Tea leaves

It’s always dangerous to read too much into by-elections, especially on the day after a single by-election rather than a batch of them. The sample size is low, and the politics so local that it can be very reckless to make too-broad generalizations about the broader implica —

Oh, what the heck!

Last night, the voters in Straits and White Bay North shaved 19.3% off the Tory vote share from the 2007 general election, added 15.5% to the Liberals and 3.8% to the NDP.

That vote swing, applied across the province, would be enough for provincial Liberals to defeat sitting rural PC MHAs Terry Loder (Bay of Islands), Calvin Peach (Bellevue), Tracey Perry (Fortune Bay-Cape La Hune), Darryl Kelly (Humber Valley), Derrick Dalley (Isles of Notre Dame), Wallace Young (St. Barbe), and make things exceptionally tight for Harry Harding (Bonavista North), Clayton Forsey (Exploits), and Ray Hunter (Grand Falls-Windsor-Green Bay South).

The NDP would also be in a dogfight with Clyde Jackman in Burin-Placentia West.

Meanwhile, Danny Williams-Government would be driven out of Labrador like the snakes out of Ireland: on the same vote swing, the Dippers would notionally win back Labrador West, while both John Hickey and Patty Pottle would fall to the Liberals.

In short, the electoral map would look an awful lot like it did after 2003.