As voters enjoy a holiday meal with family and friends this long weekend, they might also be digesting the leadership debates — and the election campaign writ large.
Holidays in the middle of a campaign aren’t new. Canada’s fixed date election rules means the vote usually takes place in October after the Thanksgiving weekend.
But the spring snap election call has put Easter and Passover celebrations in the final weeks of the campaign.
“A lot of people are going to gather with family and friends and if you track things like trust — word of mouth, your friends’ opinion, your family’s opinion still matter an awful lot,” Greg MacEachern told CBC’s Power & Politics last week.
At Issue | Did the federal leaders’ debate change anything?
MacEachern, who has worked on Liberal campaigns in the past, pointed to the 2008 campaign where he said the Thanksgiving weekend contributed to a souring of the public’s perception of then Liberal leader Stéphane Dion.
“There was a long weekend, Thanksgiving, and a lot of conversations around whether Stéphane Dion had the stuff,” MacEachern said.
Lori Turnbull, a political science professor at Dalhousie University, says the long weekend coming on the heels of the leadership debates will also give undecided voters something to chew on.
No leader seemed to land a decisive blow in either the French or English debate, but the leaders took plenty of jabs at each other while trying to stay on their main message.
“What you’re likely to get is undecided voters who might be listening closely,” Turnbull told CBC News. “You might have people who don’t necessarily listen to every single thing that’s going on in the campaign — they tend to switch on in the last couple of weeks — and so the leaders’ debate can kind of give you a quick crash course.”
On the flip side, former Conservative cabinet minister James Moore said the debates typically only galvanize or reaffirm the choices of voters.
“We’re going to go into Easter weekend, Good Friday, where [the debates will] be, I think, probably a bit of a wash on the whole exercise,” Moore told CBC’s Rosemary Barton Live on Sunday.
But Moore said that family gatherings over the long weekend might sway some undecided voters as they discuss the choice they’re facing.
“People will get back to what matters most, which is connecting with their families and having a heart-to-heart with their families about who they want to see as the next prime minister, which is I think where the vote will probably crystallize,” he said.
But holiday conversations aren’t exclusively about politics and talk may drift into other topics, including the start of the NHL playoffs.
Turnbull argued that even conversations about U.S. President Donald Trump — who has become a key issue this election — doesn’t necessarily mean folks will explicitly talk about the campaign.
But even with other conversations on the table, Turnbull said election talk will be difficult to avoid.
“The overall level of engagement with this election is higher than typically is because there’s a sense that the stakes are so high and the fact that it’s shaped up to be a two-party race between the Liberals and the Conservatives,” she said.
Elections Canada will also be running advance polls from Friday to Monday. Turnbull said that could also encourage more turnout, especially among first-time voters.
“For example, the university student is home for Easter. Tme to vote, you go with your parents. That’s significant, that’s important. That makes it more likely that the person is going to maintain that practice of voting over time,” she said.
