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There were no seat changes in Monday's federal byelections, but the governing Liberals took a hit in all five of the contested ridings marking their worst byelection performances so far under Justin Trudeau.

The Conservatives saw gains in three of the five ridingswhile the New Democrats took hits of their own in all but one, leaving the Conservatives as the winners of the night.

The Liberals held on to the three ridings they were defending (MarkhamThornhill, OttawaVanier and Saint-Laurent) while the Conservatives retained their two seats of Calgary Midnapore and Calgary Heritage, the latter being the old seat of former prime minister Stephen Harper.

But across the five ridings, the Liberals' vote share dropped by an average of 4.7 points. That was a steeper loss than the NDP's average 2.2-point decline. The Conservatives gained an average of 4.2 points compared to their supportin the 2015 federal election.

This is a reversal of the trends exhibited between the 2011 and 2015 votes, when the Liberals made gains in 13 of 15 byelections and the Conservatives suffered losses in all of them.

Granted, byelections can be largely driven by local issues.But being on the wrong side of the trend line does not bode well for future performance.

Turnout was low on Monday, ranging from 27.5 per cent in MarkhamThornhill to 34.1 per cent in OttawaVanier. Accordingly, the big parties lost votes in every riding and the Liberals lost vote share across the board.

Though the most significant decline for the Liberals occurred in OttawaVanier, the result for Mona Fortier (51.2 per cent of the vote, down 6.4 points) was better than the late Mauril Blanger's scores between 2004 and 2011, when the Liberals were either in opposition or reduced to a minority government.

Support for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberals fell from their 2015 election results in all five byelections Monday, including Calgary Midnapore, where Trudeau campaigned for candidate Haley Brown, right. (Jeff McIntosh/Canadian Press)

The nomination controversies in MarkhamThornhill and Saint-Laurent did not seem to have a disproportionate impact on Liberal fortunes, as the decreases suffered there by Mary Ng (down 4.4points to 51.3 per cent) and Emmanuella Lambropoulos (down 2.5 points to 59.1 per cent) were not notablydifferent than those in the other three ridings.

The Liberals were unable to maintain the gains made in Calgary in 2015 (whenthey won their first seats there since 1968), capturing21.7 per cent of the vote in Calgary Heritage (down 4.3 points)and just 17 per cent in Calgary Midnapore(down 5.7 points). Nevertheless, with the exception of 2015, those were the party's best results in the ridings since 1980and 1997, respectively.

With 71.5 per cent support for Bob Benzen in Calgary Heritage, up 7.7 points from 2015,and 77.2 per cent for Stephanie Kusie(+10.5) in Calgary Midnapore, the Conservatives made a renewed show of strength in two traditional strongholds. Kusie's score in Calgary Midnapore was the Conservatives' best in the riding since the merger of the Progressive Conservatives and Canadian Alliance in 2003.

Conservative candidate Stephanie Kusie celebrates with her husband James and son Edward after winning Calgary-Midnapore. (Todd Korol/Canadian Press)

The Conservatives also put up good numbers in MarkhamThornhill, the kind of GTA riding the Conservatives will need to win in the future to form a majority government. The party captured 39 per cent of the vote, up 6.7 points and their best performance since 1997 when the Liberals last lost the riding.

But the Conservatives put up worse results in two francophone ridings, OttawaVanier and Saint-Laurent. The party held its 19.5 per cent vote share in the Montreal seat. In OttawaVanier, the Conservatives were down 3.7 points, their worst performance there since 1968.

It is possible the Conservative leadership race has helped boost the party elsewhere, but the lack of French-language skills among the field of 14 candidates for the top job (including one of the front-runners, Kevin O'Leary) may not be doing the party favours in ridings with large francophone populations.

The New Democrats saw their vote drop most significantly in ridings that were primarily head-to-head contests between the Liberals and the Conservatives down 4.4 points in Calgary Heritage, 5.2 points in Calgary Midnapore and 7.2 points in MarkhamThornhill.

Their numbers in these three ridings were their worst since before Jack Layton took over the party in 2003.

The loss of 3.7 points in Saint-Laurent is not a good sign for the New Democrats in Quebec, where the party needs to regain some lustre.

But the results in OttawaVanier were far more positive for the NDP. The New Democrats gained 9.4 points, reaching 28.7 per cent andnearly matching their all-time best performance in the riding in 2011.

Liberal candidate Mona Fortier, centre, won the Ottawa-Vanier byelection. (Justin Tang/Canadian Press)

The Greens saw little change in their numbers with the exception of again of 5.6 points in Saint-Laurent, where their deputy leader, Daniel Green, was a candidate. The Bloc Qubcois, in its first electoral test under new leader Martine Ouellet, did little better in Saint-Laurent than the party did in 2015, but also no worse.

