Why are there no Fraser Valley election polls? And other questions about the federal government.

There is only one poll that matters—especially at the local level.

As politicians and Canadians focus on polls to get a sense of who might win the next election, at the local level, the best gauge of the future is the past.

Below, we answer your questions about local polls, tariffs, trade, politician pay, party whips, and more.

Polls

Are there any polls being taken that are riding-specific? We can find lots of information about how the parties are doing nationally—but nothing about what’s developing in our own riding. For people who are planning to vote strategically, this would be very helpful information to have.

The short answer is no.

Polling is expensive. Polls are created one of three ways: a polling company will produce a regular poll that it makes public as a type of advertisement of its services; media companies (and sometimes interest groups) hire companies to poll the public as a news-gathering and information service; and political parties commission their own polls to use for strategy reasons.

Parties often finance riding-level polls, but they rarely become public. Media companies rarely commission (and polling companies rarely freely share) riding-level polls because they are expensive to produce and have a limited reach. And although political parties sometimes disclose their own internal polls, they almost always do so out of self-interest and in a way that can’t be trusted (even if the numbers themselves are legitimate.)

There is one site, 338canada.com, that produces riding-level projections. It’s important to note that the projections on the site are not based on actual polling data. Instead, they use an algorithm to translate provincial and regional polling numbers to the level of individual ridings, based on previous election results. The projections, then, are highly variable, and do not reflect the quality of candidates this election, nor other local factors.

You can see this in action for the Abbotsford-South Langley riding. Historically a Conservative area (although the riding itself is brand new this year), 338Canada projects essentially a dead heat between the Liberal and Conservative candidates in the riding. But independent candidate Mike de Jong is likely to have significant influence in the outcome of that riding’s election. A former BC finance minister, de Jong has been endorsed by former Abbotsford mayor Henry Braun and the area’s previous Conservative MP Ed Fast. De Jong himself released an internal poll his team commissioned. That suggested voters were largely split between de Jong and the Conservatives, with the Liberals further behind.

(You should be wary of reading too much into that internal poll. A single poll is not entirely reliable, especially when it’s released by someone trying to move an audience in a certain direction. We don’t know the margin of error of de Jong’s poll. More than that, we don’t know if the poll result is an outlier—a statistical anomaly based on pure chance. When you see a poll is accurate within a certain range “19 times out of 20,” that reflects the fact that, every now and then, a poll will be off by more than that range. Outliers can be identified through the release of multiple polls. Without that, skepticism is warranted. A candidate may commission a set of polls, but only release a single poll with a result that might be most expected to move an audience to take a certain action.)

We won’t know the accuracy of the 338 projections or de Jong’s polling until after the votes are tallied—and even then, voting intentions can change over time.

In general, nationwide Canadian polling has been accurate during past elections. That’s largely because there is a lot of it. But at a riding level, sometimes the best one can do is to look at previous election results, and try to gauge how the present campaign is different or similar.

First past the post

Two people asked about Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system and why it hasn’t changed.

Why do we still have first-past-the-post? And why doesn’t the party with the popular vote always win?

First, we have to define how we talk about an election’s “winner.” And that’s going to take some time.

The winner of a Canadian election is whichever party is able to form the next government. Real power in our democracy lies with the House of Commons and the Members of Parliament chosen to sit in it and represent their constituents.

And for a government to function, and a Prime Minister and cabinet to wield power, they need the support of a majority of Members of Parliament (regardless of which parties they belong to).

As our reader alludes to, a government does not necessarily need to be led by the party with the most total votes. Indeed, an election’s “winner” doesn’t even always receive the most seats—even if it does usually line up that way.

What matters is that a party leader can obtain the support of a majority of MPs and thus gain the “confidence” of the House of Commons. Winning the most seats usually means a party can form government—even if a party doesn’t have a majority, it can usually govern with the support of MPs from other parties. This is how Canada’s minority federal governments have functioned in recent years. But smaller parties can also collaborate to create a government that has the backing of a majority of MPs.

