The Colours of the Ridings: Manitoba, 2008

So the previous blog entry explains what 'the colours of the ridings' means. The day I did the map for Saskatchewan, I also did one for Manitoba. Events are rapidly conspiring to make 2008 ancient history, but I did the map, so I might as well get it out there, pre-election. It looks like this:

Manitoba has the urban-rural split that strange riding boundaries have denied Saskatchewan. And there's a clear difference too. Of course, by square kilometres the vast majority of this province is one riding, and a reliably NDP riding it is too. But outside of Churchill, the rural ridings are pretty darn blue. In Winnipeg, though, we see more colours. It never gets overly red, but it gets a pretty deep purple in the south. The north is more reliably green though.

The Colours of the Ridings: Saskatchewan, 2008

Have you ever seen a variation on the colour wheel that you can find on some 'paint'-style computer programmes, that I call a 'colour hive', since it is often a grid of hexagonal cells?

Well, in any case, I was thinking about how to visually represent voting percentages in multiparty elections when it popped into my head. I got thinking about how you could use RGB values to produce a colour that was made up of the relative voting percentages of three parties - one for each primary colour.

Of course, there were no three-party races in Canada in 2008. Outside of Québec, they were four-way, and in Québec they were five-way. I decided to ignore the Green Party, and then be left with the Conservatives, the Liberals and the NDP. It was a no-brainer to call the Conservatives blue and the Liberals red - which left green for the NDP. A far cry from orange, but green is the NDP's secondary colour.

In other words, in a riding that went 50% CPC, 49.9% LPC and 0.1% NDP, the result would be a pretty vivid purple colour: half blue and half red. A riding that went 34%, 33% and 33% would more or less be grey.

I thought it would be a decent way to show the underlying differences that exist between 'a blowout for party A' and 'a narrow win for party A', something that you can't readily observe in areas that are painted as huge swaths of the same colour.

I chose Saskatchewan. I was curious to see how the province, the historical heartland of the NDP, could have elected no NDPs, letting in a Liberal amidst an otherwise uniform blue wave.

Was it really so uniform?

In retrospect, I shouldn't have chosen Saskatchewan for the experiment. Blue-green splits are less dramatic, colourwise, than, say, red-green. But I liked the experiment anyway. Most of these circles are pretty darn blue. Wascana fails to be red at all, since the Conservatives put up a good fight and the NDP were also in the mix - the result is an attractive brown. The NDP's best performance in the province, Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar, shows up as that colour, 'cyan', that no-one outside of the world of computers has heard of. And the northern riding showed good Liberal numbers and weak NDP numbers, giving it a purple colour.

I find it interesting that Saskatchewan has a strange riding system that kind of smells like Gerrymandering - though I don't accuse Elections Canada of actually intending it. There are no 'urban ridings' at all in Saskatchewan: four huge ridings, spreading across miles and miles of prairies, happen to intersect into a four-corners located squarely in downtown Saskatoon, and another four do the same thing in downtown Regina. These two cities each encompass part of several ridings, but no riding can claim to be 'Regina only' or 'Saskatoon only'. I wonder what urban dwellers in Saskatchewan think of this - certainly the NDP do best in cities, and were the election map drawn differently, the NDP would have taken a few seats in the province.

Anyway... I think aftert the election, I'll do some of these maps for the whole country. In the meantime, I might try a more competitive area. Manitoba, perhaps?

The Liberals' and NDP's Strategies of Mutual Destruction

Please note: the above graphic requires detail that isn't really visible when it's this small. Please click on it to make it larger.

Jack Layton is criticising Stephen Harper. Michael Ignatieff is criticising Stephen Harper. It's a strange country we live in where the main goal these two men have in attacking Stephen Harper is not to steal votes from Harper but to steal votes from each other.

But it's true. The sad fact is the the NDP sees its best chance for growth in siphoning from the Liberals, and the Liberals see their best chance for growth in siphoning from the NDP. Both parties seem to think that Harper's 35-or-so percent is more or less carved in stone, and as yet they haven't made much of an attempt to take votes from the two seemingly 'single-issue' parties.

