Wednesday, April 05, 2017

By-election are meaningless

I generally avoid reading political pundits now a days.  I find their arguments to be vacuous and superficial.  There is not a single one of them who actually adds anything useful to any political argument.

However, I happened to glance at a news aggragator site today and there was a story indicating that the reduction in the level of Liberal support was not all Justin Trudeau's fault.

Upon closer inspection the column was essentially arguing that the big defeats in Calgary and the fact their victories in Ontario and Quebec were only by 25 point margins instead of 30+ points seemed to indicate that the Liberals had cause for concern.

When I read that I began to wonder if pot had been legalized and I had just missed that fact.

The two Calgary ridings were held by Jason Kenney and Stephen Harper.  I cannot think of two more rock steady Conservative ridings in Canada.  The Conservatives could have run a pair of chimps as candidates and they still would have taken those ridings in a walk.

As for the other three, the margins of victory by the Liberals was impressive by any measure.  The fact that those margins did not hit some arbitrary level set by an individual columnist proves nothing.

Bottom line, the Liberal seats stayed Liberal and the Conservative seats stayed Conservative.  That is the only real story here.  Any speculation on what these results mean to the bigger picture is just a columnist attemping to justify their job.

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