Ottawa

If an election had been held last month

A Liberal-NDP accord?

Eric Grenier has posted the polling averages for September. In terms of the popular vote, it’s a 32/30/25 split for the Liberals, Conservatives and New Democrats, but if you plug that into Eric’s seat projection model, it’s a 136/115/70 split with the Conservatives leading.

We are two years out from an election, but the Throne Speech is still a day away and there’s not much to talk about except the select items the Conservatives have leaked for the purposes of generating their preferred discussion, so feel free to spend this free time considering what that sort of result in 2015 would mean.

In the opinion of the amateur constitutional scholar who currently occupies the Prime Minister’s Office, “losers” don’t get to form government. But in this scenario, the Liberals would have “won” the popular vote. And the Liberals and New Democrats, meanwhile, would also have a majority of the seats between them.

The result would be something like the outcome of the 1985 Ontario election, when the Progressive Conservatives won the most seats, but the Liberals won the popular vote. The result of that was that a non-confidence motion was moved against the incumbent PC government and the lieutenant governor invited David Peterson, the Liberal leader, to form a government, which he was able to do as a result of an accord between the Liberals and New Democrats.

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