers for the Liberals, Ekos has them lower by little more than 2%. All in all, pretty good numbers. So good, in fact, that we can conclude that (a) the three houses must be doing reasonably good jobs if their numbers are so similar, and (b) these numbers must be pretty accurate, if three different polling houses have produced them, more or less.

The national sample size is going, of course, to be some ten times larger than the sample size of each province. Of course as a result the margin of error is going to be greater at the provincial level. But what strikes you looking at the three houses is just how deviant their provincial numbers are from each other, in spite of their similarities at the national level. It's an interesting paradox that unreliable numbers at the provincial level can combine to produce more reliable numbers at the national level, but it's a fact of statistics that deviation gets 'rounded out' as numbers increase. Still, it's tough to make any real statements at all about what's going on provincially based on these three polls.

For example, let's look at the four-province megaregion pollsters call 'the Atlantic'. The four provinces east of Québec all obviously have different voting trends and traditions, but due to their relatively smaller population bases are still lumped together in polls. Look at each of the three pollsters, though, and you get a remarkably different picture of these provinces.

Ipsos Reid has the Liberals at 48%, domination on a level we rarely see anymore. Ipsos Reid will tell you that just slightly less than half of all Atlantic Canadians are planning to vote Liberal. Ekos, on the other hand, has the Liberals slightly behind the Conservatives - 32.5% to 33.2%, with the NDP doing historically well at 22.4% in a legitimately tripartisan race: numbers that might be plausible in Nova Scotia, but as for the other three provinces? Environics, on the other hand, not only agrees with Ekos by putting the Conservatives first but puts them far ahead, at 35% to the Liberals' 31%. Has Danny Williams's ABC campaign lost its fizzle? Or are these numbers just all over the place?

Going from one coast to the other, we have BC. Now, yes, BC is notoriously volatile. And yes, BC is legitimately three-way (or even four-way) to an extent unheard-of in any other anglophone province. But... Ekos puts the NDP ahead at 30.8% and has the Conservatives and the Liberals neck-and-neck at 27.0% and 26.5% respectively (and Green at 15.0%). Those numbers might be plausible if surprising, but contrast them with the other two: Ipsos has the NDP at a sad third with 21% behind a surging CPC at 41% and the Liberals at 25% (Green at 13%). Environics also has the NDP at third at 23%, well behind the Liberals at 30% and the Conservatives at 35% (Green at 10%). Admire that range: are the NDP polling 31% or 21%? Are the Tories polling a sad 27% or a mighty 41%?

The national numbers produced by these polling houses provide great talking points. But come election day national numbers mean nothing (remember 1993, where 16% of the national vote got the PCs two seats but 14% of the vote got the BQ 54 seats). And just how much can we trust these polling companies to give us useful provincial (in fact regional) data when it's so very hit-and-miss?

Now that's how I remember it.

Harris-Decima's got a new poll out. Thought I'd look at The NPD in La Belle Province. Accepting that there are standard preferential differences between polls (and thus they're not directly comparable), we can see that their numbers are much closer to business-as-usual than the Angus Reid poll I recently discussed.


What do they look like? Well, here's the current Harris-Decima numbers in Québec:

• BQ: 37%
• Liberals: 28%
• Conservatives: 15%
• Greens: 10%
• NPD: 9%

These numbers are more than a little different from those Angus Reid numbers, aren't they? They were, with the deviation in parentheses:

• BQ: 37% (even)
• Liberals: 20% (up 8%)
• NDP: 18% (down 9%)
• Conservatives: 16% (down 1%)
• Greens: 7% (up 3%)

So while you can expect a percent or two difference from one polling house to another, can one polling house really say that one party's support is twice what another polling house suggests? Well, apparently so.

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The Odd Notion of Québécois Voting NDP

It's tough, while following federal polls, to avoid noticing a certain number slowly and inexorably inching up, try as you might to downplay it as a mere statictical anomaly, sure to disappear come election day. That number is the NDP's current support in Québec. Historically, the NDP have been, let's face it, a joke in Québec. Given that the Québec branch of the Liberal Party of Canada (as distinct from the PLQ, which is a different kettle of fish) has always had a more socialist bent than its Ontario branch and has always been the main 'federalist' vote-getter in the province, and furthermore given that on non-constitutional matters the NDP and the BQ overlap on a lot of policies, leaving the BQ as the main pro-union 'old left' party in the province, there's never been much reason for Québécois to vote NDP. And given its image - fair or not - as a Western party of anglophones, blind to the realities of life in Québec and built of a rather alien tradition, unable even to keep the provincial party alive (Québec is the only province currently without a provincial NDP party), it's certainly never come near the breakthrough in the province that the party perpetually talks up.