As Harper himself seems eager to paint them as natural coalition partners dying for the chance to jump in to bed with each other, it may seem bizarre to see these two 'infighting' so much. It must seem, from the outside, counteractive as hell - and there are many who consider it the surest way to get Harper's Conservatives a majority.

Is it?

Well, what I've done here is looked at the results of the 2008 election. And then what I've done is determined what the composition of the house would look like if we shifted support only between these two parties. So that suggests a scenario where everyone who voted CPC, Green or BQ last time does again this time, and the only fluidity is between the Liberals and the NDP, in a completely consistent and predictable fashion across the country. For the sake of consistency, the graph I've generated looks only at increments of ten percentage points, even though a shift of merely 1% is enough to get seats changing colours. So when it says, for example, "LIB-10%", that imagines a scenario where one in ten Liberal supporters starts voting NDP - in each riding, one-tenth of the 2008 Liberal vote is shaved off the Liberal tally and added to the NDP tally. Obviously this is going to see Liberals lose seats and the NDP gain seats, but it can also effect the other parties too: a riding where the Liberals finished first, the Conservatives finished second and the NDP finished third is likely to turn Conservative sooner than turn NDP as in this scenario Liberal support bleeds to the NDP. To what extent is this a problem?

Well, the results are interesting. The centre column of the graph shows the Commons composition that actually resulted from the 2008 vote. When we start to move left from there, as Liberal support goes, ten percentage points by ten percentage points, to the NDP, we see that the Liberal seat count drops swiftly and the NDP seat count rises. Ten percent gone and the Liberals lose ten seats, another ten percent gone and they lose another seventeen seats. Yet where the Liberals have lost 27 seats, the NDP have picked up only ten. Where have the other seventeen seats gone?

Amazingly, to the Conservatives. With no other factors affecting voting preferences, the defection of one in five Liberals to the NDP gives the Conservatives a majority. That is to say that in my scenario the Conservatives get not a single voter more than they had in 2008, yet this movement on the 'opposition' side gives them their majority.

It continues from there - to a point. If the Liberals shed 30% of their vote to the NDP, then the NDP pick up eleven seats, passing both the Liberals (now down to a mere 33 seats) and the stable BQ to form the official opposition - but to a further strengthened Conservative majority. The NDP's success at the Liberals' expense in this scenario has handed the Conservatives a remarkable 22 seats, which is even more than the NDP themselves have been able to pick up. In these 22 ridings, the Liberal vote has dropped below the Conservatives, but the NDP vote hasn't risen enough to pass the Conservatives. Yet, I hasten to add, though while the model continues, past here I think it really stretches the boundary of 'possibility' into 'strictly theoretical'.

But let's carry on: an extra ten percent reduces the Liberals to an eight-party rump, and this time it's just the NDP who benefit: the Conservatives and the Bloc stay more or less the same, while the NDP seat count vaults from 58 to 83. When we reach the 50% mark, the point were one in two 2008 Liberals have left the party and are now voting NDP, the Liberals have disappeared from Commons altogether and the NDP have now hit the 100 mark. One hundred MPs and a turnaround where the Conservative numbers are now starting to drop again - but at this 50% point, even if the 100-person-strong NDP caucus unites with the essentially-unchanged 50-strong Bloc caucus, and even in the unlikely event that Bill Casey and André Arthur side with them, the opposition is still not enough to topple Harper. The Conservatives still have a majority.

As we preside over the final destruction of the Liberals here, as we watch 60%, 70%, 80%, 90% and finally every last Liberal vote cross over to the NDP, these numbers switch. At 60%, the Conservatives lose their majority. At 80%, the NDP passes the Conservatives and we finally see the spectacularly unlikely face of Prime Minister Layton (provided Harper doesn't form a coalition with Duceppe...). And at the terminus of 100%, we have the point at which the Liberals and NDP have entirely combined to form a new party - a different 'unite the left' scenario - we see the NDP/Liberal party with 152 seats to the Conservatives' 113 and the Bloc's 41, and Casey and Arthur still laughing. But still no majority.

