Of Polls and Cabinet Shuffles: Updated

Being a political animal I checked my usual sources to learn more about the cabinet shuffle today only to have the latest Abacus poll to be shoved at me.

On the face of it that poll is bad news for the Liberals, although if you look at the actual changes in the estimates compared to their last one you will note they are all within the Margin of Error, which means the changes are all statistically insignificant. Which makes sense since nothing has happened in the last month or so that would move the political needle one way or another.

Anybody who has read my blog before knows what I think of the public polls and that view has not changed. Quite frankly I do not believe any of them, regardless of whether they are good or bad news for the party I support.

Can someone please tell me why that when the Liberals have a good week or the Conservatives have a bad one a pollster always seems to come out with a polls that can only be interpreted as bad news for the Liberals. That has to be a coincidence, right?

As I have stated before I have no faith in polling companies to be on the up-and-up with regards to their polling, especially outside of election campaigns. They have no incentive to be so. No polling company actually makes money conducting political polls. They use them as a marketing tool. So, a polling company could be like Nanos, who is the in-house polling company of Bell/Globe media. They can use that fact to sell their services to clients that will actually pay them on more than a cost recovery basis. 

If, on the other hand, the polling company is not employed by a media company they have to make their political polls stand out if they are going to be effective marketing tools. One way to do that is to be different from everybody else and claim they are seeing things differently from the rest of the "herd". There are no consequences for doing so when no election is taking place because their polls will never be tested against the actual results of an election. Therefore, they can publish polls that say almost anything if they wish.

We only need to look at the 2021 election to see this. Before the writ was dropped the polls were all over the place. Almost exactly one day after the writ was dropped the variance in the public polls disappeared. Suddenly when the testing of polls was imminent the herd regathered.

I have been saying for some time that if you want to see what is really happening in politics you need to look at what the political parties are doing.

For the Conservatives, Pierre Poilievre and his brain trust decided he needed a makeover. Political parties that are comfortable with their leader and message do not change the appearance and image of that leader.

For the Liberals they had a massive cabinet shuffle today. A superficial assessment of that shuffle would be that the Trudeau government is feeling the heat and they have decided that a major change is in order to salvage their political fortunes. There might be some merit in that argument. After all the government is not getting any younger and they can expect the next election to be their most difficult one yet.

However, you have to go a little deeper to get the whole picture and a deeper dive shows that the PM had to construct a cabinet where seven existing Ministers were dropped from cabinet. That is a seismic change and with the necessity to have a cabinet that is gender balanced and regionally and provincially representative combined with having to bring in seven new cabinet minister the need to make huge changes becomes clear. 

So the extent of the cabinet shuffle is probably a combination of the two, plus considerations that only the PM and his team would be privy to. Certainly their internal data is telling them that things are not a rosy as they were a few years ago but that should surprise no one, including them. As well, the need to integrate so many new ministers and meet the other needs of cabinet making required all of the changes that were made today.

By the way, the core of the cabinet did not change so that should also be taken into consideration when assessing the motivations behind the cabinet decisions. If their internal data showed that they were in real trouble there would have been changes in the core.

Update: I read in passing that when asked the PM stated that he would not rule out breaking the agreement the Liberals have with the NDP before 2025. I doubt they would but the fact he did not avoid the question (We are focused on serving Canadians and not on elections.) can also be taken as an indicator that things are not as bad as the public pollsters would have us believe.

Some Summer Thoughts

It is summertime so I am not paying as close attention to politics as I usually do but I have noticed a few things on which I can comment.

First, Pierre Poilievre's makeover is yet one more example of the underlying disrespect Conservatives seem to have for voters. He is the latest Conservative/Canadian Alliance/Reform Party leader to do so. They actually seem to believe that a politician's looks matter. It is one of the reasons why so many Conservative commentators are always going off on Mr. Trudeau's hair or socks. 

Of course they are wrong. Jean Chretien is by no means a dreamboat and he also talks funny in both official languages. Yet he beat a somewhat attractive blond woman to win his first election, then he beat a made over Preston Manning and he finally beat Stockwell Day, his wetsuit and his jet ski. Stephen Harper has the charisma of a turnip yet he beat three Liberal leaders. He could not beat Mr. Trudeau but contrary to Conservative belief it was not because Mr. Trudeau is good looking.

Mr. Chretien, Mr. Harper and Mr. Trudeau won their elections because they were perceived to be men with substance. When people of substance goes up against those without it they win almost every time.

I have seen some speculation in the media about what would happen if the Conservatives won the most seats but not a majority government in the next election. It has all been out to lunch. Just remember that political pundits get bored in the summer because nothing is really happening so they usually try to make something up to justify their jobs. Often times it is just good old fashioned election speculation, i.e. the government may call an election in the Fall. However, even they cannot sell such silliness this time because there is no way the PM is going to call an election and despite all of his bloviating there is no way Mr. Singh will vote non-confidence in the government any time soon. As well, there is no issue that the media can grab hold of and call a scandal right now.

So they have resorted to coming up with more and more convoluted arguments about how the Liberals can stay in power despite losing an election. It is all BS, not least of which because an election is not imminent so talking about the outcome of something that may not happen for two more years is pointless. So much can change before then. As well, all of their arguments go against how politics is done in this country, which is something all of them should know if they call themselves political pundits. 

Bottom line, the party that wins the most seats gets the first opportunity to form a government and seek the confidence of The House. If that is the Conservatives after a future election, but they do not hold the majority of seats, they will either dare the other parties to vote against a Throne Speech, triggering another election, or they will sell everything including the kitchen sink to the Bloc and win confidence that way.

It's fun watching Conservative commentators squirm when RWNJs overstep like they did in Belleville last week. They were spinning that event, what the protesters said and did and how the PM handled it so much that I would imagine all of them are suffering from severe cases of motion sickness. 

Climate change is real and its impacts are being increasingly felt with each passing year.

There will probably be a cabinet shuffle this week. Seeing that two years have gone by since the last election it is right on schedule. However, that will not stop some Conservative pundits from claiming it is a sign the Liberals are in trouble. Ignore them.