I suppose it's not terribly surprising: our immediate neighbor is having a nationwide election tomorrow and hardly anyone around here - or anywhere - mentions it. Even FiveThirtyEight has been silent - there is not a single article on the Canadian election on its politics page. Perhaps they are leaving it up to the folks at ThreeHundredEight.com, this after FiveThirtyEight got burned (along with everyone else) in the recent United Kingdom election. Still, the deafening silence is still a bit eerie.
Is the Canadian election important? Maybe, maybe not. No matter who wins, Canada is not likely to invade the United States. (But if Canada did invade the United States, and they won, they might impose single payer health care - just saying). If the NDP were to win tomorrow, the Keystone Pipeline would be dead, but they're not going to win, they seem to want to extract the petroleum and process it locally instead anyway, and Keystone seems to dying in its own tar sands regardless.
So maybe there's no point. But just because there might be no point is no reason not to diary the election. After all, there's no point to discussing who Trump has insulted most recently, but we do it anyway. EVERY SINGLE DAY.
So here's the latest, and presumably the not-to-be-updated any more, info:
The Projected Seat Count According to CBC News:
Liberals (Trudeau): 141
Conservatives (Harper): 120
New Democratic Party (Mulcair): 71
170 seats are needed to win a majority.
The Polling Averages according to CBC News:
Liberals: 36.5%
Conservatives: 31.1%
New Democrats: 22.2%
The average of the most recent nine polls (three days) from Wikipedia:
Liberals: 36.4%
Conservatives: 32.4%
New Democrats: 21.5%
All the polls will have closed by 7:00 PM Pacific time.
The best listing of Party positions I've been able to find is at the National Post.
The Conservatives want to invest $20M in the lobster industry, do lots of tax cuts and raise the age for Social Security to 67.
The Liberals want to do deficit spending on lots of stuff, tax the one percent, and allow students to wait until they're earning $25,000 before starting to repay student loans.
The New Democrats want to balance the budget in 2016 but not raise personal income tax rates, refuse to ratify the TPP, and boost the forestry sector.
None of them wants to invade the United States to impose single-payer health care. I think I'll sit this one out.