We explained this in depth in our Government 101 story, and you can read that section here.

The unequal distribution of votes means that similar vote tallies can translate to very different numbers of seats. It also means that a party with the most votes can win fewer seats than a party with a smaller number of votes.

Canadian elections are actually more than three hundred local elections for Members of Parliament. If every victorious candidate won by the same margin, one could easily predict what percentage of the vote translated to what percentage of seats.

But that’s not what happens. Some parties have a more “efficient” distribution of voters than others. Essentially, if a party has a lot of supporters spread over a large number of ridings, its vote will generally result in more seats than if those voters were spread over a small number of ridings that you won easily. The Conservatives’ overwhelming popularity in the prairie provinces tends to result in a large number of votes that don’t do much to add to the party’s seat tally.

The reverse tends to be true among parties with a smaller share of the vote. In that case, a small party with many of its voters concentrated in a few ridings might be able to win some seats, while another with a more even distribution of voters might be left with little representation in Parliament. In 2021, for instance, the NDP received twice as many votes as the Bloc Quebecois, but because the Bloc’s voters were concentrated in a single province, it won more seats.

Why we still have first-past-the post is a question that has been put to former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who previously promised a new electoral system for Canada.

Many countries use various forms of proportional representation systems that attempt to match the total share of votes a party receives with a similar proportion of seats in the country’s legislative assembly. (Australia uses preferential voting, and you can watch a beer-themed explainer of how that works here.)

But Canadian governments have not moved toward a new system for a variety of political reasons.

Most obviously, it’s rarely in the self-interest of the government of the day to introduce a new electoral system. After all, the status quo just allowed them to win control of government. A new system may make winning future elections more difficult. Thus, they stick with the current system.

UBC political science professor Stewart Prest notes that second-place parties also often don’t push the matter, since they tend to see an avenue to power through the existing electoral system. So electoral reform tends to be a priority of small parties, with little actual power or leverage.

Sometimes, elected parties do move to change the electoral system but the voters themselves balk. Twenty years ago, British Columbia’s BC Liberals convened a citizens’ assembly to explore a new electoral system for the province. The assembly’s suggested system, called ranked-ballot format called single-transferrable vote, then went to a referendum. But although a majority of voters endorsed the system, it didn’t meet the 60% threshold that had been set to signal widespread approval. A second referendum took place in 2018. It too was a response to a promise to reform the electoral system by the incoming NDP government. But more than 60% of those who took part voted to stick with the current system.

There are different views on the benefits and drawbacks of a first-past-the-post system. Some like the fact that first-past-the-post leads to more consistent majority governments, and thus governments that are more stable and able to deliver policies. First-past-the-post also generally reduces the ability of fringe parties to win seats in Parliament.

Others prefer proportional representation systems that give smaller parties a greater voice, and which ensure that every vote cast in an election is factored into how many seats a party receives in Parliament. Some say the existence of more parties encourages co-operation and better reflects a population’s diversity of views.

Tariff responses

How much authority does each provincial government have to choose its own response to American tariff threats? What happens if a province is in direct opposition to the response of the federal government?

The federal government is in charge of foreign policy—and that includes negotiating trade deals. It has the ability to set tariffs on incoming goods—and impose export taxes as retaliation against other countries’ tariffs. That said, each province has both official and non-official tools at their disposal to try to respond to tariffs on their own, or respond to the federal government’s decisions.

Many provincial governments have control over various ministries, agencies, and Crown corporations that do business with the United States. The province can direct those bodies to alter their behaviour in response to American bluster. (Although those actions must still generally abide by existing trade agreements.)

Most prominently, Canada’s largest provinces all run massive hydroelectric systems that sell electricity to the US. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has threatened to restrict electricity sales to the United States, and added a temporary 25% surcharge to energy exports in March. (That surcharge threatened to exacerbate the Canada-US trade war, with Trump saying he would increase steel and aluminum tariffs to 50% in response. The surcharge ended after one day.) Last week, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said his province would not be renewing a deal in which it sells energy to a US power company.

