Talk:2017 New Democratic Party leadership election

Edit war

I see there's an edit war on whether a leadership review vote is held at every NDP convention or only at the first one held after a general election. I'm wondering if @Mona778: could provide a source for her position that the latter is the case? Electoralist (talk) 22:46, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

According to the Canadian Press, the NDP is the only party that holds this vote at every convention: "The NDP conducts such votes at every convention, though they rarely generate the kind of tension attending this one. Both the Liberals and Conservatives put their leaders to similar tests — but only at the first national convention following an election in which the leader does not become prime minister." [1]. ---- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 23:55, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Peter Julian photo

Could someone crop the Peter Julian photo in the infobox to be like the one in the main body? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.66.89.53 (talk) 16:32, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

Done. sikander (talk) 03:33, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

Inconsistency on opinion polling numbers

I noticed a degree of inconsistency when it comes to which polling number to be used For example: the numbers by Probit (twitter) and Mainstreet (website) is based on who the New Democrats support as leader of the NDP. However, the numbers by Campaign research (used by wiki) is based on who the Canadian support as a leader of the NDP

For the sake of methodological consistency. I suggest that the numbers used by Campaign Research should be based on the sampling of NDP membership (according to their website, 3% of the total 2,676 sampled) which is Angus (19%), Singh (16%), Julian (10%), Caron (10%), Ashton (9%). https://www.campaignresearch.ca/single-post/2017/06/19/Mixed-results-for-the-NDP-Leadership-Jagmeet-Singh-with-slim-lead-among-those-with-an-opinion-Charlie-Angus-among-party-members

Aquitoba (talk) 22:04, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

Update: Date for entry has closed

Therefore, the election can no longer go until October 29, it must end by October 22. This is because there are 5 candidates, so there can only be 4 rounds of voting maximum.

Gord Johns

I'm not sold that this tweet implies an endorsement of Ashton by Johns. "Thank you @GordJohns for such inspiring words" is different from "thanks for your support" or something along those lines, and "Niki Ashton is this campaign's Bernie Sanders" doesn't really directly imply that he's supporting her. Any thoughts? Madg2011 (talk) 03:17, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

You're definitely right. Calling her the campaign's Bernie Sanders doesn't necessarily constitute an endorsement, per se — it depends on whether Johns wants an equivalent to Bernie Sanders as the party's leader or not, which is a question his comment actually leaves unanswered. As much as I and a lot of other people do like Bernie Sanders, being "the Bernie Sanders" of any given electoral contest is not universally accepted by all people as a good thing — he does have detractors and opponents, just like any other politician, and even within the NDP there's far from universal agreement that "a Bernie Sanders" is necessarily the direction the party needs to go in. (Hell, even the US Democrats aren't actually in any sort of consensus on that.)

And, just for the record, while I can't find any definitive coverage of when or where Johns said that Ashton was the Bernie Sanders, Ashton's response to it sounds to my ears much more like a "why would being the Bernie Sanders be a bad thing?" spin on a comment that was not intended as a compliment than it does a straightforward acceptance of a straightforward endorsement. Obviously, without a reliable source to determine the context of his comment there's no way to really know one way or the other what he meant — but the fact that it's possible to interpret what we know in that light obviously means we can't construe it as a straightforward endorsement of her without more solid information. Bearcat (talk) 14:19, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

An additional data point here is that, later the same day, Singh was hanging out with Johns ... Madg2011 (talk) 21:32, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Campaign Research poll

The Campaign research poll of NDP members shows that the sample size was only 86 people. I think that's too small of a sample sze to reliably show what the electorate wants. Should we keep it still though? Shin Jun Bak (talk) 18:24, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

I'd say so. We're just aggregating publicly released polls, not choosing them based on methodology. Campaign Research is a well-known firm and those member numbers were a key part of their release. Madg2011 (talk) 18:41, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Even huge polls with massive sample sizes are subject to error, as witness the polls last year which projected that Hillary Clinton was set not just to win the presidency of the United States but to do so in a landslide (but in the end, even though she did win the popular vote but get screwed by the electoral college, it ended up being far closer than most of the polls had predicted.) If there's one thing Nate Silver has tried to stress in his work at 538.com, it's that the general aggregate of all polls over a given period of time is likely to provide a much more realistic picture of things than any one individual poll is. So, yeah, I'd have to agree with Madg: if this were the only poll we were citing as evidence of the candidates' support breakdowns, then yes, the sample size would be too small to make it useful for that purpose — but since we're aggregating all of the polls taken over the course of the entire campaign, there's no particular reason to exclude this one from the list. Bearcat (talk) 15:37, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

Tables?

Not everything has to be a table but the Endorsements are becoming impossible to read and edit. Thoughts? sikander (talk) 14:41, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

How would a table be set up? I'm open to the idea, but any improvements to readability would be compromised by making the article way longer and by breaking the common format used across Canadian leadership election articles, some of which are way worse (Conservative Party of Canada leadership election, 2017, New Democratic Party leadership election, 2012) Madg2011 (talk) 14:47, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

Something like

Endorsements
Members of Parliament (2)
Randall Garrison	Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke
Jenny Kwan	Vancouver East
Members of Provincial Parliament (5)
Harry Bains	British Columbia MLA for Surrey-Newton; Minister of Labour
Judy Darcy	British Columbia MLA for New Westminster; Minister of Mental Health and Addictions
Catherine Fife	Ontario MPP for Kitchener—Waterloo
Rob Fleming	British Columbia MLA for Victoria-Swan Lake; Minister of Education
Nahanni Fontaine	Manitoba MLA for St. Johns

This is much easier to read. sikander (talk) 16:55, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

Hmm, that's interesting. It is a lot tidier and readable - my concern is just that the page would be massively longer with tables instead of rows. Currently, Jagmeet's endorsements list takes up 15 text rows on my screen (granted, a pretty wide one) - a table would have six header rows and 36 endorser rows, and table rows are bigger than text rows to begin with. Wouldn't this harm the overall readability of the article? Madg2011 (talk) 17:38, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

That's a good point. What if Endorsements section lists out the totals for each candidate and you have to click to open the table to see the full list? See: collapsable table. sikander (talk) 18:17, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

I think that's a good idea. For a similar example, that's also how we keep lists of officeholders in city infoboxes — e.g. for the city council, or for the MPs/MLAs in a big city like Toronto that has 20 or 30 such creatures instead of just one or two — from exploding the infobox beyond rational size too. Bearcat (talk) 05:50, 3 October 2017 (UTC)