Byelections, Billy Bishop, And Beaches’ False NDP Hope

It’s a weird feeling for me to feel bad for Avi Lewis, but I do slightly feel like everyone is setting him up for failure.

I have a complicated feeling to Avi - I wrote about him for Macleans in April, and I’ve been plenty critical of his party over the years - but my main feeling towards him right now is feeling bad for him, because people who are nominally on his side are setting him up for failure.

Mark Carney called three byelections on Sunday, including one in Nate Erskine-Smith’s Beaches East York fiefdom, and he did so two days after announcing the government won’t allow airport expansion at Billy Bishop, and he did so the week after polling has cropped up claiming Mike Layton might be a candidate for the NDP in Beaches. He’s also doing this at a time when the NDP’s polling is pretty good, and all of this is leading to a situation where Avi can only lose.

So let’s be very clear: the NDP have no chance of winning any of the three byelections being held now, and have very little chance in the byelections later this year, and expecting Avi to win any of them is setting him up for failure.

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North Van is the easiest to dispatch with - it’s a Liberal-Conservative contest and the Liberals will win easily. Chicoutimi is a seat where there are three serious contenders, and NDP voters will correctly decide to back a credible candidate with a chance of winning under this flawed electoral system. Failures to win, and even failures to be at all competitive, make sense, and should not be held against Avi.

Where this matters is Beaches. It is well known I’ve been a fan of the previous MP, but that’s not the point. The NDP optimism in the seat is built on a fundamental statistical misunderstanding. The NDP vote at the last election was 7% in Beaches, but that number was significantly impacted by NES’ progressivism. Right now my model, with a big affect for personal votes, has the LPC winning by 44% - a margin not particularly dissimilar to what 338 and Poliwave have. But people are trying to do phony math to make it add up to a competitive race where none exists.

People are trying to apply the NDP’s rise in polling to the seat - which is real! - and then take away Nate’s personal vote, add in a big personal vote for Mike Layton, and then throw in a big pile of shit to get to a close race. I have the NDP on 18% of the vote right now after taking Nate’s personal vote away - which, to be clear, will likely be at least somewhat sticky, given Tanveer has worked for Nate forever. If the NDP break 25% without Layton, it’s a miracle. If Layton is stupid enough to run, then breaking 30% would be the miracle.

The discourse over whether Avi should run in any of these byelection seats fell for a basic ignorance of just how badly the NDP had been fucked by Jagmeet Singh’s leadership. None of the seats - including Rosemont! - are winnable for Avi Lewis or any prominent New Democrat. The fact that one of the most leftwing seats in Canada had an NDP vote sub-10% is pathetic, even with Nate being a good incumbent. That it feels like a left wing seat doesn’t change the hole Avi needs to get the NDP out of. In Rosemont, the NDP are facing an immense challenge, as Boulerice was basically elected as an independent in recent years - and when Duceppe left the ballot in 2019 finally, we saw that Quebecers have a deep loyalty to big names that doesn’t extend when they’re off the ballot.

The problem for Lewis is that Singh left a party with lots and lots of room to grow in vote share, but with very little room to grow in seats. That means that a lot of seats that would have been targets in 2013 or 2017 or even 2023 are no longer targets. The NDP has been hollowed out of prime targets by a previous failed leader, which means that Avi is playing from completely behind the 8 ball. Any expectations on the NDP right now fail to live in the reality of that moment.

The government’s decision to announce the decision on Billy Bishop this weekend killed any chance of Beaches going orange. I’m unpersuaded that the government wanted this idea in the first place - I am firmly of the idea that they acted like they would consider it to please Ford, while never having any intention of doing this - but even if they hadn’t I don’t get the sense this would have swung huge amounts of votes. But I get I’m a boring Ottawa resident who doesn’t get Toronto - but in this case, the issue’s now off the table. It’s also if, in many cases, this government knows what it’s doing. (Which is what makes the fucking bridge debacle so fucking annoying, but I digress.)

Chicoutimi represents a fascinating test for the Government, actually, but they’ve constructed it such that it is a free swing. If they win it - they are tiny underdogs in both my model and the Pallas poll of the riding done this week - they get hailed as conquering heroes and more proof of their everlasting strength. But a loss, far from being a crisis, would be written off as a nothing burger - a failure to win a seat the models didn’t think they’d win even if they won 210 seats nationally. The fact that the LPC can manage expectations competently is something the NDP should copy.

Anybody selling a fiction that the NDP are remotely competitive in Beaches is lying. Whether it’s to themselves or the rest of us is for them to know in their hearts. But what I do know is simple - Jagmeet set the NDP so far back that Avi cannot be expected to fix this quickly. If you care about the NDP, stop hyping up the party’s chances and setting expectations in a place the party can’t achieve - all it will do is come back to bite in 5 weeks.