UPDATE: Mark Your Calendar, Manitoba (you too, Vaughan)
Veteran Conservative M.P. Inky Mark, who already announced last year that he would not run for re-election, has decided to step up his schedule and resign as a Member of Parliament effective September 15, 2010, in order to run for the mayor's job in Dauphin, Manitoba, the Winnipeg Sun reported earlier today.
[See below for update relating to other MPs.]
Assuming the Prime Minister knew this was a possibility, it certainly explains why we didn't have a by-election call before now in already-vacant seat of Winnipeg North.
- A resignation date of Wednesday, September 15, 2010 means that the earliest the Prime Minister could call a by-election in Dauphin – Swan River – Marquette, MB would be 11 days later, on Sunday, September 26. An election called on that date would fall on or after Monday, November 1.
- The last day to call the Winnipeg North, MB by-election (as we noted last week) is on Wednesday, October 27, which would put its Election Day on or after Monday, December 6.
So, assuming the Prime Minister believes it would be ideal to call the two Manitoba by-elections together, we could expect to see the call come sometime between the end of September and the end of October, for a date sometime in November, or perhaps early December. The House of Commons is adjourned the week of Monday, November 8 for the Remembrance Day break, so that particular Monday is certainly one very likely possibility for Election Day.
The Conservatives acclaimed naturalist Robert Sopuck to run in Mark's place this past October, and the Green Party's Kate Storey has been in place since the March before that. However, the only other parties to ever hold the seat (the Liberals for a term in 1993 against two conservative parties, and the NDP for a term in 1980) have yet to name their candidates for the forthcoming contest.
Interestingly, I just had an email the other week from a Dipper who argued that Inky Mark's popularity as an incumbent masked the fact that, but for his huge margins, the Dauphin seat would naturally have been the higher NDP priority over Selkirk – Interlake, MB which has shown some closer races in recent years. My correspondent noted that the NDP holds 2 of the 4-and-a-bit provincial constituencies within its boundaries, including the Swan River seat represented by Deputy Premier Rosann Wowchuk.
Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff's summer bus tour has already been through Manitoba, and is scheduled to do a swing through BC, followed by the Québec south shore, eastern townships, and rural Nova Scotia, on its way to the summer caucus retreat in Baddeck, NS. The NDP's caucus retreat is scheduled for Regina, SK, which is a bit closer. Both parties now have around a month to do some high-powered candidate search and tour plans for the Dauphin riding; and given that they've been running neck-and-neck with each other in opposition to Inky Mark over the years, it will no doubt fall to local organization, candidate strength, and historical voting patterns to determine who has the upper hand. Certainly the NDP has been running second to Mark over the past three elections, but as little as 2.5 points ahead of the Liberals, and in spite of a poorly-funded effort under new candidate Ron Strynadka in 2008.
Now, would a double-barrel, urban-rural set of Manitoba by-elections constitute a proxy for the popularity of the country's currently longest-serving provincial NDP government and its new premier, or as a popularity contest for the federal Harper Conservative government, or would it simply reflect the typical urban-rural voting patterns that prevail across the prairie provinces?
Well, unless we see any more M.P.s step down and join their seats into a late fall set of by-elections, I guess we're going to find out soon enough. Thanks to commenter TrueBloo in the previous post for bringing this clipping to our attention.
UPDATE: A Twitter follower is reminding me that Vaughan, ON Liberal M.P. Maurizio Bevilacqua is believed to be actively preparing a run for mayor of Vaughan. That being the case, he has until 2 PM Friday, September 10 (municipal nomination day) to resign his seat for a municipal run, according to Ontario provincial legislation. A resignation on that date would also dovetail with the timeline hypothesized above.
Tags: Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette, Retiring Incumbents, Vacant Seats, Vaughan, Winnipeg North
Conservative MPs have the best attendance record of all parties in the HOC.
With the exception of Geurgis and Harper MP Inky Mark had the worst attendance of the caucus for quite some time, certainly in the third session.
It would be nice if MPs who have more or less tuned out promptly resigned.
Communities deserve an actively engaged MP and a new generation of leaders is always waiting in the wings.
