Accountability

Attribution signal: Articles from 50 outlets across every province are scored by a large language model: is economic hardship being blamed on Ottawa, or on outside forces like US tariffs and global markets? Scoring runs from −1 (all external blame) to +1 (government held responsible). Only politically-relevant articles pass a relevance gate. The daily signal is smoothed with a 28-day exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) and blended with public attribution surveys (direct polling questions asking who Canadians blame for economic conditions). The chart then bins those daily values by ISO week and applies a 5-week sliding average, so each plotted point reflects roughly a month of underlying data rather than a single week.

Approval: Rolling aggregate from Abacus Data, Angus Reid, Léger, Ipsos, EKOS, and Research Co. Forward-filled between polls. The 40% midpoint reflects the long-run Canadian average across governments since 2000.

Confidence: Each weekly reading carries a confidence level (High / Medium / Low) based on article volume and signal consistency. Low-confidence periods are treated with more caution in the forecast model.

Rally-around-the-flag: When blame shifts outward, governments sometimes see a short-term approval boost as voters rally behind the incumbent. The ribbon around the trajectory shows the standard error of the mean framing signal: how confidently the daily average can be estimated given how many articles were scored and how much they disagreed. More articles and more consistent framing produce a narrower ribbon; fewer articles or split framing produce a wider one.

Forecast impact: This signal currently has no statistically significant effect on seat projections. The attribution modifier is set to zero pending further calibration against election outcomes. The chart tracks the signal in real time; the weight it receives in the forecast model will be updated as the relationship is validated.