So the results of the byelections have something to please each of the opposition parties, with the Conservatives having the most to smile about in addition to their two wins.

On the government's side, theirthree comfortable victories might be little to worry about just yet.But if these byelections acted as a mid-term report card for the Liberals, they might want to return to their studies or risk failing the next test.

The rest is here:
Liberals lose support, Conservatives gain in status quo byelections - CBC.ca

OTTAWA Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau emerged unscathed from his first real test with voters on Monday as the incumbent party held onto power in five by-elections across the country, leaving Trudeau's Liberals with an undiminished majority in parliament.

As expected, none of the regional votes to elect members of parliament produced an upset, with Trudeau's Liberals retaining three seats in Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa and the opposition Conservatives holding onto two seats in Calgary, according to preliminary results from Elections Canada.

With the majority of votes counted in each race, all of the incumbent parties were leading by more than 10 percentage points and all had been projected as winner by the Canada Broadcasting Corp.

Still, the votes could be the last easy victory for the Liberals, who have enjoyed a long honeymoon with voters in part because both opposition parties are in the process of replacing their leaders ahead of a 2019 general election, when both Trudeau and members of the House of Commons face the electorate.

"I don't think it means anything at this stage because it was very predictable," said Nelson Wiseman, a political science professor at the University of Toronto.

"I think once the Conservatives select their new leader, you're going to see a boost in Conservative support - it happens after every leadership convention, and that goes on for a while ... so the more important by-elections will be those closer to 2019," Wiseman added.

A December poll showed Trudeau's approval rating remained high but was dropping amid rising dissatisfaction with the economy, and voter anger over a broken promise to reform the electoral process could eat into the government's popularity.

In addition, nearly half of Canadians want to deport people who are illegally crossing into Canada from the United States, and a similar number disapprove of how Trudeau is handling the influx, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released in March.

(Reporting by Andrea Hopkins; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Michael Perry)

ANKARA Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday called on Iraqi Kurds to lower the Kurdish flag in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, warning that failure to do so would damage their relations with Turkey.

CARACAS Venezuelan security forces quelled rowdy protesters with tear gas, water cannons and pepper spray in Caracas on Tuesday after blocking an opposition rally against unpopular socialist President Nicolas Maduro.

CAIRO Islamic State said on Tuesday the United States was drowning and "being run by an idiot".

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Canada Liberals unscathed as by-elections return status quo - Reuters

Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a contributing editor to Reason magazine.

The New York Public Library hosted an event Saturday dedicated to what seems, in our day and age, a far-fetched goal: civil dialogue across partisan and ideological lines.

The symposium, Shades of Red and Blue, was co-sponsored by American and international groups, in partnership with the British daily, The Guardian. It featured novelist Salman Rushdie, Columbia University president Lee Bollinger, and former Princeton University dean and Obama administration official Anne-Marie Slaughter on panels that discussed topics ranging from White House politics to national security to immigration to the media and the fake news problem.

Not surprisingly, the Trump presidency dominated the discussion with former Richard Nixon counsel John Dean providing analogies to another turbulent presidency. But political polarization, and the divide between middle America and the cultural elites, was a central topic as well.

On the morning panel, John Podhoretz, editor of the conservative Commentary magazine, noted that in the 1980s and 1990s, he used to say that conservatives were bilingual they spoke the language of the conservative movement but also the language of the more mainstream liberal culture and understood liberal thinking while liberals tended to be more monolingual. Today, he said, things have changed: a conservative can easily stay in his or her own niche and have little understanding of liberals. Veteran liberal journalist Hendrik Hertzberg, a writer at The New Yorker, agreed. The right and the left no longer touch each other across a no mans land, he said.

Did the elites misunderstand and wrongly condescend to Trump voters? The question repeatedly came up, causing some fireworks at times, with the partisan lines not always predictable. Anti-Trump Republican, author and Naval War College professor Thomas Nichols, author of the new book, The Death of Expertise, was a strong proponent of the view that the Trump voters populist grievances stem largely from ignorance a shallow understanding of foreign policy and a failure to grasp the ways in which they themselves benefit economically from globalization. This caused some sharp exchanges between Nichols and Bard College foreign affairs professor Walter Russell Mead; Mead argued that the widespread sense among Americans that working hard and playing by the rules are no longer tickets to a good life is rooted in real social and economic shifts.

There was more spirited debate on the media panel, where conservative journalists Mollie Hemingway and Matthew Continetti argued that declining trust in the media is due largely to the medias political biases and insufficient commitment to truth and accuracy. The liberal panelists Rushdie and Bard College president Leon Botstein focused on the post-truth environment promoted by the Trump White House, which Rushdie called the source from which all untruth flows.