Which raises and entirely different point: that for all the talk of a divided left, that neither the NDP nor the Liberals can sneak to a majority by reaching into each other's pockets. In more than half the ridings in Canada, the theoretical combined Liberal/NDP vote remains less than the actual vote given to the Conservatives or the Bloc - there is simply no way either the Liberals or the NDP can get a majority without stealing votes from the Conservatives or Bloc, and there's no way they can get a functioning coalition without working with either of them. Not based on 2008's numbers, anyway.

Excepting that I've completely ignored the Green vote here. The Green vote could serve as a spoiler in a number of ridings, I don't know. That might be another thing to look at on another day.

However, I've only looked at half of the above graph. As the current Liberal caucus is much larger than the current NDP one, obviously the game of dominoes I've set up tumbles more entertainingly when we watch the Liberal vote shift to the NDP vote. But looking in the other direction, we see a very different story indeed.

Superficially, much is the same: the NDP number drops quickly, to the point where it takes a 50% vote shift to kill of the NDP completely (meaning that if half of all 2008 NDP voters in every riding in the country cast their votes this time out for the Liberals, the NDP would not win a single seat). We have to go all the way to 70% to see the Liberals pass the Conservatives as the party with the largest number of seats - what Harper would like to call 'the winner' (it was 80% for the NDP, though the 70% number was pretty close). And of course the end point is the same - as it should be, since 100% NDP support going to the Liberals is much like 100% Liberal support going to the NDP. The Liberals are as unable to vault to a majority on NDP backs as the NDP are on Liberal backs.

Yet there is a huge difference between these two scenarios: bleeding support from the NDP to the Liberals never pushes the Conservatives into majority territory - in fact, it never results in anything greater than a single seat gain for the Tories. In fact, as an NDP-to-Liberal bleed starts peeling seats away from the Bloc much faster than the other way round (since the NDP were much less of an issue in Québec in 2008 than they're shaping up to be thins time round), NDP-to-Liberal transfer immediately improves the total combined Liberal/NDP seat count.

A million other factors muddy the issue to the extent that nothing here has any value outside of the strictly academic, I concede. Yet when viewed strictly on the basis of this information here, the outcome is tough to overlook: to the extent that 'vote splitting' between the Liberals and the NDP can be seen as a 'key to a Conservative victory', it's really only true whenever the NDP manage to take votes from the Liberals: the Liberals can fearless steal from the NDP as much as they want without risking a Conservative majority, while the NDP can make no such claim.

A surprising result, perhaps. But one with many repercussions for the campaigns over the next month.

The Progressive Fiction on the Eve

In the past, I've mused aloud about a theoretical 'Progressive Party' - not one that would unite the Liberals and NDP, since I don't consider the Liberals a progressive party, but one that would unite the NDP, the BQ and the Greens. Implausible though I realise this is, I consider those three parties to represent the 'progressive voice' in Canada, and if you combine their levels of support, based on current polling, you'd have a party that would surpass the Liberals and compete very closely with the Conservatives.

Now I know, I know - such a party could never exist, and were such a theoretical beast occur anyway its levels of support would not be the current levels of support of the three parties added together: the question of Québec sovereignty obviously complicates things. As does the fact that not all Green voters (or BQ voters for that matter) are politically to the left, though as a countervailing force a strong united-left party would siphon some support from the current Liberals.

Anyway, let me have my fun. Since we might be minutes away from an election, I thought I'd use the current numbers Éric Grenier has at his sight threehundredeight.blogspot.com. He combines recent polls and uses his own algorithms to make seat projections. At the moment he has the following:

• The Conservatives: 38.3% support and 149 seats.
• The Liberals: 27.4% and 75 seats.
• The BQ, the NDP and the Greens in combination: 33.2% and 84 seats.

