Is Joe Oliver losing Eglinton-Lawrence?
He may be one of the most high-profile incumbents in the country, but finance minister Joe Oliver is in very real danger of losing the Eglinton-Lawrence riding to Liberal candidate Marco Mendicino, experts say.
“What happens in these elections is, the national campaign goes up and down, and it takes all the ridings up and down with it,” Forum Research president Lorne Bozinoff says. “So what we’re seeing nationally is, we have the Tories down about 10 points from 2011, and that’s translating into them being down about 10 points in each of their ridings.”
Eglinton-Lawrence, where Forum conducted polls that favoured Oliver in August and Mendicino in September, offers a prime example, he says.
The Conservatives “are at risk of losing that riding because they’re down at least 10 points from last year’s national campaign, and the Liberals are up 10 points,” Bozinoff says. “That’s a 20-point swing — it’s very hard to survive that.”
As of Oct. 10, poll aggregation website ThreeHundredEight.com was listing a Liberal victory in Eglinton-Lawrence as a 77-percent probability, with Mendicino projected to receive 47.5 percent of the vote, versus Oliver’s 35.3 percent and NDP candidate and former Saskatewan finance minister Andrew Thomson’s 13.3 percent.
In an article posted on the CBC website on Oct. 7, ThreeHundredEight founder Éric Grenier provided analyses of several ridings in Toronto, including Eglinton-Lawrence, which he identified as a “favourable gain” for the Liberals — that is, a riding the party has a good chance of winning.
Those types of projections don’t surprise Bozinoff, who says that few members of parliament have the ability to buck national trends. While there are exceptions, such as former Ontario premier Bob Rae winning Toronto Centre for the Liberals in 2011, few incumbents have that sort of “big name” impact, he says — even senior cabinet ministers like Oliver.
“If the election were held today, it looks like Joe Oliver would lose,” Bozinoff says.
That doesn’t mean voters should count Oliver out yet, says University of Toronto political science professor Nelson Wiseman, who disagrees with Bozinoff’s assessment that the finance minister doesn’t count as a big-name candidate.
“I think what ThreeHundredEight is doing is taking the numbers they have for Ontario and distributing them as if they have the same impact in every riding,” Wiseman says. “I think Oliver’s profile gives him something of an advantage.”
That said, Wiseman believes the Liberals gained an advantage when they elected longtime resident Mendicino as their candidate. He doubts the party would be doing as well had the riding nominated Eve Adams, the Mississauga—Brampton South MP who famously defected to the Liberal Party in February and was leader Justin Trudeau’s favoured choice for the riding.
“I have a feeling Oliver will do better than the numbers you cited,” Wiseman says. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if he loses at all.”
While Environics Analytics cannot offer predictions for Oct. 19, the organization’s practice of collecting post-election data and dividing it into the company’s signature PRIZM Canadian lifestyle categories does yield some interesting observations, says Rupen Seoni, Environics Analytics’ vice president and practice leader.
According to the organization’s data, the Conservatives dominated upscale segments like Urbane Villagers (average annual household income: $227,566) in Eglinton-Lawrence during the 2011 election, while the Liberals won over culturally diverse segments such as Newcomers Rising (average annual household income: $59,751) and Diverse City (average annual household income: $84,781), groups where the NDP also received its largest share of votes.
And while the percentage breakdown of each PRIZM segment in Eglinton-Lawrence is a closely guarded secret, Seoni says that broadly the number of affluent voters in the riding outweighs its population of culturally diverse voters.
