Fun facts, predictions, etc.

Here's an interesting fact: seven times in Canadian history, minority governments have gone into elections: 1926, 1958, 1963, 1965, 1974, 1980, and 2006. The mean lifespan of the minority governments in question was about sixteen and a half months. Six of those elections resolved the minority situation, either by throwing the government out or by giving it a majority. The two exceptions were 1963 and 1965, when incumbent Lester Pearson was as unable to win a majority as Diefenbaker was to take his old job back (interestingly, these two exceptions also comprise the longest minority governments in Canadian history - removing them, the average falls to less than a year).

While I'm leery of ascribing motivations to Canadian voters collectively (if they get together in advance of elections to decide what message they want to send and to coordinate their voting accordingly, as seems to be the belief of so much of the pundocracy, they've somehow forgotten to invite me), it seems reasonable to draw some conclusions from this: Canadians are not generally hesitant in their evaluations of minorities, and seem to dislike minority situations enough that they'll vote for stability, even after a relatively short trial period.

Which brings us to this election, which gives every indication of deciding absolutely nothing. At the beginning of the campaign, I predicted an increased Conservative minority, which still looks like it will be the case, but I was thinking something on the order of 145 seats. Now, it appears that they'll struggle to break 130. Moreover, it seems very unlikely that any party will see their seats change by more than ten in either direction from what they held at dissolution (in the net, the Liberals are likely to lose a handful of seats to the Conservatives and New Democrats).

I've played Prime Minister Forever, an election simulation game that's more fun than accurate, a few times. In it, each party is given a goal, which I suspect corresponds roughly to the parties' actual goals going into the campaign. Not a single one of the pan-Canadian parties is poised to reach its goal from the 2008 scenario.

Two questions emerge from this: first, when will the next election be? The popular money right now says "soon" (unless, as Lawrence Martin quite incorrectly suggested, there's some possibility of the Conservatives being replaced by either a Liberal minority or a coalition government without an intervening election), but the popular money isn't the smart money. In January of 2006, I bet no less a light than Edmonton City Councillor Don Iveson that there wouldn't be another federal election in 2006; to say that I won that bet would be understating it. I made that bet because minority Parliaments are, for their first couple of years especially, giant games of chicken, in which each party wants to appear to be taking bold action regardless of how it might play with opposing parties, but each party is also desperate to avoid being seen as responsible for a new election, and indeed desperate to avoid triggering such an election absent some indication that it will improve its standing in it. I don't pretend to know exactly how the Harper government will survive another two years or so, but it will find a way (or, more accurately, the opposition parties will find a way to allow it to). If the Liberals unwisely engage in another leadership campaign, it suddenly becomes pretty easy, but that's by no means a prerequisite.

Speaking of leadership campaigns, the second obvious question is, given that every federal leader (Gilles Duceppe doesn't count) will have failed to achieve his/her objective, who pays? Stephen Harper, in my view, is safe for at least the duration of this next government; his leadership brought the Conservatives to government from a place where it seemed an impossibility, and there aren't a lot of saviours waiting in the wings anyway. But he's the only one.

Elizabeth May is likely to be gone, unless she can win a seat in a by-election quickly. She probably could have had her pick of at least a dozen ridings winnable to her solely on the strength of her status as Green Party leader; she chose to run in a different one. The Greens will enter this post-election period in no better shape than they entered the last one, and responsibility for that is primarily May's. The Greens have already remained a viable national party for longer than anybody else has done so without winning a seat; one has to wonder if the ghost of Mel Hurtig will be beckoning for it soon.

Dion, too, will probably be ousted, though this would be a mistake. I believe that he has established himself as an alternative to Harper in the minds of enough Canadians that, if the Conservatives should falter early in their new government, the Liberals would be better off with him at the helm than with a vacuum (that faint praise wasn't intended to be quite that damning, but there you are). It would be easy to note that only the Liberals will win fewer seats than they did in 2006, but it would be more useful to compare their election day performance to their standing at dissolution than to their 2006 performance. By that comparison, I think Dion has the Liberals on the upswing. Besides that, his baggage has been checked; the same is not true of Rae and Ignatieff.

This leaves us with Jack Layton. On the one hand, he will (for the third consecutive election) increase the NDP seat count. On the other hand, the New Democrats were hoping for a breakthrough in Montreal and to at least challenge the Liberals for the title of Official Opposition. Neither will occur. It looks very much like the NDP is very close to its plateau under Layton and, for the first time in a while, there's an heir apparent in Thomas Mulcair. Back on the first hand, polls consistently show that Layton is (inexplicably) more popular than his party, and this is not a party that has historically been quick to turf underperforming leaders. My bet is that he'll stick around for a while as well.

All of that said, here are my predictions:
* Conservative: 130
* Liberal: 90
* Bloc: 51
* NDP: 35
* Independent: 2