Hemingways assertion that the media largely gave Barack Obama a pass while leaping at every instance of Republican misbehavior got loud applause from a small portion of the audience but was disputed by Rushdie and Botstein; but in the end, there seemed to be a fair amount of agreement with Hemingways suggestion that mainstream media should get more input on how their coverage looks to conservatives, if only from a devils advocate standpoint. Rushdie still got the biggest applause for saying that well have to work very hard to get the American people to believe in truth again.

It will take hard work to get the American people to talk to each other across the no mans land of the political divide again. The forum was a good start that should be emulated.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor to Reason magazine.

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Liberals, conservatives really can talk - Newsday

Now we see some liberals sneering at poor whites and saying theyre getting what they deserve. But it wasnt poor whites who put Trump in office.

If you didnt bother to look at the data and relied entirely on the popular narrative, you could be forgiven for thinking that Donald Trump won the presidency by getting everyone who lives in a rural area on a low income to spontaneously decide to start voting. Trump won, the story goes, because of those rural white working class voters. Theyre the people who voteagainst their own best interests.

This has led to a resurgence in popular classism in the public square. Its in vogue in certain liberal circles to laugh at the very real struggles of the poor. When a story of horrific racism comes across their feed, the Twitter wags ironically cluck economic anxiety, to mock the narrative that economic anxiety made the racist punch that black person or call in that bomb threat.

A variation on that joke is liberal smirking at the prospect of some poor person who voted incorrectlylosing health careas a result of Trumps monstrous policies. These bon mots are explained away because after all, its those rural white low-income earners who got us Trump, a man who would happily terrorize a litter of puppies if it earned him a dollar.

Only 20 percent of the American population lives in a rural area. Even if every single denizen of the mountains, hills, and plains voted for Trump, it wouldnt make up enough people to have won him the presidencyand they didnt. Rural voters made up17 percent of the electorate. That number is up, to be sure. But its still not even representative of the population.

Beyond that, there were plenty of rural voters who went for Hillary Clinton. I should know; Im one of them. So are my closest friends and family. It seems more likely that I will be made president of Australia than that our little group of 10 or so in Meigs County, Ohio, were the only rural Hillary voters in the whole country. But the narrative took hold because rural turnout was up while city turnout was down, and its much simpler to talk about how the country folk came out and handed the White House to Trump than it is to parse out the reasons why the city dwellers stayed home. And who wants to let facts get in the way of a solid session of group condescension, anyway?

Then theres the problem of income. Poor people famously do not vote in anywhere near the numbers their wealthier peers do. Yet suddenly were all pretending that the people with the least political power in a country that is run on money and fantasies of meritocracy are the kingmakers, the real power behind Trumps throne. It must be nice, after years of rhetoric about the 99 percent and endless discussions about income inequality, for bigots who think the poor are beneath them to finally have an excuse to unleash all the venom and bias theyve been holding back politely.

Theres just one problem. Trumps voters skew wealthy. Two-thirds of voters making less than $50,000 yearly voted for Clinton. People makingmorethan that went for Trump, in margins that increased along with the tax bracket. Hisaveragevoter earns $72,000 a year. Its surpassingly unlikely that low-income white people voted en masse for Hillary. We dont have solid data, but we can infer from what we know that many or even most voted for Trump. Still, it doesnt follow that strong support from a low-turnout demographic can then be blamed alone for the election of Trump.

The single biggest predictor of voting behavior was educationevenmajority-minority countieswith low to medium educational attainment shifted toward Trump. (It is a personal belief of mine that black women will eventually save the world from itself, and the data show us that they voted against Trump in huge margins. That should be noted. But they dont make up enough of the population to swing a whole election any more than rural voters do.) As it turns out, poor people arent stupid, but the uneducated are susceptible to demagogues and propaganda. This shouldnt be surprising to anyone whos even thought about history or human behavior, much less studied it.

It may be cathartic to imagine all rural voters as toothless rednecks waving the Stars and Bars and singing racist chants, and then to blame that caricature for the countrys woes, but it doesnt get us anywhere. Bigotry surely does exist out in the country, and its ugly. It exists in the lower classes, and it should be stamped out. But it exists everywhere in America. Nobody from the holler is gentrifying Brooklyn. No poor person has set a rapist free with merely probation as punishment. It isnt out-of-work welders scratching busily away at legal justifications for the travel ban. Not a single rural opiate addict is conducting ICE raids, and that now-ubiquitous voter from Youngstown isnt in a position to close the wage gap.

If you want to mitigate bigotry and hate, try focusing on the system and the people who perpetuate it instead of merely pointing and laughing at the people who consume its outputs. It is never excusable and should be obliterated with vigor and forceespecially when the bigotry comes from people who actually have the political power to enforce and perpetuate it.

