Manitoba is looking blue. Saskatchewan, even bluer. But Alberta, oh Alberta — it’s bluer than ever before, hoisting Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives into the driver’s seat as it rounds on Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau with every oil-fired cylinder.And back east? Overwhelmingly, the climate threat is emerging as the top election issue in the centrist pockets Scheer will need to triumph on election night.Fully 72 per cent of Ontarians and 78 per cent of Quebecers now identify climate action foremost among their policy desires, according to the national polling firm Mainstreet Research – numbers that suggest Scheer’s path to victory is narrowing in central Canada, if not blocked outright.Pollsters have been closely watching Canada’s worsening regional polarity for months. But as the Oct. 21 election draws nearer, the national difference of opinion is growing ever more acute.“It really is two worlds out there. Two Canadas,” Mainstreet president and CEO Quito Maggi told the Star as he pored over a trove of fresh polling data showing Alberta’s intensifying shift rightward.“The Conservatives now are pushing close to 70 per cent in Alberta and close to 60 per cent in Saskatchewan and rural Manitoba, according to our latest three-night rolling sample – and the surge is continuing,” said Maggi.“For a single party to get 70 per cent support in any one province — I don’t recall it ever before, not in my lifetime. Piling up such big, big leads on the Prairies doesn’t give the Conservatives more seats — but it drives up the national numbers, making the election appear closer than it is.”That’s horse-race talk, the who’s-up-who’s-down banter common to politicos so inundated with survey numbers. But Maggi and some of his surveying peers have begun sounding alarms about the mess the horses will leave behind, regardless of who ends up first past the pos ...
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