Canadian Election Results Thread

[Foucaulf]

Plot twist!

Voter turnout still decreased this election. This time, it would be more immigrants not voting than general inactivity, though I think Albertans cared little either. At least my skepticism over high advanced voter turnout was justified.

Not quite - turnout is calculated from counted votes versus the number of eligible voters, even if not all the votes have been counted yet. It's currently at 57% but with a few thousand polling stations still to come I expect it will pass 60%. A rise, but a small one - certainly not the big increase a lot were predicting.

Thanks; CBC is predicting 61% turnout now.


Also realized Conservatives have a seat in every province right now. Couldn't cringe a little when Mansbridge said they were "The true national party".

Since the NDP put a lot of female candidates in Quebec to fulfill a gender quota, their landslide in Quebec means they have greatly changed the balance of the sexes in parliament; ~38% of their caucus, in fact.

[Foucaulf]

To conclude the night, remarks against Harper:

-Now that Harper has a four-year mandate, he will be the longest serving PM under the Conservative label since John A. McDonald.
-Always irritated when Conservative spin refers to Harper as "Prime Minister Stephen Harper" or "Rt. Honorable Stephen Harper". If they were as reformist as they claim, they would botch the honorific system altogether.
-"Strong Stable National Conservative Majority Government" should be the Party's slogan in 2015.
-Harper thanked Conservative supporters "for their prayers".
-Surely he must stand up for "all regions", considering he will either lose the stranglehold on Alberta and Ontario if he prefers one too much.
-"Comprehensive measures to make our streets safer"? How comprehensive?
-Harper paid lip service to all politicians except for Ignatieff.
-For all his compliments of Canada, he never mentioned that the nation could be a "leader".

anybody see Canada turning into France where the left remains split and is dominated by a leftist/socialist party that cannot seem to win nationally, but cannot move toward the center, while the center-right governs for an eternity?

Of course. I'm terrified.

EDIT: Well, not "move toward the center" as instead "shoot itself in the foot".

[Foucaulf]

The last of the "leading" CBC ridings;

Etobicoke Centre: With 1 poll left, LIB Borys Wrzesnewskyj leads CON Ted Opitz by 9 votes out of 51174 voters. Will head for a recount.
Esquimault-Juan de Fuca: With 4 polls left, NDP Randall Harrison leads CON Troy DeSouza by 573 votes out of 62279 voters.
Yukon: With 1 poll left, CON Ryan Leef leads LIB Larry Bagnell - who was whipped on a no vote to abolish the gun registry - by 168 votes out of 15877 voters.

[Foucaulf]

Etoibicoke Centre will go under a recount, since the Conservatives' candidate only has a 21-vote lead.

[Foucaulf]

CBC Vancouver is interviewing Libby Davies, NDP MP for Vancouver East.

For some reason she keeps refering to Layton as "our leader". She also blabbers about proportional representation, as if the Tories will ever blink on that!

NDP candidate Randall Garrison will win Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca at this point.

[Foucaulf]

Some members of the media did lose, but not in the way I expected. PostMedia and Sun Media won for supporting the Conservatives; the Globe did, to an extent. the Star backed out fast enough. For those who lost, they lost badly:

Projectors. Once again, even the most generous projection underestimated the Conservatives by ~15 seats. The actual NDP seat count of 102 was 7 above the mean 95 seats projected, which is decent. Nobody saw the GTA dissection, however, nor did anyone predict the scope of the BQ's defeat. In light of any accurate result, most of them will either be fired or ignored. Which leads me to...

Strategic voting groups. As the NDP carved into the Liberal vote halfway through, it became impossible to rally all non-Conservative voters under a "progressive" banner. This is exemplified by Project Democracy, that strategic voting site which not only exaggerated Liberal support but could not prevent a Harper majority. Toronto bohemia has finally failed.

Pollsters. Since there was a greater diversity of results, it is difficult to blame pollsters as a whole for being incorrect. And it's not as if they were horrible; they can blame a 2% swing from the Liberals to the Conservatives on an election-day scramble. It is clear regional breakdowns need a lot of work, though, and perhaps there will now be a move from national polling to provincial polling, as different firms have to downsize.