But it seems we still need to blame someone who isnt ourselves. We arent ready yet to grapple with what it says about this society that we elected a kleptocrat whos incapable of politely shaking hands with foreign leaders or going more than a month without a rally to shore up his fragile ego, but who has found time to install his family and crypto-Nazis in positions of power while he terrorizes small children because their parents overstayed their visa. So instead of doing that, were taking this opportunity to blame the poor for the behavior of the well-off, because otherwise wed have to admit that it was just normal Republicans who voted for Trump. Worse, we might have to admit that economic anxiety isnt just a punch line any more than its just for white people.

More than three times as many people voted for Trump on Staten Island, and nearly ten times as many in Macomb County, Michigan, than live in my whole county. If youre looking for a reason Trump is in office, you might start by looking where the majority of his voters are.

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Country Folk Arent Perfect, but No, Coastal Liberals, Trump Is Not Their Fault - Daily Beast

Mary Ng (in red scarf) campaigns with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at a Markham restaurant last week. ( Chris Young / THE CANADIAN PRESS )

By Lee BerthiaumeThe Canadian Press

Mon., April 3, 2017

OTTAWAUpstart Conservative and New Democrat candidates gave their heavily favoured Liberal rivals a bit of a scare Monday in a pair of byelections in Ontario, where some of Justin Trudeaus policies and promises played a central role.

In Markham-Thornhill, Liberal candidate and former PMO staffer Mary Ng pulled away from Ragavan Paranchothy by a margin of more than 2,000 votes after her Conservative rival made a strong early showing.

A strong performance in the riding long held by former Liberal cabinet minister John McCallum was critical for the party, given the importance of holding Toronto if they want to form government again in 2019.

It was also important for Ng, who is currently on a leave of absence from her job in Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus office and seen by some as a strong candidate for cabinet.

The Liberal future is in Ontario, said political analyst Tim Powers, vice-president of Summa Strategies. If the Liberal vote goes down in Markham-Thornhill, then they will want to spend a lot of time diagnosing what went wrong.

That did indeed appear to be the case: with nearly 90 per cent of polls reporting, Ng had claimed just 51.4 per cent of the vote, compared with 55.72 per cent for the party in 2015.

And in Ottawa-Vanier, where the New Democrats campaigned aggressively against the Liberals for breaking a promise to end the first-past-the-post electoral system, the NDPs Emilie Taman gathered nearly 30 per cent of the vote.

But it was nowhere near enough to challenge Liberal candidate Mona Fortier, who had about 50 per cent of the vote and was nearly 4,000 votes ahead of Taman with about three-quarters of polls reporting.

Greg MacEachern, a former Liberal strategist now at lobby firm Environics Communications, said significant inroads in Ottawa-Vanier for the NDP suggest a surprising degree of anger over the abandonment of electoral reform.

More at thestar.com

Five byelections wont be a test of Trudeau but do mark end of an era: Hebert

Three other byelections took place Monday, and their results were hardly a surprise.

In the Montreal riding of Saint-Laurent, with 70 per cent of polls reporting, Liberal candidate Emmanuella Lambropoulos had 57.3 per cent of the vote, compared with Conservative rival Jimmy Yu, a distant second at just 20.4 per cent.

Lambropoulos, a 26-year-old high school teacher, stunned many when she won the Liberal nomination contest in Saint-Laurent, defeating former Quebec cabinet minister Yolande James.

Im sure it will hit me a little later, she said after her victory speech late Monday.

James had been considered the party favourite to replace Stphane Dion, the former Liberal leader who resigned his seat to become ambassador to Germany and the European Union.

I looked up to him, said Lambropoulos, who worked in Dions office in the riding, which has been held by the Liberals since it was created in the late 1980s.

I didnt let anything stop me. I worked really, really hard. I didnt stop.

The Alberta ridings of Calgary Heritage and Calgary Midnapore, formerly held by Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney, respectively, were no contest.

In Calgary Heritage, Bob Benzen was leading with about 70 per cent of the vote, well clear of the Liberals Scott Forsyth at 22.6 per cent.

In Calgary Midnapore, Conservative Stephanie Kusie cruised to an easy win, posting 76.5 per cent of the vote with just over half of polls reporting, leaving her closest rival, Liberal candidate Haley Brown, at 17.6 per cent.

Conservative supporters in Calgary were in an upbeat mood as the polls closed Monday. Voters are angry, especially about the economy, said Sarah Watson, who worked on Kusies campaign.

The voters weve talked to are pretty fired up. Theres a strong sense of really wanting to communicate that Alberta matters, Watson said.

I think youve had a chance to try on Mr. Trudeau for a year and a half to kind of see. Maybe people were willing to see if he was any different, and I think thats worn off.

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Liberals hold Thornhill, Ottawa, Montreal seats in byelections - Toronto Star