So just adding Grenier's seat counts for the Bloc and the NDP gives 84 seats and official opposition status. That 84 is 52 for the BQ and 32 for the NDP (1 in Québec, the other 31 in the rest of the country). That's interesting, but it's only half of the story. Since Grenier has riding-by-riding projections, you can add the vote for those three parties (or two outside of Québec) together and see if 'vote splitting on the left' is coasting any seats at the moment, seats that Grenier has going to the Conservatives or Liberals but that would go to a united Progressive Party if their votes were combines.

The answer is yes: not as much as you might suspect, but yes. Let's take a look:

In British Columbia, Grenier has 7 NDP seats, but the "Progressives" would get nine: Elizabeth May's obviously high Green numbers in her own Saanich-Gulf Islands would tip it from the Conservatives, and Greens more modest numbers in Vancouver Kingsway, a three-way split currently looking Liberal, would still be enough to tip it.

Grenier has every Alberta riding going Tory, but a united left could pry one away: Edmonton-Strathcona, which anyway has an NDP incumbent.

Grenier gives the NDP four Prairie ridings, all in Manitoba. A united "Progressive Party" would change nothing there.

In seat-rich Ontario, Grenier currently projects 15 NDP seats. Not that much would change, actually, but the Greens could help snag three more: Guelph, a comically mutipartisan riding with great Green numbers, would tip from the Liberals. Neither Sault Ste. Marie nor Welland have particularly impressive Green numbers, but they're currently neck-in-neck CPC/NDP races. Those stray percentage points would tip them both away from the Tories.

Québec is where the story gets interesting, obviously. The Bloc dominate, of course. The Greens aren't much of a presence here, but the NDP are at an all-time high in the province. So already the vast majority of seats are progressive: 52 BQ and 1 NDP. The Conservatives and the Liberals get a measly 22 combined, and a united "Progressive Party" would wrest away a further ten of those: Four of the Tories' current nine would tip: Beauport-Limoilou, Charlesbourg-Haute-Saint-Charles and Lotbinière-Chutes-de-la-Chaudière. Fully six of the Liberals' thirteen would tip as well: Honoré-Mercier, Hull-Aylmer, LaSalle-Émard, Laval-Les Îles, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce-Lachine and lastly Papineau. Additionally, I should note Lévis-Bellechasse, where the combined projected BQ/NDP/Green vote equals the projected CPC vote exactly. I decided to give the advantage to the incumbent, though, so it's not in the counts.

In the Atlantic provinces, across four entire provinces, not a single seat would waver in a combined "Progressive" scenario. Grenier's numbers, 13 Conservative, 15 Liberal and 4 NDP (read: "Progressive"), woud stay completely the same.

And in the North, Grenier's numbers, giving one each to the three main federal parties, would remain.

So in total, then, a united "Progressive Party" would see the following numbers: the Conservatives with 141, the Liberals with 67 and the Progressives with 100, and either official opposition status in a Conservative minority, official opposition status against a Tory/Grit coalition, or senior partner in a Progressive/Grit coalition. Not really wonderful numbers, actually.

But that's the rub at present: Grenier's current numbers show a scenario where the "Progressives" would still trail the Conservatives in every part of Canada except Québec, where they'd be trampling all over the opposition. Almost two in every three "Progressive" seats would come from Québec. Regionally, support percentages would be as follows:

• BC: CPC 41.5, Prog 32.3, LPC 24.0
• Alberta: CPC 62.4, Prog 18.0, LPC 17.0
• Prairies: CPC 51.0, Prog 26.3, LPC 21.2
• Ontario: CPC 41.4, LPC 33.7, Prog 23.7
• Québec: Prog 58.8, LPC 21.4, CPC 18.8
• Atlantic: CPC 36.9, LPC 35.4, Prog 24.6

Progressives in 2011 should thank God for Québec.