Plus by-elections are terribly fun. Here’s to hoping for a big mini-election this winter!
Sometimes those MPs are urged by their leaders to stay on for a certain amount of time, just so you know. Other times, they try to time their retirement announcements to coincide with an election window that winds up closing.
Of course it would be easier to do all this if there were in fact a fixed election date people could count on (ahem!).
However, I have to agree with you that some by-elections would be a pleasant diversion for all of us!
Thanks for your comments the past few weeks, Shadow (and everyone else). I do read them all, even when I’m immersed in other things.
I think the issue is attendance.
Until the day you’re no longer an MP you should be showing up for work, even if you’re only staying there at the request of the leader or counting down the time until the next election.
I’ll be watching Jay Hill’s attendance this fall after seeing a piece about him packing his belongings into a U-Haul and leaving Ottawa.
He’s looking for a job in Alberta in the energy field. If he gets one before the next election he says he’ll resign.
My feelings on the matter are that if he’s gone for good he should resign this fall with the others, job offer or not.
Poor attendance is a big part of the public cynicism around the senate. I’d hate to see it spill over to the more well behaved HOC.
Conservative MPs have the best attendance record of all parties in the HOC.
I’d be highly interested in seeing a source for that – since last I checked the Cons kept their attandance records secret, and were demonstrably below the NDP in MP attendance for votes.
(Which doesn’t mean they aren’t going around claiming to have the best attendance record, secure in the knowledge that they’re withholding the information the public would need to test the claim.)
Following up on my previous post, there’s more thorough information on MP absences at How’d They Vote, but it doesn’t look like there’s an easy way to compare party by party.
i’m actually not that surprised Inky Mark is leaving as he announced his retirement last year and may of got tired of waiting for parliament to end . the riding is mostly rural and fairly safe for the conservatives and just north of candice hoeppners seat so be a test of the rural hunters vote . even though it bizarely went liberal due to vote spliting in 93 i suspect a by-election just be about trying to improve liberal results there as they know they realistically can’t expect to win that one. ndp have a bit more of a chance but would likely come up short like what happened in cumberland colchester a simialar rural tory stronghold .
This will be the first time that the Conservatives will have to face a by-election in a Conservative-held riding since they came to power in 2006. (I don’t count C.C.M.V. in Nova Scotia, as Bill Casey was elected as an Independant.)
It will be very interesting to see the results.
Any chance one of the provincial NDP M.L.A.’s might be thinking of resigning to try and win the seat?
Oh, you are alert today David! I’ve just tweet’ed about this, thanks to you.
The Jurist simply use the down arrow button to rank MPs by absence.
The sea of red at the top of the list and the sea of blue at the bottom is pretty much self explanatory.
It would hardly be surprising that government-side MPs would have the highest vote attendance in any government, never mind a minority situation, Jurist and Shadow. Makes perfect sense to me. This is one of the reasons the Conservative backbenchers raised concerns about people being able to organize against them for their nominations while they were stuck in Ottawa on House duty, and why the party moved to provide for those nominations to be secured.
Alice I should add in the interest of fairness that the Liberals also had a deliberate strategy of keeping MPs away from confidence votes this session so that is also skewing the attendance stats somewhat.
Although one could argue that showing up and abstaining like the NDP members did a year ago would be better for the institution of parliament.
TrooBlue’s previous less news-worthy post is hilarious!
One reliable thing about Harper is that he likes calling by-elections together- …. Always has in the past:
Fall 2006 London North Ctr and Repentigny
Summer 07 – –Outremont, St Hyacinthe , + Roberval – Lac St Jean.
Spring 08- Toronto Centre, Quadra, Churchill River, Willowdale
Summer 08 – Guelph, Westmount Ville Marie, Don Valley West and Saint Lambert
Fall 2009-New Westminster—Coquitlam, Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, Montmagny—L’Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, Hochelaga
In this case, it would be trio of seats, each of the three parties favoured in one, and the historic challenger in one other. Quite a symmetrical situation when you think about it.
