Yeah I'll admit I'm not as familiar with the conditions on the ground in Edmonton. But if the Tories lose 4 seats in Alberta, then the Liberals will win a majority government, I think.
It would be interesting to post some predictions given the unusually stable polling over the past number of months. The numbers right now look really bad for the Tories, but there are of course two very important caveats, both of which have been raised already in this thread: one is that we are still very far from an election (and it's unlikely there will be an early election call given that Harper is dipping in the polls), and a lot can change even after the writ is dropped.
The other is that Canada is hard to poll, for reasons that I don't think are well understood. My belief is that it has to do with the fact that a federal election is not one election but 308
separate elections, each of which has a separate, relatively tiny electorate. This affects not only voter intention, but voter behaviours; a Liberal in Red Deer may tell a pollster that he intends to vote Liberal, but decide not to bother on Election Day because his candidate is going to be annihilated.
I'll add a third, which is the in-this-case aptly named "shy Tory
effect." In essence, where an incumbent is embroiled in scandal and so personally unpopular that it is embarrassing to admit that you intend to vote for him anyway, voters will tell pollsters that they are switching their votes only to have a last minute change of heart in the booth. In this case, Harper has very publically bungled a few things (his spat with the Chief Justice is just one example) and this might lead to an "illusory" dip in his polling numbers that we might afterward attribute to "shy Tories".
All of this is mere speculation, but that to me is part of the fun of poll watching. If I had to predict I would say that Trudeau is headed for a minority government, but I wouldn't dream of putting any money on it.
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