Canadian Elections (past)

[DistingFlyer]

As we wait for the last of the 2021 recounts to finish, let's look at some past elections.

Here are maps for general elections from 1968 through 1984, first shaded according to the winners' margin of victory and then according to their shares of the vote. Constituency boundaries were drawn by AJRElectionMaps from Deviantart.com.


1968 - Lib 155 (45.5%), PC 72 (31.4%), NDP 22 (17.0%), SC/RC 14 (5.2%), Ind 1




1972 - Lib 109 (38.5%), PC 107 (35.0%), NDP 31 (17.7%), SC 15 (7.6%), Ind 2




1974 - Lib 141 (43.2%), PC 95 (35.4%), NDP 16 (15.4%), SC 11 (5.1%), Ind 1




1979 - PC 136 (35.9%), Lib 114 (40.1%), NDP 26 (17.9%), SC 6 (4.6%)




1980 - Lib 147 (44.3%), PC 103 (32.5%), NDP 32 (19.8%)




1984 - PC 211 (50.0%), Lib 40 (28.0%), NDP 30 (18.8%), Ind 1

[Geoffrey Howe]

Excellent stuff. Very interesting to see some now rock-ribbed blue ridings in SK go Liberal/NDP in 1968, yet eastern Alberta already being solidly Tory. You can really see how the West gets gradually more and more angry with Pierre Trudeau through the 1970s.

Also notable in 1984 that the Francophone parts of Montreal are the Tory ones and many Anglo stay Liberal. Nowadays Anglophone West Island is the only part where the Tories can hope to get double-digit, let alone decent, scores.

[Cassius]

Fun fact: Throughout the period depicted above, the Riding of Yukon was held by Erik Nielsen, elder brother to Leslie Nielsen of Airplane! and Poseidon Adventure fame.

[DistingFlyer]

Excellent stuff. Very interesting to see some now rock-ribbed blue ridings in SK go Liberal/NDP in 1968, yet eastern Alberta already being solidly Tory. You can really see how the West gets gradually more and more angry with Pierre Trudeau through the 1970s.

Also notable in 1984 that the Francophone parts of Montreal are the Tory ones and many Anglo stay Liberal. Nowadays Anglophone West Island is the only part where the Tories can hope to get double-digit, let alone decent, scores.

The Tories dipped noticeably on the Prairies in 1968 - no doubt a consequence of dumping Diefenbaker the previous year, who had achieved clean sweeps of Saskatchewan in 1963 & 1965. The Tory vote held up well in Alberta, but that was probably a consequence of the final Socred collapse there (23% to 2%). Having Stanfield as leader saw one of the Tories' best-ever results on the East Coast but couldn't stop Trudeau's initial wave of popularity elsewhere.

[Hash]

Also notable in 1984 that the Francophone parts of Montreal are the Tory ones and many Anglo stay Liberal. Nowadays Anglophone West Island is the only part where the Tories can hope to get double-digit, let alone decent, scores.

Well, that's not surprising considering who formed a substantial part of the PC base in 1984/88. According to the late Pierre Drouilly's calculations for that election, in the 31 ridings of the Montreal CMA (to be taken with a grain of salt, of course), the Francophone vote was ~47% PC (±13%), ~34% Liberal (±6%) with around 74% turnout while the non-Francophone vote was ~47% Liberal (±4.5%) and ~35% PC (±9%) with 78% turnout. The NDP+others vote among Francophones and Anglophones was similar (19% and 18%), though with the NDP doing slightly better among non-Francophones and 'others' doing better among Francophones ('others' here are mostly the Parti nationaliste du Québec, a more radical precursor of the Bloc which folded in 1987, and the Rhinoceros Party). Compared to his calculations for the province as a whole, this implies the PCs did slightly worse with Francophones in Montreal, and better with non-Francophones in Montreal.

But interestingly it is not really a West Island* vs. east split: it's more of a rough centre and north vs. east and west split which is quite unfamiliar and rare as a split in Montreal politics, which means that it kind of straddled the linguistic border: for example, the Liberals held Sainte-Marie, which was 91% Francophone in 1986, as well as Papineau (74% Francophone) and Laurier (70% Francophone), and the PCs gained Lachine, the most Anglophone riding in Quebec on 1986 census data at 58%, as well as Dollard (37% Anglophone + 25.7% allophone). As a rough and inaccurate big picture, the Liberals won the oldest/older parts of Montreal that were the most cosmopolitan, and socially very mixed (both some of the wealthiest and poorest parts of the city at the time). In the absence of more micro data, I don't want to conclude too much about specific patterns but...

It is quite clear that the Liberals performed best with allophones - immigrants and white ethnics (at that time mostly Greek, Italian and Jewish) - they won the four ridings with the largest allophone populations at the time, namely Saint-Denis (46.5% allophone, and which had the largest Liberal majority of any Montreal seat), Saint-Léonard-Anjou (32% allophone, with the first victory of Liberal MP Alfonso Gagliano, of later Adscam fame), Mont-Royal (31% allophone, Pierre Trudeau's old seat, with a large Jewish population in Côte-Saint-Luc and Hampstead and a large immigrant population in Côte-des-Neiges) and Outremont (30% allophone). Nearly all the other seats won by the Liberals also had significant allophone/immigrant populations as well, and one could assume that provided the base of their vote.

Unsurprisingly, it also seems as if the PCs didn't do very well with Francophones in the older, more urban (and poorer) parts of Montreal, like the Plateau - which, at the time, was in the very early stages of gentrification (driven by precarious and disadvantaged young professionals) but which was still a largely lower-income area, although already with a history of social and community activism and therefore more progressive. The riding of Laurier, which included those parts of the Plateau where gentrification had begun in the 1970s, had the lowest PC vote of any Montreal seat (28.7%) as well as a very high left-wing third party vote (NDP 17.1%, Rhino 12.1%, Green 2.8%, plus the PNQ at 3.4%). Sainte-Marie (which covered parts of eastern Montreal that were still quite poor and working-class) also had a high left-wing third-party vote (NDP 11.2%, Rhino 7.4%), as did Papineau (NDP 13.1%, Rhino 5.9%, plus the PNQ at 3.6%).

(*) In any case, the West Island is usually defined as the current de-amalgamated municipalities of Dorval, Pointe-Claire, Kirkland, Dollard-des-Ormeaux, Beaconsfield, Baie-d'Urfé, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue and Senneville and the Montreal boroughs or Pierrefonds-Roxboro and L'Île-Bizard–Sainte-Geneviève, and sometimes Lachine. On 1984 boundaries, the Liberals didn't win any seat on the West Island.

[DistingFlyer]

Not maps this time, but polling graphs - first, of the Mulroney Tories' first term (1984-1988):




Then, of their second (1988-1993):

[CascadianIndy]

Out of curiosity, where did you get the maps in the first post of the thread, and do you have any blank versions lying around or a source you can point me to? I've been looking for ones like these for months.

[mileslunn]

I am using ridingbuilder to get results by county and municipality so in next few weeks as I finish them off I can give some maps for 2021 and 2019 elections on those as well as data.  Some interesting stuff some less surprising.