Erin O’Toole, the beleaguered leader of the Trumpian-right Conservative Party of Canada

Following on Mr. Sloan’s ejection from the Conservative Party, an as yet unhealed and destructive rift in the Conservative Party occurred.
Most recently, 62 of the 119 elected Conservative Party MPs and former Conservative MP turned Independent Derek Sloan drew outrage from Canadians across Canada, when they voted against legislation brought in by the Trudeau government that would ban “conversion therapy”, the widely condemned practice of trying to change someone’s LGBTQ identity to heterosexual. The final vote was 263-63 in favour of the Liberals’ Bill C-6, passage of the bill banning conversion therapy, include talk therapy, hypnosis, fasting and the use of electric shocks.
The Conservative Party had outed itself as a federal political party largely comprised of homophobes and transphobes, regressives in the manner of Donald Trump and his many hateful acolytes. VanRamblings will expand on this story and theme in a post to be published next month.

Tasteless, sexist, misognynist, objectionable Conservative Party ad attacking Justin Trudeau.

Eighty-two per cent of Canadians 12 year of age and older have had at least one dose of vaccine, while 70+ per cent have been fully vaccinated.
The vaccine requirement for federal and federally regulated employees, however, would not be implemented by Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, despite garnering the support of public sector unions & 82% of Canadians.
To dig the hole even deeper for the prospect of Mr. O’Toole and the Conservative Party forming the next government of Canada, on Monday, despite the widely popular and economically sound initiative of the federal Liberal government to implement $10-a-day childcare across Canada — the first national, universal social programme to be implemented since 1964, when the Liberal government of Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson mandated universal medicare, and successfully moved legislation that brought the Canada Pension Plan into existence — and despite the fact that eight provinces and terrritories have enthusiastically signed onto the universal child care programme (including provinces led by Conservative governments), Mr. O’Toole went on record to state a Conservative Party would not implement any sort of national child care programme, but would instead create a tax credit for the parents of young children.
Make no mistake, the Conservative Party of Canada under Erin O’Toole is not your parent’s Progressive Conservative party, not the progressive party of Robert Stanfield, Joe Clark or Brian Mulroney.
Rather, the current Conservative Party of Canada under Erin O’Toole has become a far right, Trumpian party that ill represents the values of Canadians across our land, and as such have not a hope in hell of either being elected to national government, or even holding onto a goodly portion of the 119 seats held by the Conservative Party at dissolution.
Tomorrow’s VanRamblings column will explore in some detail, why it is that Erin O’Toole and the Conservatives have almost an insurmountable uphill battle to hold onto their seats in northern British Columbia, across Alberta and Saskatchewan, in Ontario — particularly in the 905 Metro Toronto region — in Québec, and across the Maritimes.
A dire situation, indeed, for Erin O’Toole and Canada’s Conservative Party.

Once again, the Curse of Politics panel — David Herle, Scott Reid and Jenni Byrne — weigh in on Elxn44, reviewing the release of the Conservative Party platform, among a raft of other issues that have come to the fore in Day Three of the current federal election.

Day 3 | The Curse of Politics panel weigh in on #Elxn44, and Charlie Brown … er, Erin O’Toole.

If you believe that palaver, VanRamblings has a bridge we’d like to sell you.

Public polling has fallen out of favour in recent years, with pollsters in Canada and the United States wildly wrong in their predictions as to the outcome of various elections. Why?
Polling respondents, more often than not, lie to pollsters — who also fail to survey a broad cross-section of the public. Pollsters fail to compensate or adjust their figures factoring in that those members of the electorate under the age of 45 are significantly less likely to turn up at the polling booth, or mail in their ballot, than voters over the age of 45 — but pollsters give these “younger” respondents equal weight in calculating their polling results. As a consequence of their continued failure to accurately account for the intention of the potential electorate, pollsters face an existential crisis, and a disaster for the polling industry and for media outlets and analysts that package and interpret the polls for public consumption.
The polling that counts, and the polling the general public never gets to see is the polling conducted for the two leading parties, in Canada, the Liberals and the Conservatives, each of whom dedicate between five and eleven million dollars of their campaign budgets to paying private internal pollsters who, unlike the 1,000 respondents contacted for the Nanos Research poll above, conduct daily polling in the two hundred or so ridings the two mainstream political parties believe they have chance of winning, contacting between 300 and 500 respondents in each riding every day, as well as conducting in-person demographically diverse research groups in these ridings, among those members of the electorate who are engaged and likely, or almost certain, to vote in the current federal election.
The following “story” illustrates the meaning behind what you read above.

Approximately six months before Premier Christy Clark went to the polls in 2013, B.C. Liberal party campaign manager Mike Macdonald engaged the services of longtime Stephen Harper pollster, Maple Leaf Strategies’ Dimitri Pantazopoulos, one of Canada’s leading strategists and public opinion researchers, with more than 25 years of experience and practical knowledge in providing strategic advice to right and centre-right political parties and their leaders, and renowned for his dogged, thorough and in-depth, and almost invariably accurate, public opinion research studies.
Following in-depth polling in all, then, 84 ridings across British Columbia, approximately one week before the provincial writ was dropped in 2013, Mr. Pantazopoulos advised Ms. Clark and Mr. Macdonald that despite the public polling that had the B.C. Liberal party popularity languishing between 33% & 36% in the “public” polls, with NDP leader Adrian Dix polling in the range of 47% to 51% — and assured of an overwhelming victory and majority government in the coming provincial election5 — in fact, he believed Ms. Clark could secure a majority government, advising Mr. Macdonald to “write off” 34 “unwinnable seats”, and focus on the 50 “winnable” ridings that could secure a victory for Ms. Clark and her B.C. Liberal party.
Although many in the B.C. Liberal party were aghast at the advice Mr. Pantazopoulos provided to Ms. Clark and Mr. Macdonald, both chose to take his advice. Mr. Pantazopoulos and his team conducted in-depth polling nightly in each of the “winnable” 50 ridings, and crafted a message for the candidates in each of those ridings to present to the electorate the next day to address the specific concerns of the electorate in those specific ridings. Long story short, despite the public polling that had the B.C. Liberal party and Ms. Clark going down to flaming defeat, come election night, the B.C. Liberal party secured victory in every one of the fifty ridings that Mr. Pantazopoulos had identified, as Ms. Clark and the B.C. Liberal party went on to form their much cherished majority government.

According to information provided to VanRamblings by informed sources within both the federal Liberal and Conservative parties, pre-election internal polling has the Liberal Party on track to win 200+ seats come the end of the current federal election, with the federal Conservative party hoping to hold onto 99 of their current 121 seats — the details of which VanRamblings will provide in the coming days.
Over the course of the next 35 days, both mainstream federal political parties will conduct daily and nightly polling in the ridings they’ve identified for victory, and craft both a national and a local message for the electorate to respond to concerns that have been identified by internal party pollsters, many of whom will be out door knocking in ridings across Canada.
Of course, there’s still five weeks to go until election day and anything could happen, but despite the $63.5 million the Conservative party has in its kitty to “secure victory” s, as VanRamblings will explain tomorrow, it’s going to be an uphill battle for Conservative party leader Erin O’Toole to hold onto a good portion of their current seats in the House of Commons.

As always, VanRamblings will publish the daily Curse of Politics podcast …

Day One | August 16, 2021 | David Herle, Scott Reid and Jenni Byrne weigh in on Day 1 of the 44th Canadian federal election, joined by Politico Canada’s Nick Taylor-Vaisey.