BC Premier David Eby hasn’t gone in that direction—in part because BC also buys power from the United States. But the province has taken its own steps to counter American tariffs. That has included removing US booze from the shelves of provincial liquor stores, introducing legislation that would give BC the power to toll trucks moving goods across the province to Alaska, and cancelling some contracts with US companies.

So while the federal government is in charge of foreign trade, provinces do have their own tools. The feds also usually seek to work with provinces to avoid political and constitutional conflict. If the provincial and federal governments disagree on who has jurisdiction over a certain response or policy related to international trade—or anything else—the dispute will be litigated in, and decided by, Canada’s Supreme Court.

For provinces that oppose federal measures, other options are also possible.

The federal government has threatened, although not imposed, export taxes on energy, which could have a significant impact on Alberta’s oil fields. Alberta’s provincial government has vociferously campaigned against such taxes.

Although they couldn’t do anything to directly stop those taxes, Premier Danielle Smith has threatened other actions. Back in January, Smith said a national export ban on energy would cause a “national unity crisis,” implying that Alberta would be reconsidering its place within confederation. In March, Smith reiterated the statement in her list of demands to the future Prime Minister, saying Alberta would “not accept an export tax or restriction of Alberta’s oil and gas to the United States.”

Interprovincial trade barriers

Why haven't interprovincial tariffs been removed? Why does Canada have so many barriers to interprovincial trade in the first place?

There have been a lot of news stories recently that have tried to explain this issue, because it does sound weird that there are so many barriers to trade between provinces. You can find one of those here: Why it’s so hard to do business between provinces.

Let’s try to break it down here as well. The trade barriers are not tariffs. Rather, they are informal obstacles to trade that make it more expensive or burdensome to do business across provincial lines. Frequently, the barriers are regulations that provinces have created for rational reasons. They may involve rules about the qualifications needed to do a certain job or the safety requirements required for a product to be sold.

But because these barriers can vary from province to province—and in some provinces can be more stringent—they can increase costs for businesses and consumers.

Because many barriers were created for noble reasons, they are hard to remove because doing so requires some provinces to ease rules intended to improve public safety. Even so, it’s not always clear that the rules actually accomplish that mission. Quebec, for instance, once had more-stringent rules about the type of stuffing required in car seats. Those rules increased the cost to make car seats, making it harder for manufacturers to sell their products in both Ontario and Quebec. But they didn’t turn out to actually increase safety. (They’ve since been removed.)

The trade situation with the United States has prompted Canada’s provinces and territories to try to remove internal trade barriers. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick signed deals with Ontario to allow people in certain regulated professions to easily move between provinces, and for alcohol to be sold without additional barriers.

BC has said it wants to increase interprovincial trade, and the government introduced a bill in March it said was intended to remove interprovincial trade barriers as well as give the government the power to move quickly to respond to “actions of a foreign jurisdiction.” Although parts of the bill were removed after criticism that they gave too much power to cabinet, the parts about interprovincial trade remained.

Political pay

A few readers wanted information on how politicians are compensated.

How are politicians paid and how do they access their pensions?

The pay for MPs and Senators is set by Parliament. Like with legislators, federal politicians get pay for being a member of Parliament. Politicians get additional money for extra roles. Those include leading a party, being a cabinet minister, serving as speaker, being a member or chair of a committee, or serving in the Official Opposition’s shadow cabinet.

Your average Member of the House of Commons receives $209,800 a year. They get $120 deducted each time they are absent from a sitting of the House, unless they are sick, on official business, serving in the Armed Forces, pregnant, or caring for a newborn. (They get 21 freebies before the money starts being deducted.)

