Attentive readers of this blog will remember the sceptical eye cast at a poll of Guelph voters taken by a Winnipeg company last summer in the midst of what was just a byelection there.
That poll showed that it was going to be a Liberal win in a cakewalk.
Well, Allan Bruinooge — the Winnipeg pollster who is the brother of the Winnipeg Conservative MP Rod — went back to Guelph for the general election and, this time, he finds that the Conservative candidate is poised to win a squeaker.
Given Guelph's voting history, that makes some sense. With two exceptions in the last 50 years, Guelph's MP has always been on the government side of the House. One of those exceptions was the last Parliament, where the Conservatives formed the government but Guelph's MP Brenda Chamberlain was on the Liberal benches.
Here's the headline number from Bruinooge's company, Klr-Vu Research:
Conservative Gloria Kovach: 29.94 %
Liberal Frank Valeriote: 27.63 %
NDP Thomas King: 21.42 %
Green Charles Nagy: 21 %
You can read more about his methodology — which involves automated robot callers and touchtone responses — but here's what he says about the accuracy:
“This poll was completed Oct 8th 2008, from unique households in the Federal Riding of Guelph. 1,711 completed responses out of 13,307 possible respondents, for a response level of 13% with a 95% confidence level and a margin of error of 2.31%”
And, as he noted in a e-mail message himself, he himself is the poll's sponsor. (Elections Canada requires that the polling company and the poll sponsor be identified in any poll published during the writ period — something he did not do in the first byelection poll).
The cool pic I've included with this post, by the way, was taken by Rockwood Ray”. It'a shot of the northeast corner of MacDonnell and Wyndham Streets, about a block east of an apartment I onced lived in. I haven't asked Ray for permission to throw his pic up here but I hope he's OK with that — and I trust readers of this blog will click back through to see the other cool work Ray's done.
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I would still be pretty surprised if Gloria Kovach does win (I live in Guelph). Although she's got a pretty good reputation as a hard worker, it seems like her campaign has really not done much to campaign here. For a while (during the by-election that wasn't) we got a lot of campaign ads from her, but after numerous letters to the editorial page as well as a few pieces in the newpapers about the negativity of the ads they just stopped. I'm not sure what their door-to-door has been like in other parts of Guelph, but I haven't talked to anyone who actually has spoken to a campaign worker in Guelph yet (although I'm sure they exist). She hasn't bothered to attend some of the all-candidates meetings, and the lack of support from the Conservative govt. has been very apparent, although apparently Harper did make it to Guelph yesterday. Couple all of those things with a feeling that “if she doesn't win, she'll stay in council”, a fairly strong swell of resentment against the Federal Conservatives for getting rid of our old PC candidate with no explanation, and a pretty big groundswell for the Greens, and I'd be extremely surprised if she won. The only polls that I've seen that have the Conservatives taking Guelph have all been done by Conservatives, haven't they?
It's going to be interesting, to say the least. I'm not a fan of the Conservatives, but I also don't have any doubt that if Ms. Kovach wins she'd do a great job as M.P. We seem to be very lucky this year that no matter who wins, we are going to get a good M.P.- that's certainly not always the case.