COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. DECEMBER 20, 2022. According to Philippe J. Fournier’s latest 338Canada polling update on December 18, the federal Conservatives are still somewhat ahead of the Liberals in cross-Canada popular vote — 34% to 32%. Yet the Conservative vote is still heavily concentrated in the two most westerly Prairie provinces. The Liberals would still wind up with somewhat more seats — in this case 147 to 133.

Moreover, the party arguably doing best in the 338Canada numbers at the moment is the federal New Democrats, currently at their recent high-end of 21% of the cross-country vote. And if you add their 29 projected seats to the Liberals’ 147 you get a working majority of 176 seats (where 170 is a bare majority of the current 338 total number of federal Members of Parliament) .

All this is also arguably good enough reason for Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats to just continue their current supply and confidence agreement with the Justin Trudeau Liberals. Right now the Liberals have 158 seats and the NDP has 25, based on the September 20, 2021 election. On the 338Canada December 18, 2022 projection the Liberals would have only 147 seats and the NDP 29. On these numbers the New Democratic strength in what some Alberta right-wingers misleadingly call the Liberal-NDP Coalition in Ottawa has gone up not down. (By four seats. Meanwhile the Liberals have lost 11 seats!)

Whatever else, our sense is that the March 22, 2022 flexible and somewhat open-ended supply and confidence agreement between the Singh New Democrats and Trudeau Liberals has to be judged one of if not even the single most important Canadian federal political story of the year about to pass into the pages of history. And we still have some haunting sense that it just might last all the way to the next fixed-date federal election in the fall of 2025. (Despite such strong opposing views as those of a retired federal NDP leader in “Tom Mulcair: Brace yourself because 2023 will likely be an election year.”) And all this is finally reflected in our first choice for Top 4 counterweights articles in the second quarter of 2022 noted below.

Meanwhile, before quite rushing into the Top 4 2Q 2022 we note this December 19, 2022 report from the Jamaica Observer : “Jamaica-born man appointed new Chief Justice of Ontario.”

To cite the Observer at greater length : “Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, has announced that Jamaica-born, Michael H Tulloch, has been appointed the new Chief Justice of Ontario and President of the Court of Appeal for Ontario … Tulloch was born in Jamaica and migrated to Canada as a child. According to literature obtained from the Canadian Prime Minister’s official website, Tulloch was appointed a judge of the Superior Court of Justice for Ontario in 2003. He was elevated to the Court of Appeal for Ontario in 2012, becoming the first Black Canadian to sit on any appellate court in Canada … Before his appointment to the bench, Chief Justice Tulloch served as an assistant Crown Attorney in Peel and Toronto from 1991 to 1995 before entering private practice, where he specialised in criminal law.”

Finally here are the Top Four counterweights articles for the second quarter of 2022, as determined by the cw editors over drinks at the place just around the corner, earlier tonite :

APRIL 15 : “Giving Canadians stable progressive government for the next three years in a stormy global village” ;

MAY 10 : “Pausing in Ontario election campaign to consider prospect that PM Stephen Harper and PM Justin Trudeau may (in some ways) be similar federal leaders?” ;

MAY 28 : “The Globe and Mail seems to be saying that Canada must just accept some obsolete colonial institution forever (and make the country today an Authoritarian State?)” ;

JUNE 3 : “ONTARIO ELECTION WATCH VI: Ford Conservatives win majority government .. with record low voter turnout” (and less than 41% of the popular vote).

Again, back soon for the last two quarters of 2022 … happy holidays and all that!