The Prime Minister receives an additional $209,800 a year, plus a car allowance. The leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons, on the other hand, receives an extra $99,900 a year, also with a car allowance. That is the same bonus as for Ministers and the Speaker of the House of Commons, although the Speaker gets a smaller car allowance.

You can see a full breakdown of the salaries (called sessional allowances) and those bonuses here, along with the many, many rules around expenses and insurance.

The sessional allowances are updated each year. They have been going up over the past few years, with Members of Parliament receiving $167,400 in 2015 and nearly $210,000 today. Salaries increases are pegged to the average wage hike for private-sector union workers. (The federal government’s Department of Human Resources publishes an index of those settlements at the end of the calendar year.)

Pensions were first introduced for Members of Parliament in 1952, when then-Prime Minister Louis St-Laurent expressed concerns that some people would not run for Parliament because it would make it less likely they could provide for themselves after retirement. (At that time, the average Canadian wage for workers in manufacturing was around $3,000 a year, and the MP sessional allowance was $8,000.)

Members of Parliament still need to pay into a pension plan, the same way people elsewhere do. They are entitled to a full pension after service for six years; if they retire with less than six years of service, they get back the money they paid in a single installment.

There are various rules about people who lose one election and return to the House of Commons years later; there are also rules around survivor benefits, formulae for how much Prime Ministers receive after their retirement, and other details on how pensions are distributed. Those are all laid out in the Members of Parliament Retiring Allowances Act.

One person specifically wanted to know the difference in covered expenses for the Prime Minister and other party leaders.

What kind of expenses are taxpayers supporting for MPs, and specifically party leaders?

Beyond pay, all Parliamentarians are entitled to have a certain amount of their expenses covered. The permitted expenses are regulated by Parliament. (You can learn more about that here and here.) Each MP also gets money to operate a local constituency office and communicate with constituents.

Let’s take a minute and look at the third quarter expense report for retiring Abbotsford MP Ed Fast. (We’re not picking on Fast: you can find the detailed expense reports for all MPs here.)

In that quarter, Fast claimed over $50,000 in travel expenses, nearly $2,000 in hospitality expenditures, and around $26,500 in contract expenses.

Fast’s travel expenses largely included trips from Abbotsford to Ottawa and back again; they also included costs for a secondary residence in Ottawa, but not for his home in Abbotsford. (Some of Fast’s claims were actually travel expenses for his executive assistant, Michael Murray, who also travelled with him to Ottawa and back.)

Fast’s hospitality expenses were for things like restaurant meals in both Abbotsford and Ottawa, eaten while meeting with constituents or conducting meetings. He also claimed purchases from Rexall, Costco, and Nespresso, presumably to get snacks for a meeting in his Ottawa office. He also spent $130 on the Conservative Christmas dinner.

Fast’s contract expenses included things like advertising in local newspapers, a cell phone plan, a subscription to the Globe and Mail, hosting for his constituency website, internet for his constituency office, stamps, office supplies, and office janitorial services.

Various government roles—including those both of Prime Minister and Leader of the Official Opposition—bring additional expenses that are covered through other means, depending on the specific duty related to the expense.

Party leaders can spend extra on travel, for example. And the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Official Opposition each get a free—but very temporary—home. Since 1971, the Prime Minister had been provided with a rent-free residence at 24 Sussex Drive, although it has been vacant since 2015. The Leader of the Opposition is provided with a home at Stornoway, another official residence and heritage building. (You can read more about all the official residences—and the work needed to maintain them—here.)

Some of the extra expenses for party leaders are reimbursed by the members’ political parties. (Regulation around the parties’ financial activities only began in 1974; you can read more about that here.)

Individual votes

In response to our Government 101 feature, one reader wanted to know whether MPs can vote the way they want.

What about the party whip? How much freedom does an MP really have?

By the rule and the spirit of Parliamentary law, Members of Parliament are entitled to vote however they see fit. Just a cursory familiarity with politics, however, is enough to know that MPs almost always vote in lockstep with other members of their own party. So what gives?