Maurizio Bevilacqua had better resign from the HOC pretty quick here because he’s coming under major fire:
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/851501–questions-raised-about-vaughan-mp-s-mayoral-intentions?bn=1
3 possibilities:
*This is a trumped up issue over the mailouts MPs send to constituents all the time
*This really is using federal funds for a mayoral campaign and the ethics committee should investigate it
*He’s not actually going to run
This isn’t necessarily related to this post, but I have two Alberta candidate updates. 2006 and 2008 candidate Michael Cormican has been acclaimed as the Liberal candidate in Lethbridge and 2-time NDP candidate Michael Butler has been acclaimed as the Liberal candidate in Edmonton-Mill Woods-Beaumont. Mr. Butler was the NDP candidate in that riding in the 2008 federal election and the 2008 provincial NDP candidate in the Edmonton-Rutherford constituency.
- Dave
Thanks for the interesting update, Dave. I’ll be back to all this soon.
I took a look at recent contributions to the federal Conservative and Liberal parties in these ridings. Since information about a contributor’s address is only posted for large contributors, this does not include contributions from ’small’ contributors. Since riding boundaries do not exactly match postal code boundaries, this may not be as precise as it ought to be.
The Conservative Party received a total of $6,755 in the first two quarters of 2010 from 15 contributors in the area of the Dauphin–Swan River–Marquette riding (postal codes beginning with R7N, R0J and R0L. The Liberal Party did not receive any large contributions from contributors listing these postal codes in the same period.
The Liberal Party has the edge in the Winnipeg North riding, having received a total of $4058.89 in the first two quarters of 2010 from contributors with postal codes beginning with R2P, R2R, R2W or R2X. The Conservative Party received $2350 from contributors with those postal codes in the same period. Note that one individual contributed the maximum to both parties.
That’s interesting, Robert. You’re using a similar methodology to the one Glen McGregor and Mia Rabson have used recently. To match the first three characters of a postal code (what’s called the “forward sortation area”) to federal electoral districts (FEDs) there is a file available for purchase from Statistics Canada, but it’s really expensive. There is another data provider, but I forget the name off the top of my head … maybe geolocator.ca or something like that. Also, Cory Horner has an API method through his website HowdTheyVote.ca, but I believe for licencing reasons he has to put a limit on it.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks, Alice. I got the FSA maps from Canada Post’s web site and just compared them visually to riding maps on the Elections Canada web site. Low-tech, but useful for the limited scope of what I was looking at.
Alice, I apologize for changing the topic slightly, but you are one of the few people that might know the answer to this.
What is the current status of Bevilaqua’s leadership debt, and how is that affected if he is no longer in federal politics ?
Very good question, jad.
The last I wrote about that came after Glen McGregor’s story about the extension to December of 2011, which the candidates were granted by the courts in early February.
Mr. Bevilacqua’s leadership debt at that time was reported by Glen to be $193,133. As I wrote at the time:
I have to say that I’m coming to agree that one aspect of those rules does need to be changed. I think the per-leadership contest limit on contributions needs to be changed to a per-year limit. Those folks would stand a chance of raising sufficient funds to pay off the debts if most of the likely donors hadn’t already contributed the leadership contest limit to another candidate. Not changing it seems willfully cruel to me, because it’s a limitation that is really not justified by the circumstances. I’ll readily admit that some of the candidates should not have spent nearly as much as they did on their bids, but they should be given a reasonable chance to raise the money to pay off their debts, I think, and I believe that may be the only way to do so.
In any event, I believe he is bound by the requirements of the Elections Act and the court ruling regardless of whether he continues to be an MP or not. And, unless there are some provisions of the Ontario Municipal Elections Act I don’t know about, I don’t see how it would affect his right or ability to run municipally.
Anyways, thank you for reminding me about that aspect of the Vaughan race. Does this jive more or less with what you expected?
Thanks, Alice, that’s qbout what I thought.
I agree with you on the per year rule needing to be changedm but on the other hand, I am also concerned about a number of people who ran up large debts with no means of repaying them – and quite honesyly in most cases little expectation of winning. It’s hardly inspiring if someone wants to be leader but can’t manage his own campaign finances.
I suppose they were guilty of excessive optimism, and clearly you don’t run to become leader if you’re a pessimist, but perhaps the rose coloured glasses were a little too tinted, eh.