[Foucaulf]

Closest Ridings

Nipissing--Timiskaming (Consv - Liberal)   14
Etobicoke Centre (Consv - Liberal)   26
Montmagny--L'Islet--Kamouraska--Rivière-du-Loup (Conserv - NDP)   110
Winnipeg North (Liberal - NDP) 117
Yukon   (Consv - Liberal) 132
Labrador   (Consv - Liberal) 231

The first two will go for an automatic recount. The NDP might demand a recount in Winnipeg North, given how sure a victory it was for most observers. Maybe the NDP will challenge all of its lost seats, but the Liberals certainly won't. In Yukon, Bagnell knew that voting for the gun registry would spell his doom. The less one thinks of Labrador, the better.

[Foucaulf]

Starting tomorrow, every New Democrat will have to ask a question: what should the NDP oppose?

Do they begin with opposing the crime legislation brought forward by the Conservatives, and barring that the extra money spent on prisons? Do they protest the cancellation of the vote subsidy, arguing that it hurts the opposition more than the government? Do they oppose the copyright laws or a weakening of government control over telecommunications? Or do they go right after the social issues, taking a strong stance against regression over abortion and gay marriage?

For everything they oppose, they will lose voters. For a party elected on an era of good feeling, having to alienate some to please others might be a difficult choice. But four years is enough for a post-Layton leadership to start thinking ideas, a grand blueprint for federal government; to snatch away Harper's "national government" before it can be entrenched. If four years is too short a time, the NDP would never be able enough for government anyway.

Being in opposition is hard. Harper has hammered his policy goals so much that infrequent voters have been bit by curiosity. From tomorrow, the NDP will have to convince that these fantastical policies have real effects. The next hundred days are very important, but in a completely different way.


I have to thank this forum for their interest and analysis; certainly better than the most of the Canadian media. Please stick around for four more years!

[Foucaulf]

Back to the results...

Recount scheduled for Montmagny--L'Islet--Kamouraska--Rivière-du-Loup. NDP leads the Conservatives by five votes.

CBC and other sources say CON incumbent Bernard Généreux is leading by 110 votes. This does not qualify for an automatic recount, but the NDP has paid for a requested one.

Where did you get "NDP leading by 5 votes" from?

[Foucaulf]

But yeah, I hate when people are referring to the GTA, and call it Toronto. Big difference.

Quite guilty of that. My reasoning has always been that the "GTA" encompassed what is now amalgamated Toronto, quite like how the "Lower Mainland" refers to Vancouver and all the suburbs under control of the GVRD which would be called Vancouver after amalgamation.

But, going back to the Liberal collapse - more people should be talking about Mississauga-Brampton! Peel region has gone entirely Tory, and by a far wider swing than Toronto. The Tory takeover of Brampton, at the very least, could be evidence that their targeting minorities strategy has worked, if only among the Indians. Or that they were right about immigrants only voting Liberal out of nostalgia.

[Foucaulf]

I took the liberty of mapping the results of the Liberals versus the NDP for the past two elections:





One can see from these maps that the NDP vote bloomed throughout the St. Lawrence Valley and New Brunswick (the latter caused by continued discontent with the Graham government)

I'll make a more detailed map if there are requests for it.

[Foucaulf]

On a more thread relevant note. I find the Canadian party system quite facinating. It seems to be caught between the Anglo-Saxon very personalised system, where it is the person more that the party you vote for, and the "European", where parties are predominant and where it is not uncommon to see elections to parliament where a substatial portion of the MP's are newly elected and unknown to the general public. The average Danish MP scores between 1000 and 8000 personal votes, far from the cirka 20.000 votes a mandate actually "costs"
NDP's Quebec group of virtually unknowns is something that I wouldn't expect to see in a Westminster system.

I think this is a consequence of the regionalism that dominates Canadian politics. Uniform national swings are unrealistic - the path to a party's victory depends on building coalitions of voters that pushes a government into majority territory.

This is peculiar among Anglophone nations. Voting coalitions are stabler in the UK (North votes Labour, Southeast vote Tories), the US (Red v. Blue states), South Africa (Blacks vote ANC) and Ireland (Fianna Fáil until 2011). These nations shift electorally when the nations face an existential crisis, and the result is lopsided. This is when paper candidates come into play.

Other countries are small enough that swings are uniform (New Zealand).

The dynamic nature of Canada's voting coalitions mean that there's always a big shift every few elections - the rate is increased once we factor in Canada's demographic changes. When the party leader reels in a region like Mulroney/Layton did to Quebec, the quality of the candidates is forgotten. People can instinctively sense if a candidate's mandate is material or symbolic. But the symbolism triumphs the material, and incumbency is not as effective as observers would think.

(Of course I could be wrong and it's only Quebec being wonky. The Liberal sweep of Ontario can also be the result of discontent over Rae + Harris)