The answer is that parties and MPs have deemed it to be in their political interest to vote in groups. That, after all, is the point of a political party. A party allows likeminded individuals to join forces to exercise democratic power by co-ordinating strategy, tactics, policy, and votes.

A party’s strength and purpose comes from its unified pursuit of a set of common goals. That, inevitably, demands some sacrifice on the part of individuals who may broadly agree with their party’s policies but differ on individual issues.

Each party has a “whip,” whose job is to try to cajole all members to vote the same way on matters of importance to the party. (They get some extra pay, which you can read more about above.) Each party shapes its own approach to unity and discipline. Some may require rigid discipline from members, while others may tell representatives they can “vote their conscience” on all matters except for “confidence” votes that determine who holds the balance of power in Parliament.

(The exception to all this are members of cabinet, the internal leadership of a party. A cabinet functions as a team within a team and are the key players in developing party policy. All members are expected to vote the same way, every time, because they are the ones who created the legislation in the first place.)

Parties enforce discipline through a combination of carrots and sticks. They may reward representatives who put the party over their own personal preferences with committee assignments, cabinet positions, or internal influence. Those who break from the group can be threatened with expulsion, or not given Parliamentary roles they may desire.

There are social and human factors as well. Party-first representatives can be seen as more trustworthy and loyal to their colleagues. They may enjoy social benefits that come from being seen as a team player who doesn’t create what might be seen as unnecessary conflict and strife. Disunity within a party tends to result in annoying questions from the media and can be seen as a harmful or annoying distraction. Those who seek to break from the pack may be seen as a potential threat, relegated to the sidelines, and shunned—or at least not embraced—by their colleagues.

The perception that internal divisions harms the political fortunes of parties is universal. But Canadian Members of Parliament tend to deviate from their party leadership much less frequently than their colleagues in the UK, which has a very similar system of government.

There are several possible factors. First, Canada’s Parliament is smaller than that of the UK. That means there are far fewer “backbench” MPs—essentially MPs without a party-appointed job beyond casting votes in Parliament and representing their constituents. Backbench MPs are the least powerful MPs. In the UK, where their sheer numbers make them less likely to be chosen for a party-appointed role, they have less hope that being a team-player will eventually land them a more interesting role. Backbenchers comprise a far greater share of UK Parliamentarians, making them more powerful as a collective (or as collections of groups) and reducing the social costs that come from straying from the in-group.

That dovetails with the fact that in the United Kingdom, MPs—rather than party members—pick the party’s leader. A leader cannot alienate large contingents of their MPs without risking a backbench revolt that could threaten their own political future.

This situation isn’t purely happenstance: Canada’s political parties have chosen the means through which they elect leaders. And those leaders have also created a large number of appointed roles that they can use to incentivize their MPs to co-operate and pull in the same direction.

The result is that parties have given themselves more carrots to incentivize Canada’s backbenchers—the MPs most likely to break from their parties—to toe the line. They’ve also reduced the power of backbenchers to hold leaders to account.

There’s one more factor too: the increasing role leaders play in selecting local candidates themselves. Leaders must sign and approve the candidates for the individuals’ running under their party’s name. Some have suggested parties are reluctant to run candidates—even established ones—who may end up deviating from the party and casting votes based on their own thoughts and opinions.

To wrap up our federal election explainers, we asked Prest what he thought was the biggest or most common misconception about how our democracy and government worked.

Here’s what he told us.

You can find more details about the upcoming federal election in our general election hub, as well as our riding-specific hubs: Langley | Abbotsford & Mission | Chilliwack & the Eastern Fraser Valley

If you want to learn more about Canada’s federal government, check out our explainer: Government 101: How does Canada’s federal government really work?

You can find the first part of the Q&A series, on Canada’s democratic safeguards, here: What keeps Canada democratic—and independent? Readers asked. We answered.

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