Canada: Alberta Unreformed

So it goes without saying that there's certainly a good reason why, in discussing the Conservative Party of Canada, they call Alberta 'Fortress Alberta'. It's tough to imagine a place so fond of a single political party. In the six elections they've contended under the names Reform, Canadian Alliance or the Conservatives, they've never taken fewer than 22 seats in a province that has a total of either 26 or 28 seats (depending on the year). In fact, there is a seventh: the Reform party comtended the 1988 election, but as a relatively minor party that took no seats. I don't include the 1988 election, because it ruins the narrative: one of the PC imploding spectacularly and two parties being born as a result, one of which is called Reform. Canadian electoral history is divided into pre-1993 and post-1993. So 1988 is 'old-school'. Irrelevant.

Anyway, I've been noticing with surprise that the Liberals seem to be doing rather well in Alberta - 'well' doesn't mean much, of course, as it's inconceivable that they could actually threaten the CPC. But the fact is that they are currently presenting themselves as the only real alternative in Alberta to Harper's party. I was a bit surprised to see this; I know the NDP have tended to do horribly in Alberta, but at least they're a Western party with at least a historical taste for a bit of populism. The Liberals are supposed to be everything Albertans hate about Ottawa, aren't they? Elitist, centralist, resource-stealing, Ontario and Québec controlling the country. Right?

Well, I decided to look at those six elections with the following premise: what would happen if the Reform / CA / CPC party just disappeared? If this party just didn't exist, where would the Albertan vote go?

Now, obviously my techniques here are hardly scientific. What I did was look at each seat that this party won and considered which party came in second. So if, say, the Reform Party took 65% and the Liberals took 15% (with the remaining 20% going to the NDP, the PCs and various other parties and candidates), I say that in the non-Reform world, this seat goes to the Liberals. Now, that's not entirely realistic. The Reform/CA/CPC gets in some ridings enormously high margins of victory, and with such a huge voter base left to redistribute, the numbers are really quite up in the air: and one imagines a fair amount would go to the PCs, despite the animosity those two parties had for each other in the early days.

Still, the results are intriguing. Here they are:

• In 1993, Reform took 22 of Alberta's 26 seats, and the Liberals took the other 4. In a non-Reform Alberta, the Liberals would dominate, taking 19 while the remaining 7 would go to the PCs.
• In 1997, Reform increased their seat count in Alberta, getting 24 and leaving only two to the Liberals. but a non-Reform Alberta would look exactly the same as it did in 1993: 19 Liberal seats, 7 PC seats.
• And how weird is this: in 2000, the renamed Canadian Alliance got 23 seats, while the Liberals took 2 and the PCs took 1. But without the CA? Well, we're starting to see a trand here, but 19 Liberal seats and 7 PC seats. Any hope for long-term trends dies here though, along with the PC party.
• In 2004, the newly-minted Conservative Party of Canada took 26 seats to the Liberals' 2 (a seat redistribution gave Alberta an added two seats). Amazingly, if there were no CPC, all 28 seats would have gone Liberal. So the Liberals being the main opposition to the Conservatives is evidently nothing new.
• In 2006, the Conservatives made a clean sweep of Alberta: all 28 seats. A non-CPC landscape (so this, the second-place finishers across the province) are a bit more interesting, though: the Liberals would have 18 seats, the NDP 8, the Greens 1 and one seat would go to an independent.
• The most recent election a near sweep for the Conservatives: 27 seats and just one for the NDP. There's a sea change below the water level, though. An Alberta sans Harper would give 16 seats to the NDP, 8 to the Liberals, 3 to the Greens and 1 to an independent. Intriguing stuff.

If we do have an election this year, Alberta's not going to be the most interesting story. It'll still be CPC all the way, with perhaps a few seats here or there (likely in Edmonton) being competitive. But if current trends hold, the NDP won't be what they were in 2008, when they made significant inroads as the main alternative to the Conservatives in Alberta. Odd that no-one even noticed that.

Canada: When to Leave

Beleaguered Alberta premier Ed Stelmach is stepping down.

