Projection: Looking for 10 Ridings Good and True

The final polling weekend indicates that the final trend is continuing decline by the Liberals, mostly to the Conservatives in Ontario, mostly to the NDP in British Columbia.

Expect as follows:
ATLANTIC:
Conservative 13, NDP 10, Liberal 9
QUEBEC:
NDP 41, Bloc 17, Liberal 10, Conservative 7
ONTARIO:
Conservative 58, NDP 26, Liberal 22
PRAIRIES:
Conservative 20, NDP 6, Liberal 2
ALBERTA:
Conservative 27, NDP 1
BRITISH COLUMBIA:
Conservative 19, NDP 14, Liberal 3
NORTH:
Conservative 1, NDP 1, Liberal 1

TOTAL:
Conservative 145, NDP 99, Liberal 47, Bloc 17

That means we're looking for 10 ridings good men and true, to stand up and give us a Conservative majority. Here's a list of 10 prospects. The Conservatives don't need to win all 10 to win a majority; if they fail in one area they could make it up by picking up additional marginals elsewhere. In particular there's 4 more GTA ridings that could fall if the Liberal collapse is even more severe than it seems. But, for a majority, the Conservatives should be winning (or holding) 7 or more of these 10 to form a majority:

Central Nova, Essex, Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca, Kamloops-Thompson-Caribou, Kingston and the Islands, Lotbiniere-Chutes de la Chaudiere, Mississauga-Streetsville, Palliser, Pontiac, South Shore-St. Margaret's

So those of you who live in Atlantica should watch to see whether the Tories can hold Central Nova and South Shore-St. Margaret's against the NDP tide. For those elsewhere, I understand that Elections Canada has ruled that the results can be transmitted west from the Atlantic by smoke signals, so long as the fire is started by matches and not by any more modern technological device, particularly one that uses hashtags.

One final note: don't cheer too loud at the evisceration of the Bloc. The last 2 things we want are the NDP and Liberals together having more seats than the Tories, or, worse, having a majority without needing Bloc assistance.

Tory Top 30 -- All Hits All The Time

John Ibbitson said in the Globe and Mail over the weekend that the Tories had a list of 30 seats they could win. I decided to sit down and start analyzing things and come up with my own list of seats, with help in finding the last few (and identifying one good one I missed) from someone more knowledgeable about these things than me. In fact we're now up to 31! (All hits all the time! 31 straight hits with no commercials!)

Many of these seats are implausible given the current polls, but anyway....

NWFD Avalon, St. John's East, St. John's South-Mount Pearl

NB Madawaska-Restigouche, Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe

PEI Malpeque

QUE Chicoutimi-Le Fjord, Lac-Saint-Louis, Louis Hebert, Mount Royal, Richmond-Arthabaska

ONT Ajax-Pickering, Bramalea-Gore-Malton, Brampton Springdale, Brampton West, Eglinton-Lawrence, Guelph, Kingston and the Islands, London North Centre, Mississauga South, Sault Ste Marie, Welland, York Centre

MAN Elmwood-Transcona

ALB Edmonton-Strathcona

BC Burnaby-Douglas, Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca, New Westminster-Coquitlam, Vancouver South

NWT Western Arctic

YUK Yukon

Now if anybody wants to order them for me by likelihood....

Next task is to pick the most likely seats that would get us to a majority....

The Real Scandal

How 'bout the Auditor General says "I am outraged that drafts of my reports are being stolen and leaked for political purposes. These acts endanger the very important political neutrality of this office, both the perceived neutrality and possibly the real neutrality, depending on the identity of the perpetrators. I have asked the RCMP to investigate and find the perpetrators tout de suite (as we say here in Ottawa)"?

Lamestream Media Lets Iggy Off Hook

The media seems to think it has forced Michael Ignatieff to box himself in on the issue of the Grits' forming a government despite having fewer seats than the Conservatives. In fact it has left not just the back door, but the front door wide open.

In the National Post, John Ivison says: In Montreal Sunday, [Ignatieff] put the final nail in the coalition coffin lid, when he clarified one possible ambiguity in the statement he made the day before: did the commitment to rule out a coalition and a formal arrangement to the Bloc extend to a Conservative minority? “Yes,” he said. “We will work with other parties but a coalition is out of the question. I have an obligation to voters to be as clear on this as I can.”

But a coalition or formal arrangement with the other parties isn't the only way in which a second-largest party might form a government early in a minority situation; it's not even the most typical way. The likely scenario is this:

!. Conservatives get more seats than the Liberals but not a majority.
2. Conservative government stays in office; prepares throne speech.
3. Combined opposition parties defeat Harper government on throne speech.
4. Mr Harper resigns, either immediately or (possibly) having been refused a request for another election.
5. The G-G asks the leader of the next largest party whether he believes he form a government. Mr Ignatieff says "Yes".
6. Liberals form government, not based on a coalition, or a formal arrangement with another party (e.g. the Liberal-NDP 'Accord' in 1985), but simply seeking support from any and all parties on an issue-by-issue basis, just as the Conservatives have been doing for the last five years.

And for that matter the Liberals might make a "formal arrangement" with another party say six months later, to keep the thing running.

I don't know whether Ignatieff has secret intentions along these lines or not. He might not have thought it all through yet. He does not seem to know much about the constitutional niceties of these situations. It is not true, as he says, that after an election the G-G invites the leader of the largest party to form a government. Rather the government stays in power until it resigns; it is fully entitled to go back to Parliament and proceed with a Speech from the Throne even if some party has more seats, as numerous governments have thought of doing in such situations (e.g., the St Laurent Gov't in 1957). Theoretically it could even do so if another party had a majority of the seats; it is the disapproval of the public and his own party that prevents a defeated prime minister from doing this. The Prime Minister's use of the word "coalition" has helped Iggy keep his options open so far. Harper can legitimately use the word to include a de facto arrangement, while Ignatieff uses it in its stricter sense and so evade the issue. But if Canadians don't want to have a second-place party forming a government, the media will have to be a lot more specific, and get a commitment from all the parties that they will allow the party with the most seats a reasonable time to govern on the principles it has set out during the campaign.