And yet Angus Reid has some new numbers. Certainly they're a bit on the extreme side as regards Québec. Certainly they're to be taken with a grain of salt, or even with a salt lick. But before condemning the numbers, let's take a minute to marvel at them. Angus Reid is showing the NDP at 18% in Québec. Historically, those are unheard-of numbers. How remarkable are they? Well, Angus Reid has the NDP at 13% in Alberta and at 15% in the Atlantic. Now obviously no-one expects much from the NDP in Alberta, but they had recently had reasons to be optimistic about the Atlantic, and more than just Nova Scotia as well. The Angus Reid has the Librals at a laughable 65% in the Atlantic, though, so let's get back to that salt lick. Anyway, Angus Reid has the NDP in monolithic Ontario at... 18%. Obviously Ontario has never been the biggest supporter of the NDP, but it's always considered the NDP to be an alternative, and electoral successes and failures for the NDP down the years have usually depended on their ability to bring in a few seats in Ontario. And 18% is not a bad poll for the NDP in Ontario. Yet it only equals the NDP's numbers in Québec. More incredibly, the entire list for the province reads as follows: BQ 37%, Liberals 20%, NDP 18%, Conservatives 16%, Green 7%. In other words, according to this poll, the NDP are within 2%, presumably well within the margin of error, of the Liberals. They're a whisker away from being the second most popular party in Québec, from being the main federalist option.

If you want to take these numbers and run even further with them, consider the extent to which the NDP rise seems to be mirroring the Liberal decline - and I think we can safely assume that's no coincidence. I doubt I could find it now, but I stumbled across a poll from a few months ago that showed NDP support in Québec was actually higher as a percentage among Francophones than among Anglophones. Since in recent history NDP inroads tend to be in places with significant anglophone populations, this is also a significant stat. If we're really looking at this 18% existing in roughly equal numbers in both the anglophone and the francophone populations, then the NDP could really be looking at seats in various parts of the province - particularly if they can inch past the Liberals' numbers and actually establish themselves as the go-to party for strategic federalist votes. Since Québec seems as ripe as Newfoundland for an 'Anyone but Conservatives' campaign, strategic voting might really matter. And with the Liberal brand so low these days, who would have thought that the NDP could conceivably be the recipient of strategic voting? In Québec? Take it even further - the NDP have a decent amount of respect in Québec, and always have had: not necessarily as a legitimate vote option, but as a decent party. The alien status that has plagued the NDP in Québec has never really meant that the people of Québec don't like the party, just that it's seen as a party of English Canada. But to the extent that that's a factor, it's common to all of the federalist parties at the moment. Jack Layton, by a large degree Canada's most-liked federal party leader and well-liked in Québec as well, is the single federalist party leader with the best chance of seeming 'one of us' to the people of Québec. Anglo, yes, but born and raised in the province.

I don't mention this to say that 'bloquistes will only vote for someone Québécois'. I don't believe that's true. But I think it can possibly increase the comfort level bloquistes would feel toward the NDP - already, according to EKOS, warm enough towards the NDP that 27.7% would vote for them as a second choice (eliminating those who listed 'no second choice' makes this number an amazing 39.6%). I have often wondered what percentage of BQ voters would list constitutional matters and the status of Québec as their prime reason for voting BQ. While undoubtedly a high number, I know it's hardly 100% - additionally, the BQ's progressive economic and social platform brings in voters. There's no reason why those voters - avowed seperatists or not - couldn't be convinced to vote for a snowballing NDP, one who (hopefully) would keep its constitutional policies out of the spotlight (I don't think anyone wants a consitutional election this time out).

Theoretically, a nudge of a few percent in Québec, then, could start a ball rolling that would actually see NDP numbers open up significantly in Québec. This, in turn, might have a minor snowball effect on Atlantic provinces and an even more minor effect on Ontario. And more significantly, it would do much to present the NDP as a truly national party - something they've always struggled to do. With just a few percentage points, the NDP could even start looking like a potential senior coalition partner, and the notion of Canada's most-liked federal party leader actually looking Prime Ministerial? Well, it...

...er, sorry. Time to wake up, I think. As tantalising as it seems, I don't think we'll see Prime Minister Layton any time soon. But in this scenario, a theoretical Prime Minister Layton would have something that neither Prime Minister Harper nor theoretical Prime Minister Ignatieff would have - the support of a significant percent of Québec. It might make certain people angry in this country that a government that doesn't have a measurable level of support in Québec doesn't really have a legitimate mandate, but it is frankly true. And something that really needs to be addressed if we ever want a return to governments that have the support of a broad segment of the population.

The thing is, though, that while it's interesting to see the NDP in a position of relative strength in Québec, and conceivable that it could snowball and lead to a real leap forward in Québec, it'd be tough to call it a 'breakthrough', because one wonders if the current political realities are actually creating long-term NDP voters in the province or merely allowing disaffected Liberal or BQ supporters an exciting new face to vote for until their regular parties become more atractive again. With a different Liberal leader at the helm, or a fresh new constitutional crisis to bear, would 18% of the province of Québec still be voing NDP? It seems even harder to believe.