It's interesting news: we've had three premiers retire or resign in the past few months. Danny Williams of Newfoundland retired with levels of support the likes of which we rarely see in Canada . The question there is how much the PC's sky-high levels of support depend on the personage of Williams himself - in other words, how much of those astronomic poll numbers are now available for the Liberals and (snort) the NDP to cherry-pick.

Gordon Campbell and Ed Stelmach wish that was their parties' main concern at the moment. You get the sense that Campbell understood that the BC Liberals were in a real free-fall, and that they had yet to bottom out. You sense that Campbell 'took one for the team', stepping down for the good of the party in order to take the blame personally for BC's current problems and let the party carry on without him. Amazingly, due also to similar stories in the NDP opposition, it may actually have worked. Time will tell, but on the day of Campbell's resignation he was looing at polls so terrible that an NDP victory at the next election seems like a done deal.

Alberta's somewhere in the middle, and this is where it intrigues so much. Its history is one of single-party dominance, where one party dominates politics for a generation and then in a single election is crushed into insignificance by another party, who holds the reins for a generation. Since 1935, these have been parties on the right: Social Credit until 1967, when they were challenged by the reemergent Progressive Conservatives, who have held the reins ever since.

By March of 2010, Stelmach's PCs were in a freefall, and the Wildrose Alliance had overtaken them in the polls. Projections based on the polls at the time showed that the WRA would have decimated the PCs, overtaking them as the party of government and as the main party of the right. And if we can understand anything from Alberta's history, that change might have been permanent.

Were Stelmach Cambell, that is the point at which he would have resigned. But he's not, and interestingly in the past 10 months or so, polls suggest the PCs have come around: surpassing the WRA or at least drawing even with them. "The inevitable" suddenly seemed a good deal less so.

I'm genuinely curious and unable to guess what this means for the 'battle for the right' in Alberta. The captain abandoning a sinking ship might be the single event that pushes Danielle Smith's Wildrose Alliance to electoral success (for thirty-some years, perhaps). Or does Stelmach see in Campbell's departure an example to imitate? Will Albertains forgive the party now that Stelmach is gone? One thing I can say for sure is that it's a huge gamble, one that I never saw coming.

Another thing I can say for sure is that while Dalton McGuinty is probably nonchalantly pretending not to care, Jean Charest is almost certainly in the curious position of wonder if there is anything - anything at all - that Québec can learn from Alberta.

Canada and the UK: Lessons From Britain

What we know, heading into 2011, regarding the Canadian political scene is this: there might be an election, but there might not. And if there is an election, it might change a lot, but it might not. Not much to go on, really.

The interesting thing, though, is that those among us who sense that the stasis that has set in regarding our political landscape might be shaken up (might need to be shaken up) have by-and-large ignored the Westminster System just across the Atlantic that has a half-year leg up on the changes we might well be seeing in Canada in 2011.

If we really do enter an era of coalitions, we shouldn't be looking at countries like Germany or Italy that know them well: we should be looking at the UK as it stumbles through its first proper coalition. The other way the UK presents a model for us is in the existence of Caroline Lucas, the UK's first-ever elected Green MP. This matters because (for now, anyway) the UK has the same problematic FPTP system that we do. So if Nick Clegg's reform referendum fails, sticking the UK with its current dysfunctional system, Caroline Lucas's successes and failures will tell us a lot about the feasability of having a Green Party in a Westminster FPTP system.

The comparison is not entirely valid. For instance, the three-party system that the UK has right now might seem to match ours quite closely (with the same colours, even), but since the mid-nineties, the non-right of the political spectrum in the UK has been really confused. The Liberal Democrats, whose participation in the current coalition has been disastrous for their popular support, appeared to be an option more progressive than the Labour party - an appearance not borne out of the histories of the two parties but on recent trends in parliament, current platforms, and to a large degree on the personages of Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown. Nick Clegg was the story of the 2010 election, and his party seemed like a vital alternative to the two stagnant main parties.

Things are different here. Setting aside the Greens and the BQ (who, of course, correspond to the SNP and the PC), we're quite clear on who our left, our centre and our right are - to the extent that the actual beliefs and policies of the NDP, the Liberals and the Conservatives respectively would do little to change that popular perception. A Conservative/NDP coalition seems even less plausible than a Conservative/LibDem one, which means that Nick Clegg's noble aspiration, as the third party, to negotiate with the first party before talking ot the second party might be dead on arrival domestically. It's a pity, because it's a mature and intelligent working system in a 'coalition era' of politics. But the concept of coalition has coalesced so firmly around the Liberals and the NDP that nothing else is even considered. Realistic in the short-term, I realise, but dangerous in the long.

Dangerous, perhaps, for the NDP. Whatever the rank-and-file might think, I think the NDP as a party has grown comfortable with its role as kingmaker: in Ontario it has been kingmaker a few times before and in 2011 there is a decent chance it will be again. Federally it was kingmaker in the 1970s, and was more comfortable in the role under Martin than it has been under Harper. If the scales tipped just enough this year to give the Liberals more seats than the Conservatives, I think the NDP would be happy to 'prop up' a minority - if they could introduce some key legislation during that time (say, regarding Afghanistan), then it might even help them. If the Conservatives still lead in total seat count (which seems likely), then the NDP are stuck where they were before - either discussing the so-called 'coalition of losers' that so inflamed popular opinion in 2008 or carrying on as they have been for five years now.

A genuine Liberal-NDP coalition presents an interesting challenge for the NDP: as we saw in the 1970s, failures would taint the NDP brand while successes would not necessarily vindicate them. It's tough for a junior partner to take much credit in a coalition, and it's here also that we need to look at the LibDems.

The numbers in the UK are horrifying: scant months ago at the polls, the LibDems took 23.0% of the vote to Labour's 29.0 and the Conservatives' 36.1. This happened after a heady post-televised-debate bubble that had all three parties polling equal numbers; there were even four polls that put the LibDems out front - on 24 April, YouGov posted the LibDems at an unbelievable 34%.

It was unbelievable. Unrealistic and unsustainable. YouGov today posts the following numbers: Labour 43%, Conservatives 37% and the LibDems 9%. The cost of coalition has been astonishing for the LibDems, though you could argue (quite rightly) that the LibDems' numbers were artificially inflated by wavering Labour supporters who have since returned home. Why they have returned home is important, and I don't think it's merely a distaste for the government side of Commons (though there's that). Yet think this way: of any five people who voted LibDem just a few months ago, only two remain faithful. More than half have wandered away. Obviously the tuition fiasco is of great importance. But it reflects the strange situation the LibDems, historically a centrist party, find themselves in: are they responsible to their party loyalists or to their most recent electors? If their intentions have been misunderstood by a large number of the people who cast votes for them (though the tuition fiasco is a bit different - it does seem to be a genuine turnaround), is that really their fault? And how grateful should they be for the votes they managed to secure last time around, if many of those votes were cast against the other two parties as opposed to genuinely for them?

For the moment at least, the LibDems and Labour are tied to each other: one party's success is the other party's failure. One wonders how well a Labour/LibDem government would have performed - and one wonders how well the LibDems would be polling were Nick Clegg Ed Miliband's junior partner. One also wonders where the UK Greens - a more soundly left-wing party than the Green Party of Canada - fit into all of this (quite well in the short-term, at least - were an election to be held tomorrow, Caroline Lucas's seat would seemingly be secure and perhaps joined by a few others). All this matters over here because whatever fluidity can be squeezed from the stone of Canadian politics falls clearly on the left side of the Conservatives-vs.-everyone-else axis. Coalition, merger, collapse, whatever: it's only a shakeup in the relative positions of the four non-Tory parties that can really change the composition of parliament. The signals from the UK are mixed at best. But we need to be reading them much more carefully than we currently are.